Charles Telfair

His old colonial château has now been turned into a restaurant, with watercolours of local flora painted by Telfair’s wife Annabella Chamberlain adorning the walls.

In 1826 Telfair persuaded two local collectors, Julien Desjardins and Louis Bouton, to donate their collections to form the nucleus of a proposed colonial museum.

As this offer met with no response from the Governor, Telfair, together with Bouton, Desjardins, Wenceslas Bojer, François Liénard and other local naturalists convened an 1829 meeting at which the Société d’Histoire Naturelle de l’Ile Maurice was founded.

Desjardins, who had already set up his own museum at Argy in the Flacq district, left for Paris in 1839, intending to write a natural history of Mauritius, but unexpectedly died there in 1840.

The nascent museum opened to the public in 1842 as the Muséum Desjardins, in Port Louis, with Bojer acting as the first curator.

He regularly corresponded and exchanged specimens with notable figures in the botanical world, including William Jackson Hooker.