Charles Telfair was a surgeon and naturalist born in Belfast in 1778. He joined the Royal Navy in 1797 and when in 1810; the British took the Isle de France from the French, Telfair was present on board one of the British naval vessels that blockaded Port Louis.
Telfair settled on the island and became part of the ruling colonial administration. He served first as the private secretary to Sir Robert Farquhar, Governor of Mauritius.
In 1816 Telfair purchased the Bel Ombre sugar estate. In order to improve sugar production, Telfair introduced the horizontal roller mills to Mauritius in 1819.
Charles Telfair improved the education and housing of estate slaves and found less strenuous occupations for elderly slaves. In 1830 He published a detailed, idealistic, account of life on his sugar plantation, entitled Some account of the state of slavery at Mauritius since the British occupation in 1810, in refutation of anonymous charges promulgated against government and that colony [in the ‘Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter’
In 1826 Telfair was appointed superintendent of the Pamplemousses botanic garden. Telfair’s mission was to support Director John Newman into reinstating the garden from its derelict state. Telfair Introduced ornamental plant species such as the Vitex trifolia, the liane cire, Hoya carnosa; the Dahlia in Mauritius
On an expedition to southern China in 1826, Charles Telfair collected some banana plants and introduced them in Mauritius. In 1829, he sent some of the banana plants to England where they were successfully cultivated in greenhouses and sold to Lord Cavendish who formally named the banana variety Cavendish in 1836.
In 1829 Telfair became the first President of the Natural History Society and stayed in this post for 4 years. He sent specimens of indigenous Mauritian plants to the herbarium at Kew Gardens and collaborated with the Zoological Society in London and shared much infomation on the Solitaire Pezophaps solitaria and other local fauna.
Charles Telfair is commemorated by the plant genus Telfairia, the lizard species Leiolopisma telfairii (Telfair’s skink), and the mammal species Echinops telfairi (lesser hedgehog tenrec)