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

Madagascar (Part I)

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Madagascar: I European authors of the late seventeenth century viewed Madagascar as potential territory, or space for asylum 'outside' their realm. A goal of this modern project is to instead focus on the island's role as a nexus, the center of a vast commercial and cultural network.

Although often dwarfed on maps, in comparison to neighboring Africa, Madagascar is an enormous landmass; a few thousand square miles larger than the entirety of California and Georgia combined, it is also one of the richest centers of biodiversity on the planet.

While Madagascar is among the last major landmasses to be settled by humans, the island itself is ancient and was once part of the supercontinent Rodinia (a precursor to the better-known Pangea).  Interestingly, in recent years scholars noted several scientific anomalies in the area around Madagascar. For example, some areas of the ocean exhibit a stronger gravitational pull, and zircon rocks were found on Mauritius, a (once closely) neighboring island that is geologically 8 million years old, dating back 2 billion years. It seems a lost continent named Mauritia was located in between Madagascar and India. As the continents drifted apart, this relatively small piece of the puzzle collapsed into the sea and later volcanic eruptions propelled the zircon up onto the surface of the more newly-formed Mauritius.

Further evidence has been found in the ancient crust underneath Mauritius "of central-east Madagascar affinity," further supporting the fact that the islands were once physically connected; the Mascarene Basin (the shallow underwater plateau north/northeast of Madagascar) opened about 84 million years ago and thus India, the lost continent of Mauritia, the Seychelles and Madagascar broke apart (Ashwal et al).

As to the first humans on the island, there is speculation that east African hunting societies might have found their way to the island as early as 2400 BCE. However, no record of any permanent settlement at that time has been found, and the evidence (largely markings on animal bones) can be attributed to a wide variety of causes beyond human involvement. There is firm archaeological evidence of human activity on the island, including pottery made locally, around 685-745 CE, covering what appears to be a lower level of human activity dating to 405 CE, which is perhaps the earliest known date of human presence on the island (Ellis 20). In addition, scientists have confirmed that the “presence of Cannabis/Humulus pollen […] dated by approximation to c. 150 BCE” could indicate a human presence on the island, although there are “no increases in charcoal which would be expected if people were using fire as a tool for managing the landscape.” Recorded changes to landscape can be useful indicator of large-scale human presence, but on Madagascar such records only begin around c. 1250 CE, when the charcoal record and sudden increases in grassland “indicate that people probably used fire to transform the wooded landscape to a grassland dominated one” (Exblom et al, 207).

Despite the likely presence of visitors from inhabitants of the east coast of Africa, anthropologists, linguists and archaeologists have confirmed that the original settlers of Madagascar have their roots in Indonesia, on the far side of the Indian Ocean. Gwyn Campbell points out that the overall movement throughout the Indian and Pacific Ocean of these Austronesian islanders, from roughly 1500 BCE to 1500 CE, was the largest dispersal of peoples in world history prior to the European voyages of discovery and colonialization.

As a result of this massive and rapid expansion over such a large area, the estimates of when the ancestors of the first settlers of Madagascar (the "proto-Malagasy") might have first departed their homes ranges from 3000 BCE to the 1200s CE (Campbell 14). This map illustrates one of many contemporary theories about the early movement of these ocean-going people:

Evidence that it was the Austronesians who largely settled the island comes in no small part from the language of the people there, recorded by Europeans as early as the late 1500s. It is not an African language, but rather a descendant of the ancient South East Barito group of languages from the region of Borneo, with some influence from the Malay and Javanese languages; virtually all foreign loanwords (words taken and incorporated as-is, from another language) were adapted in such a form that implies continued contact between the residents of Madagascar and their ancestors in southeast Asia would have been ongoing for some time after the initial settlement (Adelaar 78, 82).

Edward Alpers sees a "general agreement that the initial [Austronesian] voyages probably reached northern Madagascar sometime between around 100 BCE to 300-400 CE, while further settlement continued sporadically for another one thousand years" (37-8). The island seems to have been used for centuries by natives of the region much as it would be by later European ships: as a convenient place for rest and resupply, often on the way to and from ports in east Africa or southwest Asia.  Thus a native, permanent population formed as recently as 500 -1000 CE, although this is a theory still under investigation.

While the initial arrivals and settlements of the island are shrouded in mystery, much more is known about the technology that the Austronesians used to find their way there. Scholars have "brought to light the sophisticated non-instrumental navigational techniques which allowed Austronesian-speakers to progressively occupy the Pacific Islands, to reach and keep contact with remote and often tiny islands thousands of islands apart....[and through] reassessing eighteenth-century descriptions by Western explorers, it was also proven that the vessels that carried people into the Pacific had often been complex, large, plank-built canoes, not mere dugouts" (Manguin 54).
Of great importance, of course, were the currents and monsoons, drastically changing between winter and summer. "Although the Equatorial Current was never the preferred way to sail across the Indian Ocean," as opposed to the far safer method of hopping along the northern coastline in smaller voyages, "it may have facilitated Indonesian migration to eastern Africa and Madagascar" (Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History 9).

In an interesting twist, recent work completed using DNA analysis indicates an event in which Madagascar was permanently settled "by a small effective founding population—estimated at only approximately 30 women, most of whom had Indonesian ancestry (93%). Although this number of founding women might seem surprisingly small, it fits well with estimates of the small number of women (approx. 70) who founded New Zealand, another island nation settled by related Austronesian speakers at around the same time period" (Cox et al). Archaeological records suggest women were not normally a part of most merchant and exploratory cruises by southeast-Asian islanders, so for even thirty women to have been part of a voyage, the best guess is that a larger ship of settlers or even refugees made an early (or perhaps, the first) permanent settlement on the island.

Further evidence of an early and primarily Austronesian colonization of the island is found via recent work on the biological ancestry of local flora, which shows that 10% of the biodiversity on the island is Southeast Asian in origin. According to a recent study, "Historically or currently important crops on Madagascar, like banana [...] yam [...], taro [...], and coconut [...], are Southeast Asian cultivars." Asian rice, "which was domesticated separately in East and South Asia but is the basis of traditional agriculture across much of Madagascar today, was also widely grown in Southeast Asia by the first millennium CE" and "other Asian crops, like mung bean [...] and Asian cotton" are also present in the long biological record of Madagascar (Crowther et al). In that same study, it is clear that the influence of Asian crops on Madagascar is quite different from the dominance of African crops on the nearby mainland: