Who was the first European to discover Madagascar?
50875#23
By the 15th century, Europeans had wrested control of the spice trade from the Muslims. They did this by bypassing the Middle East and sending their cargo-ships around the Cape of Good Hope to India. The Portuguese mariner Diogo Dias became the first European to set foot on Madagascar when his ship, bound for India, blew off course in 1500. In the ensuing two-hundred years, the English and French tried (and failed) to establish settlements on the island.
History of Madagascar
50875#22
Europe knew of Madagascar through Arab sources; based on them "The Travels of Marco Polo" claimed that "the inhabitants are Saracens, or followers of the law of Mohammed", without mentioning other inhabitants. Other than its size and location, everything about the island in the book describes southeastern Africa, not Madagascar. European contact began on 10 August 1500, when the Portuguese sea captain Diogo Dias sighted the island after his ship separated from a fleet going to India. The Portuguese continued trading with the islanders and named the island "São Lourenço" (Saint Lawrence). In 1666, François Caron, the director general of the newly formed French East India Company, sailed to Madagascar. The company failed to establish a colony on Madagascar but established ports on the nearby islands of Bourbon (now Réunion) and Isle de France (now Mauritius). In the late 17th century, the French established trading posts along the east coast. On Île Sainte-Marie, a small island off the northeastern coast of Madagascar, Captain Misson and his pirate crew allegedly founded the famous pirate utopia of Libertatia in the late 17th century. From about 1774 to 1824, Madagascar was a favorite haunt for pirates. Many European sailors were shipwrecked on the coasts of the island, among them Robert Drury, whose journal is one of the few written depictions of life in southern Madagascar during the 18th century. Sailors sometimes called Madagascar "Island of the Moon".
History of Madagascar
2041178#20
One of the ships under command of Diogo Dias arrived at a coast that was not in East Africa. Two years later, a chart already showed an elongated island east of Africa that bore the name Madagascar. But only a century later, between 1613 and 1619, did the Portuguese explore the island in detail. They signed treaties with local chieftains and sent the first missionaries, who found it impossible to make locals believe in Hell, and were eventually expelled.
European exploration of Africa
27653365#21
Local tales of a "song'aomby" (Malagasy for "cow that is not a cow"), or pygmy hippopotamus, led French naturalist Alfred Grandidier to follow a village headman to a marsh in southwestern Madagascar, a site called Ambolisatra, which became the first known subfossil site in Madagascar. In 1868, Grandidier uncovered the first subfossil remains of lemurs—a humerus from "Palaeopropithecus" and a tibia of a sifaka. The "Palaeopropithecus" remains were not described for several decades, and it took decades more for the remains to be correctly paired with other sloth lemur remains. It was not until 1893 that giant lemur species were formally described, when Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major discovered and described a long, narrow skull of "Megaladapis madagascariensis" in a marsh. His discoveries in various marshes of central and southwestern Madagascar sparked paleontological interest, resulting in an overabundance of taxonomic names and confused assemblages of bones from numerous species, including non-primates. Specimens were distributed between European museums and Madagascar, often resulting in the loss of field data that went with the specimens, if the data had been recorded at all.
Subfossil lemur
1376379#3
In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were a number of resettlement plans for European Jews that were precursors to the Madagascar Plan. Paul de Lagarde, an Orientalist scholar, first suggested evacuating the European Jews to Madagascar in his 1878 work "Deutsche Schriften" ("German Writings"). Members of the Zionist movement in 1904–1905 seriously debated the British Uganda Programme, by which Russian Jews, who were in immediate danger from ongoing pogroms, would be settled in what today is Kenya. The plan was later rejected as unworkable by the Zionist Congress. Adherents of territorialism split off from the main Zionist movement and continued to search for a location where Jews might settle and create a state, or at least an autonomous area. The idea of Jewish resettlement in Madagascar was promoted by British antisemites Henry Hamilton Beamish, Arnold Leese, and others. With the cooperation of the French, the Polish government commissioned a task force in 1937 to examine the possibility of settling Polish Jews in the island. The head of the commission, , felt the island could accommodate 5,000 to 7,000 families, but Jewish members of the group estimated that, because of the climate and poor infrastructure, only 500 or even fewer families could safely be accommodated.
Madagascar Plan
2041178#34
France also set her eyes on Madagascar, the island that had been used since 1527 as a stop in travels to India. In 1642, the French East India Company founded a settlement in southern Madagascar called Fort Dauphin. The commercial results of this settlement were scarce and, again, most of the settlers died. One of the survivors, Etienne de Flacourt, published a "History of the Great Island of Madagascar and Relations", which was for a long time the main European source of information about the island. Further settlement attempts had no more success but, in 1667, François Martin led the first expedition to the Malgasy heartland, reaching Lake Alaotra. In 1665, France officially claimed Madagascar, under the name of Île Dauphine. However, little colonial activity would take place in Madagascar until the 19th century.
European exploration of Africa
40955884#36
Madagascar was colonised rather recently compared to other landmasses, with first evidence for humans—arrived from either Africa or Asia—dating to 2,300 or perhaps 4,000 years before present. It is assumed that humans first stayed near the coast and penetrated into the interior only several centuries later. The settlers had a profound impact on the long-isolated environment of Madagascar through land clearing and fire, introduction of zebu cattle, and probably hunting to extinction the native megafauna including, among others, elephant birds, giant lemurs and giant tortoises. The first Europeans arrived in the 16th century, starting an age of overseas exchange. Population growth and transformation of the landscape was particularly rapid since the mid-20th century.
Flora of Madagascar
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French naturalist Alfred Grandidier was a preeminent 19th-century authority on Malagasy wildlife. His first visit in 1865 was followed by several other expeditions. He produced an atlas of the island and, in 1885, published "L'Histoire physique, naturelle et politique de Madagascar", which would comprise 39 volumes. Although his main contributions were in zoology, he was also a prolific plant collector; several plants were named after him, including Grandidier's baobab ("Adansonia grandidieri") and the endemic succulent genus "Didierea". The British missionary and naturalist Richard Baron, Grandidier's contemporary, lived in Madagascar from 1872 to 1907 where he also collected plants and discovered up to 1,000 new species; many of his specimens were described by Kew botanist John Gilbert Baker. Baron was the first to catalogue Madagascar's vascular flora in his "Compendium des plantes malgaches", including over 4,700 species and varieties known at that time.
Flora of Madagascar
425804#37
British missionaries of the London Missionary Society (LMS) arrived in Antananarivo in 1820 during the reign of King Radama I. The subsequent spread of Christianity in Madagascar was coupled with the introduction of solfège as missionaries developed Malagasy-language hymns for their nascent church. The first wave of missionaries was obliged to depart Madagascar under Ranavalona I in 1836, but the hymns they developed became anthems for early Malagasy converts persecuted under the Queen's traditionalist policies. In 1871, an LMS missionary (J. Richardson) improved the rhythm and harmony of these original hymns, which were considerably influenced by European musical styles such as quadrilles and waltzes. Originally, church music was performed by slaves seated in groups of four to five at the front of the church. By the 1870s a more European congregational style had been adopted with all members of the church rising to their feet to sing together.
Music of Madagascar
40758280#2
The first formal European-style school was established in 1818 on the east coast of Madagascar at Toamasina by members of the London Missionary Society (LMS). King Radama I, the first sovereign to bring about half the island of Madagascar under his rule, was interested in strengthening ties with European powers; to this end, he invited LMS missionaries to open a school in his capital at Antananarivo within the Rova palace compound to instruct the royal family in literacy, numeracy and basic education. This first school, known as the Palace School, was established by LMS missionary David Jones on 8 December 1820 within Besakana, a Rova building of great historic and cultural significance. Within months, classes were transferred to a larger, purpose-built structure on the Rova grounds.
Christianity in Madagascar