Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper
carrying Indian cottons and slaves. Even more remarkably to Spilberg, “mulattoes” manned the ship. These “half-Portuguese” spoke Portuguese, were dressed in Portuguese clothing, and carried Portuguese firearms.72
Such trade was the norm between the ports of northern Madagascar and Portuguese settlements on the East African coast by the seventeenth century.73 By the early seventeenth century, a ship was reportedly dispatched annually from the Portuguese base at Querimba for cows, goats, ambergris, slaves, and cloth woven of “rushes” from northern Madagascar.74 Many of the ships that crossed the channel were African-owned, African-operated vessels, spurred on by Portuguese demand, and this trade remained free of Portuguese monopoly controls. The Portuguese used Indian cloth and firearms to buy food and slaves from the African merchants who frequented visited Madagascar.75 In spite of this regular commerce, the trade of the Estado da Índia remained far more focused on commodities found in the northern Indian Ocean and the East African interior.76 Without further research into Portuguese archives, the extent of the trans–Mozambique Channel traffic remains unknown, but Mozambique Island’s proximity to East Africa suggests that exports from Madagascar were less essential to the Portuguese colonists than those from the continent.77
Perceptions of Madagascar as an island both “beautiful and fertile” still persisted among the Portuguese.78 In 1667, the Jesuit Manoel Barretto argued that “if any European nation should take possession of St. Lourenço [Madagascar] Portugal may well give up all desire of the whole conquest from the Cape of Good Hope to the entrance of the straits, of which they will be masters who are masters of St. Lourenço.”79 Many seventeenth-century Portuguese may have agreed with him. Portuguese officials in East Africa looked on with dismay as the Dutch, English, and French all attempted to establish themselves on the large island to their east. In fact, when other Europeans expressed interest in settling Madagascar, the Portuguese reacted by attempting to prop up their own claims in East Africa. Newitt suggests that Portuguese dependence on the food of Madagascar and, by extension, the Comoro Islands, may also explain why the Portuguese never attempted to conquer the Comoros, as they feared disrupting regional commerce.80 Exports from Madagascar, even absent the fine cloth and desirable spices found elsewhere along the ocean’s littoral, still wielded a noticeable influence over Portuguese officials.
THE DUTCH AT MAURITIUS AND THE CAPE
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were no longer dominant in the trade of Madagascar. Their Dutch, English, and French rivals were newly influential on the island, as they were throughout the entire ocean.81 The Dutch began regularly visiting Madagascar after 1595 and the French and English followed less than a decade later.82 As Michael N. Pearson argues, the Dutch and English trading companies, unlike the Portuguese, “adroitly mixed skilful trade with the selective use of military force.”83 The careful focus on economic advantage that the Dutch brought to their plans for control in the ocean led them to only engage with Madagascar to support their trade elsewhere within the Indian Ocean. They had fewer colonial and religious aspirations on the large island than the Portuguese a century earlier and yet the Dutch had a greater impact on political and economic life on the island.
FIGURE 2.1. Dutch VOC ships visiting Madagascar, by decade, 1590–1780. Sources: See appendix for full documentation.
The rivalry between the Dutch and Portuguese formally began in 1602, with the formation of the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). The VOC intended to forcibly and violently dominate European trade in the ocean. In addition to competing in Southeast Asia, VOC merchants targeted Portuguese holdings in East Africa, already weakened by Arab and African hostility, and mounted an unsuccessful attack on Mozambique Island in 1607.84 Madagascar rarely enters into this history of conflict. The Dutch themselves knew little about Madagascar initially, as the sixteenth-century reports of Jan Huygen van Linschoten make clear.85 The Dutch were so focused on securing spices, as highlighted in historical studies of the VOC, that their engagements with Madagascar seemed to be an afterthought. Stories of negotiations for rice pale in comparison to those detailing bloody conflicts over nutmeg and cloves in Southeast Asia.86
It is true that most early Dutch fleets only landed on Madagascar by accident or out of great necessity. Yet, given the length of their voyages and the challenges involved in crossing the Indian Ocean, these stops were more frequent (and influential) than one might suspect. When the first Dutch ships, a fleet of four vessels, arrived in the ocean in 1595, they spent several months replenishing their stores in southwestern Madagascar and along the east coast of the island. After loading fresh food and water, the ships sailed to Java and Sumatra.87 This southern route would eventually enable the Dutch to traverse the ocean more quickly than the Portuguese, particularly after they developed other provisioning stops on the way to Southeast Asia.88
Only about ten percent of Dutch trading ships sailing into the Indian Ocean between 1595 and 1630 stopped at the shores of Madagascar, but this small percentage is misleading. Such was the level of Dutch involvement in commerce in the ocean overall that at least thirty-nine ships sponsored by Dutch trading companies stopped at Madagascar during these years. The ships came to anchor in Antongil Bay, St. Luce Bay (Bay of Saint-Lucia), and St. Augustin Bay.89 None of the islanders living in these locations were accustomed to frequent trade with European merchants, so their stays proceeded with predictable consequences—food supplies were in short supply and recognizable trading partners were not always available. For example, the merchants in the 1595 fleet stopped in “St Augustijn” and visited the arid, sparsely populated land beside the bay, home to pastoralists who herded humped zebu cattle along with sheep and goats. The rivers near the bay, the Onilahy and the Fiheraña, would later provide easy transportation for foodstuffs, but Dutch sources provide no indication that there were direct trading connections with the interior during the late sixteenth century.90 The Dutch visitors bartered with the Andriana (nobles, lords) for fish, cattle, fowl, sheep, and fruit. Despite the availability of food, when the Dutch departed after less than a week only 127 out of the 249 men who had boarded in Europe were still alive. The fleet then sailed around to the east coast of Madagascar, where the crews spent one month at Nosy Boraha (Île Sainte Marie) and Antongil Bay.91 Subsequent trading voyages to Madagascar continued to visit these same locations. In 1598, a fleet spent almost a month in St. Augustin Bay, then several more weeks in the Comoros, visiting both Mayotte and Ndzuwani (Nzwani, Anjouan, Johanna).92 The Dutch were pleased to report that only two men died during the 1598 visit to the island.93
Despite occasional visits to St. Augustin Bay, twenty-six of these early voyages halted on the east coast, in St. Luce Bay or Antongil Bay.94 The Dutch later observed that “there was not a single Portuguese on this entire outer coast so that no difficulty need be feared from them.”95 During the early seventeenth century, rice seemed plentiful in eastern Madagascar. The Dutch described vast amounts of rice which the islanders would sell in return for small trinkets and cloth.96 In spite of these positive descriptions, the results from provisioning in eastern Madagascar were mixed. One Dutch commander complained in 1598 that the people around Antongil were at war and there was a lack of food for purchase at the nearby island of Nosy Boraha.97 On this small island, only about sixty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide, the inhabitants were fishermen, skilled in the capture of whales. They exported ambergris (a whale secretion used in perfume production) to the northern port cities of Madagascar, from where it would be sold to African and Arab merchants.98 Apparently the production of foodstuffs for sale was less common on Nosy Boraha.
FIGURE 2.2. A Dutch visit to southeastern Madagascar, c. 1618. Source: Willem Ysbrandsz Bontekoe, Ovrnael ofte gedenckwaerdige beschrijvinghe vande Oost-Indische reyse . . . (Hoorn: Ghedruckt by I. Willemsz, 1646), opposite page 10 (image from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division).
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