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• 1 media/ESA Madagascar Jellyfish.jpg 2017-10-03T05:24:08-07:00 Madagascar (Part III) 65 Arrivals from the West plain 2017-12-18T10:35:39-08:00 Europeans first charted Madagascar via a wave of Portuguese vessels, starting in 1498. Diego Diaz stumbled on the island in 1500, and found both supplies and willing native peoples.  However, for much of the sixteenth century, voyages to the island remained largely "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" (Hooper 25).   The Dutch, also among the first Europeans to explore the island, had similar experiences,  as disease and low morale took a heavy toll on the crew of their first major expedition in the region. While one of the commanders, Frederik de Houtman, would eventually publish the first European translation of the Malagasy language, the expedition was marred by a fifty-percent casualty rate, violence with natives in southeast Asia and with Portuguese rivals, and Houtman's own incarceration for two years in Sumatra.  While results were encouraging enough to be cited in the subsequent formation of the Dutch East India Company, maps of the expedition noted the heavy loses, labeling one part of the island "the Dutch graveyard because many of them are buried there."
  
  Once navigation science progressed to the point that Europeans could (relatively) reliably sail naval and merchant vessels into the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century, exploration and trade exploded.  The Portuguese, despite being the first Europeans in the region, were aware of the reality of their limited manpower and naval power. This meant that they "soon realized that they could not compete directly with well-established indigenous merchant networks [and instead,] operating from fortified points around the Indian Ocean littoral, they sought to rake off profits by imposing port taxes, requiring Crown licenses or passports known as cartazes on non-Portuguese merchant vessels, and forcibly inhibiting dangerous rivals that they defined either as 'infidels' or 'pirates'" (Alpers 79-80).
  
  By and large, the Portuguese incursions into Madagascar were focused on conversions. One of the most notable encounters occurred when a local prince named Drian-Ramaka was taken from the island to their colony at Goa to be forcibly educated at a Jesuit mission. His royal parents and their subjects were understandably furious at the Portuguese when he was returned to the island two years later in 1616, with the expectation that he be a part of their conversion efforts on the island, and did little to help when the Europeans succumbed to fevers -- eventually leaving the prince and the island, having converted only one inhabitant, alienating the entire south-eastern Anosy region, and spreading an unfounded rumor about the savage nature of the island's inhabitants (Larson, "Colonies Lost", 356-7).
  
  Initially used largely as a base for these doomed religious enterprises, and for resupplying Portuguese ships, the Dutch, French and English would all soon follow.  Merchant-explorers had sought to record useful words in the languages of the region since the middle of the sixteenth century (including several dozen words noted by some of the earliest circumnavigations, Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake).  In 1603, the first recorded Malay-language group text in Europe was published by Dutchman Frederick de Houtman (who had quite a bit of time on his hands when kept prisoner for two years by the Sultan of Aceh in modern-day Sumatra), and The Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages was then quickly translated into both Latin and English.  
  
  European understanding of physical geography quite good by mid-seventeenth century. Includes understanding of seasonal changes (which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter). Representative Map.   Concepts of Africa; useful visual via the Princeton exhibit that illustrates the changing European understanding of the continent. (Interested readers might enjoy the visual tour, given from-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, at http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/africa/maps-continent/continent.html ) 
  What was lacking, of course, was an equally nuanced understanding of the continent's culture, as European names (and soon, colonies) are mapped over African soil. 
  
  The French attempted to create settlements on the island a few decades later, and thus regularly aggravated and deceived the local population.  Pier Larson explains that to "a significant extent, the chronic cycle of plunder and recrimination between the Atlantic intruders and the people of Anosy [on the SE coast where the French first settled] stemmed from the exasperating challenges chronically hungry Europeans faced in feeding themselves in a land of seeming plenty" when they lacked the local skills and knowledge to thrive" (Ocean of Letters 56). Their eventual settlement in the Anosy region, centered at Fort Dauphin, consistently struggled.
  
  Etienne de Flacourt​ was a Frenchman who had been appointed "governor" of the island by the French in 1648 as conflict increased; while the previous commander was deposed and jailed, the relations with the local Antanosy people had degraded beyond repair. Flacourt's requests for weapons and reinforcements at ​Fort Dauphin were refused or ignored for six years, during which time Flacourt applied himself to a study of the local people, flora and fauna of the island. The observations and drawings are some of the first and best records of the natural history of the island, as well as a vital record of early colonial encounters between native people and the imperial forces of the Europeans. [The entirety of his text, in French, is available in digital format in the Contemporary Documents section of this book.]  James Kay notes that "The book is remarkable for many reasons. Few people had seen Madagascar, even fewer had returned to talk about it, but Flacourt provided details of both the natural history, and the culture and history of the southern populations with great authority. As a result, many of his descriptions were of entirely new species" (253).
  
  Due to their general inability to survive on the island, the settlement  lost roughly half of its four thousand soldiers and colonists between 1642 and 1674. Kay explains that most most of the survivors moved elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, and those who remained behind on the island were killed when their overly-enthusiastic missionary efforts and need for supplies finally wore out their welcome and the native Malagasy attacked the fort, with sixty-three survivors making it aboard a company ship still in the harbor (58-9).  Despite this failure, the strategic importance of the island to the increasingly global network of trade was clear.
  
  Jan Hooper notes that, unlike the merchants of the Indian Ocean, Europeans "did not arrive during one season and wait for a change in the monsoon winds to depart again. European arrivals in the ocean were less predictable and required much larger supplies of provisions" so that while scholars generally think of this transformation of "certain food items into commodities, goods with identifiable values and produced for export, as a development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," certain items such as "rice reached this statue much earlier in provisioning locations such as Madagascar" (9).
  
  Eventually, the European powers came to believe the island was best used for provisioning, although the English always feared the French would once again create a base there from which to establish a chokehold on shipping lanes, the distance, climate and lack of support for such am endeavor meant it remained a theoretical issue that was regularly debated and dismissed in several European capitals. By the early eighteenth century, it was the pirates that drew the eye of the Europeans to the island; an  intoxicating mix of fact and fiction sold many newspapers and novels in this period, and works such as The General History were instrumental in deciding on several English inspections on the island, despite its only partial basis in fact.
   

  The seasons oceanic and atmospheric shifts due to monsoons made Madagascar an important stop for Europeans navigating their way into the Indian Ocean.  As Jane Hooper points out, in Feeding Globalization, despite the island's significant links to the slave trade, "out of the more than eight hundred voyages to the island, only about a third of the English, French and Dutch vessels that stopped there between 1600 and 1800 carried traders in search of slaves. The others loaded valuable supplies of food, wood and water during their stays on the island" (3).    While provisioning merchant and naval vessels would ensure some regular traffic on the island, it was not a regular stop (and thus made a fine base for pirates who would want to be near shipping lanes but not so close as to make themselves easy targets).  Arne Bialuschewski points out that most ships bound for India and the Far East "sailed on a southerly route and did not call at Madagascar. Ships headed for Muscat, Mocha, or Surat principally put into Cape Town and the Comoros, especially at Anjouan. If a crew ran short of water or provisions, vessels also dropped anchor on the west coast of Madagascar. Homebound ships from India normally passed by the southern tip of the island and stopped for     provisions at the Cape ("Pirates, Slavers and the Indigenous Population of Madagascar," 403).

  
  
  While the western African coast was the focal point of this movement, eastern and southern Africa were not immune. There are significant records of Malagasy transported to the Americas; according to the editor of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, "individuals from Madagascar would likely have arrived before 1722. A search of the ships arriving in North America between 1678 and 1721 revealed seven ship disembarkations with a total of 1,922 slaves from Madagascar landing in Virginia: an unnamed one in 1686; Mercury on Feb. 21, 1719; Prince Eugene on Feb. 27, 1719, and again on May 18, 1720; Rebecca on July 13, 1720; and both the Gascoigne and Henriette in 1721" (Gates). 
  
  In addition to slaves being abducted from its coastal areas, the island was a part of the shipping network that enabled the trade to thrive at such a scale. Despite the pirate captain Misson's chapter being almost entirely fictional, he did have his origins in real pirates, likely the Captains "Plantain" and Adam Baldridge.  "Plantain" is a shadowy figure, but we know more of Baldridge because of his ties to new world merchants. His settlement on Madagascar was, as Ryan Holroyd  points out, "far from being an egalitarian, proto-revolutionary statelet." It was, instead, "a slave-trading entrepôt" at which Captain Baldridge worked for the interests of "an enterprising New York merchant named Frederick Philipse, who specialised in importing goods from the Indian Ocean to British North America, especially slaves," as well as illicit treasure stolen by the pirates, and rewarding the pirates with "liquor, guns, shipping equipment, clothing and other goods" (757). In an interesting historical footnote, it was this tangle of human and illicit cargo between Madagascar and New York that eventually led to the commissioning of one of the most famous pirates of the era, William Kidd. 
  
  Aware of their importance. Appear to have been many squabbles among the different kingdom son the island, noted by Europeans (and in the texts included within this book, as well, as the pirates capitalized on these rivalries). As Randrianja and Ellis note, however, it is entirely possible these wars were caused “at least partly by the Europeans themselves” as first visitors and settlers launched raids, introduced the island to guns and a larger market for slavery, and stole grain and cattle when necessary, possibly exacerbating the seemingly cyclical rush for supplies “in the hungry period before the harvest” which generally caused “deaths from hunger far more often than from wounds during times of war” (87)
  
  
  
   
• 1 media/ESA Madagascar Jellyfish.jpg media/ESA Madagascar Jellyfish.jpg 2017-09-21T10:28:17-07:00 Madagascar (Part II) 60 Navigation of Indian Ocean and Atlantic plain 2017-12-15T11:45:50-08:00 While the details of initial settlement are still under investigation, it is clear that the Austronesian settlers did mix with the Bantu people of east Africa who had probably long visited the island.   The new civilization appears to have thrived, and “By 1100 CE, there was no single region of Madagascar, including the hinterland, whose most favorable points were not occupied, even if the total population of the island remained small” (Randrianja and Ellis 48).   
  
  The gradations of genetic heritage within the Malagasy people were visible to early visitors to the island, with the people of the central and northern regions noted as more physically similar to the Indonesian strain of origin and the Malagasy of the western and southern regions more influenced by African ancestors.  European visitors sometimes assumed a racial hierarchy based on these differences, but what extant evidence exists suggests that was based more on their own cultural assumptions than any real fact. A "racially diverse population" was thus formed, united by language and "common culture, of which the main features are ancestral veneration [...] the ritual importance of cattle [...] and the construction of rectangular houses" in the Austronesian style (Brown 11-12). 
  
  The proto-Malagasy, as these early settlers are called, were visited before the turn of the first millennium CE by Arab traders. Their "domination of east Africa (the Swahili coastal towns), the Comoros islands and the northern and eastern coasts of Madagascar increased, based on slaving and the long-distance exchange of exotic goods" (Parker Pearson 394). The already-hybrid Afro-Austronesian culture thus converted to Islam, although that influence seems to have faded over time.   "'The people hold to the law of Mohammed,'" according to a sixteenth-century French traveler "'yet they do not worship either God or Mohammed, but the moon'" (Larson 46).   This was no doubt a bit hyperbolic, as other travelers of the time observed residents who had “knowledge of the U’ran and of the annual feast of Ramadan” and noted “they did not eat pork and they practiced circumcision” (Randrianja and Ellis 62). It does illustrate, however, that the Islam of the Malagasy was as unique and multifaceted as their language and heritage. hence elements of the island's original religious structures remaining intact (some to this day) and no mosques being built on the island in this period.
  
  Kings ruled for hundreds of years in manner very similar to those of the Austronesean kings, both in terms of their titles and the their symbols of power.  Nobility was conferred to a broader subsection of society that in European structures, and could imply rights to certain rituals and foods, without necessarily including greater political power or wealth; furthermore, Randrianja and Ellis note that the definition of terms such as "white" (fotsy) and "dark" (mainty) in early modern records of the Malagasy must be expanded, they did not necessarily coincide with skin color (67-8). 
  
  
  Met's TOAH 
  
  
  
  WIKIPEDIA - UP WITH SCHOLARLY WORK This influx of diverse people led to various Malagasy sub-ethnicities in the mid-2nd millennium. The Merina were probably the early arrivals, though this is uncertain and other ethnic groups on Madagascar consider them relative newcomers to the island.^[12] The Merina people's culture likely mixed and merged with the Madagascar natives named Vazimba about whom little is known.^[13] According to the island's oral traditions, the "most Austronesian looking" Merina people reached the interior of the island in the 15th century and established their society there because of wars and migrant pressure at the coast.^[14][15] Merina people were settled in the central Madagascar, formed one of the three major kingdoms on the island by the 18th century – the other two being Swahili-Arab influenced Sakalava kingdom on the west-northwest and Austronesian Betsimisaraka kingdom on the east-northeast.^[11][16]
  
  
  
  
  
  
  European understanding of physical geography quite good by mid-seventeenth century. Includes understanding of seasonal changes (which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter). Representative Map.   Concepts of Africa; useful visual via the Princeton exhibit that illustrates the changing European understanding of the continent. (Interested readers might enjoy the visual tour, given from-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, at http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/africa/maps-continent/continent.html ) 
  What was lacking, of course, was an equally nuanced understanding of the continent's culture, as European names (and soon, colonies) are mapped over African soil. 
  
  
  
  Monsoons- general overview with more detail LINK NOT WORKING
  
  http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/shipwrecks/2014/10/02/maritime-rhythms-indian-ocean-monsoon/
  
  The seasons oceanic and atmospheric shifts due to monsoons made Madagascar an important stop for Europeans navigating their way into the Indian Ocean.  As Jane Hooper points out, in Feeding Globalization, despite the island's significant links to the slave trade, "out of the more than eight hundred voyages to the island, only about a third of the English, French and Dutch vessels that stopped there between 1600 and 1800 carried traders in search of slaves. The others loaded valuable supplies of food, wood and water during their stays on the island" (3).  These waves of European missionaries, slavers, merchants and pirates that would visit Madagascar, are discussed in Part III of this section.