Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 could exploit the land and labor of Madagascar, in addition to taking advantage of the proximity of the island to other trading centers in the Indian Ocean.¹⁶

      European desires and imaginings of Madagascar did not conform with reality and, despite lofty aspirations, attempts to possess the island failed repeatedly. After all, many of those advocating colonization had never seen Madagascar. English poet William Davenant had only visited Madagascar in a dream, yet penned a lengthy poem about the landmass.¹⁷ In her book on English piracy, Margarette Lincoln notes that this “distant island” served as a sort of blank slate in the English imagination for “a range of topical debates.”¹⁸ But Madagascar was not really a blank slate, as it was home to a large indigenous population. Island rulers encouraged early European perceptions of the island’s bays as safe shelters for their ships. Given the long history of maritime trade there, Europeans found valuable goods already for sale on Madagascar’s shores when they arrived. From the beginning, however, colonists faced opposition from coastal leaders who were favorable to trade but would not allow Europeans to control their land or labor, particularly in areas of relative food scarcity such as the southern portion of the island. English and French settlers in these areas struggled to survive. European settlements also failed to thrive elsewhere on the island. The plans of Hunt were shattered after his proposed “plantation” and its settlers disappeared entirely from northwestern Madagascar.

      Despite the shortcomings of their accounts, descriptions from early visitors provide us with some of the first glimpses of populations on the island. Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English traders, priests, and settlers wrote reports and letters about their successes and, especially, failures in dealing with island communities. For example, between 1648 and 1655 the French colonial governor Flacourt recorded lengthy observations about the islanders he encountered, including outlines of social customs, religious beliefs, and political structures, many of them hostile to French rule in the region. French officials were still referring to Flacourt’s influential writings more than a century later.¹⁹

      Through their attempted settlements, European trading companies gained extensive knowledge of the island, and such information encouraged them to continue visiting Madagascar in search of provisions. Competition between the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English for continued access to food and slaves lay just beneath the surface in European interactions with the islanders. These rivalries rarely developed into overt conflict, but instead encouraged Europeans to carve out separate spheres of influence and frequent a wide variety of regions. This story of failed colonial attempts and continued optimism explains how the island became a center for provisioning during the late seventeenth century and remained so throughout the following century.²⁰

      THE PORTUGUESE IN EAST AFRICA

      Within a few years of sailing into the Indian Ocean in 1498, Portuguese sailors stumbled upon the island of Madagascar. In 1500, a ship commanded by Diego Diaz sailed off course to the west coast of Madagascar on the day of Saint Lawrence. While ashore, Diaz discovered he could obtain supplies of water and fish, as well as other provisions, from the islanders in return for knives, iron, cloth, and mirrors.²¹ Subsequent voyages of the Portuguese to the island of “São Lourenço” were similarly unintentional, as their ships landed on the island following harsh storms in the Mozambique Channel. Later voyages were sometimes intended to discover any survivors from shipwrecks.²² For the first decades of Portuguese exploration and trade in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar remained firmly outside of European commercial and military interests.

      Portuguese vessels tried to fight against the powerful Agulhas currents that pushed southward around both sides of Madagascar. The debris left by the Portuguese ships on the southern shores of the island, an area that lacks natural harbors, was a testament to the power and danger of these currents.²³ As European vessels entered the Indian Ocean, they were forced to choose between the inner or outer passage around Madagascar on their way to the northern Indian Ocean; both choices offered challenging sailing conditions.²⁴ The Portuguese frequently opted for the inner passage, despite it being fraught with unpredictable winds and currents. By contrast, taking the outer passage around Madagascar meant fewer chances of running aground or losing time on their way to Asia, but the route presented dangers to the passengers on board, who usually required additional food and water by this point in the journey. To take the outer passage meant “the almost certain death of many,” according to one sixteenth-century Portuguese observer.²⁵ Many Portuguese captains preferred to brave the channel and stop on the East African coast before continuing their voyages.²⁶ Even after ships arrived safely at Mozambique Island (Ilha de Moçambique), their route to India was not assured. From November to January, monsoon winds blow from the northern Indian Ocean toward eastern Africa and then reverse between April and August.²⁷ The Portuguese quickly discovered that to be caught in the southwestern Indian Ocean at the wrong time of year could mean slowed travel or deadly СКАЧАТЬ