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TWO

“The Richest and Most Fruitful Island in the World”

AN ENGLISH VISITOR TO Madagascar published a pamphlet with this title in 1643, following the publication of his other tract (A Paradox: Prooving, That the Inhabitants of the Isle called Madagascar . . . Are the Happiest People in the World) just three years prior.¹ Expressing such a positive view of Madagascar was not unusual in the seventeenth century. In fact, notions of Madagascar as a fertile land for both settlement and agricultural production date back a century earlier, when the first European ships arrived at its shores. In their sixteenth-century reports back to Europe, the Portuguese emphasized the plentiful supplies of food and slaves they had found. By 1609, people all over Europe had heard of the “extremely rich, powerful, and famous island of Madagascar . . . which in our days is considered as the largest in all the world.”² The island was rumored to be home to exotic wildlife such as giraffes and elephants, as well as gold and silver mines.³ Such legends encouraged a widespread fascination with the exotic flora and fauna on Madagascar, while making little mention of the people already inhabiting this apparent paradise.

European writers celebrated the natural fertility of an island perceived as an untouched and sparsely populated Eden.⁴ An English poem was even written celebrating this point and imagining the glory of conquering such an island, “scenting of rich gummes.”⁵ Throughout Madagascar, according to one visitor, “Glens and slopes, hills, mountains, and valleys are enhanced by beautiful glimpses of dense woods, flourishing acres, and verdant fields. The fruitful earth only has to thank mother nature, that it, through her more than any effort of a zealous farmer, yields more fruits than there are hands to pick.”⁶ This and other such descriptions imply that the land was so naturally productive that Europeans with their agricultural skills could quickly transform the land into a granary to support their operations throughout the ocean.

Not only was the island described as richly fertile, but it was also known to be a huge landmass, almost continental in size. In one report defending the French decision to place a colony on the island, the writer noted that Madagascar was the fourth largest island in the world, larger even than England.⁷ The idea that a small French settlement could eventually control the entire island attracted interest back in Europe. In fact, virtually every seventeenth-century description of Madagascar began with an estimate of the size of the island and noted that it was far larger than necessary to support its small (according to Europeans) human population. Indeed, the island was so expansive that it would be several centuries before a European successfully crossed it and described the interior accurately. Before they did so, fantastic descriptions of the island’s animals featured prominently in early modern European publications.⁸

Practical concerns were initially responsible for attracting Europeans to the shores of the island, located roughly at the halfway point for voyages from Europe to Asia. Europeans learned that provisions were not as readily available in all islands and ports throughout the Indian Ocean. Unlike other coastal trading centers and settlements in the western Indian Ocean, such as Mozambique Island or Aden, the entrepôts of Madagascar drew upon a relatively rich foreland and hinterland, both capable of producing a wide variety of items for export.⁹ Early traders reported acquiring cattle, poultry, rice, legumes, tubers, and plenty of fruits during their visits. The seventeenth-century French colonial governor Étienne Flacourt described Madagascar as home to a wide variety of ecosystems: mountains with gold mines, dense forests, pastureland capable of supporting large herds of cattle and sheep, rich soil for grain production, and rivers full of fish. The diversity provided abundance in every imaginable food item.¹⁰

For all these reasons, Madagascar was viewed as a favorable base for trading operations, but, as an island, it was viewed as especially ripe for colonization. When Europeans began to explore the great oceans, many of their first settlements were on islands. Since the Phoenicians, maritime merchants and empires had used islands as stopover locations for ships seeking to rapidly refuel.¹¹ By the seventeenth century, European plantations already existed on islands in the Mediterranean, in the Canaries, and along the Atlantic coastline of Africa. As T. Bentley Duncan argues, during early phases of European global travel islands became important “out of all relation to their size and resources,” enabling merchants to set up limited colonies and conduct trade with land-based states and empires.¹² Islands also provided safety from hostile indigenous groups on the mainland of Africa.¹³ This preference for occupying islands did not cease after Europeans sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Shortly after their arrival in the Indian Ocean, Portuguese colonists were drawn to the islands of East Africa, including Mozambique and Kilwa, as well as those found elsewhere in the ocean. About a hundred years later, the Dutch focused their efforts on securing a foothold in the islands of Southeast Asia and the French in the Mascarenes. Many of the islands that attracted transoceanic merchants, such as St. Helena in the Atlantic and those in the Indian Ocean such as Mauritius, were completely uninhabited and first colonized by Europeans leaving animals to provide provisions for passing vessels. Convenient oases in the middle of transoceanic routes, such colonies on uninhabited islands were without threat from indigenous human populations, but they lacked laboring populations. As Europeans sought to settle and develop these islands, workers had to be imported along with supplies of food.

There would be no such labor problem on Madagascar itself, given that the island was believed to be incredibly fertile and home to a small population that could be made to work for European colonists. The island was also unclaimed by any powerful state or empire during the early seventeenth century, unlike the more hotly contested islands elsewhere in the Indian Ocean that became the battlegrounds for Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Ottoman competitors. Madagascar, the French argued in 1664, was more fertile, more friendly, and more welcoming to the spread of Christianity than the island of Java, then dominated by the Dutch.¹⁴ Around the same period, one Englishman described how a successful English colony would turn Madagascar into a “Second Ormuz” (Hormuz) and make the English “Emperor of all of India.”¹⁵ Another Englishman, Robert Hunt, advocated a settlement on the northwest coast of the island in 1650. Once developed, he argued, the settlement would eventually rival Barbados in terms of sugar cane production, but agriculture would be “far cheaper,” as laborers could be procured within Madagascar or brought from nearby East Africa. The settlement would also facilitate trade with India. Hunt, along with many other colonial planners, primarily focused on how this settlement could exploit the land and labor of Madagascar, in addition to taking advantage of the proximity of the island to other trading centers in the Indian Ocean.¹⁶

European desires and imaginings of Madagascar did not conform with reality and, despite lofty aspirations, attempts to possess the island failed repeatedly. After all, many of those advocating colonization had never seen Madagascar. English poet William Davenant had only visited Madagascar in a dream, yet penned a lengthy poem about the landmass.¹⁷ In her book on English piracy, Margarette Lincoln notes that this “distant island” served as a sort of blank slate in the English imagination for “a range of topical debates.”¹⁸ But Madagascar was not really a blank slate, as it was home to a large indigenous population. Island rulers encouraged early European perceptions of the island’s bays as safe shelters for their ships. Given the long history of maritime trade there, Europeans found valuable goods already for sale on Madagascar’s shores when they arrived. From the beginning, however, colonists faced opposition from coastal leaders who were favorable to trade but would not allow Europeans to control their land or labor, particularly in areas of relative food scarcity such as the southern portion of the island. English and French settlers in these areas struggled to survive. European settlements also failed to thrive elsewhere on the island. The plans of Hunt were shattered after his proposed “plantation” and its settlers disappeared entirely from northwestern Madagascar.

Despite the shortcomings of their accounts, descriptions from early visitors provide us with some of the first glimpses of populations on the island. Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English traders, priests, and settlers wrote reports and letters about their successes and, especially, failures in dealing with island communities. For example, between 1648 and 1655 the French colonial governor Flacourt recorded lengthy observations about the islanders he encountered, including outlines of social customs, religious beliefs, and political structures, many of them hostile to French rule in the region. French officials were still referring to Flacourt’s influential writings more than a century later.¹⁹

Through their attempted settlements, European trading companies gained extensive knowledge of the island, and such information encouraged them to continue visiting Madagascar in search of provisions. Competition between the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English for continued access to food and slaves lay just beneath the surface in European interactions with the islanders. These rivalries rarely developed into overt conflict, but instead encouraged Europeans to carve out separate spheres of influence and frequent a wide variety of regions. This story of failed colonial attempts and continued optimism explains how the island became a center for provisioning during the late seventeenth century and remained so throughout the following century.²⁰

THE PORTUGUESE IN EAST AFRICA

Within a few years of sailing into the Indian Ocean in 1498, Portuguese sailors stumbled upon the island of Madagascar. In 1500, a ship commanded by Diego Diaz sailed off course to the west coast of Madagascar on the day of Saint Lawrence. While ashore, Diaz discovered he could obtain supplies of water and fish, as well as other provisions, from the islanders in return for knives, iron, cloth, and mirrors.²¹ Subsequent voyages of the Portuguese to the island of “São Lourenço” were similarly unintentional, as their ships landed on the island following harsh storms in the Mozambique Channel. Later voyages were sometimes intended to discover any survivors from shipwrecks.²² For the first decades of Portuguese exploration and trade in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar remained firmly outside of European commercial and military interests.

Portuguese vessels tried to fight against the powerful Agulhas currents that pushed southward around both sides of Madagascar. The debris left by the Portuguese ships on the southern shores of the island, an area that lacks natural harbors, was a testament to the power and danger of these currents.²³ As European vessels entered the Indian Ocean, they were forced to choose between the inner or outer passage around Madagascar on their way to the northern Indian Ocean; both choices offered challenging sailing conditions.²⁴ The Portuguese frequently opted for the inner passage, despite it being fraught with unpredictable winds and currents. By contrast, taking the outer passage around Madagascar meant fewer chances of running aground or losing time on their way to Asia, but the route presented dangers to the passengers on board, who usually required additional food and water by this point in the journey. To take the outer passage meant “the almost certain death of many,” according to one sixteenth-century Portuguese observer.²⁵ Many Portuguese captains preferred to brave the channel and stop on the East African coast before continuing their voyages.²⁶ Even after ships arrived safely at Mozambique Island (Ilha de Moçambique), their route to India was not assured. From November to January, monsoon winds blow from the northern Indian Ocean toward eastern Africa and then reverse between April and August.²⁷ The Portuguese quickly discovered that to be caught in the southwestern Indian Ocean at the wrong time of year could mean slowed travel or deadly encounters with cyclones.²⁸

MAP 2.1. Indian Ocean

Ships from the Portuguese Estado da Índia rarely visited Madagascar at first, but after the gradual accumulation of information about the large island, so close to their settlements on the East African coast, Portuguese explorers and traders expressed interest in visiting it more frequently.²⁹ They hoped to find untapped supplies of spices and precious metals on the “very large island” so close to their East African trading posts.³⁰ In 1507, Afonso de Albuquerque, the second viceroy of Portuguese India, wrote a letter celebrating the ready availability of cloth, gold, silver, and rice on the island.³¹ One man they encountered even suggested that clove trees grew along the northwest coast of Madagascar.³² In an effort to gain support from the Portuguese crown for further expeditions, Albuquerque asserted that the ginger in Madagascar was superior to that of India.³³ Another Portuguese official later reinforced Albuquerque’s contentions, promising “that, if a caravel is brought to these parts [Madagascar and the Comoros] in the monsoon, great service will be done to Your Highness and that much gain will come to you.”³⁴ In Madagascar, officials believed, the Portuguese could purchase “things which made them imagine they had reached India.” Once there, they would find that the “good people” on the island sold a type of pepper, as well as scented wood and wild cinnamon, in return for iron goods and cloth.³⁵

For Europeans residing in East Africa, there were far more practical (and realistic) reasons to visit the island. Provisions had to be acquired continually for the many soldiers and merchants who lived in Portuguese forts and trading posts. The Portuguese could purchase rice, millet, sugar, and cattle from key trading centers in East Africa near Sofala and Kilwa Island, but these exchanges were prone to disruption thanks to frequent (often Portuguese-instigated) conflict in the region. Over the long term, these supplies were insufficient for the Portuguese military as well as their small, but growing, settler population.³⁶ As early as 1506, Portuguese officials in charge at Kilwa Island complained they were unable to feed not only the men at the fortress, but also sailors left ashore by shipwrecked vessels, and African leaders were refusing to provide them with food.³⁷ The Portuguese colony at Mozambique Island, a dry and largely barren island, faced similar challenges as it grew, especially after the building of a hospital for sick sailors by the middle of the sixteenth century.³⁸

The Portuguese believed that large quantities of food could be obtained from northwest Madagascar, especially rice and livestock.³⁹ This belief was reinforced when they became aware of frequent commercial traffic across the Mozambique Channel. Since the tenth century, ports in the north of Madagascar, home to an Islamized population, had attracted merchants and migrants from East Africa, the Middle East, and even the Far East.⁴⁰ At least a dozen ports were identified in northern Madagascar by the late fifteenth century by the Arab geographer Ibn Mājid.⁴¹ The most prominent, at least according to sixteenth-century Europeans, was Massaliege (also referred to as Mazalagem, Mathaledge, etc.). The port was home to six or seven thousand people, many of them Muslim with ties to East African populations.⁴² Ports throughout northwest Madagascar functioned as entrepôts for the fertile interior of the island, as the bays on this coastline, such as Boina, were connected to long rivers.⁴³ These rivers provided access to rich agricultural land and enabled the easy transportation of provisions as well as other trading commodities to the island’s shores. The Portuguese learned that the “fair Island of St Laurence” was home to “sheep and much rice and maize, also many oranges and lemons.” Fish were plentiful along the coast and in rivers. The availability of goats, cows, corn, fruits, cloth, and timber also enticed Portuguese captains.⁴⁴ Rice particularly interested the Portuguese, who became aware of a brisk export in the grain to the Middle East via Kilwa.⁴⁵ During their early explorations, they noted that rice supplies in the northwest of Madagascar were so plentiful that twenty ships could not exhaust supplies of the grain.⁴⁶

Food exports were complemented by a traffic in captive laborers. According to one visitor, the large ports along the northwestern coast were surrounded by farmland and large herds of cattle, with much of the work completed through slave labor.⁴⁷ While this Portuguese assessment was made on the basis of only tenuous evidence, it was clear from other sources that thousands of people were sold on the shores of the island throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As early as 1506, Portuguese passing by the northwest coast of Madagascar observed a bustling slave trade conducted by “Moors.”⁴⁸ Other sixteenth-century visitors to the island described a traffic with “Arab” traders whose ships carried as many as five thousand slaves from the northwestern ports of Madagascar annually.⁴⁹ The exact magnitude is difficult to judge, in part because the enslaved individuals were shipped to a wide variety of destinations, including Malindi, Mombasa, Mogadishu, Muscat, and Aden.⁵⁰

Many slaves came from the interior of the island, along with quantities of foodstuffs. In 1640, the captain of the English vessel Frances described his visit to “Mattaledge” (likely Massaliege), where he observed the trade between the people near “Mackamby island” (Nosy Komba?) and those on Madagascar. In March and April of each year, he reported, people from the interior (the “Hoves”) moved in a caffalo (caravan) with ten thousand head of cattle and two to three thousand slaves, both to sell on the coast. Other exports included rice, hides, goats, hens, and various exotic woods.⁵¹ The trade the Portuguese first observed may have been conducted in a similar manner, with slaves being sold for luxury goods such as fine cloth and precious metals.⁵² By the mid-seventeenth century, Portuguese traders had established a regular slave trade on the northwest coast, judging by Dutch mentions of a Portuguese trading agreement with the “strongest king” on the island, perhaps residing in Massaliege.⁵³ Slaves that originated in Madagascar may have been purchased by Portuguese merchants visiting the Comoro Islands or on the East African coast.⁵⁴ The Portuguese preferred other sources for slave labor, although the trade from East Africa was not particularly large before the late eighteenth century.⁵⁵

Even with the establishment of this food and slave trade with the islanders, misunderstandings were rife. Following their visits to the ports of Madagascar, Portuguese noted the lack of strong centralized authority, with the rule of coastal leaders rarely appearing to stretch far beyond their port cities. Portuguese visitors viewed political, religious, and linguistic divisions among the islanders as a positive feature, making the island more easily conquered.⁵⁶ This was not the reality. Northern coastal communities participated in trading networks that were openly hostile to the Portuguese, particularly in light of their frequent battles for control with Muslims. In 1506, shortly after their discovery of Madagascar, Portuguese sailors and soldiers raided the port cities of “Sada” and “Langane” in northwestern Madagascar. They burnt homes and seized supplies as coastal inhabitants fled.⁵⁷ The Portuguese attackers pursued them into the interior, where they captured the frightened islanders, while other Portuguese watched from the shore as “the sea [became] strewn with drowned men, women, and children.” In a letter to the king, Albuquerque estimated that over a thousand people had died in the two raids. Those who survived were taken captive and given to the Portuguese soldiers, with each “to take as many as he liked.” As their final act of treachery, the Portuguese commander oversaw the theft of goods from the ports, including fine cloth from India, some silver and gold, as well as a large quantity of rice. It took the Portuguese forces three days to complete their plundering.⁵⁸

Further aggravating tensions, Portuguese missionaries endeavored to convert coastal peoples in Madagascar, including Muslim populations.⁵⁹ The inhabitants of northwestern Madagascar were willing to trade with visiting European merchants in times of peace, but showed increased concern when the Portuguese threatened to become a more permanent presence on their shores, such as when they established a settlement for trade and Catholic missions at Massaliege in 1585.⁶⁰ The growing antagonism between the missionaries and the coastal people resulted in the murder of a Portuguese priest. Portuguese officials also accused the “Muslims of Madagascar” of harboring their enemies following attacks in East Africa and used this “alliance,” along with the death of the priest, to justify a Portuguese attack on Massaliege in 1587.⁶¹ By the early seventeenth century, some Portuguese blamed an implacable hatred of Christians and the strength of the “commercial sphere of the Arabs” for discouraging the Muslims of the northwest ports of Madagascar from trading with them, although Portuguese violence was a more likely cause of this hostility.⁶²

Even outside of the north of Madagascar, further from the influence of East Africa, the Portuguese were unable to develop a stable trading presence. Portuguese missionaries focused some of their earliest conversion efforts in Antanosy (near Taolagnaro), a region in the southeastern portion of Madagascar where Portuguese settlers were lured by promises of abundant silver and gold.⁶³ Portuguese missionaries, traders, and soldiers formed a small trading post there in 1510. Their attempts to convert rulers were unsuccessful. The search for gold and silver mines was also abandoned. The Portuguese once again blamed their failures on religious differences, although the influence of Islam in this area was far more diffuse than in the north.⁶⁴

By the seventeenth century, many Portuguese still struggled to maintain peaceful relationships with island leaders. An English visitor reported the following story in 1640 and some portions of his narrative can be confirmed by referring to a letter written by a Portuguese priest around the same period.⁶⁵ King Tinguimaro (Itongomaro), the ruler of “Mangakelly” (Mangakely) on the island of “Assada” (likely Nosy Be) had been trading with the “Moors” and Portuguese for decades.⁶⁶ These interactions were described as generally peaceful, until two of the king’s wives (or concubines) were found missing after the departure of some Portuguese merchants. The English narrator tells us that “it was knowne” to the islanders that the merchants had taken the women back to Mozambique. The king sent a message to Massaliege informing the Portuguese that they should not return to his island until they returned the women. He explained that he had already converted to Christianity and expected a certain level of respect from the Portuguese.⁶⁷ Portuguese merchants returned the women to Nosy Be two years later and the king assured the kidnappers that he was not angry. Instead he told them that “they were wellcome and made them a great feast.”⁶⁸ Yet after one of the women appeared with a light-skinned child of European parentage, the king was offended and killed one of the Portuguese men. Both women were also put to death. The king died soon after, his heirs suspecting poisoning by the Portuguese and vowing revenge, although there is no evidence they were ever able to achieve this aim.⁶⁹ The English, trading rivals of the Portuguese by 1640, may have been told an exaggerated version of the story, but this incident suggests violence continued to mar relationships between Portuguese and island officials.

Another encounter, described by one of the first Dutch to visit the region, provides further evidence of Portuguese influence. When the ruler of the Comorian island of Mwali (Mohéli), dressed like a “Turque,” boarded a visiting Dutch ship in 1601, he instantly began questioning the Dutch captain, Admiral G. Spilberg, about navigation and European maps.⁷⁰ By the time other European groups arrived in northwestern Madagascar, many of the leaders and traders could speak passable Portuguese and this ruler was no exception.⁷¹ The king on this small island, to the surprise of the captain, not only proved knowledgeable in the art of navigation, but also had recently traversed the Red Sea during a trip to Mecca. His ease in trade with the European merchants also reflected a century of engagement with Portuguese traders. As if to confirm this fact, a few days later Spilberg spotted a ship sailing between East Africa and Madagascar, carrying Indian cottons and slaves. Even more remarkably to Spilberg, “mulattoes” manned the ship. These “half-Portuguese” spoke Portuguese, were dressed in Portuguese clothing, and carried Portuguese firearms.⁷²

Such trade was the norm between the ports of northern Madagascar and Portuguese settlements on the East African coast by the seventeenth century.⁷³ By the early seventeenth century, a ship was reportedly dispatched annually from the Portuguese base at Querimba for cows, goats, ambergris, slaves, and cloth woven of “rushes” from northern Madagascar.⁷⁴ Many of the ships that crossed the channel were African-owned, African-operated vessels, spurred on by Portuguese demand, and this trade remained free of Portuguese monopoly controls. The Portuguese used Indian cloth and firearms to buy food and slaves from the African merchants who frequented visited Madagascar.⁷⁵ In spite of this regular commerce, the trade of the Estado da Índia remained far more focused on commodities found in the northern Indian Ocean and the East African interior.⁷⁶ Without further research into Portuguese archives, the extent of the trans–Mozambique Channel traffic remains unknown, but Mozambique Island’s proximity to East Africa suggests that exports from Madagascar were less essential to the Portuguese colonists than those from the continent.⁷⁷

Perceptions of Madagascar as an island both “beautiful and fertile” still persisted among the Portuguese.⁷⁸ In 1667, the Jesuit Manoel Barretto argued that “if any European nation should take possession of St. Lourenço [Madagascar] Portugal may well give up all desire of the whole conquest from the Cape of Good Hope to the entrance of the straits, of which they will be masters who are masters of St. Lourenço.”⁷⁹ Many seventeenth-century Portuguese may have agreed with him. Portuguese officials in East Africa looked on with dismay as the Dutch, English, and French all attempted to establish themselves on the large island to their east. In fact, when other Europeans expressed interest in settling Madagascar, the Portuguese reacted by attempting to prop up their own claims in East Africa. Newitt suggests that Portuguese dependence on the food of Madagascar and, by extension, the Comoro Islands, may also explain why the Portuguese never attempted to conquer the Comoros, as they feared disrupting regional commerce.⁸⁰ Exports from Madagascar, even absent the fine cloth and desirable spices found elsewhere along the ocean’s littoral, still wielded a noticeable influence over Portuguese officials.

THE DUTCH AT MAURITIUS AND THE CAPE

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were no longer dominant in the trade of Madagascar. Their Dutch, English, and French rivals were newly influential on the island, as they were throughout the entire ocean.⁸¹ The Dutch began regularly visiting Madagascar after 1595 and the French and English followed less than a decade later.⁸² As Michael N. Pearson argues, the Dutch and English trading companies, unlike the Portuguese, “adroitly mixed skilful trade with the selective use of military force.”⁸³ The careful focus on economic advantage that the Dutch brought to their plans for control in the ocean led them to only engage with Madagascar to support their trade elsewhere within the Indian Ocean. They had fewer colonial and religious aspirations on the large island than the Portuguese a century earlier and yet the Dutch had a greater impact on political and economic life on the island.

FIGURE 2.1. Dutch VOC ships visiting Madagascar, by decade, 1590–1780. Sources: See appendix for full documentation.

The rivalry between the Dutch and Portuguese formally began in 1602, with the formation of the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). The VOC intended to forcibly and violently dominate European trade in the ocean. In addition to competing in Southeast Asia, VOC merchants targeted Portuguese holdings in East Africa, already weakened by Arab and African hostility, and mounted an unsuccessful attack on Mozambique Island in 1607.⁸⁴ Madagascar rarely enters into this history of conflict. The Dutch themselves knew little about Madagascar initially, as the sixteenth-century reports of Jan Huygen van Linschoten make clear.⁸⁵ The Dutch were so focused on securing spices, as highlighted in historical studies of the VOC, that their engagements with Madagascar seemed to be an afterthought. Stories of negotiations for rice pale in comparison to those detailing bloody conflicts over nutmeg and cloves in Southeast Asia.⁸⁶

It is true that most early Dutch fleets only landed on Madagascar by accident or out of great necessity. Yet, given the length of their voyages and the challenges involved in crossing the Indian Ocean, these stops were more frequent (and influential) than one might suspect. When the first Dutch ships, a fleet of four vessels, arrived in the ocean in 1595, they spent several months replenishing their stores in southwestern Madagascar and along the east coast of the island. After loading fresh food and water, the ships sailed to Java and Sumatra.⁸⁷ This southern route would eventually enable the Dutch to traverse the ocean more quickly than the Portuguese, particularly after they developed other provisioning stops on the way to Southeast Asia.⁸⁸

Only about ten percent of Dutch trading ships sailing into the Indian Ocean between 1595 and 1630 stopped at the shores of Madagascar, but this small percentage is misleading. Such was the level of Dutch involvement in commerce in the ocean overall that at least thirty-nine ships sponsored by Dutch trading companies stopped at Madagascar during these years. The ships came to anchor in Antongil Bay, St. Luce Bay (Bay of Saint-Lucia), and St. Augustin Bay.⁸⁹ None of the islanders living in these locations were accustomed to frequent trade with European merchants, so their stays proceeded with predictable consequences—food supplies were in short supply and recognizable trading partners were not always available. For example, the merchants in the 1595 fleet stopped in “St Augustijn” and visited the arid, sparsely populated land beside the bay, home to pastoralists who herded humped zebu cattle along with sheep and goats. The rivers near the bay, the Onilahy and the Fiheraña, would later provide easy transportation for foodstuffs, but Dutch sources provide no indication that there were direct trading connections with the interior during the late sixteenth century.⁹⁰ The Dutch visitors bartered with the Andriana (nobles, lords) for fish, cattle, fowl, sheep, and fruit. Despite the availability of food, when the Dutch departed after less than a week only 127 out of the 249 men who had boarded in Europe were still alive. The fleet then sailed around to the east coast of Madagascar, where the crews spent one month at Nosy Boraha (Île Sainte Marie) and Antongil Bay.⁹¹ Subsequent trading voyages to Madagascar continued to visit these same locations. In 1598, a fleet spent almost a month in St. Augustin Bay, then several more weeks in the Comoros, visiting both Mayotte and Ndzuwani (Nzwani, Anjouan, Johanna).⁹² The Dutch were pleased to report that only two men died during the 1598 visit to the island.⁹³

Despite occasional visits to St. Augustin Bay, twenty-six of these early voyages halted on the east coast, in St. Luce Bay or Antongil Bay.⁹⁴ The Dutch later observed that “there was not a single Portuguese on this entire outer coast so that no difficulty need be feared from them.”⁹⁵ During the early seventeenth century, rice seemed plentiful in eastern Madagascar. The Dutch described vast amounts of rice which the islanders would sell in return for small trinkets and cloth.⁹⁶ In spite of these positive descriptions, the results from provisioning in eastern Madagascar were mixed. One Dutch commander complained in 1598 that the people around Antongil were at war and there was a lack of food for purchase at the nearby island of Nosy Boraha.⁹⁷ On this small island, only about sixty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide, the inhabitants were fishermen, skilled in the capture of whales. They exported ambergris (a whale secretion used in perfume production) to the northern port cities of Madagascar, from where it would be sold to African and Arab merchants.⁹⁸ Apparently the production of foodstuffs for sale was less common on Nosy Boraha.

FIGURE 2.2. A Dutch visit to southeastern Madagascar, c. 1618. Source: Willem Ysbrandsz Bontekoe, Ovrnael ofte gedenckwaerdige beschrijvinghe vande Oost-Indische reyse . . . (Hoorn: Ghedruckt by I. Willemsz, 1646), opposite page 10 (image from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division).

The challenges the Dutch had faced in eastern Madagascar encouraged them to send ships to St. Augustin Bay the next year, but the islanders now fled from the Dutch merchants and provisions were scarce. This failure forced the Dutch to visit the island of “Anschuan” (Ndzuwani) to the north instead.⁹⁹ Despite these challenges, Dutch ships continued to visit both coasts of the island and it seems that provisions were usually available, if in somewhat limited quantities.¹⁰⁰ For instance, in 1601, the crew of the Zwarte Leeuw was sailing from Antongil Bay, where they had stayed for a few days and sought fresh supplies, when they went aground near Nosy Boraha. They were forced to spend considerable time on the island repairing the vessel, buying food from the island’s residents.¹⁰¹

In spite of the frequency of these early visits, fewer VOC vessels bought food from people in Madagascar after 1620 and interest in the island only revived following the founding of a Dutch settlement on nearby Mauritius. While sailing together in the southwestern Indian Ocean in 1598, a Dutch fleet became separated in a storm near Madagascar. In attempting to return to Madagascar, the vice admiral Wybrand van Warwijck arrived at an uninhabited island that he named Mauritius. Following years of visits to Mauritius for food and water, the VOC finally dispatched a governor and colonists to create an outpost on the island in 1638. During their first occupation, between 1638 and 1658, only a few settlers lived on the island. The Dutch hoped to create a strategic base, not a large populated colony, and made little effort to invest in growing food. At least two ships stopped annually during this phase of colonization to load ebony wood, along with some water, exhausting the limited food supplies on the island.¹⁰² The focus on acquiring easy exports of ebony and consuming tortoises, birds, and wild fruits prevented focused agricultural production on Mauritius. Settlers on the mountainous island also complained about unreliable rains, strong winds, and frequent cyclones.¹⁰³ According to Megan Vaughan, the perennial lack of food on Mauritius was produced as much from mismanagement and the “unruliness” of the Dutch settlers, who eventually included a large contingent of convicts from Jakarta, as from the shortcomings of the natural environment.¹⁰⁴

Madagascar was only a short sail from Mauritius so colonial officials tried to establish regular trade between the two islands. The Dutch seem to have viewed Madagascar as a reservoir for both food and laborers; the latter they hoped to purchase to replace the convicts who were currently employed by the company.¹⁰⁵ In 1639, Adriaan van der Stel, the commander on Mauritius, was instructed by VOC officials to sail to the east coast of Madagascar and sign treaties with leaders for slaves. The Dutch also signed a treaty with the Portuguese in 1641 in which the Portuguese agreed to recognize the east coast of Madagascar as within the Dutch sphere of influence and promised to restrict their visits to the west coast.¹⁰⁶ Van der Stel made a total of three voyages to the east coast of Madagascar in search of rice and slaves.¹⁰⁷ In 1641, the commandant sailed to St. Luce Bay where he was apparently successful at obtaining rice, but not slaves. He continued on to Antongil Bay, where he purchased 105 slaves with Spanish reales (silver coins), as well as combs, mirrors, linen cloth, and iron pans.¹⁰⁸ In 1642, he signed a treaty with the king “Filo Bucon” that placed the leader and his allies under the protection of the VOC and the United Provinces. In return, the king agreed he would not trade with the French, English, or Danish.¹⁰⁹ Shortly after van der Stel returned to Mauritius, half of the slaves he had purchased marooned and disappeared into the forests of the largely empty island, following a pattern that would become common in future years.¹¹⁰ The slaves who did remain under Dutch supervision were kept busy harvesting and moving ebony to the coast.¹¹¹

When van der Stel finally returned to Antongil Bay several years later in 1644, the king told him that the two Dutchmen left behind had died more than a year earlier (murdered by the islanders, according to French contemporaries, although it seems just as likely that they had died from tropical diseases).¹¹² In addition, the ruler had not adhered to his side of the treaty. Three times the king had assembled slaves for the Dutch. After van der Stel failed to arrive, the king sent the slaves across the island to the northwest ports of Madagascar.¹¹³ The islanders also reported that a French ship had recently visited. In an effort to fight this competition, the Dutch continued to pursue a trading partnership with the king.¹¹⁴ Another treaty was signed in 1645 in which the king agreed not to supply slaves to the French or Portuguese, only the Dutch. During a short stay in 1645, van der Stel purchased a hundred more slaves. When van der Stel set sail for Mauritius, he again left on shore a head merchant and five sailors, along with goods for trading.

The new commander of Mauritius, Jacob van der Meersch, continued the efforts of van der Stel and undertook two additional voyages to Madagascar. In October 1645, he procured 108 slaves from Antongil Bay and, the following year, sent traders to build a fort on the shores of the bay. The traders also visited Taolagnaro in 1646 and bought slaves from the French living there. Despite these efforts, the VOC was reluctant to continue its investment in the slave trade from Madagascar. VOC vessels had been taking slaves from Madagascar to Jakarta, but with the first arrival of slaves came fears that the importation of a large number of enslaved individuals speaking the same language would encourage them to rebel or flee in groups, as they had on Mauritius.¹¹⁵ Likewise, the long distance to sail between Mauritius and Jakarta meant a relatively large number of the slaves died en route, far more than perished on much shorter voyages between Jakarta and slaving locations in Southeast Asia. In 1646, the governors at Jakarta announced that they no longer desired slaves from Madagascar.¹¹⁶

VOC support for the colony on Mauritius also faltered and they abandoned the island briefly in 1658. Settlers returned only a few years later, amid fears over English and French competition in the region. During their second occupation of Mauritius, between 1664 and 1710, VOC ships seldom stopped at the island. The Dutch outpost on Mauritius remained small, its inhabitants numbering fewer than two hundred people, and even this group was ungovernable. The Dutch finally decided to abandon their settlement on Mauritius in 1710, thanks to difficulties produced by locusts and rats, as well as the dangers posed by the runaway slave population, marauding pirates using the island as a base for operations, and the frequent violent storms that buffeted the ports and fields of Mauritius. Even after the administration officially left the island, many unwilling subjects, both free and unfree, had to be rounded up and forcibly shipped to Jakarta.¹¹⁷

By this period, the VOC had refocused their energies on developing a colony in southern Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, first founded in 1652.¹¹⁸ In contrast to Mauritius, the Cape eventually became a successful center for supporting VOC fleets crossing into the Indian Ocean. For crews of ships seeking to refuel, the new colony was perfectly located, even if the land was not a fertile breadbasket. The colonists struggled to grow food and also faced challenges in procuring supplies from their hostile African neighbors.¹¹⁹ Even though VOC ships were instructed to call at the Cape, not Madagascar and Mauritius (these islands became known as a “troublesome way to the Indonesian archipelago,” according to historian Jaap Bruijn), the Dutch colonists at the Cape had to turn to Madagascar to fulfill their need for laborers and food.¹²⁰ Such was the interest in this trade that the Cape governor Jan van Riebeeck sent a message to Mauritius in 1655 asking for all of van der Stel’s papers describing eastern Madagascar.¹²¹ After reading several optimistic accounts and hearing from French traders about the plentiful food and “large numbers of slaves” available, van Riebeeck decided to send several ships to Madagascar.¹²²

As a result, a total of fourteen VOC ships visited Madagascar during the1650s and 1660s.¹²³ The first two voyages from the Cape were to Antongil Bay, but the traders failed to load more than a few slaves, despite signing an agreement with a local king.¹²⁴ Undeterred, the VOC sent another ship to eastern Madagascar, but the vessel went ashore near Antongil Bay.¹²⁵ In his journal entries from 1656, van Riebeeck describes a well-timed encounter with an Englishman who had visited Mozambique and brought promising news to the hungry colonists at the Cape. The English visitor reported that the Portuguese obtained “all their supplies of rice, beans, peas, wax, honey &c” from the northwest coast of Madagascar, where they sent several small vessels annually. These ships were commanded by one or two native Portuguese, the rest being “8 or 10 half castes with better courage.”¹²⁶

By 1662, van Riebeeck had decided that western Madagascar could provide the food needed at the Cape “in the least expensive manner possible.” Other sources for food, such as Jakarta, were far too distant to be reliable. Van Riebeeck also confessed a desire to diminish the power of the Portuguese by directing some of this valuable trade away from Mozambique Island, crippling the ability of the Portuguese to provision their merchant fleets. He made plans to have a company ship set aside for a regular provisioning trade with Madagascar (as the French would later do in the Mascarene Islands).¹²⁷ Van Riebeeck identified St. Augustin Bay as a place with “an abundance of cattle . . . whilst always no rice, or at least, very little.” Gaining access to these cattle stores was important, as their African neighbors seemed resistant to providing the Dutch with this valuable resource. Furthermore, St. Augustin Bay would be “distant enough from the French, who profess to have the right of possession mostly everywhere on the Eastern side.”¹²⁸

Despite van Riebeeck’s resolution, it took several more years for the VOC to send its ships to western Madagascar, the Dutch preferring to visit the more familiar east coast. In 1663, for instance, the ship the Waterhoen sailed to eastern Madagascar but only managed to obtain seven slaves and five “lasts” of “rice, cadjangh [peanuts], beans and peas.” The day before they left the bay, five people from the vessel deserted, “evidently hoping to reach the French in the neighbourhood,” and took guns with them on their escape. Once the ship returned to the Cape, the scale of the Waterhoen failure became evident. The slaves, whose number included two little boys and a girl, were all suffering from scurvy. The rice was crushed like meal and barely edible. Despite this failure, the Waterhoen again visited Antongil Bay the following year but could not obtain any slaves. According to Dutch records, the king “Fillo Horiva” told them he was unable to sell any slaves but could provide them with plentiful rice.¹²⁹ It was during this period, in 1663, that a Dutch ship, Wapen van Amsterdam, carried 354 slaves (of whom only 265 survived) to New York.¹³⁰ While the ship was able to obtain a large number of slaves, perhaps from the northwest coast of Madagascar, the high mortality rate foreshadowed the challenges European slavers would face later.

The Cape colonists only began to pursue trade on the west coast after 1672, when the Dutch captured an English slaving vessel which had 184 slaves on board, all procured from the ports of northwestern Madagascar.¹³¹ Inspired by this success, a Cape slave ship, the Voorhout, sailed in 1676, the slavers on board purchasing 276 captives in “Mazalagem” and “Maningaar.”¹³² Following this success, the VOC sent the ship again to the same ports, but found slave prices higher amid competition from three Arab vessels. The health of the slaves was poor.¹³³ Likewise, in 1678, the VOC ship the Elisabeth bought 114 slaves from “Magalage” for Jakarta, but 51 died on the voyage across the ocean.¹³⁴

Undeterred, the Cape government continued to send ships to the west coast of Madagascar for rice and slaves.¹³⁵ Trade became relatively predictable and Madagascar was seen as a reliable supplier for the Cape when the colonists faced dangers of food shortages and also for slave ships visiting East Africa.¹³⁶ Ships would leave southern Africa in May, sail for a month to Madagascar, and then spend three or four months visiting several ports along the west coast of the island. Even on such short voyages time was of the essence, as the return could take as long as six months and the risk of revolt on board or while near the shore was always high.¹³⁷ Historian Richard Allen estimates that 1,069 slaves were brought from Madagascar to the Cape on VOC-sponsored voyages between 1652 and 1699, with a further 1,756 slaves carried from Madagascar during the eighteenth century.¹³⁸

While Madagascar remained important to the Dutch both as a victualing source as well as supplier of slaves for Mauritius and the Cape Colony, the impact of Dutch trade on the people of Madagascar was mixed. The Dutch never managed to attempt anything larger than a small trading post on the island. Nevertheless, the Dutch were the first to try to conclude written trading agreements in eastern Madagascar, an area previously distant from frequent oceanic commerce. Even though trade was relatively small and infrequent compared to what was being carried out on the opposite coast, material traces of seventeenth-century Dutch trade have been found in the interior of Madagascar. The experience of van der Stel, describing the continued pull of trade toward the west coast of the island, suggests that this period was one still dominated by interisland commerce. There is also archeological evidence of the continued importation of goods into northeastern Madagascar throughout this entire precolonial period from as far away as China, even as more Europeans arrived on the island’s shores.¹³⁹ In light of these trading opportunities, the decision of the king of Antongil to send his captives to northwest Madagascar, rather than reserving them for the Dutch, made perfect sense.

THE FRENCH AT FORT DAUPHIN

In 1529, two French vessels visited Madagascar before continuing to Sumatra. They were followed by several other French attempts to intervene in the commerce of the ocean. Reports of ample food being bought with “things of little value” in Madagascar may have helped place the island at the center of French commercial schemes.¹⁴⁰ In 1642, Cardinal Richelieu founded the Compagnie française d’Orient, intended to be an imitation of the Dutch VOC.¹⁴¹ The following year, the first French settlers landed near St. Luce Bay. Early Dutch sailors had recently visited this region and bought a great deal of fruit, rice, and boiled milk from a king who was conversant in “Spanish” (likely Portuguese).¹⁴² The French hoped that this location might be ideal for a commercial base. Control of the establishment was given to a company agent named Jacques Pronis. His initial plans were ambitious, as he sought to control the entire east coast of the island, but they were rapidly halted by tropical diseases. After the first two months, only fourteen of the original forty settlers remained alive. Pronis decided to move his people to the south, where he oversaw the building of Fort Dauphin. This part of the south was cooler and Pronis hoped it would be healthier. The nearby bay was seen as a favorable location for ships to stop and load livestock. Shortly after his arrival, multiple ships sailed from France to Madagascar carrying colonists and trading goods to replenish the colony.¹⁴³

FIGURE 2.3. French visits to Madagascar, by decade, 1600–1700. Sources: See appendix for full documentation.

Even after their move to Taolagnaro, the French settlers struggled. According to seventeenth-century accounts, Pronis was responsible for many of the difficulties these colonists would face. He married an island woman and tried to ally with leaders known as the Raoandriana. French sources list dozens of kings living near Anosy, each of them carried around in litters by their subjects. The kings traced their ancestry to the Middle East through oral traditions and written sources known as the sorabe, recorded using an Arabic script.¹⁴⁴ The Raoandriana secured their power through relationships with religious specialists known as ombiasy.¹⁴⁵ The French noted that the kings were less concerned with selling provisions to the French than with benefiting militarily from alliances with foreigners.¹⁴⁶ People lived in villages surrounded with strong palisades to protect their populations and cattle herds from theft. One of the leaders reportedly had 14,000 men under his control, presumably recruited to protect villages and their herds. Pronis contributed to this regional conflict when he decided to sell islanders as slaves to visiting Dutch slavers.¹⁴⁷ By the time Pronis’s replacement, Étienne Flacourt, arrived in 1648, there were only twenty-eight Frenchmen living on the coast, the rest residing in the interior.¹⁴⁸ Flacourt despaired over the lack of religion apparent among these Frenchmen, who were more at home with their island wives than in Fort Dauphin. Food was in short supply at the fort, suggesting that the decision to ally and live with local families was a practical choice for many. Flacourt noted that the “grands” of the country had asked Pronis what riches he possessed, as he lacked both rice and meat. Pronis replied that while he lacked food, at least he had slaves. His response effectively demonstrates why the colony, intended to be a provisioning base for French merchants, was failing miserably.¹⁴⁹

Flacourt had brought with him eighty additional colonists, including priests, and high hopes for reinvigorating the French settlement. The priests were meant to convert the islanders, but they also spent considerable time trying to restore the French to the faith and foster obedience to their new commander. Several more ships were sent between 1654 and 1660 with yet more settlers and priests to expand the Madagascar settlement.¹⁵⁰ In spite of his goals, Flacourt faced repeated difficulties. His reports describe a province at war, disrupted by the presence of French soldiers and firearms. Flacourt decided to return to Paris to ask for additional aid, but drowned in 1660 before returning to Madagascar. The account Flacourt left of his time on the island, providing lengthy descriptions of the religious and political practices of the Raoandriana, would be more influential on French commercial plans in the ocean than his time on the island itself.¹⁵¹

The French did not abandon hopes of settling Madagascar. By the 1660s, the mercantilist policies of Jean-Baptist Colbert had contributed to a French interest in undermining Dutch domination in the Indian Ocean. In 1664, Louis XIV granted the “island of Madagascar and its dependencies” to the Compagnie française des Indes orientales (the third French company to be awarded an exclusive monopoly on trade in the Indian Ocean). Unlike earlier attempts, this colony was to be under the close oversight of the French government and operated under a royal charter that gave the colonists a monopoly on trade from Madagascar.¹⁵² Madagascar was once again chosen, according to Ames, “out of both historic and strategic necessity.”¹⁵³ It seems that the French were still unable to envision a plan for the Indian Ocean that did not involve the island. They persisted in believing that southeast Madagascar had “the most gentle climate in all the Indies,” and they hoped to begin to produce their own food on the island. In 1670, French admiral Jacob de la Haye described the land as “fertile” and naturally favorable to a number of crops.¹⁵⁴ Any food shortages, he argued, were produced by the failure of the islanders to cultivate the land correctly. Several times a year locusts ate all the plants to the roots, but he suggested that, with French oversight, this scourge could be easily wiped out. Hardworking French farmers could make the region far more productive.¹⁵⁵ These settlers believed, as a Frenchman expressed over a century later, that “the fortunate inhabitants of Madagascar never moisten the earth with their sweat; they turn it up slightly with a pick-axe; and this labour alone is sufficient” to produce rice and potatoes.¹⁵⁶ A seventeenth-century French observer likewise noted that “the common Food of the Inhabitants of this Island . . . is Rice boil’d with Salt and Water, which serves them instead of Bread; not but that the Ground will bring forth good Wheat, but the laziness of those, who should cultivate it, deprives them of the advantage of this so useful Commodity.”¹⁵⁷ It was obvious to the French that, in spite of the islanders’ shortcomings as farmers, supplies were readily available. If the islanders were able to acquire ample food from the island, imagine what industrious French farmers would be able to achieve?

Ships dispatched to Taolagnaro in 1664 contained almost three hundred passengers, including colonists and soldiers as well as carpenters, masons, and gardeners.¹⁵⁸ Their numbers included thirty-two women and some children. In spite of hopes for growing their own food, the climate of southeastern Madagascar was not amenable to French settlement and the new settlers faced the same challenges as others had under Pronis and Flacourt. The crops planted by the French failed. Wheat did not flourish in the hot, dry climate. Disease kept the mortality rate of colonists shockingly high, a number increased by the continued lack of nourishment. Even if they could purchase food, there was little, beyond cattle, that the people of Anosy had in large quantities. Water was in short supply, as were items for trade. The French realized that most of the people were materially poor, living in small, impermanent huts, storing their things in baskets, and only attired in bark cloth. During times of scarcity, people consumed “roots” and the locusts that plagued the area, practices that the French found appalling.¹⁵⁹ The picture of an endlessly fertile land proved to be a mirage.

As they lacked food in the south of Madagascar, the French in 1664 established trading posts in the rice-exporting regions of “Ghalemboule” (likely Fénérive), Antongil Bay, and Nosy Boraha.¹⁶⁰ French hopes were rather inflated. They believed, for instance, that Ghalemboule could provide ten or twelve vessels annually with rice, along with large amounts of honey and poultry.¹⁶¹ One of the Frenchmen posted to the east coast, François Martin, left a detailed account of his time as an under-merchant between 1665 and 1668.¹⁶² Martin lived near Ghalemboule with several other merchants in a small enclosed palisade with several huts, intended to store trading goods for purchasing rice. He explored the interior of the island in search of food, frequently in vain, as he encountered communities destroyed by cyclones, locusts, and warfare. People suffered in the lean months and, when the rice harvests did come in, they rarely sold their food, preferring to keep any surplus in reserve. Hunger was so widespread that people had to consume roots, locusts, and “monkeys” (lemurs). Far in the interior, people lived in more affluent circumstances. They sold large quantities of rice, along with slaves, to the ports of the northwest in return for firearms and silver “pieces of eight.” The French made little effort to tap into this trade, due to the distances and terrain involved, and preferred instead to negotiate with east-coast leaders. Even this strategy was a failure. It was clear that the French merchants were wearing out their welcome within a few years. By the time Martin left Madagascar, he noted that the leaders tried to prevent their subjects from trading with the French. When the latter attempted to force them to sell food, people fled to the interior.¹⁶³

Meanwhile, the French in the south of the island were living in increasingly perilous conditions.¹⁶⁴ Local kings became known as the “enemies of our religion” by French priests.¹⁶⁵ According to one eighteenth-century French traveler, “Dian Manangue,” the sovereign of “Mandrarey” and a “faithful ally” of the French, attracted the attention of Father Stephen, the superior of the mission of Madagascar. The king made a speech to his people in which he rejected Christianity’s strictures around polygamy and asked the priest why his “countrymen at the fort” did not follow the laws of his religion themselves.¹⁶⁶ The missionary confronted Dian Manangue and “snatched from him his oli [talisman] and his amulets, threw them into the fire, and declared open war against him.”¹⁶⁷ The missionary was “instantly butchered” and the king declared he would “extirpate the French from the island.” He sent his (baptized) son to gather support.¹⁶⁸ In the ensuing clashes, dozens of French were killed and the Frenchmen, in return, slaughtered men, women, and children and set fire to many villages. Thousands of people fought on both sides as communities throughout the region starved.¹⁶⁹

Seventeenth-century French reports suggest that such conflict was frequent and more rooted in competition between the French and islanders for cattle and slaves than in religion.¹⁷⁰ The French at the fort continued to associate themselves with island women, despite official censuring of such relationships, with disastrous results.¹⁷¹ More than a century later, a Frenchman named Alexis-Marie de Rochon described the exploits of a Frenchman he identifies as La Case, a man also mentioned in Arabico-Malagasy documents.¹⁷² La Case reportedly married “Dian-Nong,” the daughter of a sovereign who became a ruler after the death of her father. La Case and Dian-Nong raided the countryside, pillaging and attacking their enemies, and selling the proceeds (chiefly rice, cattle, and slaves) to the French at Fort Dauphin. Despite the violence described in his account, Rochon looked with favor on the exploits of La Case as he managed to successfully ally with many leaders. He even blamed the eventual collapse of the French colony on La Case’s death.¹⁷³ While La Case was a particularly notorious example, French marriage with island women was common along the entire east coast. Martin tells a story of one French merchant, Sieur de Belleville, who decided to remain at Antongil with his wife for five or six years.¹⁷⁴ Once the French decided to close their posts on the east coast in 1671, some of the Frenchmen also chose to stay with their wives after one of the captains would not take the women on board.¹⁷⁵

By 1672, only 250 French remained in the southeast of the island, most of these having set up household with women and refusing to leave.¹⁷⁶ The French settlers were “an impoverished, ill, and nearly naked lot,” according to historian Pier Larson.¹⁷⁷ The French had arrived full of hope but found that Anosy was in fact “the most wicked land in the world.”¹⁷⁸ They had discovered little worthy of exporting from the island, other than very limited supplies of food, and violent conflict between rulers continued to threaten trade.¹⁷⁹ French men and their families, including wives, their children, and household slaves originally from Madagascar, were finally moved to Réunion and Surat.¹⁸⁰ Attempting to colonize Madagascar had almost ruined the French trading company financially and had diverted their commercial energies from other ventures in the ocean. Only one or two French ships a year entered the Indian Ocean during the next few decades until another French Compagnie des Indes was founded in 1719.¹⁸¹ After this date, the French sent far more vessels into the ocean, as they refocused their attention on acquiring cloth in Surat and settling the Mascarenes.¹⁸² After the collapse of Fort Dauphin, French ships took both the inner and outer routes around Madagascar on their way to Asian ports.¹⁸³ In the Mascarenes, Madagascar still was viewed as an ideal location for a colony, as eighteenth-century French observers attributed the collapse of the seventeenth-century settlement to the incompetence of colonial officials, not the local environment or the hostility of local communities.¹⁸⁴

The seventeenth-century French settlements left their mark on the communities of southeastern Madagascar. Malagasy sorabe documents describe the events of the seventeenth century, including memories of the warfare instigated and perpetuated by French settlers. During one battle c. 1659, large portions of the southwest were described as “ravaged.” The narrator observes that ten thousand cattle were taken from the inhabitants. When some villages did not give “whites” their cattle, gold, silver, and cloth, there was extensive bloodshed.¹⁸⁵ The murderous exploits of La Case, so lauded by Rochon, were remembered in particular detail. On one occasion, “Lakasy” (La Case) led an alliance of rulers who burned entire villages and stole three thousand cattle. Following several such raids, La Case returned to Fort Dauphin with ten thousand cattle and ten thousand captives.¹⁸⁶ One of the leaders at war with the French declared, “I must flee, as [my] people have died from hunger.”¹⁸⁷ The violence that accompanied these French attempts at settlement had become intimately linked to starvation, not only for the settlers but also the islanders.

ENGLISH PLANTATIONS

The English East India Company (EIC) sent its first ships into the ocean in 1601. The first fleet sailed into the Mozambique Channel and stopped at St. Augustin Bay as they entered the ocean. English reliance on provisioning in the Mozambique Channel would set the stage for, and determine the locations of, English settlements on Madagascar several decades later. Despite increasing interest by historians such as Alison Games and Emily Erikson in seventeenth-century English plans for Madagascar, there have been few attempts to link the success of early provisioning visits to later English desires for colonies on the island.¹⁸⁸ It was only following frequent, peaceful refueling in western Madagascar that some in England decided to include the large island in their “struggle for power and wealth through overseas expansion,” to borrow Games’s phrasing.¹⁸⁹

When the English arrived in southwestern Madagascar in the first decades of the seventeenth century, they discovered that local communities were initially unaccustomed to supplying visiting vessels with plentiful provisions. For example, four EIC trading vessels came to anchor in St. Augustin Bay in 1614.¹⁹⁰ When they arrived, the English discovered the shoreline was sparsely populated. No kings, queens, or courtiers approached the visitors or offered to board their ship. No coastal inhabitants arrived in their own dugout canoes or clamored to sell the sailors produce of the island. At the time of the Englishmen’s arrival in August, rain would have been almost completely absent from the region.¹⁹¹ When the English boarded canoes and came ashore, they discovered a collection of huts made of “bark” (woven palm leaves) near the shoreline. Herds of cattle may have been wandering nearby, but no people. The lack of people made the English at first assume that the islanders hid in fear, and perhaps they did, given European descriptions of recent encounters near the bay.¹⁹² After all, seventeenth-century Portuguese had boasted that there were so many cattle in Madagascar that sailors could come ashore and easily “kill the cattle as unowned or disregarded property, simply for the sake of the tallow, leaving the flesh for the vultures.”¹⁹³

Fortunately for these English merchants, men and women eventually approached the merchants and agreed to provide them with much-needed supplies. The coastal people sold the English several head of cattle and provided them with other invaluable sources of nutrition. They also helped the sailors in securing such fresh water and wood as was available in this arid region. Among the most important English purchases were baskets of lemons and oranges to help them combat scurvy. The English made these food purchases with various small items, including silver chains they assumed would be used “to hang about [the traders’] necks.”¹⁹⁴ Indeed, silver and beads were the only items that could be used to purchase cattle from the inhabitants living near the bay and EIC merchants quickly learned to carry such trading goods with them on their voyages into the Indian Ocean.¹⁹⁵ Knowing that the season was growing short, the EIC captains only stayed in St. Augustin Bay for about two weeks.¹⁹⁶ The four ships left Madagascar, their supplies refreshed and their captains full of memories of a friendly people and a fertile island. The English captains were eager to arrive at the richer shores of India before their ships fell into further disrepair. To stay longer would also increase the number of their sailors catching malaria and other tropical illnesses, provide them with more opportunities to run away, and even risk large-scale revolts by disgruntled crew members. These EIC ships visited the island of “Comara” before continuing to Socotra and Surat. The precarious survival of crew members in this crossing is clear in the experience of one of the vessels, the Hector, which had undertaken four journeys into the Indian Ocean previously. It had to be abandoned in the northern Indian Ocean for being “rotten” in 1616, within a few months of their departure from Madagascar. The crew members and all the cargo on board had narrowly escaped disaster.¹⁹⁷

Following their arrival in Asia, the EIC officers issued reports back to company officials in Europe. Their positive experiences in Madagascar, when combined with earlier EIC reports, recommended the island to future expeditions. One English merchant, John Sandcrofte, wrote approvingly of the bay, describing the “excellent good” cattle. In the same year, the merchant Robert Preston reported that “the people [showed] themselves both civil and loving, being the properest men that I have seen.” He found the islanders to be “reasonable” and amenable to trade, despite their lack of experience in dealing with European merchants.¹⁹⁸ The bay was easy for sailors to find after crossing under the Cape of Good Hope and the people here provided cheap and plentiful food to visiting fleets. These positive descriptions of southwestern Madagascar began circulating among EIC captains and, within a few years, the bay in Madagascar was recommended as a good meeting place and the “fittest place of refreshing” for EIC fleets on long voyages into the Indian Ocean.¹⁹⁹ From 1607 to 1700, at least fifty-two EIC ships stopped in St. Augustin Bay before sailing onward.²⁰⁰

Despite the recent introduction of oceanic trade to southwestern Madagascar and occasional clashes, coastal communities welcomed the opportunities presented by the arrival of European ships, not just those of the English, but Dutch and French as well. Visitors to the bay described the arrival of people in canoes full of food to sell to the sailors. When news of a ship’s arrival spread, inhabitants along the rivers would approach the bay with their herds or in canoes to bring goods for trade. “Chiefs” (the Andriana) sold the English small supplies of rice, cattle, “callavances” (also written calavances, likely the hyacinth bean, Lablab purpureus), and lemons in return for metal and red carnelian beads that the Europeans had brought from India or the Persian Gulf region.²⁰¹ The Andriana also requested military support and firearms from the English. In return, these leaders promised to provide visiting Englishmen with cattle or slaves obtained in raids on groups in the interior of the island.²⁰² Such was the extent of English success that the French at Fort Dauphin made repeated requests to move their settlement to the opposite side of the island.²⁰³

FIGURE 2.4. English East India Company visits to Madagascar, by decade, 1600–1700. Sources: See appendix for full documentation.

The islanders were so obliging that one English trading group, the Courteen Association, decided to finance two colonies on the island in 1645, one based at St. Augustin Bay and a second on the northwest coast at “Assada,” near or on Nosy Be.²⁰⁴ With these colonies, the English hoped to create export centers for moving slaves from Madagascar to EIC establishments in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as securing provisions within Madagascar.²⁰⁵ After their arrival in 1645, the 140 settlers built a fortified camp along the southern side of St. Augustin Bay.²⁰⁶ The colonists, expecting a fertile (if sparsely inhabited) paradise, complained to a passing English merchant about the “extreme barrenness of the soil” and the difficulty in keeping their cattle safe from thieving people.²⁰⁷ They may have exaggerated these difficulties, since coastal communities had long managed to survive in the region, but the English were not prepared for the environment, which was not suitable for growing wheat and the other English crops that they had hoped to plant in the colony. They had to rely upon the islanders to herd their purchased cattle. After only a few short weeks the settlers were close to starvation and the neighboring communities refused to sell them food. At the peak of tensions, some of the settlers complained that once the islanders had sold cattle, they stole them back after only a short period.²⁰⁸ English soldiers were dispatched to recover cattle but some of their island neighbors killed the men and then set fire to the colony’s forge and bellows.²⁰⁹ When ships sent elsewhere in the ocean failed to return with food and trading goods for the colonists, the few remaining English settlers decided to abandon the hostile shores of Madagascar. Of the 140 colonists, men, women, and children, who had arrived at the island in March 1645, only twelve sailed from Madagascar in May 1646.²¹⁰

Intended to rival the sugar plantations of Barbados, the settlement at Assada founded in 1650 met with an even more disastrous fate, despite being located in what would seem a more favorable location for coordinating trade and developing agriculture. When an English captain, James Berblocks, visited Assada a few months after the colonists were to have arrived, he discovered that all signs of the settlement had disappeared entirely, along with all of the “planters” (settlers).²¹¹ He suspected the worst after eventually finding the remains of what he described as an “English fort.”²¹² After facing down an attack on the shores of the island and fearing an ambush if he lingered any longer, the captain ordered his ship to sail to nearby Ndzuwani. The captain spoke with the king of “Demonio” (Domani) in Ndzuwani while purchasing provisions on that island and learned that the kings of Madagascar “would not admit any of our people to inhabit his land or islands.”²¹³

After deciding to return to Madagascar and visit the port of “Martaledge” (Massaliege), the captain urged his crew to make no mention of the Assada colony. Instead he instructed them to tell the people that they were sailing to India and only in search of water and provisions. While at anchor near Massaliege, the English encountered a Portuguese ship off the coast with several slaves hidden aboard. The English captain learned that these slaves had to be held below deck, as the slaves had been reserved for “Arabians” who exported them to Ndzuwani and the islanders feared reprisals if they were found selling slaves to Europeans. Berblocks negotiated with traders in Massaliege and managed to purchase twenty-four slaves in poor condition. He also bought plenty of cattle and sheep from the traders for excellent prices before sailing to Bantam.²¹⁴

Berblock’s account reveals a great deal about the relationship formed between Europeans and islanders by the 1650s. The disappearance of the Assada colonists was attributed to the hostility of the coastal communities, but the failure of both English settlements on Madagascar suggests a deeper-running challenge to European colonization on Madagascar. As the English and French experiences repeatedly proved, the islanders were willing to provide merchants with provisions and even slaves, but Europeans faced considerable animosity when they attempted to seize supplies of rice, cattle, and laborers.

As a result of these failures, never again did the English attempt to create a permanent trading post on the island, but EIC vessels continued to visit ports in western Madagascar to provision their ships before sailing to India. By the mid-seventeenth century, the EIC expressed a particular interest in purchasing slaves from the island, particularly on the west coast, where, according to one English guide, “you need not doubt of meeting of slaves enough at some of these places.”²¹⁵ One of the first English purchases of slaves in the southwestern Indian Ocean region was in 1639, when an EIC trader bought a shipment of slaves with cloth in the Comoro Islands.²¹⁶ These slaves may have originated in northwestern Madagascar, a region the English frequently visited and described as connected with slaving in the Comoros. In 1644, for instance, an EIC captain observed “a junk” carrying five hundred slaves from Massaliege and sailing toward the Comoros.²¹⁷ This and other similar observations of a preexisting traffic in captives on the west coast of Madagascar, as well as some luck in obtaining small cargoes of slaves, contributed to the English proposing that ships sent to Surat should stop and “buy up what slaves they can procure at St Laurence [Madagascar], Mozambique, Johanna [Ndzuwani] and the [Comoro] Islands.”²¹⁸ The EIC issued orders in 1663 for several ships to visit the island of Madagascar, “either to the Eastward or westward of the island as . . . most advantageous and soonest gained . . . [and if to the west], sail for Masiladge [Massaliege], or any other place within judgment” to purchase thirty or forty slaves, aged from fifteen to twenty-one, for EIC settlements.²¹⁹ The promise of the slave trade, as well as the continued pursuit of provisions, encouraged EIC visits to western Madagascar for slaves and provisions into the eighteenth century.²²⁰

PERSPECTIVES ON EUROPEAN IMPACT

The periodic arrival of Europeans in the ports of Madagascar during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has usually been dismissed as peripheral to European interests elsewhere in the ocean. The Portuguese cared more for gold in East Africa than rice from Madagascar, and paid the price.²²¹ The Dutch wanted spices from Asia, cloth from India, and ebony from Mauritius, and much more, but only slaves from Madagascar.²²² In a recent history of Madagascar, Stephen Ellis and Sofolo Randrianja argue that the island offered few exports that Europeans were interested in carrying long distances, other than slaves.²²³ But a focus on luxury goods and slaves ignores the need of fresh food and water that spurred European merchant fleets to spend weeks at a time on the shores of Madagascar in the middle of their transoceanic voyages, to say nothing of the multiple attempts to settle and convert the islanders by the mid-seventeenth century.

In the midst of the fantastic and speculative claims made by Europeans about Madagascar there are also the detailed descriptions of the islanders they encountered. Through European eyes, we primarily receive information about the commodities for sale on the shores of Madagascar. In the southern half of the island, cattle and citrus fruits were abundant, while the people of the north and east of Madagascar had rice for sale, but fewer cattle. The north was also home to a bustling slave trade. Food supplies were frequently limited and subject to disruption. Absent are the descriptions of royal ceremonial feasts that would be a hallmark of eighteenth-century trading rites. Our knowledge of seventeenth-century Madagascar is not only limited by the information that Europeans chose to record but also where they decided to visit. Merchants only halted at locations that offered secure harbors for sheltering their ships. These harbors usually were deep bays and river basins. Few vessels came to land directly to the north and south of St. Augustin Bay, for instance, so descriptions of these regions largely come from shipwrecked sailors.

It is clear that European trade networks, as shown in the experiences of Berblock or van der Spil, were secondary to those already operating within and around Madagascar throughout the seventeenth century. Slaves were reserved for East African and Arabian traders, not Europeans. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European trading records reveal that a ready market for Asian cloth already existed, as well as knowledge of its relative value, particularly in the north of the island. To the south, beads, firearms, and miscellaneous manufactured goods were more frequently used to purchase foodstuffs. The nuanced demand for certain colors and types of beads changed over time, from the red “rangoe” beads of the seventeenth century to the yellow glass beads requested during the eighteenth. The portability and durability of these forms of currency gave them higher demand in the south of the island and they may have been transported across trade routes stretching deep into the interior of the island before the seventeenth century.²²⁴

Work completed by prominent archeologists, including Robert Dewar, Chantal Radimilahy, and Henry Wright, confirms that communities throughout Madagascar had been connected through frequent migration and commerce for centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans on the island’s shores.²²⁵ Judging by the distribution of imported goods, merchants on the northwest coast traded (directly and indirectly) with a variety of groups throughout Madagascar by the thirteenth century. On an island of fluctuating rainfall and crop productivity, the ability to access and control food supplies may have contributed to political centralization by the sixteenth century. As agricultural communities in Madagascar’s interior produced more commodities for export, such as ironware, cloth, and other manufactured goods, they also supported leaders who could oversee these and other exchanges.²²⁶ Such economic and political changes have been noted throughout much of the island, even among the less populated pastoral communities in the south.²²⁷ There may have also been a population boom in the interior of the island as the first European ships began visiting Madagascar, although details are elusive.²²⁸

Thus island communities may have been in the midst of a major phase of reorganization just as the first Portuguese were arriving on their shores.²²⁹ Given these conditions, was the arrival of European merchants at the shores of Madagascar immediately transformational? Scholars have debated the importance of European intervention on communities along the shores of the Indian Ocean, but, by and large, most would agree with Abdul Sheriff who, along with others, concludes that the initial arrival of Europeans was less of a shock to the littoral societies of the Indian Ocean than it was to the economies of Europe.²³⁰ After all, Europeans not only competed with each other in these early years, but also faced challenges from other maritime and land-based powers.²³¹ In Madagascar, Europeans needed to adapt to the economic conditions they encountered. Trade with Europeans in the northwest of the island was perhaps initially an outlet for surplus agricultural production that was already being accumulated for sale to African and Arab merchants. In the south of the island, by contrast, it would take an economic and political revolution for the people to secure dozens of bags of rice annually to sell to European merchants. Following this revolution, leaders could dictate the prices of the commodities they knew Europeans most needed. While European merchant groups introduced additional competition into trade in Madagascar, the real threat to coastal leaders did not come from these European visitors and colonists, but from populations elsewhere on the island.