HIS PROPOSALS TO FLEURT. 113 His internal administration was equally energetic and c **| p - judicious. He took very good care that the negroes were not unduly oppressed by the colonists. He com- 1737. pelled the landowners to lay out tapioca plantations, five hundred yards square, for each negro and family serving under them. He encouraged the cultivation of sugar, soon to become a great success, prevented the indiscriminate slaughter of cattle, and, until the breed should revive, he forced the ships' crews to live upon fish and turtle during their stay in port.* Nor was he less successful in Bourbon, though that island, at the time of his arrival, was further advanced in civilisation than the other. His principal object was to administer the two islands, so that they should be valuable to France, and to make them fit to be the commercial station between France and India. To this end, it was necessary that they should be fortified. Though the means were apparently wanting, La Bour- donnais commenced the work, and in less than five years he succeeded in providing them with such fortifications as would have rendered an attack upon them by a small force extremely hazardous. In 1740, La Bourdonnais returned to France. On his arrival there he learnt that complaints preceded him. Cardinal Fleury was then still Minister. A timid economist, with little breadth of view, Fleury had but one principle of external policy. This was the maintenance of peace, especially of peace with England, at any price. It was partly from a fear of giving umb- rage to England, partly from his economic habits, that he starved the French navy, neglected the army, and gave no encouragement to commerce. Such a man could have little sympathy with a genius so fertile, an energy so buoyant, a desire to advance French interests so irrepressible, as were bound together in the person of La Bourdonnais. When therefore some of those
- Memoire pour La Bourdonnais. — RaynaVs India.
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