Thomas Bowrey's Madagascar Manuscript of 1708

I

In 1913 an old chest was discovered in a manor house in Worcestershire in the west of England. Packed with bundles of manuscripts, it contained several hundred letters and business papers written in a crabbed italic hand. These documents belonged to Thomas Bowrey, an English overseas merchant, who was born in 1662 and died in 1713. The collection of papers was later purchased by Colonel Henry Howard, and in 1931 part of it was presented to the Guildhall Library in London. These documents include an incomplete manuscript titled "Discription of the Coast of Affrica from the Cape of Good Hope, to the Red Sea" dated 1708.¹ The notes indicate that Bowrey intended to write a book that encompassed descriptions of all the major ports of the region.

Only fragments of the draft survive. Most of the manuscript contains amendments, crossed-out sections, and blank spaces. The text consists of different versions of a preface, brief accounts of the Dutch Cape Colony and Delagoa Bay in Mosambique, as well as a draft portion which has the title "Islands of y^e Coast of Africa on y^e East Side of y^e Cape of Good Hope: Places of Trade on Madagascar." The densely written and in part hardly legible text is on sixteen folio pages. It gives information about Assada, Old Masselege, Manangara, New Masselege, Terra Delgada, Morondava, Crab Island, St. Vincent, St. Iago, Tulear, St. Augustin Bay, St. John's, Port Dauphin, Matatana, Bonavola, St. Mary's Island, and Antongil Bay. This document also includes descriptions of Mauritius and Bourbon, nowadays called Réunion. Most of these places were visited by English, Dutch, and French seafarers in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

The appearance of Europeans in Madagascar is connected to profound organizational transformations in the coastal regions. The most prominent change occurred along the west coast. In the course of the seventeenth century Sakalava dynasts gradually gained control over the ports, where they exchanged captives taken in their many wars for firearms, gunpowder, and other commodities. A series of campaigns led to the conquest of a large territory. By the end of the century two powerful Sakalava kingdoms controlled most of the western part of the island.² We know little about the internal structure of these kingdoms, and much remains to be investigated by historians, anthropologists, and archeologists. Against this background every written document about pre-colonial Madagascar is a valuable source that needs to be studied in detail.

Bowrey structured his description of the places of trade on Madagascar in an orderly fashion. At the beginning of each chapter the reader finds a description of land and people, followed by what Bowrey termed "Its Product" that in some cases involved the price of slaves. The last part of each chapter is about the "Season of y^e Years Proper for Navigation thither." Some of these sections are entirely blank, others contain elaborate texts that provide detailed information. Even though this manuscript does not contain startling revelations that will radically alter our understanding of Malagasy history, the document is of interest for scholars working on precolonial Madagascar, cross-cultural relations, and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean.

II

In his early career Thomas Bowrey made a living as an independent trader in the East Indies. After having spent nineteen years in Bengal, Bowrey was back in England in 1689. In the following years he twice returned to Bengal as commander of East India Company vessels. Bowrey also undertook a voyage to the South Sea, and in 1695 he led an expedition in quest of the Northwest Passage.³ During or between his voyages Bowrey must have

Figure 1.

worked on the first Malay-English dictionary, published in 1701. Moreover, he became an inveterate projector, who submitted numerous proposals to the East India Company for new trade outlets, plantations in the New World, the suppression of piracy, and the like. Even though never translated into action, Bowrey's projects bear witness to the thriving merchant adventurism of this age...