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 that western Madagascar could provide the food needed at the Cape “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
