'One That's More Torrid': The Pirates of Madagascar

Madagascar (Part III)

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.  

The French attempted to create a colony on the island a few decades later, and 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). 

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" (Kay 253). Given that the native Malagasy traditions were largely oral, except for the sorabe ("big writing," Malagasy-language texts kept in Arabic script, of which none are extant from before the mid-eighteenth century), these are the first significant written contemporary records of many of the people, flora and fauna of the island.

Due to the settlers' general inability to survive on the island (and to learn the requisite skills from the native people), 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).  The fear of reprisal from angered Malagasy is another real-world influence that is felt even in the entirely fictional segments of the General History.

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, even then 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).



What records exist of slave trading in the era do show 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). 

Many records of the era refer to struggles among the different kingdoms and tribes of Madagascar and the Comoros Islands to the northwest, including The General History, 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 then settlers launched raids, introduced the island to guns and a far larger and more lucrative market for slavery, and stole grain and cattle when necessary, possibly exacerbating the existing cyclical rush for supplies “in the hungry period before the harvest” which had previously caused “deaths from hunger far more often than from wounds during times of war” (87)



 

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