style="font-size:15px;"> 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 coast at “Assada,” near or on Nosy Be.204 With these colonies, the English hoped to create export centers for moving slaves from Madagascar to EIC establishments in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as securing provisions within Madagascar.205 After their arrival in 1645, the 140 settlers built a fortified camp along the southern side of St. Augustin Bay.206 The colonists, expecting a fertile (if sparsely inhabited) paradise, complained to a passing English merchant about the “extreme barrenness of the soil” and the difficulty in keeping their cattle safe from thieving people.207 They may have exaggerated these difficulties, since coastal communities had long managed to survive in the region, but the English were not prepared for the environment, which was not suitable for growing wheat and the other English crops that they had hoped to plant in the colony. They had to rely upon the islanders to herd their purchased cattle. After only a few short weeks the settlers were close to starvation and the neighboring communities refused to sell them food. At the peak of tensions, some of the settlers complained that once the islanders had sold cattle, they stole them back after only a short period.208 English soldiers were dispatched to recover cattle but some of their island neighbors killed the men and then set fire to the colony’s forge and bellows.209 When ships sent elsewhere in the ocean failed to return with food and trading goods for the colonists, the few remaining English settlers decided to abandon the hostile shores of Madagascar. Of the 140 colonists, men, women, and children, who had arrived at the island in March 1645, only twelve sailed from Madagascar in May 1646.210
Intended to rival the sugar plantations of Barbados, the settlement at Assada founded in 1650 met with an even more disastrous fate, despite being located in what would seem a more favorable location for coordinating trade and developing agriculture. When an English captain, James Berblocks, visited Assada a few months after the colonists were to have arrived, he discovered that all signs of the settlement had disappeared entirely, along with all of the “planters” (settlers).211 He suspected the worst after eventually finding the remains of what he described as an “English fort.”212 After facing down an attack on the shores of the island and fearing an ambush if he lingered any longer, the captain ordered his ship to sail to nearby Ndzuwani. The captain spoke with the king of “Demonio” (Domani) in Ndzuwani while purchasing provisions on that island and learned that the kings of Madagascar “would not admit any of our people to inhabit his land or islands.”213
After deciding to return to Madagascar and visit the port of “Martaledge” (Massaliege), the captain urged his crew to make no mention of the Assada colony. Instead he instructed them to tell the people that they were sailing to India and only in search of water and provisions. While at anchor near Massaliege, the English encountered a Portuguese ship off the coast with several slaves hidden aboard. The English captain learned that these slaves had to be held below deck, as the slaves had been reserved for “Arabians” who exported them to Ndzuwani and the islanders feared reprisals if they were found selling slaves to Europeans. Berblocks negotiated with traders in Massaliege and managed to purchase twenty-four slaves in poor condition. He also bought plenty of cattle and sheep from the traders for excellent prices before sailing to Bantam.214
Berblock’s account reveals a great deal about the relationship formed between Europeans and islanders by the 1650s. The disappearance of the Assada colonists was attributed to the hostility of the coastal communities, but the failure of both English settlements on Madagascar suggests a deeper-running challenge to European colonization on Madagascar. As the English and French experiences repeatedly proved, the islanders were willing to provide merchants with provisions and even slaves, but Europeans faced considerable animosity when they attempted to seize supplies of rice, cattle, and laborers.
As a result of these
