4.5 Dating the First Settlement of Madagascar
75
This is a realistic scenario given that Austronesian societies were matrilineal and
matrilocal. That is, land ownership was through female lines of descent. Invaders
would have spared women in order to secure land rights through them as well as to
build sustainable population levels quickly. This scenario suggests initial colonization by Spice Islanders, bringing the Polynesian motif, to Madagascar. There may
have been several second-wave colonizations (perhaps more than one by secondwave Spice Island traders) before, as the genetic picture suggests, there occurred a
final attack or attacks by men whose Y chromosomes link them to the Barito River
area of Borneo. These later invaders, by slaughtering the men on the island, could
have wiped out the Y-chromosome genes of the Spice Island founders and of any
later Spice Island colonists and imposed their language on the Malagasy. Attacks
of this kind are repeatedly recorded in traditional histories. They drove the choice
between tribal extinction and oceanic migration that led to colonizations in Hawaii
and possibly in New Zealand.
Genetically cold-resistant women in Madagascar over time could have passed
their genes for cold resistance to the Barito invaders or the invaders could have
acquired them through earlier invasions of spice-producing islands in the Spice
Island archipelago with the same sparing of cold-adapted women and slaughter
of defeated men. Invaders from Borneo would have to have had significant cold
resistance for, as we have noted, only cold-adapted mariners could have sailed the
Cinnamon Route.
4.5 Dating the First Settlement of Madagascar
We know that Madagascar, by the time of the Roman writer, Pliny the Elder (AD
23–79), was a major staging post for the Cinnamon Route. Double-outriggers from
the Spice Islands carried cargoes of spices via Madagascar to Rhapta: cinnamon
from the islands of Seram and Ambon in the southern Spice Islands where it was
indigenous (though it also grew in Java), cloves from the Halmaherian off-shore
islands and nutmeg and other spices from Banda also in the southern Spice Islands.
In his Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder, who had studied Greek sources and was
in touch with the mercantile community in Rome [16], described the feat of bringing spices to Madagascar and to the ports of the east African coast by the Cinnamon
Route. Pliny’s marvellous, if inaccurate, description of the double-outriggers or sailing rafts that carried the spices to Rhapta reads as a paean of praise to the courage
and daring of the mariners who sailed them:
They bring it [the cargo] over vast seas on rafts which have no rudders to steer them or oars
to push or pull them or sails or other aids to navigation; but instead only the spirit of man
and human courage. What is more, they put out to sea in winter, around the time of the
winter solstice, when the east winds are blowing their hardest. These winds drive them on
a straight course, and from gulf to gulf. Now cinnamon is the chief object of their journey,
and they say that these merchant-sailors take almost five years before they return, and that
many perish. In exchange, they carry back with them glassware and bronze ware, clothing,
brooches, armlets, and necklaces (p. 171).
75
This is a realistic scenario given that Austronesian societies were matrilineal and
matrilocal. That is, land ownership was through female lines of descent. Invaders
would have spared women in order to secure land rights through them as well as to
build sustainable population levels quickly. This scenario suggests initial colonization by Spice Islanders, bringing the Polynesian motif, to Madagascar. There may
have been several second-wave colonizations (perhaps more than one by secondwave Spice Island traders) before, as the genetic picture suggests, there occurred a
final attack or attacks by men whose Y chromosomes link them to the Barito River
area of Borneo. These later invaders, by slaughtering the men on the island, could
have wiped out the Y-chromosome genes of the Spice Island founders and of any
later Spice Island colonists and imposed their language on the Malagasy. Attacks
of this kind are repeatedly recorded in traditional histories. They drove the choice
between tribal extinction and oceanic migration that led to colonizations in Hawaii
and possibly in New Zealand.
Genetically cold-resistant women in Madagascar over time could have passed
their genes for cold resistance to the Barito invaders or the invaders could have
acquired them through earlier invasions of spice-producing islands in the Spice
Island archipelago with the same sparing of cold-adapted women and slaughter
of defeated men. Invaders from Borneo would have to have had significant cold
resistance for, as we have noted, only cold-adapted mariners could have sailed the
Cinnamon Route.
4.5 Dating the First Settlement of Madagascar
We know that Madagascar, by the time of the Roman writer, Pliny the Elder (AD
23–79), was a major staging post for the Cinnamon Route. Double-outriggers from
the Spice Islands carried cargoes of spices via Madagascar to Rhapta: cinnamon
from the islands of Seram and Ambon in the southern Spice Islands where it was
indigenous (though it also grew in Java), cloves from the Halmaherian off-shore
islands and nutmeg and other spices from Banda also in the southern Spice Islands.
In his Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder, who had studied Greek sources and was
in touch with the mercantile community in Rome [16], described the feat of bringing spices to Madagascar and to the ports of the east African coast by the Cinnamon
Route. Pliny’s marvellous, if inaccurate, description of the double-outriggers or sailing rafts that carried the spices to Rhapta reads as a paean of praise to the courage
and daring of the mariners who sailed them:
They bring it [the cargo] over vast seas on rafts which have no rudders to steer them or oars
to push or pull them or sails or other aids to navigation; but instead only the spirit of man
and human courage. What is more, they put out to sea in winter, around the time of the
winter solstice, when the east winds are blowing their hardest. These winds drive them on
a straight course, and from gulf to gulf. Now cinnamon is the chief object of their journey,
and they say that these merchant-sailors take almost five years before they return, and that
many perish. In exchange, they carry back with them glassware and bronze ware, clothing,
brooches, armlets, and necklaces (p. 171).