Abraham Momber, also known as Abraham Momber van de Velde, was the last commander (''opperhoofd'') of the

Dutch East India Company The United East India Company ( nl, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC) was a chartered company established on the 20th March 1602 by the States General of the Netherlands amalgamating existing companies into the first joint-stock ...

( nl, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, commonly abbreviated to VOC) settlement on

Mauritius Mauritius ( ; french: Maurice, link=no ; mfe, label=Mauritian Creole, Moris ), officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about off the southeast coast of the African continent, east of Madagascar. It incl ...

. He followed

Roelof Deodati Roelof Diodati (Dordrecht, 28 July 1658 – Batavia, 10 March 1723) was a governor of Dutch Mauritius in the late 17th century. Life Diodati was from Swiss-Italian descent. His grandfather was Jean Diodati, a theologian, who translated the Bible ...

as the de facto Dutch governor on November 25, 1703. On November 15, 1707, the VOC's premises, goods, and administration were almost entirely destroyed by a fire. The same year, instructions were received from the VOC to abandon the island. and sailed to Mauritius in September 1708 for transporting people and their effects to either Batavia or the Cape. ''Carthago'' continued onto Batavia, whereas ''Mercurius'' arrived at the Cape with most families on 26 January 1709. After destroying everything they could not take with them in order to prevent the abandoned station to be of service to anyone else, Momber and his garrison left on January 25, 1710, to

Batavia Batavia may refer to: Historical places * Batavia (region), a land inhabited by the Batavian people during the Roman Empire, today part of the Netherlands * Batavia, Dutch East Indies, present-day Jakarta, the former capital of the Dutch East In ...

on the ship . The next colonial governor did not arrive until 1715 with Guillaume Dufresne d' Arsel of the

French East India Company The French East India Company (french: Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales) was a colonial commercial enterprise, founded on 1 September 1664 to compete with the English (later British) and Dutch trading companies in the ...

References

Further reading