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were finally moved to Réunion and Surat.¹⁸⁰ Attempting to colonize Madagascar had almost ruined the French trading company financially and had diverted their commercial energies from other ventures in the ocean. Only one or two French ships a year entered the Indian Ocean during the next few decades until another French Compagnie des Indes was founded in 1719.¹⁸¹ After this date, the French sent far more vessels into the ocean, as they refocused their attention on acquiring cloth in Surat and settling the Mascarenes.¹⁸² After the collapse of Fort Dauphin, French ships took both the inner and outer routes around Madagascar on their way to Asian ports.¹⁸³ In the Mascarenes, Madagascar still was viewed as an ideal location for a colony, as eighteenth-century French observers attributed the collapse of the seventeenth-century settlement to the incompetence of colonial officials, not the local environment or the hostility of local communities.¹⁸⁴

      The seventeenth-century French settlements left their mark on the communities of southeastern Madagascar. Malagasy sorabe documents describe the events of the seventeenth century, including memories of the warfare instigated and perpetuated by French settlers. During one battle c. 1659, large portions of the southwest were described as “ravaged.” The narrator observes that ten thousand cattle were taken from the inhabitants. When some villages did not give “whites” their cattle, gold, silver, and cloth, there was extensive bloodshed.¹⁸⁵ The murderous exploits of La Case, so lauded by Rochon, were remembered in particular detail. On one occasion, “Lakasy” (La Case) led an alliance of rulers who burned entire villages and stole three thousand cattle. Following several such raids, La Case returned to Fort Dauphin with ten thousand cattle and ten thousand captives.¹⁸⁶ One of the leaders at war with the French declared, “I must flee, as [my] people have died from hunger.”¹⁸⁷ The violence that accompanied these French attempts at settlement had become intimately linked to starvation, not only for the settlers but also the islanders.

      ENGLISH PLANTATIONS

      The English East India Company (EIC) sent its first ships into the ocean in 1601. The first fleet sailed into the Mozambique Channel and stopped at St. Augustin Bay as they entered the ocean. English reliance on provisioning in the Mozambique Channel would set the stage for, and determine the locations of, English settlements on Madagascar several decades later. Despite increasing interest by historians such as Alison Games and Emily Erikson in seventeenth-century English plans for Madagascar, there have been few attempts to link the success of early provisioning visits to later English desires for colonies on the island.¹⁸⁸ It was only following frequent, peaceful refueling in western Madagascar that some in England decided to include the large island in their “struggle for power and wealth through overseas expansion,” to borrow Games’s phrasing.¹⁸⁹

      When the English arrived in southwestern Madagascar in the first decades of the seventeenth century, they discovered that local communities were initially unaccustomed to supplying visiting vessels with plentiful provisions. For example, four EIC trading vessels came to anchor in St. Augustin Bay in 1614.¹⁹⁰ When they arrived, the English discovered the shoreline was sparsely populated. No kings, queens, or courtiers approached the visitors or offered to board their ship. No coastal inhabitants arrived in their own dugout canoes or clamored to sell the sailors produce of the island. At the time of the Englishmen’s arrival in August, rain would have been almost completely absent from the region.¹⁹¹ When the English boarded canoes and came ashore, they discovered a collection of huts made of “bark” (woven palm leaves) near the shoreline. Herds of cattle may have been wandering nearby, but no people. The lack of people made the English at first assume that the islanders hid in fear, and perhaps they did, given European descriptions of recent encounters near the bay.¹⁹² After all, seventeenth-century Portuguese had boasted that there were so many cattle in Madagascar that sailors could come ashore and easily “kill the cattle as unowned or disregarded property, simply for the sake of the tallow, leaving the flesh for the vultures.”¹⁹³

      Fortunately for these English merchants, men and women eventually approached the merchants and agreed to provide them with much-needed supplies. The coastal people sold the English several head of cattle and provided them with other invaluable sources of nutrition. They also helped the sailors in securing such fresh water and wood as was available in this arid region. Among the most important English purchases were baskets of lemons and oranges to help them combat scurvy. The English made these food purchases with various small items, including silver chains they assumed would be used “to hang about [the traders’] necks.”¹⁹⁴ Indeed, silver and beads were the only items that could be used to purchase cattle from the inhabitants living near the bay and EIC merchants quickly learned to carry such trading goods with them on their voyages into the Indian Ocean.¹⁹⁵ Knowing that the season was growing short, the EIC captains only stayed in St. Augustin Bay for about two weeks.¹⁹⁶ The four ships left Madagascar, their supplies refreshed and their captains full of memories of a friendly people and a fertile island. The English captains were eager to arrive at the richer shores of India before their ships fell into further disrepair. To stay longer would also increase the number of their sailors catching malaria and other tropical illnesses, provide them with more opportunities to run away, and even risk large-scale revolts by disgruntled crew members. These EIC ships visited the island of “Comara” before continuing to Socotra and Surat. The precarious survival of crew members in this crossing is clear in the experience of one of the vessels, the Hector, which had undertaken four journeys into the Indian Ocean previously. It had to be abandoned in the northern Indian Ocean for being “rotten” in 1616, within a few months of their departure from Madagascar. The crew members and all the cargo on board had narrowly escaped disaster.¹⁹⁷

      Following their arrival in Asia, the EIC officers issued reports back to company officials in Europe. Their positive experiences in Madagascar, when combined with earlier EIC reports, recommended the island to future expeditions. One English merchant, John Sandcrofte, wrote approvingly of the bay, describing the “excellent good” cattle. In the same year, the merchant Robert Preston reported that “the people [showed] themselves both civil and loving, being the properest men that I have seen.” He found the islanders to be “reasonable” and amenable to trade, despite their lack of experience in dealing with European merchants.¹⁹⁸ The bay was easy for sailors to find after crossing under the Cape of Good Hope and the people here provided cheap and plentiful food to visiting fleets. These positive descriptions of southwestern Madagascar began circulating among EIC captains and, within a few years, the bay in Madagascar was recommended as a good meeting place and the “fittest place of refreshing” for EIC fleets on long voyages into the Indian Ocean.¹⁹⁹ From 1607 to 1700, at least fifty-two EIC ships stopped in St. Augustin Bay before sailing onward.²⁰⁰

      Despite the recent introduction of oceanic trade to southwestern Madagascar and occasional clashes, coastal communities welcomed the opportunities presented by the arrival of European ships, not just those of the English, but Dutch and French as well. Visitors to the bay described the arrival of people in canoes full of food to sell to the sailors. When news of a ship’s arrival spread, inhabitants along the rivers would approach the bay with their herds or in canoes to bring goods for trade. “Chiefs” (the Andriana) sold the English small supplies of rice, cattle, “callavances” (also written calavances, likely the hyacinth bean, Lablab purpureus), and lemons in return for metal and red carnelian beads that the Europeans had brought from India or the Persian Gulf region.²⁰¹ The Andriana also requested military support and firearms from the English. In return, these leaders promised to provide visiting Englishmen with cattle or slaves obtained in raids on groups in the interior of the island.²⁰² Such was the extent of English success that the French at Fort Dauphin made repeated requests to move their settlement to the opposite side of the island.²⁰³

      FIGURE 2.4. English East India Company visits to Madagascar, by decade, 1600–1700. Sources: See appendix for full documentation.

      The islanders were so obliging that one English trading group, the Courteen Association, decided to finance two colonies on the island in 1645, one based at St. Augustin Bay and a second on the northwest

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