It is impossible to understand present-day Madagascar without understanding its past. That applies not only to the cult of ancestors, but also to understanding the ecology of a place like the island reserve of Nosy Mangabe in Antongil Bay whose forests have undergone profound disturbance since humans first colonized the island probably some 1300 – 1500 years ago. One of the delights of Madagascar is that the remains of early human activity constitute an additional dimension to the landscape that is largely absent in many parts of mainland Africa.
Also, as the archeologist Henry Wright writes, ‘It is relevant to conservation planners to know whether the impact of human populations on these ancient forests is recent, or whether human impact is long-standing. Could some of the observed patterns of diversity be the result of the introduction, favoring, or selective removal of forest species?’
The first colonization of Madagascar by humans probably occurred between 500 and 700 AD, when migrants from across the Indian Ocean arrived and settled on the island. Some of the earliest traces of humans that have been discovered in Madagascar are on the island of Nosy Mangabe in Antongil Bay, where the greater accumulation of soil eroded from hill slopes, attested in archaeological soundings, suggests a fairly dense human occupation until some time after the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century. On the basis of his own work and that of Pierre Vérin in 1968, Wright has concluded that human visits to Nosy Mangabe began in the 8th century AD. Thus, human exploitation has had an impact on the forests of Nosy Mangabe for more than 1200 years. Probably, that human influence has contributed to the great diversity of plant life that exists on the island today, though it is important to understand more recent history in order to understand why Nosy Mangabe has been spared the ravages that occurred elsewhere in and around Antongil Bay.
Following the settlment of Madagascar by people of Indonesian origin, Muslim traders were probably regular visitors by the 13th century when Marco Polo heard accounts of a huge island named Madagascar as he traveled back through the Persian Gulf from his famous journey to the far east. The legend of the elephant bird or roc, almost certainly the flightless Aepyornis which was driven to extinction after the arrival of humans in Madagascar, also stems from Marco Polo’s account.
Madagascar remained the stuff of legend for Europeans for two more centuries after Marco Polo’s journey, until Vasco da Gama opened the passage around the Cape of Good Hope for the Portuguese in 1496 and, in 1500, the first Portuguese vessel arrived in Madagascar. The first known Portuguese visit to Antongil Bay came in 150, when Diego Fernandez Peteira arrived at the end of the year to leave again only in August 1504. The modern name of the bay may date from that first Portuguese visit, although it has been suggested too that it derives from the name of a later visitor, Antonio Goncalvès, or even from an older Malagasy name.
Over the course of the 16th century, Portuguese and other European sailors and merchants determined that Madagascar was of less interest to them in its own right than as a stepping stone for the trade in spices, porcelain, silk and other goods between Europe and the Far East. It possessed neither the riches of the New World or Far East, nor the temperate climate and agricultural potential that might have made it an attractive place for Europeans to settle in large numbers. By the end of the century, however, competitive trading from Dutch, British and later French ships led to more frequent visits by Europeans to the Antongil Bay region to reprovision on their way to and from the Spice Islands in particular. Historical accounts abound of European visits to Antongil Bay from 1595 onwards. During the half century to 1645, the Dutch were the most frequent visitors, replaced afterwards by the French.
The engraved message that Lancaster’s men found survives to this day on what is still known as ‘Dutchmen’s Beach’, along with dozens of other inscriptions left by Dutch sailors between 1601 and 1657. Most of them look like ancient graffiti, which is indeed what many of them are. Some of the messages served an important purpose, however, and some told telegraphic stories of the adventures that had brought the sailors to Nosy Mangabe. One, for example, tells in a few words of the ship Middelburg arriving in Antongil Bay on April 10, 1625, having lost its mast and continuing back towards Holland on October 25, 1625. One is left to imagine for oneself the high drama of a ship dismasted in a cyclone in the Indian Ocean, jury-rigged to limp into the shelter of Antongil Bay, finding, cutting, trimming, mounting, and re-rigging a suitable tree for a new mast, fighting or bartering with local people for enough food to feed the crew during the six month sojourn, and then setting sail again for the onward journey. It is the stuff of the wildes boyhood adventure stories, even though this one ended in tragedy After leaving Antongil Bay in October 1625, after a brief stop at Cape Town to drop off mail and collect supplies, the Middelburg headed off into the Atlantic and was never heard of again. Other carved messages at the Dutch Beach end with the phrase ‘hier leyt een brief’ (here lays a letter), indicating that the crews of the vessels had written longer missives to each other or perhaps to their families back home that were left buried in the ground near the rocks for later ships to find.
As the 17th century advanced, Madagascar slowly came to be seen as a destination in its own right and not simply a convenient provisioning stop for ships crossing the Indian Ocean. But, in the absence of spices, gold or abundant supplies of food, it runed out that the most sought-after commodity of the island was its human population, which became the focus of an active slave trade that linked Antongil Bay to Dutch colonies in Mauritius, South Africa and southeast Asia.
It is notable that Nosy Mangabe is referred to as Nosy Be in the 1642 agreement. In later documents, it is also named Nosy Marosy and Ile Marotte. The name Nosy Magabe which was used commonly from the mid 17th century onwards is intriguing because it has several possible meanings in Malgasy. Most prosaically, it could simply mean ‘big blue island’, which is the common explanation today, but makes little sense given that it is overwhelmingly green. Alternatively, it could mean the ‘Island of many mangos’, which is more logical in view of the many mango trees that still grow today at the northern end of the island. Another possible explanation is that it translates into the ‘Island of many slaves’. Mangos were planted frequently at sites around the Indian Ocean to provide cheap food for slaves and, in Madagascar, ‘manga’ indeed one of the words used in the past to refer to slaves. Since the name Nosy Mangabe appears to have been used only after the arrival of the slave traders, it seems likely that the truth lies somewhere with the latter interpretations.
The two Dutchmen left on Nosy Mangabe by Adriaen van der Stel in 1642 had both died by the time he next returned in 1644. The next year, he left another seven men, more of whom died before the survivors were finally withdrawn in 1647. Nonetheless, Dutch visits to Antongil Bay continued quite regularly into the 1660s. Over the years, more and more European sailors seem to have taken to staying in Madagascar. When two French ships names Taureau and Saint Paul anchored in the lee of Nosy Mangabe in 1665 to establish a trading station named Fort Stain Louis somewhere near the site of modern Maroantsetra, three Dutchmen emerged sheepishly from two villages around the bay (one of them perhaps Masoala) where they had apparently gone native. Another European, a Frenchman, appears to have done the same thing and was hired by the visiting ships as an interpreter. The three Dutchmen signed on as sailors with the Taureau and the ship sailed shortly afterwards, leaving 15 men to run the trading station at Fort Saint Louis.
WIth more and more Europeans leaving their ships to stay in Madagascar, and given the predictable failure of the various trading posts established along the coast, it was perhaps inevitable that the men would start looking for other means of supporting themselves. In the years following the departure of the Taureau and Saint Paul in 1665, the east coast of Madagascar became a center of activity for another group of entrepreneurs just as unscrupulous as the slaver-traders: pirates. Not surprisingly, more legitimate activities came to an abrupt end during the half-century or more when Madagascar became the base for some of the most successful privateers, including infamous Captain Kidd, Thomas Tew and Henry Avery.
Within a few years, Rantabe on the west coast of Antongil Bay had earned the reputation as one of the main havens for pirates operating in the western Indian Ocean. Known in Europe as Ranter Bay, it became the base for pirates such as James Plantain who is reputed to have built a fortress there in the 1720s. Ile Sainte Marie to the south, where one can still visit the tombs of pirates from the 18th century, was equally renowned, with an estimated 1500 pirates living there at that time. It is not clear whether the name Rantabe is a corruption from the English or vice versa. The Ranters were a group of English radicals who became prominent in the 1650s and whose more extreme members later became associated with piracy. Another local Malagasy name derived from an English original is Vringohitra, the prominent hill on the coast southwest of Maroantsetra airport, which reputedly got its name from the astute comment of a British sailor when shown a pulley system that had been installed there for careening ships: ‘very good’.
Of course, the impacts of pirates in the Indian Ocean were not limited to the ships on which they preyed. Ratsimilaho, who unified the peoples of the northeast into the Betsimisaraka people who still dominate northeastern Madagascar, was one of the presumably thousands of offspring of Malagasy women and European pirates. In Ratsimilaho’s case, the historian and diplomat Mervyn Brown suggests that his father was a British pirate named Thomas White, who upon his death left enough money for the boy to be sent to England for his education. When he returned to Madagascar in about 1712 at the age of 18, the young man immediately established himself as a leader in Antongil bay and within months captured the southern coastal towns of Fenerivo and Foulpointe from the Tsikoa people. According to Mervyn Brown’s History of Madagascar, the victorious Ratsimilaho was elected king of the northern people who now took the name Betsimisaraka (the mana inseparable), while he himself changed his name, in accordance with the general practice of Malagasy kings on accession, and was henceforth known as Ramaromanompo: he who rules over many. After further victories, Ramaromanompo soon became the leader of the entire eastern coastal region from beyond Toamasina in the south to Antalaha in the north.
When the Treaty of Utrecht made peace between France, Britain and The Netherlands in 1713, although thousands of newly unemployed sailors initially swelled the ranks of pirate ships around the world, it meant that military resources were freed to combat the common threat to commerce that piracy represented. It also meant that the plundering of foreign privateers ws no longer tolerated. During the 1720s, piracy targeted at commercial sailing ships was largely eliminated from the western Indian Ocean. By 1732, it was safe enough for European merchants to be back in Antongil Bay, concluding a contract with ‘His Majesty Adrian Baba, King of the Sakalava’ for the purchase of Nosy Mangabe for the French Compagnie des Indes. In return, the king would clear the island of its inhabitants and receive payment of two pistols, an upholstered chair, two leather-upholstered stools, two large mirrors, and a variety of other goods. The contract says nothing of the company’s purposes in establishing a presence on Nosy Mangabe, but it seems likely that it was to provide slaves fro their sugar plantations in nearby Mauritius, which the French had taken over from the Dutch in 1715.
The barely distinguishable fleur de lys on the coat of arms engraved on the front of the large rock at the Dutch Beach on Nosy Mangabe suggest that it dates from the period of occupation by the Compagnie des Indes.
Proof that one man’s pirate was another man’s patriot is provided by the extraordinary tale of Count Benyowski. Count Auguste de Benoyowski first set foot in Madagascar in 1772, after a series of remarkable adventures which had taken him from his native Hungary across to Kamchatka on the Pacific Ocean, down the coast of mainland Asia in a commandeered Russian battleship to Macau, through southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. Following a brief reconnoiter, Benyowski traveled on to France where, despite the failure of previous attempts to establish permanent European colonies in Madagascar, he persuaded Louis XV, through the agency of his ministers, the Duc d’Aiguillon and Monsieur de Boynes, to fund the establishment of a new French colony on the site of modern Maroantsetra which, he argued, could serve later as the basis for claiming Madagascar for France;
Benyowski returned to Madagascar via the Ile Bourbon (modern Réunion), arriving in Antongil Bay on February 14, 1774. In subsequent months, he established a settlement named Louisbourg on the mainland near the mouth of the Antainambalana River, with a port named Port de Boynes and a quarantine station on Nosy Mangabe which he renamed D’Aiguillon. Also on Nosy Mangabe, Benyowski claims to have built an oven, a hospital, and later a lighthouse. One of his initiatives was to build a road across the mountains from Lousbour to Angontsy, or Cap Est, though he gives little details besides noting that he persuaded local chiefs to lend him 12.000 men to do the work. Despite an apparently harmonious reception by the locals, the new colony was hard hit by malaria, which killed many of the settlers including Benyowski’s son, and later by conflict with the neighboring Malagasy brought on in part by his wife, who was determined to stamp out the local practice of slaughtering children born with disabilities or on inauspicious days.
Benyowski’s reported sale of 25 slaves to the Cape of Good Hope in return for 300.000 pounds of rice may not have helped his relationship with local people either, and belies his early contention that rice was abundant in the region. But while his memories, first published in France in 1783, after he had returned to Europe following the abandonment of Lousbour, were certainly to some extent an exercise in self-justification, there are many details that ring true today. For example, Benyowski writes of establishing outposts at ‘Foul Point, Massoualla, Mananhar, Tamatava and Angotzi’, all of them still identifiable locations today. In 1863, a Frenchman named Coignet was shown a three-meter wide path named ‘La Route de Benyowsky’ heading inland from the coast south of modern Antalaha. And another French traveler, Captain Alard, who walked from Antalaha to Maroantsetra in 1883, was shown a stone engraved with dates and the names of Europeans from the early 1770s at an inland site that matches Benyowski’s description of the second settlement that he established ‘on the Plain of Health’ to escape the unhealthy living conditions on the coast.
By 1776, it became clear that this attempt at colonization was a failure and Benyowksi was recalled amid some acrimony in Paris. After a meeting there with Benjamin Franklin, the representative in France of the American revolutionaries, his adventures continued and he is credited with a minor role in the War of American Independence. Then years later, he won American backing to set up a trading station back at Angontsy (Cap Est), where he was killed, in an unfortunate, but not unpredictable reversal of fate, by French troops following accusations of piracy. Three of the four canons that Benyowksi had with him at Angontsy have recently been recovered and can be seen in Antalaha. His descendants have restored his tomb and he has become something of a hero in his native Hungary.
Inevitably, the underlying history of native Malagasy in the Antongil Bay region in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is not as well-documented as the brief European visits. During this time, archaeology indicates that local human populations increased in the northeast, the previously scattered villages coalescing into a continuous network of larger villages at each river mouth, surrounded by small hamlets overlooking marshes ideal for rice cultivation. The first fortified hilltop villages, indicating the beginnings of endemic warfare, were probably early in this period. There is much evidence of cattle herding, fishing, the smelting of iron, and the carving of soapstone vessels. European accounts from the period rarely provide more than the names of a few places that can be correlated with modern towns and the names of leaders. There are frequent references to conflicts between different clans, which were presumably fueled to some extent by European demand for food for their ships, slaves for their colonies, and the introduction of firearms.
One clear thread that runs through both external and local accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries is the strong influence in the Maroantsetra area of the Zafirabay clan, whose origins lay in the Sakalava region of northwest of Madagascar and who were attracted to the large, well-irrigated plain north of Antongil Bay by its great potential for rice production. The French purchase of Nosy Mangabe in 1732 was from a ‘King of the Sakalava’, who may have become established there following the earlier marriage of Ratsimilaho to a Sakalava princess.
The Zafirabay were far from enlightened rulers. For example, the people of Ambolitaitry at the southern tip of the Masoala peninsula are still reluctant to visit Maroantsetra because they believe that the people there may feed them to crocodiles. Indeed, the Zafirabay are known to have sacrificed slaves from other ethnic groups to crocodiles during the 18th century and the peninsula would have been a good place for escaped slaves to seek refuge. Otusiders, however, generally faile to distinguish between the various groups of Betsimaraka and during this period they were feared as far away as the Comoros and Mozambique for the massive slave raids conducted with their sea-going dugout canoes. The Betsimirake are still reviled today among the Sakalava as thieves of women.
The end of the 18th century in Madagascar saw the unification of the central plateau region, Imerina, under King Andrianampoinimerina. Between 1816 and 1828, Andrianapoinimerina’s son, Radama I, led the Merina people to control the great majority of the island including the entire northeast. The name of Maroantsetra (the place of many spears) is thought to date from this period. A commemorative stone was placed at the pass between Maroantsetra and Antalaha where Ramada’s army crossed the mountains of Masoala in 1819 and the place was renamed Ambatoledama (a form of ‘Ramada’s stone’). Merina garrisons were established north of Maroantsetra near what amounted to the enslavement of local populations by the occupiers. The accounts of the Frenchmen Cognet and Allard who visited the area in 1863 and 1883 make it clear that Merina rule was quite harsh, for example restricting the movement of Betsimisaraka across the peninsula. Resentments born of this repressive regime are still alive today.
It was during the 19th century that the economic potential of the Masoala region begon to be realized. By the time the French seized power in 1896, commercial logging was already being carried out on the peninsula ena it was renowned as a source of latex for rubber production. The forest inland from Cap Est was one of the first to be cut, under the terms of a forestry concession signed by the Merina government with a M. Maigrot in 1887. Maigrot’s 10-year concession extended around the entire Masoala peninsula. His main focus of activity was in the Cap Est/Angontsy area, but according to early French administrators he had established several smaller bases around the coast which were used as centers for the exploitation of ebony, palissandre and rosewood in particular. A despairing 1898 report by a french forester, Chapotte, based in Maroantsetra, talks too of the problem of tavy in terms that are all too familiar today to today’s natural resource managers.
Commercial logging continued under the French administration, in particular on the flat coastal plain south of Cap Tampolo on the east coast of the peninsula which appear to have been largely clear-cut in the 1930s. Sawmills were built at the northern and southern ends of the plain and the remains of a railway connecting them can still be seen, along with small feeder lines bringing logs from inland. Wood was shipped out to Toamasina from a port established in the sandy bay north of Tampolo named Port Salvador, where the foundations of colonial period houses are still visible among the cinnamon trees that now cover the land.
Before the introduction of rubber plantation in West-Africa in the 1920s, and then again during World War I, the supply of natural latex from extensive forests such as Masoala was an important attraction to the French and one of the ways in which the colony was made to pay for itself. The fine Landolphia madagascariensis was particularly sought-after. With the introduction of vanilla in the 1900s, the northeast was also to become one of the most important revenue-producing regions of the new French colony. Off-shore too, the 19th century saw foreign states carrying off the rich resources of Antongil Bay, which became an important destination for American whaling ships who recognized that the bay was a breeding ground for humpback whales. As earlier European visitors had done before them, the American whalers recorded whale hunts by Malagsy in dugout canoes who would target the mother-calf pairs that were most common in the shallow water around the bay. Whalers in the 1840s also noted the great number of sharks in the bay, which meant that harpooned whales were sometimes lost to sharks before they could be towed back to the mother ship for processing or ‘cutting in’.
More research remains to be done on the uses to which Nosy Mangabe was put during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Whatever its use, the mature secondary vegetation and lack of new sediments in the archeological excavations suggest that it has not been occupied by large numbers of people at any point in the 230 years since Benyowski was there. When French colonial administrators moved into Maroantsetra in the 1900s, they built small cabins on the island as weekend retreats and already by the 1920s, when the black and white ruffed lemurs are said to have been introduced, it was being treated as something of a natural reserve. That formal status finally came in 1966 as the result of the efforts of André Peyrieras and others, who were responsible that same year for the introduction of six aye-ayes which have thrived and, thanks to doctoral research by Eleanor Sterling, were later to become the source of much of the information that we have today about the ecology of this most bizarre of lemurs.
Whatever ecological impacts humans have had on the forests of Madagascar since they first arrived in Madagascar some 1500 years ago, a curious and unexpected lesson from Masoala and Nosy Mangabe, is that , given the opportunity, the forest is quite capable of recovering from clear-cut logging, not to mention the lower levels of disturbance that have occured over the centuries of Nosy Mangabe. In that case, the various influences on the island’s vegetation over the centuries have resulted in one of the richest flora for an island of its size anywhere in the world. But elsewhere in the region, outside the national park, forest loss continues unchecked. Masoala’s forest has been shaped too by regular and catastrophic cyclones that can cause more damage in a few hours than humans in several years. But where cyclone-damage is a part of the natural cycle and leads immediately to the sort of mass regeneration that has been observed at Masoala since Cyclone Hudah in 2000, human-induced degradation frequently amounts to total destruction and is irreversible in the short to medium term. Nonetheless, natural forests regeneration on Masoala and Nosy Mangabe shows that humans and forest can co-exist and thrive when the conditions are right: levels and patterns of resource use must be low enough to allow natural regeneration to occur. The rule of law must be properly enforced and respected. Human populations must be stable and local people must be able to earn a living through something other than the direct use of natural resources and the benefits of improved management must be felt by those people who pay the short-term price of living next to a new protected area. These are some of the challenges facing Masoala National Park managers today.
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