The slave trade in the Indian Ocean 193chieftains, loaded their ships with slaves from the northern part of the islands.
Their preference was to frequent the north-west coasts, which were lay-over
points between Mozambique and Goa, and there take on slave cargoes bound
for India (Vérin, 1972). Miss Keswani had pointed out that the importation of
African slaves was carried on actively in Madagascar during the Portuguese
period (Unesco, 1974).
Other slaves were taken away by the various Europeans who penetrated
into the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, on their way to Indonesia, began as early as
1596 putting into the Bay of Antongil which was to become the favourite place
for their Negro slave trade in Madagascar. Their settlement in Mauritius in
1638 and in the Cape in 1652 stimulated this traffic. But it was for a more
distant destination that the Jacht Sillida carried off 236 Malagasies on 5 Decem-
ber 1681 : they were to join other slaves, mostly from Malabar, to work in a
gold-mine in western Sumatra (Lombard, 1971). Here there was a sharing of
wretchedness, and a meeting of cultures, but how many acculturations failed
to take place because of the 'mandor's' whip?
The English ports of call, the Danes stopping along the coast of Coro-
mandel on their way to their outpost at Tranquebar, and the French settled in
Fort-Dauphin, all provided new opportunities for slave trading, but the best
ones were seized by the pirates, beginning in 1685, when the European powers
temporarily withdrew from Madagascar. Driven out of the West Indies by the
advance of colonization, hundreds of freebooters took refuge in the ' Great
Isle'. They became the brokers of the slave trade until about 1726, buying
Malagasies and reselling them to the English of Bristol, the Dutch of Batavia
and the French of Martinique, as well as to the Arabs of Boina and Majunga.
The corsairs delivered their own merchandise and slaves to the neighbouring
island of Bourbon (Réunion) where a French governor had signed a contract
with them to purchase slaves whom he then resold to those under his admi-
nistration. According to the account of the Provençal pirate, Misson, the
founder of Libertalia, 'A slave in Barbados costs from £750 to £1,250, whereas
in Madagascar with some £12 of merchandise one can buy all one wants. We
can get a fine chap there for an old suit' (Filliot, 1975).
This cynical calculation had been made before Misson, since Barbados
Island had received 335 Malagasy slaves as early as 1664. The need for man-
power in the West Indies and on the American continent was to keep up this
long-distance traffic until the eighteenth century, with a peak period between
the years 1675 and 1725. All told, approximately 12,000 inhabitants of Mada-
gascar went to the New World in servitude (Hardyman, 1964). They were soon
joined there by slaves from East Africa, for example, in Santo Domingo where
the Governor estimated that in 1785, some 3,000 to 4,000 slaves came in from
the Mozambique region, as compared with 34,000 slaves from the Atlantic
coast (Debien, 1974; Toussaint, 1967).