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 with large amounts of honey and poultry.161 One of the Frenchmen posted to the 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