Madagascar, immense island on the eastern coasts of Africa. Its longitude, according to Harris, begins at 62° 1' 15". Its meridional latitude holds from 12° 12' just to 25° 10', which makes a length of 336 French leagues. It is 120 leagues at it largest width, and that part is situated north-north-east and south-south-west. Its southern point enlarges toward the Cape of Good-Hope. But that of the north, much more narrow, curves toward the Indian sea. Its circuit can run to 800 leagues; in this respect it is the largest island of the seas that we know of.

It has been visited by all European peoples who navigate beyond the equator, particularly the Portuguese, the English, the Dutch, and the French. The first called it the Isle of Saint Lawrence, because they discovered it on this saint’s birthday in 1492. The other nations named it Madagascar, a name little different from that of the region’s natives, who call it Madecasses . [1]

The ancient geographers also knew it, although more imperfectly than we. Pliny’s Cerné is Ptolemy’s Menuthias , which is placed at 12° 30' south latitude, to the east of Cape Prassum. This is also the location that our maps give to the northern point of Madagascar. Otherwise, the description made by the Périple author of his Ménuthias strongly corresponds with Madagascar.

The French have had many settlements on Madagascar that they were obliged to abandon. Flacourt [2] has made a natural history of this island that he never knew, and Rennefort [3] created the novel.

All that we know about it amounts to the guess that it is divided into many provinces and regions, is governed by diverse nations who are of different color, of different morals, and are all plunged in idolatry or in the superstitions of Mohammedism.

This island is not really populated proportional to its size. All the inhabitants are black, except a very small portion of descendants from those Arabs who captured a part of this country at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The men show all the influences of the climate; love of idleness and sensuality. The women who give themselves over publicly are not dishonored. Ordinary people are practically naked. The richest have nothing more than shorts or silk slips. They have no commodities in their homes, sleep on mats, feed themselves with milk, rice, roots, and meat that is practically raw. They do not eat bread because they do not know it, and they drink mead.

Their wealth consists of herds and pastures, because this island is watered by the hundred rivers that fertilize it. The quantity of livestock it produces is prodigious. Their sheep have a tail that drags a half-foot on the ground. The sea, the rivers, and the ponds teem with fish.

We see in Madagascar nearly all the animals that we have in Europe, and a great number that we do not know. There they pick magnificent lemons, oranges, pomegranates, and admirable pineapples. Honey is abundant there, as too is tacamahaca gum, frankincense, and benzoin. There one finds talc, coal mines, saltpeter, and iron. Precious stones such as crystal, topaz, amethysts, garnet, girasol, and aquamarine. In sum, we have not yet penetrated far enough into the vast land, nor have we made sufficient attempts to know it or describe it.

Notes

1. Eighteenth-century Englishmen would have used both “Madecasses” and/or “Malagasches.”

2. Former governor of Madagascar Étienne de Flacourt (1607-1660) who wrote Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar (Paris: Gervais Clovzier, 1661). For several translations and accounts of Flacourt’s collection of stories from Madagascar see Lee Harin, Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007).

3. A reference to seventeenth-century colonial administrator Urbain Souchu de Rennefort. He wrote several works on the Indian Ocean. The one most engaged with Madagascar is: Relation du premier voyage de la compagnie des indes orientales en l’isle de Madagascar ou Dauphine (Paris: Gervais Clovzier, 1668).