The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom situated in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and Indonesia. The territory comprises the six atolls of the Chagos Archipelago (Hindi and other North Indian languages: फेहंद्वीप Phehandweep ; Tamil: பேயிகான தீவுகள் Paeikaana Theevukal ; Dhivehi: ފޭހަންދީބު Feyhandheebu) with over 1,000 individual islands – many tiny – amounting to a total land area of 60 square kilometres (23 sq mi).
The largest island is Diego Garcia (area 44 km2), the site of a joint military facility of the United Kingdom and the United States. Following the eviction of the native population (Chagossians) in the 1960s, the only inhabitants are US and British military personnel and associated contractors, who collectively number around 4,000 (2004 figures).
Read more about British Indian Ocean Territory: History, Depopulation, Politics and Law, Geography and Communications, Demographics, Economy
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“The inhabitants of St. John’s and vicinity are described by an English traveler as “singularly unprepossessing,” and before completing his period he adds, “besides, they are generally very much disaffected to the British crown.” I suspect that that “besides” should have been a “because.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A red-headed woodpecker flew across the river, and the Indian remarked that it was good to eat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)