east coast, François Martin, left a detailed account of his time as an under-merchant between 1665 and 1668.162 Martin lived near Ghalemboule with several other merchants in a small enclosed palisade with several huts, intended to store trading goods for purchasing rice. He explored the interior of the island in search of food, frequently in vain, as he encountered communities destroyed by cyclones, locusts, and warfare. People suffered in the lean months and, when the rice harvests did come in, they rarely sold their food, preferring to keep any surplus in reserve. Hunger was so widespread that people had to consume roots, locusts, and “monkeys” (lemurs). Far in the interior, people lived in more affluent circumstances. They sold large quantities of rice, along with slaves, to the ports of the northwest in return for firearms and silver “pieces of eight.” The French made little effort to tap into this trade, due to the distances and terrain involved, and preferred instead to negotiate with east-coast leaders. Even this strategy was a failure. It was clear that the French merchants were wearing out their welcome within a few years. By the time Martin left Madagascar, he noted that the leaders tried to prevent their subjects from trading with the French. When the latter attempted to force them to sell food, people fled to the interior.163
Meanwhile, the French in the south of the island were living in increasingly perilous conditions.164 Local kings became known as the “enemies of our religion” by French priests.165 According to one eighteenth-century French traveler, “Dian Manangue,” the sovereign of “Mandrarey” and a “faithful ally” of the French, attracted the attention of Father Stephen, the superior of the mission of Madagascar. The king made a speech to his people in which he rejected Christianity’s strictures around polygamy and asked the priest why his “countrymen at the fort” did not follow the laws of his religion themselves.166 The missionary confronted Dian Manangue and “snatched from him his oli [talisman] and his amulets, threw them into the fire, and declared open war against him.”167 The missionary was “instantly butchered” and the king declared he would “extirpate the French from the island.” He sent his (baptized) son to gather support.168 In the ensuing clashes, dozens of French were killed and the Frenchmen, in return, slaughtered men, women, and children and set fire to many villages. Thousands of people fought on both sides as communities throughout the region starved.169
Seventeenth-century French reports suggest that such conflict was frequent and more rooted in competition between the French and islanders for cattle and slaves than in religion.170 The French at the fort continued to associate themselves with island women, despite official censuring of such relationships, with disastrous results.171 More than a century later, a Frenchman named Alexis-Marie de Rochon described the exploits of a Frenchman he identifies as La Case, a man also mentioned in Arabico-Malagasy documents.172 La Case reportedly married “Dian-Nong,” the daughter of a sovereign who became a ruler after the death of her father. La Case and Dian-Nong raided the countryside, pillaging and attacking their enemies, and selling the proceeds (chiefly rice, cattle, and slaves) to the French at Fort Dauphin. Despite the violence described in his account, Rochon looked with favor on the exploits of La Case as he managed to successfully ally with many leaders. He even blamed the eventual collapse of the French colony on La Case’s death.173 While La Case was a particularly notorious example, French marriage with island women was common along the entire east coast. Martin tells a story of one French merchant, Sieur de Belleville, who decided to remain at Antongil with his wife for five or six years.174 Once the French decided to close their posts on the east coast in 1671, some of the Frenchmen also chose to stay with their wives after one of the captains would not take the women on board.175
By 1672, only 250 French remained in the southeast of the island, most of these having set up household with women and refusing to leave.176 The French settlers were “an impoverished, ill, and nearly naked lot,” according to historian Pier Larson.177 The French had arrived full of hope but found that Anosy was in fact “the most wicked land in the world.”178 They had discovered little worthy of exporting from the island, other than very limited supplies of food, and violent conflict between rulers continued to threaten trade.179 French men and their families, including wives, their children, and household slaves originally from Madagascar, 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
