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Madagascar

A SUMMARY DESCRIPTION of major events, people, and places in Madagascar linked to the exportation of slaves in the eighteenth century will be helpful for readers in understanding the events described in ensuing chapters. What follows here, therefore, is neither a general history of Madagascar nor a comprehensive explanation of the various ethnic communities on the island. Rather, the chapter presents a brief discussion of terms, concepts, and events relevant to the transmigration of Malagasy people from the western Indian Ocean region to the Atlantic (see glossary for an explanation of these terms; map 1.1 shows the location of the coastal ports central to the book). The following questions lead the main themes of this chapter: What were the conditions that developed in this island that led to the export of slaves from the Indian Ocean region to the Atlantic seaboard of North America and to the Caribbean?¹ Is there documentation in the archives or quoted in secondary sources that references this movement of human cargo? What were the economic and political conditions that drew Virginia planters into the global network of Indian Ocean and transatlantic networks?

Map 1.1. Madagascar (showing St. Mary’s Island, Majunga (Mahajanga), and Fort Dauphin)

The Historical Record

Geography and Early History of the Island

Madagascar is a large island, almost a thousand miles long and about 350 miles across at its widest point. It is two and a half times the size of Great Britain.² The eastern coast of the island faces the Indian Ocean, while the western coast is on the Mozambique Channel. The Malagasy language is an Austronesian language and most closely resembles the languages of central Borneo. Most recent research suggests that the island was first settled by immigrants from the Indonesian archipelago from fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago.³ Scholarly research also indicates that mixture with Africans took place either somewhere on the eastern coast of Africa, where Indonesian sailors may have landed before migrating to Madagascar, or on the island of Madagascar, shortly after Indonesian arrival there. In any case, the omnipresence of zebu cattle and their importance to Malagasy culture shows an early link with continental Africa. The predominance of early Indonesian and then Arab immigrant settlements in the east can be attributed to the wind patterns of the western Indian Ocean. It is thought that in the eighth or ninth century adventurers may have arrived from the Arab gulf states or from Islamicized areas of Indonesia.

There is fairly strong cultural homogeneity throughout the island, with certain striking features such as terrace farming of rice, reverence of ancestors, and square thatch huts, which reflect historical links with Indonesia. The Malagasy language is spoken throughout the country, with some regional variations. In addition to much Bantu vocabulary of East African origin, there are also Arabic loan words in Malagasy, especially for days of the week and words connected with astrology, arithmetic, and divining.⁴ This influence derives from the Anteimoro, Antambahoaka, and Antanosy peoples of the east.⁵ Although there is substantial evidence of an Arab presence along the eastern littoral since the eighth century, and Chinese contact before that, Madagascar was not “discovered” by Europeans until 1500, and in the following centuries it became familiar to seamen of western European nations as a staging point on the route to the Indies.⁶

Privateers and various European adventurers used both the western and eastern coasts of Madagascar as important provision points, as they also used the Comoros Islands, to the northwest, both being long known as sources of fresh foodstuffs that were critical to keeping ship crews alive. The Malagasy traded cattle and fresh vegetables in a world where food preservation was rudimentary and fresh daily fare on European ships was meager. Access to fruits, vegetables, and meat was integral in planning a sea voyage of any duration.

The Sixteenth Century

In the late sixteenth century the people of northeastern Madagascar lived in communities whose identity was based on affiliation with maximal lineages and clans. Families within clans shared the same taboos (fady).⁷ The geography of eastern Madagascar did not favor large political groupings, which may have been constrained by the north-south mountain ranges some miles inland from the coast. One indication of this is the way kingdoms in the coastal southeast developed, such as the Antambahoaka, the Anteimoro, and the Antanosy, noted above.⁸ These kingdoms did not expand beyond the mountain ranges leading to the western plateaus. During the late sixteenth century the northern clans of the northeast, living in loosely centralized communities, were repeatedly raided for slaves by Sakalava from the northwest, who sold them in a variety of directions. By the mid-seventeenth century, the people of the eastern coast were themselves involved in exporting slaves, some of whom had been brought across the island by Sakalava traders. Recent research suggests that the slave trade from Madagascar is probably much older, and of greater volume, than has previously been suspected.

The Seventeenth Century

Archival material and historical studies of Indian Ocean commerce in the seventeenth century show Dutch, British, French, and colonial North American activity. These sources provide some historical context for the claims of today’s American slave descendants to Malagasy heritage. By the middle of the seventeenth century both the French and the English were attempting settlements in eastern Madagascar, which included missionaries, adventurers, and pirates. In this context, pirates were seamen whose maritime violence was justified by neither written commission nor unwritten policy and thus considered outside both international and local European law, though many had tacit government support or the support of gentry and merchants who profited from their activities.⁹ Sometimes, it must be noted, the same men who were pirates began or ended up as legal privateers or the reverse. Many of the pirates who came to Madagascar were fleeing action by the English government to suppress piracy in the Caribbean.¹⁰

Some pirates took part in interclan raids and wars either as mercenaries or on their own account in order to obtain slaves to sell to visiting slave ships, although slaving was not the major activity or economic base for pirates in Madagascar. Trade in captives was well established in the seventeenth century, as were networks to the New World (via Portuguese or Dutch trade). Between forty and one hundred fifty thousand slaves or more “were exported during the seventeenth century solely from the northwestern town of Mazalagem Nova alone, over an extended period.”¹¹

A colonial report, dated 1676, mentions that Barbados already had a population of over thirty-two thousand slaves from Guinea and Madagascar; Malagasy slaves were also exported at that time to Jamaica and the Carolinas, and even to Boston, where there were two hundred African and Malagasy slaves in 1676.¹² Likewise, it has been suggested that as many as “2,000 to 3,000 slaves were exported from Madagascar annually before 1700 by Swahili merchants working out of Lamu and Pate particularly” on the East African coast.¹³ It is likely that some of these slaves were shipped in British vessels during the periods that the trade was allowed by the British government; other slaves may have been traded by the Dutch, who had an important port in what is now South Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town), and in New Netherland in the Americas (which became New York State and parts of Delaware and New Jersey). Among what can be learned from the European shipping records, of special interest is the fact that the people of Madagascar were noted separately from Africans. These records tell us that at this time Europeans recorded slaves coming from Madagascar as a particular population.

In the mid-seventeenth century the British Board of Trade, fearing the creation of a pirate state, reported fifteen hundred men, forty to fifty guns, and seventeen ships at the settlement on Saint Mary’s alone.¹⁴ Numerous reports which the British Privy Council received from India and America indicated New Amsterdam (New York City) as the home port for many pirates.¹⁵ From the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Madagascar remained an important pirate refuge.¹⁶

One of the first instances of slave capture and trade as a retaliatory act was when a Huguenot named Pronis sold seventy-three Malagasy to the Dutch in Mauritius.¹⁷ This event in the mid-seventeenth century gives additional evidence that the risk of enslavement was already established when slaves boarded ships for Virginia and Barbados. By 1663 eighty more French settlers had arrived in Madagascar along with a Lazarist missionary priest. During this period a considerable number of Malagasy women had taken French husbands as well, thus creating marriage links and kin networks to nonpirate Europeans.¹⁸ At this time, slaves were also exported from the west of the island. This may be explained to some degree by the military expansion of the Menabe Sakalava, the establishment of the Sakalava Boina kingdom, and the increasing demand for captive labor by the Dutch settlers at the Cape.¹⁹

The Eighteenth Century

In the early eighteenth century, slave trading was only a corollary activity for European pirates and their Malagasy counterparts, but it was increasing.²⁰ The presence of pirates in northeastern Madagascar stimulated local trade, contributed to the growth of local power centers, and led to increased access to firearms. By the eighteenth century people of the northeast began to raid for slaves in the more southerly regions along the foot of plateaus that faced the eastern coast.²¹ It was ultimately the presence of pirates and other European “antisocials” that drew the attention of Anglo-American colonists who were looking for new ways to get silver and more ways to invest their tobacco income, eventually causing London to look for ways to crush the unruly trade centers of Madagascar.²²

Pirates not only aided various factions in interregional and interclan wars but also lived in extended webs of Malagasy kinship. The strong pirate presence was ended at Saint Mary’s by 1708, and a British squadron was sent to assure this was so twelve years later, in 1720. By then, Malagasy on the eastern coast had entered the transatlantic slave trade as traders and victims. Britain had rescinded the injunction against American direct trade to the Indian Ocean in 1719.²³

The Betsimisaraka in the Eighteenth Century

As we have seen, the coalescing of the Betsimisaraka federation was preceded by interclan conflicts attended by diverse European parties. The escalation of conflict among the various locally held power centers in the northeast of the big island evolved over time. In 1712, at the same time as pirate influence dwindled, commerce in slaves from Madagascar increased significantly, even though it had been discouraged by British policy just a few years earlier. Because of the growing demand for labor in the Caribbean, which began surpassing even Cape Town, in the early eighteenth century Madagascar and Mozambique became important sources of slaves bound for the New World.

The political origin of the Betsimisaraka people is attributed to the son of a princess named Rahena and a pirate named Tom. Around 1712 their son, Ratsimilaho, came to the forefront as a local leader who marched north and seized control of Tamatave, Foulpointe, and Fenerive during regional conflicts. Ratsimilaho eventually became titular head of the malata (mulattoes) and the zanamalata (children of the mulattoes), the families that resulted from pirate marriages to local women. In fact, the dynasties between Antongil Bay southward to Foulpointe (Mahavelona), Tamatave (Toamasina), and Mananjary were characterized by occasionally arranged French-Malagasy marriages that also functioned as contracts for exclusive trade rights between Europeans and locals as well as for marital privileges and obligations for both sides.²⁴ Ratsimilaho was far more closely integrated into the history of the Sakalava monarchy of Boina than has generally been appreciated and was closely affiliated with overseas systems of commerce, as shown in recent research.²⁵

Indicating the growth of internal violence that paralleled the growth of the slave trade, Rasimilaho’s son and successor was killed in 1767. By 1791 the kingdom had all but collapsed, and the last king was killed in 1803 by his own subjects.²⁶ The Betsimisaraka have continued as a cultural community to the current era.

North American Slave Trading in Madagascar

The official (or legal) slave trade from Madagascar to the Anglo-American colonies was actually short lived. Official slave trading open to English and colonial vessels began in the 1670s, only to close again in 1698 by an act of Parliament.²⁷ The legal Madagascar trade reopened to the Americans in 1716 and remained open until 1721, when it was permanently discontinued.²⁸ American colonist participation in the slave trade with Madagascar created government debate in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Britain regarding the interpretation of the Acts of Trade and Navigation, such as the issue of whether Negroes should be classified as merchandise within the meaning of the acts.²⁹ This issue, much debated at the time, brings us to the crux of the drama that Malagasy slaves experienced. While the British Parliament discussed whether slaves could be counted as any other cargo, like horses or bolts of Indian cotton, the captives—the subject of the debates—were confronted with the very human problem of survival and identity in a very different context, a problem of little concern to many gentlemen in Parliament.

The area that is now New York State, as well as some parts of New Jersey and Delaware, was named New Netherland by the Dutch and began as a settlement under the Dutch West India Company. It remained in the hands of the Dutch until a series of conflicts with the British, which had began in 1664 and ended in 1674, when the area from Albany, New York, to Delaware fell to the British Crown. Settlers in New Netherland came with the hope of making money; they did not come because of religious persecution, and many were not Dutch. The Dutch West India Company promoted settlement in order to gain value for their investment, and the first slaves who came to the settlement were brought by the Dutch.

The local Dutch trader Frederick Philipse of New Amsterdam was not among the most wealthy merchants, but he was successful in importing slaves to New Netherland and stayed when the British took over. Through his agent, Adam Baldridge, he facilitated the export of hundreds of Malagasy to New York during the seventeenth century, some of whom were further shipped to Connecticut, Massachusetts, and other points of New England upon their arrival in the New World.³⁰ He was also a major contact in Madagascar for other visiting Europeans.³¹ Baldridge’s trading post in Madagascar has been likened to the slave factories and forts that had already been established on Africa’s western coast.³² But instead of being financed and maintained by joint-stock companies and their shareholders, as in West Africa, the post at Saint Mary’s was primarily created through the actions of pirates and ordinary seamen, as scholars have described quite vividly.³³ Complementing the existing trade networks was the financial backing Baldridge received from some of New York’s wealthiest merchants, and he and Philipse maintained contacts with pirates, including some who had emigrated from the Caribbean to Madagascar.³⁴

The latter period of Madagascar slave trading to the Americas is of particular interest to the story begun in this chapter. The slave cargo exports of 1719–21 that brought so many enslaved Malagasy to the trading posts on Virginia’s York and Rappahannock Rivers were part of the increased slave exports that originated along Madagascar’s eastern coast, just as the earlier slave exports to New Netherland had come from the same region.³⁵

It was not until after the American Revolution that regular trade to the western Indian Ocean by North Americans resumed. By that time the Malagasy trade in slaves was not a significant part of U.S. Indian Ocean activities, largely due to efforts of abolitionists in Britain and the United States. The transatlantic slave trade was made illegal in 1808. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the spice trade and whaling superseded the slave trade for American merchants in the Indian Ocean.

Captives

The Malagasy captives who arrived in Virginia in 1719 could not have known that their fate was very much tied to the political vagaries of the British Parliament and the East India Company’s future. Due to persistent lobbying on the part of Anglo-Americans and private shippers in England, the protectionist policy allowing the British East India Company exclusive trade rights in the region had been repealed.³⁶ Evolving relations between North American colonies, European settlements in Madagascar, and the emerging Betsimisaraka federation, in northeastern Madagascar, reveal, at this stage, the complex workings of early modern colonizing projects that progressed in multiple directions, and these relations demonstrate the transregional nature of the slave trade.³⁷ The story of the slaves and early immigrants from Madagascar should be seen in this evolving global context.

The trajectories of the Madagascar slave trade to America were transregional and transnational, and actors entered and played the game both from the metropole (England, France) and from new territories that eventually were established as possessions of either crown. The historical record allows us to at least cobble together a liste de présence that reveals the dynamics that led to shipments between Madagascar and Virginia, and from this we can discern the local interplay of forces that, while leading to the Betsimisaraka federation, also led to the deportation of hundreds of people from the northeast of Madagascar.

For the purpose of their subsequent debarkation, and after traveling in canoes that plied the riverways of areas further inland, young women, men and children in slave coffles were likely forced to march to the northeastern coastal area facing Saint Mary’s Island and to the port town of Fort Dauphin, further south along the coast. It is probable that they knew what they were in for. As we have seen, by 1716 this area was known for its brisk commerce with foreigners, including slave trading. Since slave exports had seen a peak in the late seventeenth century, some fifteen years earlier, the presence of Anglo-American foreigners circulating along the coast may have suggested to the captives that their destination would not be slavery within Madagaskaria, or the Red Island, as it was known to its European visitors. However, while captives probably suspected shipment abroad, they could not have imagined their coming voyage of thousands of miles to the New World.

Due to navigational constraints, such as ocean currents, seasonal monsoons, and the difficulty of sailing the Mozambique Channel most of the year, the greater part of the trade destined for the Americas traveled from Madagascar’s eastern coast southward, stopping for provisions and trade at the Cape of Good Hope, in what is today South Africa, before crossing the Atlantic.

In 1721 Capt. Joseph Stretton entered Kingston, Jamaica, with 243 Negroes from “Africa” in the Tunbridge Galley of Bristol. Historian Virginia Platt suggests that often, when the generic term Africa was listed and the captain of record had Madagascar experience, it is probable that the ship was illegally carrying captives from Madagascar. Many captains simply reported Africa as the source of slaves in order to avoid discovery during the period between 1698 and 1712, when the Madagascar trade was illegal.³⁸ In 1721 the trade eventually closed again, which may be why Stretton listed “Africa” as his port of call.

Stretton’s next post was as captain of the Prince Eugene, a vessel in which the British merchant John Duckinfield was an investor. The Prince Eugene, having been on an unlicensed voyage to Madagascar, arrived in Virginia from Madagascar after making a stop in Jamaica. Later, a vessel named the Duckinfield (partially owned by John Duckinfield) entered Kingston with 280 slaves from “Africa,” also probably in 1721.³⁹ That ship also continued on to Virginia. As it happens, Duckinfield was also among the owners of the Rebecca Snow, one of the other ships arriving in Virginia from Madagascar during this period.⁴⁰ These are four examples of ships partially owned by John Duckinfield that brought Malagasy slaves to Jamaica, three of which continued their voyages to the Virginia Commonwealth.

Family Oral Traditions

Scholar Alessandro Portelli suggests that the diversity of oral history lies in the fact that “wrong” statements are still psychologically “true,” and that this truth may be equally as important as factually reliable accounts. Further, orality and writing, he points out, have not existed separately for several centuries. If many written sources are based on orality, Portelli argues, modern orality itself is saturated with writing.⁴¹

In the research for this volume, I discovered that for slave descendants today in America there is an interesting circularity between the received spoken word and the written word of professional historians. This has to do, I found, with family members who have a desire to know more about the stories they have heard and, as important, with their need to make a contribution to the ongoing narrative of family ancestors. A query that I received in 2001 on my e-list on “Madagascar ancestors” (managed through rootsweb.com from 2001 to 2003) is relevant to the story of early Anglo-American networks to Madagascar.⁴² This query was from someone who thought he might be descended from a British slave trader and a slave from Madagascar. He had found his surname, Duckinfield, in archival records as he searched to identify the young Englishman who, according to family stories, took a slave concubine in Jamaica and brought her to the Anglo-American colony of Virginia, thus begetting an Afro-Virginian family. The present-day Mr. Duckinfield’s archival search led him to discover the existence of John Duckinfield, one of the major slave ship owners for brigs going to and from Madagascar in the eighteenth century. He learned that John Duckinfield was connected with several ships that traded between Madagascar, Jamaica, and Virginia in the eighteenth century.⁴³

According to the family oral tradition, John Duckinfield’s son became quite enamored of his concubine and consequentially became estranged from his father. The father was upset by his son’s unreasonable demand to keep the concubine, and the son moved to Virginia with his concubine to settle there. This is the end of his family narrative as far as I was able to note it.

The contemporary African American Mr. Duckinfield did his own research to see if he could find any evidence of British Duckinfields trading in the Americas. He learned of the investor John Duckinfield of Duckinfield and Company of Bristol.⁴⁴ He did not at the time associate his family with Madagascar, but he did want to know his ancestry. In an e-mail, he expressed to me that, although his family did not mention Madagascar specifically, he thought that given the family story of his British forebear, there was a likelihood that the maternal ancestor in question may have been a Malagasy slave. He therefore joined our discussion group in the hopes of learning more. Thus, today’s family narratives are transmitted by people who spend significant time looking through written histories. Unfortunately, as with other cases, the oral history does not in this case allow for a conclusive alignment of one story (familial) to the other (historical record). Portelli speaks of the inherent incompleteness of oral sources and of data that, once extracted from an interview, is always the result of a selection produced by the mutual relationship of interviewer and interviewee.⁴⁵ Certainly in this case the contemporary Mr. Duckinfield did seem to want more information. I was sorry that, in spite of my study, I had none to offer him.

The Duckinfield example reminds us that the “captives” and the “slaves” to whom archival documents refer were, after all, people. Like others who have been forced to migrate and endure horrendous ordeals, enslaved people left a mark on their descendants through their very anonymity. That is, the lack of information about forebears leaves its own mark, giving an unknown ancestor a different importance than that attributed to ancestors whose identities are known. That absence perturbs the consciousness like a missing limb. Though their personal stories do not appear in the historical record, the descendants of slaves continue to ponder the traumatic experience of slavery and to keep their own records, and their own counsel, about what they think happened.