Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper

       TWO

      “The Richest and Most Fruitful Island in the World”

      AN ENGLISH VISITOR TO Madagascar published a pamphlet with this title in 1643, following the publication of his other tract (A Paradox: Prooving, That the Inhabitants of the Isle called Madagascar . . . Are the Happiest People in the World) just three years prior.¹ Expressing such a positive view of Madagascar was not unusual in the seventeenth century. In fact, notions of Madagascar as a fertile land for both settlement and agricultural production date back a century earlier, when the first European ships arrived at its shores. In their sixteenth-century reports back to Europe, the Portuguese emphasized the plentiful supplies of food and slaves they had found. By 1609, people all over Europe had heard of the “extremely rich, powerful, and famous island of Madagascar . . . which in our days is considered as the largest in all the world.”² The island was rumored to be home to exotic wildlife such as giraffes and elephants, as well as gold and silver mines.³ Such legends encouraged a widespread fascination with the exotic flora and fauna on Madagascar, while making little mention of the people already inhabiting this apparent paradise.

      European writers celebrated the natural fertility of an island perceived as an untouched and sparsely populated Eden.⁴ An English poem was even written celebrating this point and imagining the glory of conquering such an island, “scenting of rich gummes.”⁵ Throughout Madagascar, according to one visitor, “Glens and slopes, hills, mountains, and valleys are enhanced by beautiful glimpses of dense woods, flourishing acres, and verdant fields. The fruitful earth only has to thank mother nature, that it, through her more than any effort of a zealous farmer, yields more fruits than there are hands to pick.”⁶ This and other such descriptions imply that the land was so naturally productive that Europeans with their agricultural skills could quickly transform the land into a granary to support their operations throughout the ocean.

      Not only was the island described as richly fertile, but it was also known to be a huge landmass, almost continental in size. In one report defending the French decision to place a colony on the island, the writer noted that Madagascar was the fourth largest island in the world, larger even than England.⁷ The idea that a small French settlement could eventually control the entire island attracted interest back in Europe. In fact, virtually every seventeenth-century description of Madagascar began with an estimate of the size of the island and noted that it was far larger than necessary to support its small (according to Europeans) human population. Indeed, the island was so expansive that it would be several centuries before a European successfully crossed it and described the interior accurately. Before they did so, fantastic descriptions of the island’s animals featured prominently in early modern European publications.⁸

      Practical concerns were initially responsible for attracting Europeans to the shores of the island, located roughly at the halfway point for voyages from Europe to Asia. Europeans learned that provisions were not as readily available in all islands and ports throughout the Indian Ocean. Unlike other coastal trading centers and settlements in the western Indian Ocean, such as Mozambique Island or Aden, the entrepôts of Madagascar drew upon a relatively rich foreland and hinterland, both capable of producing a wide variety of items for export.⁹ Early traders reported acquiring cattle, poultry, rice, legumes, tubers, and plenty of fruits during their visits. The seventeenth-century French colonial governor Étienne Flacourt described Madagascar as home to a wide variety of ecosystems: mountains with gold mines, dense forests, pastureland capable of supporting large herds of cattle and sheep, rich soil for grain production, and rivers full of fish. The diversity provided abundance in every imaginable food item.¹⁰

      For all these reasons, Madagascar was viewed as a favorable base for trading operations, but, as an island, it was viewed as especially ripe for colonization. When Europeans began to explore the great oceans, many of their first settlements were on islands. Since the Phoenicians, maritime merchants and empires had used islands as stopover locations for ships seeking to rapidly refuel.¹¹ By the seventeenth century, European plantations already existed on islands in the Mediterranean, in the Canaries, and along the Atlantic coastline of Africa. As T. Bentley Duncan argues, during early phases of European global travel islands became important “out of all relation to their size and resources,” enabling merchants to set up limited colonies and conduct trade with land-based states and empires.¹² Islands also provided safety from hostile indigenous groups on the mainland of Africa.¹³ This preference for occupying islands did not cease after Europeans sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Shortly after their arrival in the Indian Ocean, Portuguese colonists were drawn to the islands of East Africa, including Mozambique and Kilwa, as well as those found elsewhere in the ocean. About a hundred years later, the Dutch focused their efforts on securing a foothold in the islands of Southeast Asia and the French in the Mascarenes. Many of the islands that attracted transoceanic merchants, such as St. Helena in the Atlantic and those in the Indian Ocean such as Mauritius, were completely uninhabited and first colonized by Europeans leaving animals to provide provisions for passing vessels. Convenient oases in the middle of transoceanic routes, such colonies on uninhabited islands were without threat from indigenous human populations, but they lacked laboring populations. As Europeans sought to settle and develop these islands, workers had to be imported along with supplies of food.

      There would be no such labor problem on Madagascar itself, given that the island was believed to be incredibly fertile and home to a small population that could be made to work for European colonists. The island was also unclaimed by any powerful state or empire during the early seventeenth century, unlike the more hotly contested islands elsewhere in the Indian Ocean that became the battlegrounds for Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Ottoman competitors. Madagascar, the French argued in 1664, was more fertile, more friendly, and more welcoming to the spread of Christianity than the island of Java, then dominated by the Dutch.¹⁴ Around the same period, one Englishman described how a successful English colony would turn Madagascar into a “Second Ormuz” (Hormuz) and make the English “Emperor of all of India.”¹⁵ Another Englishman, Robert Hunt, advocated a settlement on the northwest coast of the island in 1650. Once developed, he argued, the settlement would eventually rival Barbados in terms of sugar cane production, but agriculture would be “far cheaper,” as laborers could be procured within Madagascar or brought from nearby East Africa. The settlement would also facilitate trade with India. Hunt, along with many other colonial planners, primarily focused on how this settlement