Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/515

 last completely wasted. Hundreds of villages bad been delivered to the flames, and the inhabitants who had escaped from the butcheries had been driven to seek refuge in other parts of the island. The French garrison, surrounded by solitudes, had no longer even the resource of plunder, and had to draw their supplies of cattle and rice from great distances and at a heavy cost.

The settlement consequently began to dwindle, till the year 1672, when the few survivors were brought away bya passing vessel. Nothing beyond a few half-castes remained in the country to keep alive the memory of the French occupation of Fort Dauphin. It was estimated that two-thirds of the troops and settlers were carried off by epidemics, war, and famine. The survivors served as a nucleus for the colony of Bourbon, which was destined two centuries later to become the base of operations in a fresh attempt at the conquest of Madagascar. One of the first governors of Bourbon was the historian De Flacourt, whose work is the most frequently consulted on the island and its inhabitants during the seventeenth century.

After the abandonment of Madagascar, frequent royal edicts recalled the fact that the "Crown" still maintained its prior rights of possession, although for fully a a century these purely formal assumptions were justified by no actual attempts at colonisation. During that period the only foreign visitors were corsairs or traders from the Mascarenhas Islands, who came to exchange woven goods and other