Feeding Globalization - Jane Hooper Indian Ocean Studies Series

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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

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