Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Wendy Wilson-Fall

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СКАЧАТЬ already established when slaves boarded ships for Virginia and Barbados. By 1663 eighty more French settlers had arrived in Madagascar along with a Lazarist missionary priest. During this period a considerable number of Malagasy women had taken French husbands as well, thus creating marriage links and kin networks to nonpirate Europeans.¹⁸ At this time, slaves were also exported from the west of the island. This may be explained to some degree by the military expansion of the Menabe Sakalava, the establishment of the Sakalava Boina kingdom, and the increasing demand for captive labor by the Dutch settlers at the Cape.¹⁹

       The Eighteenth Century

      In the early eighteenth century, slave trading was only a corollary activity for European pirates and their Malagasy counterparts, but it was increasing.²⁰ The presence of pirates in northeastern Madagascar stimulated local trade, contributed to the growth of local power centers, and led to increased access to firearms. By the eighteenth century people of the northeast began to raid for slaves in the more southerly regions along the foot of plateaus that faced the eastern coast.²¹ It was ultimately the presence of pirates and other European “antisocials” that drew the attention of Anglo-American colonists who were looking for new ways to get silver and more ways to invest their tobacco income, eventually causing London to look for ways to crush the unruly trade centers of Madagascar.²²

      Pirates not only aided various factions in interregional and interclan wars but also lived in extended webs of Malagasy kinship. The strong pirate presence was ended at Saint Mary’s by 1708, and a British squadron was sent to assure this was so twelve years later, in 1720. By then, Malagasy on the eastern coast had entered the transatlantic slave trade as traders and victims. Britain had rescinded the injunction against American direct trade to the Indian Ocean in 1719.²³

       The Betsimisaraka in the Eighteenth Century

      As we have seen, the coalescing of the Betsimisaraka federation was preceded by interclan conflicts attended by diverse European parties. The escalation of conflict among the various locally held power centers in the northeast of the big island evolved over time. In 1712, at the same time as pirate influence dwindled, commerce in slaves from Madagascar increased significantly, even though it had been discouraged by British policy just a few years earlier. Because of the growing demand for labor in the Caribbean, which began surpassing even Cape Town, in the early eighteenth century Madagascar and Mozambique became important sources of slaves bound for the New World.

      The political origin of the Betsimisaraka people is attributed to the son of a princess named Rahena and a pirate named Tom. Around 1712 their son, Ratsimilaho, came to the forefront as a local leader who marched north and seized control of Tamatave, Foulpointe, and Fenerive during regional conflicts. Ratsimilaho eventually became titular head of the malata (mulattoes) and the zanamalata (children of the mulattoes), the families that resulted from pirate marriages to local women. In fact, the dynasties between Antongil Bay southward to Foulpointe (Mahavelona), Tamatave (Toamasina), and Mananjary were characterized by occasionally arranged French-Malagasy marriages that also functioned as contracts for exclusive trade rights between Europeans and locals as well as for marital privileges and obligations for both sides.²⁴ Ratsimilaho was far more closely integrated into the history of the Sakalava monarchy of Boina than has generally been appreciated and was closely affiliated with overseas systems of commerce, as shown in recent research.²⁵

      Indicating the growth of internal violence that paralleled the growth of the slave trade, Rasimilaho’s son and successor was killed in 1767. By 1791 the kingdom had all but collapsed, and the last king was killed in 1803 by his own subjects.²⁶ The Betsimisaraka have continued as a cultural community to the current era.

       North American Slave Trading in Madagascar

      The official (or legal) slave trade from Madagascar to the Anglo-American colonies was actually short lived. Official slave trading open to English and colonial vessels began in the 1670s, only to close again in 1698 by an act of Parliament.²⁷ The legal Madagascar trade reopened to the Americans in 1716 and remained open until 1721, when it was permanently discontinued.²⁸ American colonist participation in the slave trade with Madagascar created government debate in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Britain regarding the interpretation of the Acts of Trade and Navigation, such as the issue of whether Negroes should be classified as merchandise within the meaning of the acts.²⁹ This issue, much debated at the time, brings us to the crux of the drama that Malagasy slaves experienced. While the British Parliament discussed whether slaves could be counted as any other cargo, like horses or bolts of Indian cotton, the captives—the subject of the debates—were confronted with the very human problem of survival and identity in a very different context, a problem of little concern to many gentlemen in Parliament.

      The area that is now New York State, as well as some parts of New Jersey and Delaware, was named New Netherland by the Dutch and began as a settlement under the Dutch West India Company. It remained in the hands of the Dutch until a series of conflicts with the British, which had began in 1664 and ended in 1674, when the area from Albany, New York, to Delaware fell to the British Crown. Settlers in New Netherland came with the hope of making money; they did not come because of religious persecution, and many were not Dutch. The Dutch West India Company promoted settlement in order to gain value for their investment, and the first slaves who came to the settlement were brought by the Dutch.

      The local Dutch trader Frederick Philipse of New Amsterdam was not among the most wealthy merchants, but he was successful in importing slaves to New Netherland and stayed when the British took over. Through his agent, Adam Baldridge, he facilitated the export of hundreds of Malagasy to New York during the seventeenth century, some of whom were further shipped to Connecticut, Massachusetts, and other points of New England upon their arrival in the New World.³⁰ He was also a major contact in Madagascar for other visiting Europeans.³¹ Baldridge’s trading post in Madagascar has been likened to the slave factories and forts that had already been established on Africa’s western coast.³² But instead of being financed and maintained by joint-stock companies and their shareholders, as in West Africa, the post at Saint Mary’s was primarily created through the actions of pirates and ordinary seamen, as scholars have described quite vividly.³³ Complementing the existing trade networks was the financial backing Baldridge received from some of New York’s wealthiest merchants, and he and Philipse maintained contacts with pirates, including some who had emigrated from the Caribbean to Madagascar.³⁴

      The latter period of Madagascar slave trading to the Americas is of particular interest to the story begun in this chapter. The slave cargo exports of 1719–21 that brought so many enslaved Malagasy to the trading posts on Virginia’s York and Rappahannock Rivers were part of the increased slave exports that originated along Madagascar’s eastern coast, just as the earlier slave exports to New Netherland had come from the same region.³⁵

      It was not until after the American Revolution that regular trade to the western Indian Ocean by North Americans resumed. By that time the Malagasy trade in slaves was not a significant part of U.S. Indian Ocean activities, largely due to efforts of abolitionists in Britain and the United States. The transatlantic slave trade was made illegal in 1808. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the spice trade and whaling superseded the slave trade for American merchants in the Indian Ocean.

       Captives

      The Malagasy captives who arrived in Virginia in 1719 could not have known that their fate was very much tied to the political vagaries of the British Parliament and the East India Company’s future. Due to persistent lobbying on the part of Anglo-Americans and private shippers in England, the protectionist policy allowing the British East India Company exclusive trade rights in the region had been repealed.³⁶ Evolving relations between North American colonies, СКАЧАТЬ