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of an Arab presence along the eastern littoral since the eighth century, and Chinese contact before that, Madagascar was not “discovered” by Europeans until 1500, and in the following centuries it became familiar to seamen of western European nations as a staging point on the route to the Indies.⁶

      Privateers and various European adventurers used both the western and eastern coasts of Madagascar as important provision points, as they also used the Comoros Islands, to the northwest, both being long known as sources of fresh foodstuffs that were critical to keeping ship crews alive. The Malagasy traded cattle and fresh vegetables in a world where food preservation was rudimentary and fresh daily fare on European ships was meager. Access to fruits, vegetables, and meat was integral in planning a sea voyage of any duration.

       The Sixteenth Century

      In the late sixteenth century the people of northeastern Madagascar lived in communities whose identity was based on affiliation with maximal lineages and clans. Families within clans shared the same taboos (fady).⁷ The geography of eastern Madagascar did not favor large political groupings, which may have been constrained by the north-south mountain ranges some miles inland from the coast. One indication of this is the way kingdoms in the coastal southeast developed, such as the Antambahoaka, the Anteimoro, and the Antanosy, noted above.⁸ These kingdoms did not expand beyond the mountain ranges leading to the western plateaus. During the late sixteenth century the northern clans of the northeast, living in loosely centralized communities, were repeatedly raided for slaves by Sakalava from the northwest, who sold them in a variety of directions. By the mid-seventeenth century, the people of the eastern coast were themselves involved in exporting slaves, some of whom had been brought across the island by Sakalava traders. Recent research suggests that the slave trade from Madagascar is probably much older, and of greater volume, than has previously been suspected.

       The Seventeenth Century

      Archival material and historical studies of Indian Ocean commerce in the seventeenth century show Dutch, British, French, and colonial North American activity. These sources provide some historical context for the claims of today’s American slave descendants to Malagasy heritage. By the middle of the seventeenth century both the French and the English were attempting settlements in eastern Madagascar, which included missionaries, adventurers, and pirates. In this context, pirates were seamen whose maritime violence was justified by neither written commission nor unwritten policy and thus considered outside both international and local European law, though many had tacit government support or the support of gentry and merchants who profited from their activities.⁹ Sometimes, it must be noted, the same men who were pirates began or ended up as legal privateers or the reverse. Many of the pirates who came to Madagascar were fleeing action by the English government to suppress piracy in the Caribbean.¹⁰

      Some pirates took part in interclan raids and wars either as mercenaries or on their own account in order to obtain slaves to sell to visiting slave ships, although slaving was not the major activity or economic base for pirates in Madagascar. Trade in captives was well established in the seventeenth century, as were networks to the New World (via Portuguese or Dutch trade). Between forty and one hundred fifty thousand slaves or more “were exported during the seventeenth century solely from the northwestern town of Mazalagem Nova alone, over an extended period.”¹¹

      A colonial report, dated 1676, mentions that Barbados already had a population of over thirty-two thousand slaves from Guinea and Madagascar; Malagasy slaves were also exported at that time to Jamaica and the Carolinas, and even to Boston, where there were two hundred African and Malagasy slaves in 1676.¹² Likewise, it has been suggested that as many as “2,000 to 3,000 slaves were exported from Madagascar annually before 1700 by Swahili merchants working out of Lamu and Pate particularly” on the East African coast.¹³ It is likely that some of these slaves were shipped in British vessels during the periods that the trade was allowed by the British government; other slaves may have been traded by the Dutch, who had an important port in what is now South Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town), and in New Netherland in the Americas (which became New York State and parts of Delaware and New Jersey). Among what can be learned from the European shipping records, of special interest is the fact that the people of Madagascar were noted separately from Africans. These records tell us that at this time Europeans recorded slaves coming from Madagascar as a particular population.

      In the mid-seventeenth century the British Board of Trade, fearing the creation of a pirate state, reported fifteen hundred men, forty to fifty guns, and seventeen ships at the settlement on Saint Mary’s alone.¹⁴ Numerous reports which the British Privy Council received from India and America indicated New Amsterdam (New York City) as the home port for many pirates.¹⁵ From the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Madagascar remained an important pirate refuge.¹⁶

      One of the first instances of slave capture and trade as a retaliatory act was when a Huguenot named Pronis sold seventy-three Malagasy to the Dutch in Mauritius.¹⁷ This event in the mid-seventeenth century gives additional evidence that the risk of enslavement was already established when slaves boarded ships for Virginia and Barbados. By 1663 eighty more French settlers had arrived in Madagascar along with a Lazarist missionary priest. During this period a considerable number of Malagasy women had taken French husbands as well, thus creating marriage links and kin networks to nonpirate Europeans.¹⁸ At this time, slaves were also exported from the west of the island. This may be explained to some degree by the military expansion of the Menabe Sakalava, the establishment of the Sakalava Boina kingdom, and the increasing demand for captive labor by the Dutch settlers at the Cape.¹⁹

       The Eighteenth Century

      In the early eighteenth century, slave trading was only a corollary activity for European pirates and their Malagasy counterparts, but it was increasing.²⁰ The presence of pirates in northeastern Madagascar stimulated local trade, contributed to the growth of local power centers, and led to increased access to firearms. By the eighteenth century people of the northeast began to raid for slaves in the more southerly regions along the foot of plateaus that faced the eastern coast.²¹ It was ultimately the presence of pirates and other European “antisocials” that drew the attention of Anglo-American colonists who were looking for new ways to get silver and more ways to invest their tobacco income, eventually causing London to look for ways to crush the unruly trade centers of Madagascar.²²

      Pirates not only aided various factions in interregional and interclan wars but also lived in extended webs of Malagasy kinship. The strong pirate presence was ended at Saint Mary’s by 1708, and a British squadron was sent to assure this was so twelve years later, in 1720. By then, Malagasy on the eastern coast had entered the transatlantic slave trade as traders and victims. Britain had rescinded the injunction against American direct trade to the Indian Ocean in 1719.²³

       The Betsimisaraka in the Eighteenth Century

      As we have seen, the coalescing of the Betsimisaraka federation was preceded by interclan conflicts attended by diverse European parties. The escalation of conflict among the various locally held power centers in the northeast of the big island evolved over time. In 1712, at the same time as pirate influence dwindled, commerce in slaves from Madagascar increased significantly, even though it had been discouraged by British policy just a few years earlier. Because of the growing demand for labor in the Caribbean, which began surpassing even Cape Town, in the early eighteenth century Madagascar and Mozambique became important sources of slaves bound for the New World.

      The political origin of the Betsimisaraka people is attributed to the son of a princess named Rahena and a pirate named Tom. Around 1712 their son, Ratsimilaho, came to the forefront as a local leader who marched north and seized control of Tamatave, Foulpointe, and Fenerive during regional conflicts. Ratsimilaho eventually became titular head of the malata (mulattoes) and the zanamalata (children of the mulattoes), the families that resulted from pirate marriages to local women. In fact, the dynasties between Antongil Bay southward to Foulpointe (Mahavelona), Tamatave

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