Our journey to-day did not exceed eight or nine miles; betimes in the afternoon we halted at the village of Andororanto to wait for our baggage, which had been taken overland by another route.
May 22. This morning we traveled three hours by water on the River Fark, which falls into the sea not far from the village where we had passed the night. This river is very broad, but has few deep parts. Its banks afford a greater variety of scenery than the rivers we had hitherto seen. The uniform flats begin now to alternate with little clusters of hills, and in the far background a low ridge becomes visible.
Coming to a great bend in the river, we disembarked. The boats remained behind, and our journey by land began in earnest. This day we accomplished eight miles more inland toward the east. The road was tolerably good, except in the neighborhood of a few wretched villages which we passed.
As far as I have yet seen of this country, it is exceedingly fertile, except a few sandy tracts. Capital pasture-grass grows every where luxuriantly. The plains at the higher level are said to be excellently calculated for sugar plantations, and the low-lying lands for rice-fields, and yet all was lying fallow. The population is so scanty that we hardly passed a tiny village in every three or four miles. This is certainly inevitable in a country whose government seems determined to lay waste and depopulate the land. In Madagascar scarcely any one is a landed proprietor except the queen and the high nobility. The peasant may cultivate the land and sow seed where he finds a tract unoccupied, without asking permission of any body; but this gives him no proprietary right, and after he has cultivated the land the owner may take it away from him. This circumstance, added to the natural indolence inherent in all savage tribes, readily accounts for the fact that the peasant only cultivates just as much land as he finds necessary to grow enough for himself.
The taxes are not oppressive. The peasant has to deliver about a hundred weight of rice to the government annually; but compulsory service and other exactions are very burdensome, for they prevent the peasant from attending properly to his work.
Rice is the plant principally cultivated in Madagascar. The crop is sown twice a year, and the government prescribes a month each time to be devoted to the work. With an active people this would be enough time to get the harvest gathered, and the new crop put into the ground; but, unfortunately, the natives of Madagascar are very far from being an active race, and so it often happens that the month has passed away before the work is finished. After the month is over, the government requires the men for all kinds of services, of more or less importance, just as the queen or the officers appointed by her majesty may please to order. Those are worst off who live on roads leading from the harbors to the capital, for they have to do so much compulsory service as bearers that they have scarcely any time left for agriculture. At one time many left their huts and fields, and fled into the interior of the country to escape this hardship, so that the villages began to be deserted. To check this, the queen condemned every fugitive to death; but, on the other hand, she relieved the inhabitants of villages on the roads from military service, the most hateful of all obligations to the people. A few little villages were also stocked with royal slaves, who had no other duty assigned to them but to act as carriers. If the people had only to transport the royal luggage and goods, their service would not be a heavy one; but every nobleman, every officer, can procure an order for similar service, and even compel the people to work without showing any authority at all. They can not complain, for a peasant would never gain a cause against a nobleman or an officer, and so they pass the greater part of the year working on the roads. In the districts where there are no goods and chattels to be carried, other work is found for them; and if there happens to be nothing to do, they are summoned in a body, not only the men, but the women, children, and all, to attend a kabar at some place or other. Kabar is the name given to public judicial sessions, councils, audiences, and assemblies of the people, where new laws and royal orders are promulgated, and much similar business enacted.
The kabars are sometimes held in distant places, so that the poor people have to travel some days to get to them. Nor are the laws at once read out to them; this part of the business is often postponed from day to day, so that they are sometimes kept away from their homes for weeks. On such occasions many die of hunger and misery, from having taken an insufficient supply of rice; money they have none, and must therefore seek to sustain life as best they may with roots and herbs. Their destruction seems to be the object of the queen; for she hates all the people who are not of her own race, and her greatest desire would seem to be to annihilate them all at one blow.
So far as the cultivation of the land is concerned, there are people enough in Bourbon and the Mauritius who would be glad enough to lay out large plantations. A few even have tried it, clearing great tracts of land and planting sugar-canes. But they met with the greatest difficulties; for, as the land every where belonged to the queen, or to one or other of the nobles, the new-comers were obliged to propitiate the owners by presents of money to obtain permission to carry on their operations. Besides this, the government demanded ten per cent. on their profits, and, in spite of all the heavy sacrifices, they were not much better off than the natives; for the peculiar judicial institutions of Madagascar allowed the owner to break off the contract at any moment, and drive away the planter.
Some preferred to make a treaty with the queen herself, her majesty therein engaging to provide the ground, the laborers, wood, iron, in a word, every thing necessary to a plantation; the planter, on his part, undertaking to set the work in motion, and to find provisions for the hands; while the produce was to be divided equally between the contracting parties. The queen entered into several contracts of this kind, but never kept to them. In King Radama’s time, the land, they told me, had been more populous; under the rule of the present queen, not only have innumerable towns sunk down to a few scattered huts, but others have altogether vanished. Spots were often pointed out to us where fine villages had once stood.
We passed the night at Manambotre. At a little distance from this village we passed a place where great blocks of rock lay scattered here and there. Their appearance in this place astonished me not a little, as the soil consisted every where of vegetable earth on which not the smallest stone was to be found. Mr. Lambert had two oxen killed this evening for the benefit of our bearers. They were dragged out in front of our hut by ropes passed round their horns; then several men armed with knives crept up from behind, and cut the sinews of the poor creatures hind legs, so that they sank down powerless, and could be dispatched without danger. As I have already remarked, they are not flayed, but the skin is roasted with the meat; nay, the natives even prefer it to the flesh, because the greater portion of fat adheres to it.