Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/522

 ^25 SOUTH AND EAST AFRICA. as leaseholders for an indefinite term, and are also henceforth permitted to reside and trade freely in every part of the Hova territory. The neighbourhood of two rich and thickly peopled islands such as Mauritius and Reunion could not fail gradually to draw the inhabitants of Madagascar within the sphere of European intercourse. Thanks to their rich colonial produce, the Mascarenhas have necessarily been brought into direct relations with the western markets ; but they also require to maintain a local traffic with the great island, on which they depend for the supply of cattle and provisions needed by the labourers on their plantations. From the economic standpoint, Madagascar and its two eastern satellites thus form a mutually dependent commercial group. Hence the commercial, if not the political, annexation of one to the other had become inevitable, and the recent action of France should be judged in the light of these conditions. In fact, there can be no doubt that this historic event would have taken place at a much earlier date, had Mauritius and Reunion themselves not belonged to two rival powers, occupied throughout the present century in thwarting each other's operations in this part of the Indian Ocean. But although Mauritius is a British colony, it was originally settled by the French, and its present French population co-operated even with armed volunteers in the expeditions which have secured the preponderance of France in Madagascar. Sooner or later the political centre of gravity must inevitably be shifted from the small geo- graphical group of the Mascarenhas to the almost continental island, abounding as it does in still undeveloped treasures of all sorts. EXPLORATIOX. But meantime much of the interior still remains unexplored. More than half of the Sakalava territory is altogether unknown, while the southern regions, where the French made their first expeditions, between Fort Dauphin and the Bara country, have never been scientifically surveyed. The best known districts are naturally those traversed by the traders between the east coast and the capital, Tananarivo. The routes of explorers round about this central point also cross each other in all directions, so that in many places nothing remains to be done except to fill up the minor details. In the work of general exploration, no traveller has been more successful than M, Grandidier, who was also the first to accurately determine the relief of the land. This naturalist has traversed the island from coast to coast, nughly surveyed a space some thousand square miles in extent, and fixed several hundred astronomical points, which with the surveys executed on the seaboard by the European maritime states, offer a network of fundamental lines for all future cartographers. Thanks to the observations taken by Grandidier, supplemented by those of Mullens, Cameron, and Roblet, it has been found possible to effect a fairly correct triangulation of the central province, Imerina, of which we already possess more accurate charts than have yet been designed for certain European districts, especially in the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas. The bibliography of the 'island