Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper

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 failures, never again did the English attempt to create a permanent trading post on the island, but EIC vessels continued to visit ports in western Madagascar to provision their ships before sailing to India. By the mid-seventeenth century, the EIC expressed a particular interest in purchasing slaves from the island, particularly on the west coast, where, according to one English guide, “you need not doubt of meeting of slaves enough at some of these places.”²¹⁵ One of the first English purchases of slaves in the southwestern Indian Ocean region was in 1639, when an EIC trader bought a shipment of slaves with cloth in the Comoro Islands.²¹⁶ These slaves may have originated in northwestern Madagascar, a region the English frequently visited and described as connected with slaving in the Comoros. In 1644, for instance, an EIC captain observed “a junk” carrying five hundred slaves from Massaliege and sailing toward the Comoros.²¹⁷ This and other similar observations of a preexisting traffic in captives on the west coast of Madagascar, as well as some luck in obtaining small cargoes of slaves, contributed to the English proposing that ships sent to Surat should stop and “buy up what slaves they can procure at St Laurence [Madagascar], Mozambique, Johanna [Ndzuwani] and the [Comoro] Islands.”²¹⁸ The EIC issued orders in 1663 for several ships to visit the island of Madagascar, “either to the Eastward or westward of the island as . . . most advantageous and soonest gained . . . [and if to the west], sail for Masiladge [Massaliege], or any other place within judgment” to purchase thirty or forty slaves, aged from fifteen to twenty-one, for EIC settlements.²¹⁹ The promise of the slave trade, as well as the continued pursuit of provisions, encouraged EIC visits to western Madagascar for slaves and provisions into the eighteenth century.²²⁰

      PERSPECTIVES ON EUROPEAN IMPACT

      The periodic arrival of Europeans in the ports of Madagascar during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has usually been dismissed as peripheral to European interests elsewhere in the ocean. The Portuguese cared more for gold in East Africa than rice from Madagascar, and paid the price.²²¹ The Dutch wanted spices from Asia, cloth from India, and ebony from Mauritius, and much more, but only slaves from Madagascar.²²² In a recent history of Madagascar, Stephen Ellis and Sofolo Randrianja argue that the island offered few exports that Europeans were interested in carrying long distances, other than slaves.²²³ But a focus on luxury goods and slaves ignores the need of fresh food and water that spurred European merchant fleets to spend weeks at a time on the shores of Madagascar in the middle of their transoceanic voyages, to say nothing of the multiple attempts to settle and convert the islanders by the mid-seventeenth century.

      In the midst of the fantastic and speculative claims made by Europeans about Madagascar there are also the detailed descriptions of the islanders they encountered. Through European eyes, we primarily receive information about the commodities for sale on the shores of Madagascar. In the southern half of the island, cattle and citrus fruits were abundant, while the people of the north and east of Madagascar had rice for sale, but fewer cattle. The north was also home to a bustling slave trade. Food supplies were frequently limited and subject to disruption. Absent are the descriptions of royal ceremonial feasts that would be a hallmark of eighteenth-century trading rites. Our knowledge of seventeenth-century Madagascar is not only limited by the information that Europeans chose to record but also where they decided to visit. Merchants only halted at locations that offered secure harbors for sheltering their ships. These harbors usually were deep bays and river basins. Few vessels came to land directly to the north and south of St. Augustin Bay, for instance, so descriptions of these regions largely come from shipwrecked sailors.

      It is clear that European trade networks, as shown in the experiences of Berblock or van der Spil, were secondary to those already operating within and around Madagascar throughout the seventeenth century. Slaves were reserved for East African and Arabian traders, not Europeans. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European trading records reveal that a ready market for Asian cloth already existed, as well as knowledge of its relative value, particularly in the north of the island. To the south, beads, firearms, and miscellaneous manufactured goods were more frequently used to purchase foodstuffs. The nuanced demand for certain colors and types of beads changed over time, from the red “rangoe” beads of the seventeenth century to the yellow glass beads requested during the eighteenth. The portability and durability of these forms of currency gave them higher demand in the south of the island and they may have been transported across trade routes stretching deep into the interior of the island before the seventeenth century.²²⁴

      Work completed by prominent archeologists, including Robert Dewar, Chantal Radimilahy, and Henry