Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar (1661)

Title page of the 1661 edition.

Title page of the 1661 edition.

Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar

History of the Great Island of Madagascar

Publication

Author	Étienne de Flacourt(1607–1660)
Language	French
Composed	By October 1657 (date of the royal privilege to print)
Published	1658 (Paris); 1661 (Troyes and Paris), with a Relation of the years 1655–1657 added
Publisher	Nicolas Oudot (Troyes) and Gervais Clouzier (Paris), 1661
Place	Troyes and Paris
Volumes	1

Cannabis Content

Volume	(single volume)
Pages	pp. 145–146 (the plant and its smoking); p. 451 (a proposal to grow hemp for the colony) (1661 edition)
Chapter	Chapter XXXVI, "Description des Plantes"
Plates	none
Regions documented	Madagascar (ahetsmangha, ahetsboule); Manghabé, the Bay of Antongil (Rongogne)
Preparations	Leaf smoked like tobacco
Uses documented	Intoxication; easing of sadness; smoked by old women and ombiasses; stems discarded, fibre not used
Taxonomic significance	Flacourt calls the plant la chenevière (hemp), finds its stem, seed and leaf like those of France; he equates the use of its leaf with that of the Bangue of the East Indies.

Access

Digital facsimile	View the Gallica scan
Original held at	Bibliothèque nationale de France (the copy digitised on Gallica)

Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar ("History of the great island of Madagascar") is an account of Madagascar by Étienne de Flacourt, who directed the French settlement at Fort-Dauphin in the south-east of the island from 1648 to 1655. It was first printed at Paris in 1658. The second edition, printed at Troyes and sold at Paris in 1661, the year after Flacourt's death, added an account of the colony's affairs in 1655, 1656 and 1657.^{: title page} Its chapter on plants describes hemp, called Ahetsmangha and Ahetsboule and, at Manghabé, Rongogne. The inhabitants grew it with care, Flacourt wrote, to smoke its leaf like tobacco.

Flacourt wrote as the head of a trading company's colony. His book is evidence of what that enterprise wanted from the island as much as of the island's people and plants. He dedicated it to Nicolas Foucquet, the superintendent of finances, asking him for craftsmen to teach the inhabitants to "se façonner, comme les autres Nations de l'Europe" (to fashion themselves like the other nations of Europe), for laws and officers and for priests to convert them.^{: dedication} The tobacco that the French had made on the island of Sainte-Marie surpassed, in his judgement, all the tobacco made in the country; for that reason, he wrote, French settlers had to be sent there.^: 30 In September 1654 he sent a man named Marououle to the island of Bourbon to grow tobacco and look for whatever was fit to send to France. Seven Frenchmen asked his leave to go there and grow tobacco on their own account.^: 388 He calls the habitual smokers of hemp "de vieilles femmes & des Ombiasses Negres" (old women and black ombiasses).

The author and the colony

Flacourt was born at Orléans in 1607. Through his uncle Jules de Loynes, secretary-general of the navy and a member of the Compagnie de l'Orient, he was made a director of that company and then governor of Fort-Dauphin.^: xxxix The company had received a royal privilege in 1642. Flacourt sailed from La Rochelle on 19 May 1648 and reached the island on 4 December. He left it on 12 February 1655 and landed at Nantes on 28 June.^: xxxix The title page of 1661 styles him "Directeur General de la Compagnie Françoise de l'Orient, & Commandant pour sa Majesté" in the island and the islands near it.^{: title page} Named governor a second time, he left Dieppe on 20 May 1660. On 10 June, off Lisbon, Barbary corsairs attacked his ship; its powder store caught fire and the ship blew up. Flacourt died; the only survivors were 17 people taken up by the corsairs.^: xxxix

In his dedication Flacourt wrote that he had directed the colonies under Foucquet's orders for seven years and had made the inhabitants acknowledge the French crown.^{: dedication} The Relation that forms the second part of the book is the settlers' history, told by their commander, from the company's privilege of 1642 to 1657. It records among other things that settlers sold Malagasy as slaves to the Dutch of Mauritius.

Editions

The royal privilege to print the book, with its maps, was granted to Flacourt on 12 October 1657. He transferred it to the Paris booksellers Pierre Lamy, François and Gervais Clouzier and Pierre Bienfait.^: privilege Copies of the first edition of 1658 carry the names of different Paris booksellers, among them Pierre L'Amy, Jean Henault and Alexandre Lesselin. The edition of 1661 was printed at Troyes by Nicolas Oudot and sold at Paris by Gervais Clouzier. Its title page says that the Relation of 1655–1657 is "non encor veuë par la premiere Impression" (not yet seen in the first printing).^{: title page}

A. and G. Grandidier reissued the book with the historian Henri Froidevaux in their Collection des ouvrages anciens concernant Madagascar, in two volumes of 1912 and 1920, printed in runs of 325 and 190 copies. In 1905 the orientalist Gabriel Ferrand added the Malagasy words of the 1661 Histoire to his edition of the Madagascar dictionary that Flacourt had published in 1658.^: v Ferrand held, after Eugène Jacquet, that Flacourt had copied the dictionary's vocabulary from one drawn up by missionaries.^: iv Claude Allibert's annotated edition (Paris: INALCO and Karthala, 1995) gives the whole of the 1661 volume, revised against an original manuscript that had come to light shortly before. It has an introduction of some 80 pages and more than 150 pages of notes. A new, enlarged edition by Allibert appeared in 2007.

Contents

The 1661 volume has two parts with continuous page numbers and separate series of chapters. After the dedication come a list of the Malagasy words used in the text and a foreword. In the foreword Flacourt criticises earlier writers on the island: François Cauche, he says, described voyages he had never made; Vincent Le Blanc's description, taken from another man's report, is "tout a fait fabuleuse" (altogether fabulous).^{: avant-propos} The first part, the Histoire, opens with the coasts and provinces of the island, from Flacourt's own province of Carcanossi or Anossi, where Fort-Dauphin stood, round to the Bay of Antongil and to the bay of Saint-Augustin in the south-west. Its later chapters treat the origins of the inhabitants, their religion, crafts, dress, customs, law, warfare and funerals, food and farming, plants, metals, animals, birds and fish. The last chapters deal with the ombiasses and their divination and with the language and its writing.^{: table of chapters} The second part is the Relation.

In Flacourt's glossary an ombiasse is "vn Escriuain, vn Medecin, vn Prestre, & vn deuin" (a writer, a physician, a priest and a diviner).^: glossary In the foreword he also sets out his view of the peopling of the island. He took the Zaffe-Hibrahim of Sainte-Marie, "de la lignée d'Abraham" (of the line of Abraham), to descend from Jews of the earliest dispersions or from the oldest families of the Ishmaelites.^{: avant-propos} Jacques Faublée, reviewing Allibert's edition in 1996, did not follow Flacourt's reading of Ibrahim as Abraham and saw in the name a deformation of Bouraha.

Hemp in the chapter on plants

Flacourt's account of hemp, its names and its smoking, in the Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar (1661), p. 146.

Chapter XXXVI, "Description des Plantes", has a list headed "Herbes remarquées à Madagascar semblables à celles de France" (herbs noted in Madagascar like those of France). Hemp stands in it after the grape vine, which Flacourt says was first brought from the Alfissach country on his order.^: 145 The hemp-field ("La cheneuiere") was called Ahetsmangha and Ahetsboule "en ce païs" (in this country) and Rongogne at Manghabé. Earlier in the book the Bay of Antongil, on the north-east coast, is called Manghabei in the island.^: 26 The plant grew very well there. Its stem, seed and leaf were like those of France. The inhabitants, he wrote, "la cultiuent soigneusement, d'autant qu'ils prennent sa fueille en fumée, ainsi que le tabac" (grow it carefully, because they take its leaf in smoke, like tobacco).

A smoker, he wrote, became as if out of his senses and more dazed than from a great deal of tobacco. He then slept and woke cheerful and lively, freed of care and sadness, after seeing in dreams a thousand things that delighted him. Those not used to the smoke were out of their senses for two or three days. The people threw the stems away and did not know how to make thread, cloth or rope from the bark "comme nous" (as we do). The habitual users were old women and the ombiasses "qui se meslent de predire les choses à venir" (who busy themselves foretelling things to come), with some others who used it to bear their sadness and melancholy more easily. Flacourt added that in the East Indies the leaf served the same purpose under the name Bangue. The list closes with tobacco ("Le petun ou tabacq ou nicotien"), which, he wrote, grew everywhere and made the best tobacco in the world.^: 146

Near the end of the Relation, among the further advantages to be hoped for from the island, Flacourt turned to hemp as a crop for the colony. He asked what prevented hemp and flax from being grown in quantity and spun by the women of the country once they had been shown the spinning wheel. Sails could be made of hemp once enough had been grown, in little time, "car le chanvre y vient en perfection" (for hemp grows there to perfection). The inhabitants, he wrote, already made bark ropes as good as any that the best master rope-makers of France could make.^: 451

Under French chanvre (hemp), the dictionary that Flacourt published in 1658 has Ahetsmanghe, Ahetsboule and Akets sandrian.^: 75 In the Malagasy–French dictionary of Abinal and Malzac (1888), rongony is hemp.

Reception

Faublée called the book the basic work on south-eastern Madagascar and even on the whole island in the 17th century. He judged the notes of the Grandidier edition "médiocres" (mediocre) and praised the care of Allibert's critical apparatus.

See also

• Cannabis in Madagascar
• A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679
• An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (Knox 1681)
• Madagascar

References

Madagascar Smoked leaf Intoxicant Smoking Travel account Early European account