Colonies Lost: God, Hunger, and Confl ict in Anosy (Madagascar) to 1674 VARIORUM VARIORUM Pier M. Larson fl eet of thirteen Portuguese vessels under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral set sail from Lisbon for the East Indies just two years after Vasco da Gama fi rst rounded the Cape of Good Hope. In late May 1500, inclement weather at the Cape separated the vessel commanded by Diego Diaz from the others, blowing it well south of its intended course. Steering north to regain their way, Diaz and crew caught sight of land on 10 August along the coast of Anosy, Madagascar’s southeast extremity (fi g. 1). The day was the Feast of São Lourenço, and Diaz named the big island (Madagascar) for European cartography after the feast.1 As far as it is known, this was the fi rst sighting of Madagascar by seafarers hailing directly from the Atlantic via the Cape route. European sailors and mapmakers continued to identify Madagascar as São Lourenço (Portuguese) and Saint-Laurent (French) for centuries to come. From the early decades of the sixteenth century to the French abandonment of Madagascar in 1674, Anosy in southeast Madagascar was an important site of European-Malagasy interac- tion. The meeting grounds of Anosy played a signifi cant role in the early modern history of the southwest Indian Ocean, much as the Cape of Good Hope or Kilwa and Mombasa did, but they are poorly known outside a close circle of francophone Madagascar experts. At the same time little secondary literature on Anosy and its Europeans in any language is broad and compara- tive in outlook, setting them in wider and interconnected historical narratives of the region.2 In part the early history of relations between the people of southeast Madagascar and dies of transient Europeans is not well known by scholars of southeast Africa and the Indian Ocean d because colonial linguistic legacies have separated francophone, lusophone, and anglophone mparative Stu scholarship in this region of overriding British infl uence from the late eighteenth century and in part because, espied across the waters by its neighbors, Madagascar can seem aloof from the main currents of the region’s history and modern economies. Long-distance airline Co fl ights linking South Africa and Australia, Mauritius, and Southeast Asia, for example, some- South Asia, Africa an times leave their telltale vapor trails high over Anosy’s coasts, dazzling children—including this author in his childhood—who often gather below to observe them. Madagascar has yet the Middle East x-2007-010 Vol. 27, No. 2, 2007 ty Press to appear in African history textbooks treating the early era of European ventures about the 15/1089201 .12 10 Universi doi uke Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. and the inhabitants of southern Madagascar to the seventeenth century, mainly from an archaeological perspective. Anosy was © 2007 by D 1. Alfred Grandidier, ed., Collection des ouvrages anciens concer- one of several areas of European interest in Madagascar before nant Madagascar, 9 vols. (Paris: Comité de Madagascar, 1903– the late seventeenth century, others being in the west, particu- 20), 1:3–5. larly the Bay of Boina and Saint Augustine Bay, which are not 2. An exception is Mike Parker Pearson, “Close Encounters of covered in this article. For these, see Pearson, “Close Encoun- the Worst Kind: Malagasy Resistance and Colonial Disasters in ters,” the articles by Vincent Belrose-Huyghues cited in later Southern Madagascar,” World Archaeology 28 (1997): 393–417. notes, and William Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagas- This work covers a broad set of encounters between Europeans car in 1645–6,” English Historical Review 27 (1912): 239–50. 345 346 mparative Coudies of St uth Asia, So Africa and the ddle East Mi Figure 1. Madagascar and the southwestern Indian Ocean. Map drawn by author continent or as a regular component of gradu- and locations along the East African coast tend ate syllabi in southern and East African history. to populate early modern histories of the re- It is tempting to hypothesize that no satis- gion and fi nd pride of place in historical narra- fying and broadly conceived synthetic histories tives of the western Indian Ocean. But colonial of early Portuguese and French colonization in “failures” are as important to understanding a Madagascar exist because publications on the historical era as are successes, and in any case, Big Island are typically specialized in some way success and failure are positioned, if not also or because European colonizing efforts foun- rather coarse, judgments. Is little known about dered when thrown up against the hierarchi- southeast Madagascar in the fi rst centuries of cal agrarian societies of Anosy. Intruders from European navigation in the Indian Ocean be- the Atlantic could not incorporate or push the cause the people of Anosy ultimately succeeded people of Anosy off into the interior, as they in preventing a permanent implantation of At- did at the Cape, or squeeze a manageable profi t lantic foreigners on their territory? from them, as happened in many parts of South There is relatively little work on Madagas- Asia where land and maritime trade in local car in Portuguese scholarship, which in the west- products generated considerable wealth. The ern reaches of the Indian Ocean is focused pri- histories of colonial “successes” in settlement, marily on Mozambique, the East African coast, production, and commerce in places such as and India, key regions of the expansive Estado the Cape, South Asia, the Mascarene Islands, da India.3 The Big Island mostly remained on 3. Michael Naylor Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Pear- son, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 118–22. the periphery of this empire of commerce and of the gratuitous violence deployed by French 347 religion, though parts of western Madagascar colonists. The defeat in Madagascar stung the were in frequent contact with the northern por- sensibilities of French colonial partisans and tions of Mozambique across the shared channel scholars for more than two centuries to come. of water that separates them and suffered pe- “Since Richelieu, the possession of Madagas- riodic destruction at the hands of Portuguese car became one of our ambitions,” explained men of war in the early sixteenth century.4 Most J. Charles-Roux of the late-nineteenth-century writing on early Portuguese ventures about the colonization of Madagascar in the preface to a Big Island has been the product of French colo- much-used collection of primary documents on nial scholars researching Madagascar’s history Madagascar’s history. “It was not until the third during the fi rst half of the twentieth century republic that we achieved our goals thanks to and chronicles shipwreck and pioneering Jesuit our valiant army conducted by General Duch- Colonies Lost Pier M. Larson missions.5 I employ these and other published esne, and later by General Gallieni.”6 primary and secondary sources in this article to Much writing about the seventeenth-cen- tease out an intellectual, religious, and diaspo- tury French settlement in southeast Madagascar ran history of Malagasy-Portuguese interactions depends heavily on the published work of one in southeast Madagascar and Goa during the of its many governors, Étienne de Flacourt (in sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. To southeast Madagascar, 1648–55), whose Histoire write of a lost Portuguese colony in Madagascar de la grande isle Madagascar was fi rst published is not accurate in the strict sense of the term, in Paris in 1658, reissued in an expanded ver- then, for Portuguese interests in Anosy were sion in 1661, and today remains an important mostly religious in nature rather than commer- European source of seventeenth-century Mala- cial or administrative and often carried out by gasy history. Flacourt’s book was republished Jesuits who were not Portuguese by birth. Their by colonial historian Alfred Grandidier in the failures mostly went down in the annals of Cath- early twentieth century and, edited and with an olic mission rather than Portuguese expansion. introduction by Indian Ocean specialist Claude France in Madagascar was an altogether Allibert, was recently reissued by a major Pari- different matter, however, for its efforts in Anosy sian publisher of African studies (Karthala). Be- during the mid-seventeenth century at the end sides the work of Flacourt, a number of French of frequent Portuguese navigation about the colonial-era studies of the colony exist, all more shores of southeast Madagascar created the fi rst or less narrowly based on Flacourt and the pub- French colony in the Indian Ocean. This origi- lications of other seventeenth-century colonists. nary and disastrous Indian Ocean colonization Some of these works are celebratory in nature, deserves much greater attention than it has re- and others are critical and designed to bring ceived, even in Madagascar. Its ragtag bands the lessons of history to a more perfect future of hungry settlers and their ultimate military French colonization of the Big Island. All are defeat have long made for embarrassing copy decidedly nationalistic works promoting French in France, in part because the habitation’s igno- colonization in the Indian Ocean. The ill-fated minious end in August 1674 left more than half French colony in southeast Madagascar receives the European colonists dead and the rest scram- scant mention in recent histories of France’s bling to escape the island and in part because ancien régime empire, and these are all based 4. Alfred Grandidier, “Histoire de la découverte de Shorter still are the articles published in Madagascar Borro: Témoignage d’un compagnon du Père Mariano l’île de Madagascar par les Portugais (pendant le XVIe by Vincent Belrose-Huyghues on early Portuguese sur Madagascar, 1630,” Omaly sy Anio 12 (1981): 105–13; siècle),”Revue de Madagascar (10 January 1902), 34–54; ventures about Madagascar.