Subject: An Indian Ocean high seas enclave
Date: Jun 09, 2001 @ 23:53
Author: granthutchison@cs.com (granthutchison@cs.com)
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Attached is an EEZ rendering of the Indian Ocean north-east of Madagascar,
with one nice high seas enclave I'm prepared to hang my hat on, and another
tiny little thing I really wouldn't swear to at all.

The "big" enclave is defined by the 200nm limits of:
Northwest - Farquhar Atoll (Seychelles)
Northeast - Agalega Islands (Mauritius)
South - Ile Tromelin (France, administered by Reunion)
All of these islands are visible on my map, though Tromelin is just a pixel.
The enclave's size can be judged by the fact that the image is rendered at
one pixel per minute of arc; so the centre of the enclave (12 28 S 53 43 E)
is ~10nm outside the various bounding EEZs.
Now I know it's there, I can see a hint of this enclave on our favourite
maritime boundary map (http://www.maritimeboundaries.com): the hypothetical
equidistant lines don't meet up in this area, leaving a little blur of 200nm
limits. This looks slightly elongated towards Madagascar compared to my
version, and I could certainly buy that - the distance from Farquhar to
Tromelin by my calculations is 390nm, so slight differences between reality
and the map could potentially lengthen that end of the enclave quite markedly.
The other little patch of blue is bounded by Tromelin, Agalega and another
little-known Mauritian dependency, the Cargados Carajos / St Brandon Shoals.
(Despite the name, these do support a population, though I think it's largely
seasonal.) This possible enclave is only a couple of nautical miles across,
so it falls within the demonstrated error of my mapping program, and I ain't
going to vouch for it.

I have a gorgeous Admiralty Chart of Cargados Carajos, BTW: I'm sitting
smiling at it as I type. It's the 1993 printing, but it still uses the
original plates from 1846, and has a lovely copper-plate annotation: "This
eastern coast was sketched by Lieutenant Mudge in 1825 by means of boats
which penetrated from the western side among the reefs as no vessel could
venture to approach its seaward face."

Grant