Yet the domination of the provisioning trade was also key to Sakalava maintenance of other sources of power, including supplies of slaves. After all, Drury noted that Menabe was one of the richest provinces on the island, not due to the slave trade, but thanks to plentiful supplies of foodstuffs. Drury describes how, during a feast following a series of successful battles, military leaders (all of whom ritually communicated their submission to the Sakalava king by licking his feet) consumed four calabashes of “toak” (toaka, alcohol), along with honey, sugar cane, rice, and a large amount of beef. It was the best meal Drury had consumed during his many years on the island.126 This food, acquired through a complex alliance of tributaries as much as through warfare, attested to the ability of Sakalava rulers to access labor and resources on Madagascar.
FOUR
The Betsimisaraka, Pirate Kings
BETWEEN THE 1680S AND 1720s, dozens of Anglo-American pirates spent months living on the shores of Madagascar.1 These privateers and pirates of the Caribbean were seeking richer shores for plunder, and the lands of the Indian Ocean were more distant from increasingly critical politicians in Europe and the Americas.2 Piracy in the Indian Ocean, as in the Atlantic, offered opportunities for those seeking an alternative social order, as well as material advancement otherwise barred by current legal frameworks.3 Yet the distinction between merchant and pirate was fuzzy, in part due to the long-running history of maritime violence within the Indian Ocean.4 Piracy was present well before 1498 and, after this date, the labeling of individuals or groups as pirates became a means for advancing the economic and political goals of European merchants operating in the ocean.5 As soon as the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, they attempted to label their competitors as pirates but would turn the other way when their allies attacked merchant vessels. As other European groups arrived in the ocean, many Portuguese themselves were labeled as pirates, and traders of any nation who flouted monopoly laws became known as interlopers.6 Madagascar became a space where these contests over legitimacy and sovereignty would play out.
By the late seventeenth century, many Anglo-American pirates had chosen Madagascar as their destination. The choice to visit and stay there was not haphazard but instead predicated on the geographical opportunities afforded by the island as a base of operation, as well as the supplies of food and slaves already known to be available on its shores. The absence of European company control over Madagascar was an additional attraction. In short, the pirates came to Madagascar for the same reasons the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English had been arriving for decades: the island offered convenience, security, and economic opportunities.
The pirates were some of the most memorable of visitors to the island during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exploits of swashbucklers filled numerous broadsheets and novels back in Europe and contributed to a major shift in attitudes toward Madagascar.7 The history of pirates on the island has, in turn, received considerable attention from scholars.8 In fact, Madagascar is only mentioned in some histories of the Indian Ocean when they discuss this “Golden Age” of piracy, despite the limited political and economic influence the pirates exercised on the island.9 Public interest in the activities of pirates far predated the twenty-first century and the sensationalist and popular literature spawned by the pirates has resulted in substantial liberties being taken with the history of the island. For instance, a popular but largely fictionalized account of the pirates on the island, perhaps penned by Daniel Defoe, presents Madagascar as a pirate paradise, welcoming to all seeking liberty.10
These sensationalist stories of Madagascar as a pirate safe haven are at odds with the more reliable sources that reveal the quotidian nature of interactions between pirates and islanders. The pirates who came to Madagascar could be placed into one of two categories: they were either maritime raiders who preyed upon shipping in the ocean or resident merchants who sought to evade monopoly controls. The most important foreigners, those who spent significant time on the island, were more akin to the latter, acting as independent merchants and rarely taking part in the clashes at sea popularized in pirate literature. The pirate communities that inhabited Madagascar maintained frequent commercial and legal contact with North America, as historian Kevin McDonald has recently revealed.11 Once the pirates arrived on the island, many of them followed the model set by French colonists decades earlier and incorporated themselves into local families. Many of these pirates were slave traders. Trading in southeast Africa was illegal under the charter of most of the East India Companies, but it was much easier to escape the attention of authorities on the east coast of Africa, where the volume of trade and shipping was far below that of West Africa.12 In one famous case, Frederick Philipse of New York switched his focus from slave trading in the Congo region in the 1680s and dispatched traders to arrange the purchase of slaves from Madagascar. These traders would be described as pirates by the English.13 The pirates were able to oversee the transportation of thousands of people from Madagascar in one of the longest (and most deadly) Middle Passages in world history.14 These pirates primarily served as cross-cultural brokers, in parallel roles to the Indian Ocean merchants who operated outside of state control. They learned the languages of the ports in which they resided and visited and acquired homes and families in far-flung ports around the ocean’s littoral, including in northern Madagascar.15
While the slave trade between Madagascar and North America was encouraged by the pirates’ presence in Madagascar, the deeper roots of transoceanic commerce from Madagascar cannot be neglected. Anglo-American pirates were just another group of newcomers who had been stopping at the island for decades (or even centuries), although maybe the first to be so singularly focused on slaving. These pirates were not the first Westerners to marry with island women and father children, nor were they the first to enslave and deliver their captives to waiting vessels. They were not even the first to bring firearms to the island. Their presence did not eliminate other trade from the island. In spite of new fears provoked by the pirates inhabiting the shores of Madagascar, Europeans continued to acquire fresh water and food from the island. Ships stopped at the shores of Madagascar annually and some even visited known pirate haunts, even though Madagascar had become “a byword for mutiny and desertion,” according to McDonald.16 The alternatives, of sailors dying from dehydration and scurvy, were comparably more dangerous.17
After the decline of piracy on the island’s shores, European ships came in increasing numbers, as the French sought support for their Indian Ocean establishments. This commerce—the arrival of ship after ship from the Mascarenes in search of slaves and food—would leave more of a mark on the lives of most islanders in eastern Madagascar than the comparatively brief pirate-led slave trade. The records created by this growing trade, unconnected to the history of piracy in eastern Madagascar, reveal the limited impact of the Euro-American interlopers on the island. Suddenly, by 1730, trade with the French for the Mascarenes was conducted through a new port, Foulpointe. As on the west coast, the king of Foulpointe sought to monopolize the import of firearms and silver coins into the east coast of the island, although with more limited success than his Sakalava counterparts. By the close of the eighteenth century, this king identified himself to French merchants as Betsimisaraka.18 In these political innovations, the islanders were more influenced by new political patterns within Madagascar than the presence of pirates on their shores.
THE PIRATE ISLAND
The first Anglo-American pirates who sailed into the Indian Ocean during the 1680s visited Madagascar for provisions. Shortly after this first visit, other pirates decided to settle on Nosy Boraha, an island off the east coast of Madagascar.19 When these foreigners began arriving at Nosy Boraha, they confronted communities in the midst of upheaval, perhaps provoked by the presence of Dutch and French merchants in the region. Communities on the east coast of Madagascar were struggling to control and benefit from commerce with Europeans, but they likely found this task impossible without dominating the trade routes that stretched far into the interior. By 1655, the French found that frequent warfare between populations on Nosy
