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VALUE OF MADAGASCAR.

it of more worth to Great Britain than all her possessions in the West Indies.

The island is somewhat larger than Great Britain and Ireland, containing an industrious, intelligent, and semicivilized population, amounting, there is reason to believe, to between four and five millions.

The extent of its natural resources has not yet been adequately ascertained. There are vast forests, rich savannahs, numerous lakes, and many valuable rivers. The land is everywhere low in the neighbourhood of the coast, and the interior is mountainous. The highest elevation in the country probably does not exceed 8,000 feet. Iron, slate, and lime-stone are abundant. Coal, it is said, exists; and silver, it has also been affirmed, has been discovered near the capital, but of which the natives are forbidden by the government to speak, lest the fact of its existence becoming known, should excite the usual cupidity of Europeans, and terminate in the subjection of the country to a foreign yoke-not at all an improbable supposition, with the history of Mexico and India in view. Many valuable articles suited for commerce are already produced; some on a large scale, and all capable of an indefinite increase, whenever intelligence, liberty, and capital, can obtain fair play in the country. Among these articles may be specified sugar, cotton, hemp, silk, indigo, tobacco, gumelastic, gum-copal, ebony, wax, &c. The only articles at present largely exported are cattle and rice, to Mauritius and Bourbon, besides hides, horns, prepared beef, ebony, and gum-copal, and a manufactured cloth called Rofia, from the beautiful palm tree of that name.

Madagascar possesses many remarkably fine ports,

harbours, and roadsteads. Most of these are on the eastern coast, such as Diego Suarez, Vohimaro, Foul. Point, Tamatave, Mananzary, Mahela, and Fort Dauphine On the western side, the Bay of St. Augustine has been long known to all European countries having intercourse with India, and Bembatoka on the north-west. The principal trade on the east side of the island is carried on with Mauritius and Bourbon, and on the west, with the Arabs from Muscat, and the Americans. The Malagasy have no shipping whatever of their own. In marine architecture they have not advanced a step beyond the rudest and simplest canoe. They have nothing in boat building to compete with the New Zealander or South Sea Islander.

The inhabitants are all of a dark complexion, some races being much more swarthy than others. They are evidently of a varied origin, and to a large extent are now so intermingled with one another, as to have lost the distinctive traces of their original condition. The language, which is the same throughout the island, with a few dialectical varieties, identifies the inhabitants with the Malayan races. Some of the natives possess Malay features, others resemble Arabs, and a few approximate to the negro race, but without the woolly hair.

Madagascar does not appear ever to have formed one kingdom, or to have been held under the sovereignty of one chieftain. During the whole period that it has been intimately known to Europeans, which is about 200 years, it has been occupied by independent tribes, holding possession of their respective districts, and amounting to about twenty or thirty, but among which, some few were

always more powerful and extensive than the rest. There is no one generic name by which tribes recognise one another as inhabitants of the same country, nor have they any common name for the whole island itself. They distinguish themselves by the respective territories to which they belong, as Sakalavas, Betanimenas, Hovas, &c. Madagascar is a name given to the country, as it appears, by foreigners, either Arabs or Europeans; and "Malagasy," which is an adjective for the inhabitants and language of the country, is but very partially used by the people themselves, and principally on the eastern

coast.

دو

The natives of Madagascar are not in a state of barbarism. They appear to have acquired, from time immemorial, by their intercourse with Arabs and Malays, and subsequently with Europeans, many of the arts and habits of civilized life. They possess large flocks of cattle, cultivate and artificially irrigate extensive tracts of soil, are familiar with the value of property, and live in large communities, with considerable regularity of municipal government. They have no native coin. In those parts of the island, where they have had little or no intercourse with foreigners, purchases are made by exchange; in the rest, the Spanish dollar is used, and for amounts smaller than the dollar, it is cut into pieces and payment made by weight. The only native metal worked is iron; the people have long known the manufacture of various articles in that metal, as well as in horn, wood, silk, and cotton. They excel also in the manufacture of silver chain from dollars imported in the sale of their produce. Many of their houses are large and substantially

PROTESTANT MISSION.

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built of wood, and their towns, which usually occupy the summits of hills, are well defended by large moats. The people are industrious in their habits and peaceable in their dispositions: they are hospitable to strangers, and respectful and courteous in their demeanour to each other. Under a government less oppressive and rapacious, the country would soon assume an appearance of great fertility and comfort, and by the fostering care of liberal and enlightened rulers, the people would rapidly rise in the scale of intelligence, wealth, and power. There are materials to render the Malagasy a noble and powerful nation, whose friendship and resources would be well worthy of commercial relations with Europe and India, and whose mind and energy would qualify them to act as benefactors on the eastern coast of Africa.

Madagascar has attracted more of the notice of Great Britain during the last twenty-five years than in any former period. This has arisen, in part, from the circumstance of the island of Mauritius having been finally ceded (after conquest) to the Crown of Great Britain, and from the commercial relations between that beautiful island and Madagascar,—and in part, from the labours of the Protestant Mission, established there in 1818 by the London Missionary Society.

At the period just mentioned, Radama was a powerful and enterprising, though youthful, chieftain in that part of the island called the Hova country, situated in about the most central part of Madagascar, 200 miles from the eastern coast. He had succeeded to his father, Andrianimpoinimerina, who, from a very limited possession of influence and power, had risen to extensive authority, and

had formed the ambitious project of subjugating the whole country to his own individual control. Radama inherited the ambition of his father, adopted his policy, and succeeded in enlarging the boundaries of his kingdom. In all this he was much favoured by the friendship and countenance of Sir Robert Farquhar, at that time governor of Mauritius. Sir Robert had the sagacity to discern the enterprising qualities of Radama, and formed an alliance with him on behalf of the British Government. The terms of that alliance involved some points of quesionable policy, for while Radama engaged to suppress the slave traffic in Madagascar, the British government engaged to supply him annually with an equivalent, consisting, besides money, of arms, military clothing, and ammunition, for the loss of revenue occasioned by the suppression of the slave trade. Radama was sagacious enough to see his own interest in the offer of the governor of Mauritius, and found in the "equivalent" of arms, clothing, and ammunition, the means of equipping a large native army, by which he might effectually destroy the independence of the tribes around him, and so become, de facto, what he always claimed to be, but never actually was, king of Madagascar. And thus Great Britain, having supplied a handful of men with the weapons of destruction, and taught them how to wield them most effectually by sending a few soldiers to drill the natives, lent herself ungraciously to the task of abetting the ruin of the independence, liberty, property, homes, and lives of thousands and many tens of thousands of the peaceful inhabitants of the island, who had never raised a finger against the British throne, nor against the Hovas over