Page:Dupleix and the Struggle for India by the European Nations.djvu/19

12 merchandise; and that it was not even necessary that the settler should himself work to obtain all those things. All that was required of him was to set to work the negroes, 'who are docile, obedient, and submissive,' to gain all that he required. Probably a description more glowing of an island, but one small extremity of which had been explored, was never forced on the attention of any people.

But in spite of these glowing pictures, the colony at Madagascar, as I shall continue to call the island, did not prosper. The adventurers who accepted service under the Company found that the natives, far from being willing to work for them, were actually hostile; that the climate was not only far hotter than that of France, but at certain seasons was actually deadly; that the soil was only moderately fertile; and that many of the richer merchandise promised in the notices existed only in the fertile imaginations of those who had drawn them. After many years of striving against the natives and the climate, the colonists who survived packed up their household goods, and migrated the neighbouring islands of France and Bourbon, which, discovered and abandoned by the Portuguese, occupied and abandoned by the Dutch, and then nominally taken possession of by France (1649), had remained unoccupied by Europeans until 1672. In that year the baffled colonists of Madagascar, inconsiderable in number, took possession of them, and formed there the nucleus of a settlement which was one day to be powerful.