Feeding Globalization - Jane Hooper Indian Ocean Studies Series

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“in the least expensive manner possible.” Other sources for food, such as Jakarta, were far too distant to be reliable. Van Riebeeck also confessed a desire to diminish the power of the Portuguese by directing some of this valuable trade away from Mozambique Island, crippling the ability of the Portuguese to provision their merchant fleets. He made plans to have a company ship set aside for a regular provisioning trade with Madagascar (as the French would later do in the Mascarene Islands).127 Van Riebeeck identified St. Augustin Bay as a place with “an abundance of cattle . . . whilst always no rice, or at least, very little.” Gaining access to these cattle stores was important, as their African neighbors seemed resistant to providing the Dutch with this valuable resource. Furthermore, St. Augustin Bay would be “distant enough from the French, who profess to have the right of possession mostly everywhere on the Eastern side.”128

      Despite van Riebeeck’s resolution, it took several more years for the VOC to send its ships to western Madagascar, the Dutch preferring to visit the more familiar east coast. In 1663, for instance, the ship the Waterhoen sailed to eastern Madagascar but only managed to obtain seven slaves and five “lasts” of “rice, cadjangh [peanuts], beans and peas.” The day before they left the bay, five people from the vessel deserted, “evidently hoping to reach the French in the neighbourhood,” and took guns with them on their escape. Once the ship returned to the Cape, the scale of the Waterhoen failure became evident. The slaves, whose number included two little boys and a girl, were all suffering from scurvy. The rice was crushed like meal and barely edible. Despite this failure, the Waterhoen again visited Antongil Bay the following year but could not obtain any slaves. According to Dutch records, the king “Fillo Horiva” told them he was unable to sell any slaves but could provide them with plentiful rice.129 It was during this period, in 1663, that a Dutch ship, Wapen van Amsterdam, carried 354 slaves (of whom only 265 survived) to New York.130 While the ship was able to obtain a large number of slaves, perhaps from the northwest coast of Madagascar, the high mortality rate foreshadowed the challenges European slavers would face later.

      The Cape colonists only began to pursue trade on the west coast after 1672, when the Dutch captured an English slaving vessel which had 184 slaves on board, all procured from the ports of northwestern Madagascar.131 Inspired by this success, a Cape slave ship, the Voorhout, sailed in 1676, the slavers on board purchasing 276 captives in “Mazalagem” and “Maningaar.”132 Following this success, the VOC sent the ship again to the same ports, but found slave prices higher amid competition from three Arab vessels. The health of the slaves was poor.133 Likewise, in 1678, the VOC ship the Elisabeth bought 114 slaves from “Magalage” for Jakarta, but 51 died on the voyage across the ocean.134

      Undeterred, the Cape government continued to send ships to the west coast of Madagascar for rice and slaves.135 Trade became relatively predictable and Madagascar was seen as a reliable supplier for the Cape when the colonists faced dangers of food shortages and also for slave ships visiting East Africa.136 Ships would leave southern Africa in May, sail for a month to Madagascar, and then spend three or four months visiting several ports along the west coast of the island. Even on such short voyages time was of the essence, as the return could take as long as six months and the risk of revolt on board or while near the shore was always high.137 Historian Richard Allen estimates that 1,069 slaves were brought from Madagascar to the Cape on VOC-sponsored voyages between 1652 and 1699, with a further 1,756 slaves carried from Madagascar during the eighteenth century.138

      While Madagascar remained important to the Dutch both as a victualing source as well as supplier of slaves for Mauritius and the Cape Colony, the impact of Dutch trade on the people of Madagascar was mixed. The Dutch never managed to attempt anything larger than a small trading post on the island. Nevertheless, the Dutch were the first to try to conclude written trading agreements in eastern Madagascar, an area previously distant from frequent oceanic commerce. Even though trade was relatively small and infrequent compared to what was being carried out on the opposite coast, material traces of seventeenth-century Dutch trade have been found in the interior of Madagascar. The experience of van der Stel, describing the continued pull of trade toward the west coast of the island, suggests that this period was one still dominated by interisland commerce. There is also archeological evidence of the continued importation of goods into northeastern Madagascar throughout this entire precolonial period from as far away as China, even as more Europeans arrived on the island’s shores.139 In light of these trading opportunities, the decision of the king of Antongil to send his captives to northwest Madagascar, rather than reserving them for the Dutch, made perfect sense.

      THE FRENCH AT FORT DAUPHIN

      In 1529, two French vessels visited Madagascar before continuing to Sumatra. They were followed by several other French attempts to intervene in the commerce of the ocean. Reports of ample food being bought with “things of little value” in Madagascar may have helped place the island at the center of French commercial schemes.140 In 1642, Cardinal Richelieu founded the Compagnie française d’Orient, intended to be an imitation of the Dutch VOC.141 The following year, the first French settlers landed near St. Luce Bay. Early Dutch sailors had recently visited this region and bought a great deal of fruit, rice, and boiled milk from a king who was conversant in “Spanish” (likely Portuguese).142 The French hoped that this location might be ideal for a commercial base. Control of the establishment was given to a company agent named Jacques Pronis. His initial plans were ambitious, as he sought to control the entire east coast of the island, but they were rapidly halted by tropical diseases. After the first two months, only fourteen of the original forty settlers remained alive. Pronis decided to move his people to the south, where he oversaw the building of Fort Dauphin. This part of the south was cooler and Pronis hoped it would be healthier. The nearby bay was seen as a favorable location for ships to stop and load livestock. Shortly after his arrival, multiple ships sailed from France to Madagascar carrying colonists and trading goods to replenish the colony.143

      FIGURE 2.3. French visits to Madagascar, by decade, 1600–1700. Sources: See appendix for full documentation.

      Even after their move to Taolagnaro, the French settlers struggled. According to seventeenth-century accounts, Pronis was responsible for many of the difficulties these colonists would face. He married an island woman and tried to ally with leaders known as the Raoandriana. French sources list dozens of kings living near Anosy, each of them carried around in litters by their subjects. The kings traced their ancestry to the Middle East through oral traditions and written sources known as the sorabe, recorded using an Arabic script.144 The Raoandriana secured their power through relationships with religious specialists known as ombiasy.145 The French noted that the kings were less concerned with selling provisions to the French than with benefiting militarily from alliances with foreigners.146 People lived in villages surrounded with strong palisades to protect their populations and cattle herds from theft. One of the leaders reportedly had 14,000 men under his control, presumably recruited to protect villages and their herds. Pronis contributed to this regional conflict when he decided to sell islanders as slaves to visiting Dutch slavers.147 By the time Pronis’s replacement, Étienne Flacourt, arrived in 1648, there were only twenty-eight Frenchmen living on the coast, the rest residing in the interior.148 Flacourt despaired over the lack of religion apparent among these Frenchmen, who were more at home with their island wives than in Fort Dauphin. Food was in short supply at the fort, suggesting that the decision to ally and live with local families was a practical choice for many. Flacourt noted that the “grands” of the country had asked Pronis what riches he possessed, as he lacked both rice and meat. Pronis replied that while he lacked food, at least he had slaves. His response effectively demonstrates why the colony, intended to be a provisioning base for French merchants, was failing miserably.149

      Flacourt had brought with him eighty additional colonists, including priests, and high hopes for reinvigorating the French settlement. The priests were meant to convert the islanders, but they also spent considerable time trying

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