ONE
Feasts and Violence
MORE THAN EIGHT HUNDRED European and American ships arrived at the island of Madagascar during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The men on board these vessels immediately sought fresh provisions from the coastal rulers who greeted them on the shores of the island. One such vessel was the Cape slaving ship, the Brack, which first arrived and anchored in St. Augustin Bay (alternatively, Saint Augustine’s Bay) on July 26, 1741. O. L. Hemmy, the first commies (trade commissioner) on board, was responsible for securing slaves for the Dutch colony in southern Africa, but his first concern was finding food and water for the crew. Fortunately for Hemmy, although the shoreline appeared dry and barren, people approached the ship with oranges, chicken, and fish for sale. A leader identified as Prince William greeted the Dutch and agreed to supply them with cattle. Despite this warm welcome, Hemmy was told that he had to visit King Baba to the north if he wished to purchase more valuable commodities, namely rice and slaves.1
Hemmy and his companions were escorted by royal representatives to the nearby port of Toliara (Tulear, Tuléar). Hundreds of armed men surrounded the beach. King Baba was seated on a small bench, with an asseegaye (spear) to one side and a particularly handsome “English” gun on the other. The king was dressed in fine cloth and wearing an opulent necklace made of gold, silver, and glass beads. As Hemmy approached, the king immediately demanded to see a formal letter of introduction from the Cape Colony governor. One of the king’s trusted advisers, Captain James, read and translated the letter for the king.2 The king requested a bottle of arrack, a type of strong alcohol, which was quickly drained, as was a second bottle. Momentarily satisfied, King Baba invited the commies to dine and promised to kill a bull, as was his custom to celebrate the arrival of traders.3
Hemmy was led to the king’s palace, where he sat beside low wooden planks and was invited to eat. The meal featured pieces of cooked meat with skin and hair still attached, complemented with dishes of cooked potatoes and rice stewed in milk.4 As the king and commies began eating, the king also asked James and Jan, his other adviser, to join in the feasting. The king told the Dutchman that if the meat was not to his liking, he could have it prepared in the “English way.” Hemmy replied that it was very good, as he was quite hungry, and he explained that he hoped they could “live as brothers.”5 During the meal, bottle after bottle of arrack was consumed by the participants after the king rejected a bottle of Cape red wine as “not healthy with such sweetness.” In the king’s estimation, arrack was the most suitable for a powerful ruler and Hemmy had no choice but to supply it in vast quantities. After the king had eaten his fill, the Dutch soldiers received the leftovers.6
As they were concluding their feast, King Baba announced to Hemmy that “I am a great king. I have people and livestock, greens, rice, and land in abundance. Come now with your ship and stay two or three months. I will give you slaves and all the things you may wish for.”7 The king’s speech marked the end of formalities and the start of trading negotiations. His comments also served as a reminder that this scene of peaceful feasting took place during a period of intense violence, when many on the island were restricted from receiving even a bite of food from the feasts. Instead, these islanders were at risk of being enslaved and sold to foreign slavers. Between 1500 and 1800, an estimated 292,000 people from Madagascar were transported to slave markets on the Indian Ocean; a third of these were shipped to European forts and plantations that encircled the ocean’s littoral. A further sixteen thousand traveled to the Americas where they would be sold, if they survived the extremely long journey, along with more than six million other Africans forcibly transported to the Americas.8 The violence in and around Madagascar was on a scale typically associated with the transatlantic slave trade from western Africa. While persons taken from Madagascar formed a relatively small part of the magnitude crossing both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, this traffic transformed Madagascar itself. Connecting populations on the island to the growing global demand for coerced labor, it introduced immense upheaval.9
Despite the central importance of the slave trade to the history of Madagascar, out of the more than eight hundred voyages to the island, only about a third of the English, French, and Dutch vessels that stopped there between 1600 and 1800 carried traders in search of slaves. The others loaded valuable supplies of food, wood, and water during their stays on the island.10 The island’s coastal ports and communities began to specialize in a bustling export trade in rice and cattle, with slaves sold to Europeans when food supplies were less abundant. The sale of captives became an alternative route for acquiring European imports. Following the intensification of food production on the island by the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves were relatively scarce and also expensive, being priced in silver coins that Europeans found challenging to procure.
Provisions, however, were still easy to obtain from coastal rulers. Without fresh supplies of food from Madagascar, European vessels would have struggled to carry silver to Asia and spices back to Europe. Colonists in the Mascarene Islands and in southern Africa relied upon frequent imports from the large island, as their colonies were located on lands of strategic importance but only marginal fertility. Rice from Madagascar filled the stomachs of the Europeans who supervised the labor of East African and Malagasy slaves working in plantations in Mauritius. English sailors eagerly consumed fresh beef from cattle originally purchased in Madagascar en route to India. Oranges and lemons from Madagascar revived soldiers suffering from scurvy following long months at sea. Pirates, including the famous Captain Kidd, spent time on the shores of Madagascar hoping to benefit from trading with prosperous island communities.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these disparate groups arrived at the shores of Madagascar in search of fresh food and alliances. They “lived as brothers” with coastal rulers after sharing bowls overflowing with cooked beef and rice. That some of this food had been produced using slave labor or obtained through warfare scarcely concerned the Dutch or other visitors. The provisioning trade brought Madagascar to the center of global trading networks that intersected in the southwestern Indian Ocean. The resulting global connections enabled the islanders to sustain contacts with New York pirates and South African slavers, among others. Throughout, food served as a ritual marker of culture and status, imbued with social meaning going well beyond simple consumption. This was, after all, a world where only certain types of alcohol were deemed suitable for royalty. Only rulers and captains, those who participated in the ritual feasts, regularly consumed beef and white rice, while others were lucky if they received the leftovers.11
FEEDING RULERS
For people in Madagascar, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ushered in dramatic political transformations, thanks in part to this provisioning trade. These two hundred years were a period of intense change for groups throughout Eurasia and along the Indian Ocean littoral.12
