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 to restore the French to the faith and foster obedience to their new commander. Several more ships were sent between 1654 and 1660 with yet more settlers and priests to expand the Madagascar settlement.150 In spite of his goals, Flacourt faced repeated difficulties. His reports describe a province at war, disrupted by the presence of French soldiers and firearms. Flacourt decided to return to Paris to ask for additional aid, but drowned in 1660 before returning to Madagascar. The account Flacourt left of his time on the island, providing lengthy descriptions of the religious and political practices of the Raoandriana, would be more influential on French commercial plans in the ocean than his time on the island itself.151
The French did not abandon hopes of settling Madagascar. By the 1660s, the mercantilist policies of Jean-Baptist Colbert had contributed to a French interest in undermining Dutch domination in the Indian Ocean. In 1664, Louis XIV granted the “island of Madagascar and its dependencies” to the Compagnie française des Indes orientales (the third French company to be awarded an exclusive monopoly on trade in the Indian Ocean). Unlike earlier attempts, this colony was to be under the close oversight of the French government and operated under a royal charter that gave the colonists a monopoly on trade from Madagascar.152 Madagascar was once again chosen, according to Ames, “out of both historic and strategic necessity.”153 It seems that the French were still unable to envision a plan for the Indian Ocean that did not involve the island. They persisted in believing that southeast Madagascar had “the most gentle climate in all the Indies,” and they hoped to begin to produce their own food on the island. In 1670, French admiral Jacob de la Haye described the land as “fertile” and naturally favorable to a number of crops.154 Any food shortages, he argued, were produced by the failure of the islanders to cultivate the land correctly. Several times a year locusts ate all the plants to the roots, but he suggested that, with French oversight, this scourge could be easily wiped out. Hardworking French farmers could make the region far more productive.155 These settlers believed, as a Frenchman expressed over a century later, that “the fortunate inhabitants of Madagascar never moisten the earth with their sweat; they turn it up slightly with a pick-axe; and this labour alone is sufficient” to produce rice and potatoes.156 A seventeenth-century French observer likewise noted that “the common Food of the Inhabitants of this Island . . . is Rice boil’d with Salt and Water, which serves them instead of Bread; not but that the Ground will bring forth good Wheat, but the laziness of those, who should cultivate it, deprives them of the advantage of this so useful Commodity.”157 It was obvious to the French that, in spite of the islanders’ shortcomings as farmers, supplies were readily available. If the islanders were able to acquire ample food from the island, imagine what industrious French farmers would be able to achieve?
Ships dispatched to Taolagnaro in 1664 contained almost three hundred passengers, including colonists and soldiers as well as carpenters, masons, and gardeners.158 Their numbers included thirty-two women and some children. In spite of hopes for growing their own food, the climate of southeastern Madagascar was not amenable to French settlement and the new settlers faced the same challenges as others had under Pronis and Flacourt. The crops planted by the French failed. Wheat did not flourish in the hot, dry climate. Disease kept the mortality rate of colonists shockingly high, a number increased by the continued lack of nourishment. Even if they could purchase food, there was little, beyond cattle, that the people of Anosy had in large quantities. Water was in short supply, as were items for trade. The French realized that most of the people were materially poor, living in small, impermanent huts, storing their things in baskets, and only attired in bark cloth. During times of scarcity, people consumed “roots” and the locusts that plagued the area, practices that the French found appalling.159 The picture of an endlessly fertile land proved to be a mirage.
As they lacked food in the south of Madagascar, the French in 1664 established trading posts in the rice-exporting regions of “Ghalemboule” (likely Fénérive), Antongil Bay, and Nosy Boraha.160 French hopes were rather inflated. They believed, for instance, that Ghalemboule could provide ten or twelve vessels annually with rice, along
