Description
Robert Townsend Farquhar (1776–1830) entered the service of the British East India Company at a young age, served at various posts in India and the Moluccas (in present-day Indonesia), and in 1810 became governor of Mauritius, which Britain had conquered from France in the Napoleonic Wars. He commissioned a detailed map of Mauritius and neighboring Madagascar, with the objective of promoting British trade in the region. The map is the work of Jean-Baptiste Lislet-Geoffroy (1755–1836), the son of a French father, an engineer employed by the Compagnie des ...