Page:History of the French in India.djvu/31

THEIR FIRST ATTEMPTS ON MADAGASCAR. 9 don their hold on Madagascar, it was only as we chap. shall see, to seize and secnre the smaller islands con- tiguous to it, the possession of which from 1672 to 1642. 1810 proved to them a tower of strength in their wars with England ; a festering thorn in the sides of their maritime rivals. Madagascar, originally discovered by Marco Polo in 1298, and subsequently lost sight of, had been reopened to European enterprise by the Portuguese under Fernan Suarez, one of the officers of Lawrence Almeida, in 1506. It was visited the following year by a Portu- guese squadron under Tristan de Cunha ; but that celebrated navigator, after a minute examination of the topography of the place, the customs of the inhabitants, and the productions of the soil, thought it inexpedient to form a settlement there, and continued his voyage eastward. Two years later, however, the Portuguese Government resolved to occupy a post on the seaboard of the island. A settlement was accordingly made on its northern part but those who formed it had been massacred by the inhabitants before the period of the French expedition of 1642. The first French vessel equipped by the French India Company reached Madagascar in the summer of 1642, and landed the settlers at a point near the southern extremity of the island. Their landing was opposed, though ineffectually, by the natives of the country. They forthwith attempted to carry out a regular scheme of colonisation, and to this purpose they devoted all the resources of the Company. They soon found, however, as the wise Tristan de Cunha had foreseen, that, though in appearance rich and fertile, the soil of the island could not produce, in any great quantity, those articles which entered the most into European consumption. When they began to make inroads into the interior, they found still greater difficulties awaiting them. They came in contact, then, with a numerous and warlike