Sainte-Marie Island

Come to the XVIII^th century, the pirates who settled in this paradisiac island weren't wrong. The beauty and the legendary charm of this archipelago is a gift for nature and a invitation to journeys. This ancestral welcome earth is stayed savage, authentic, and hasn't suffered from none tourist overthrow.

Situated on the Eastern coast of Madagascar in the region of Toamasina, the Sainte Marie island, also nicknamed the island of women or Nosy Boraha, will you delight. This little archipelago bordered with 80 kms of idyllic beaches will astonish the most exacting among you. Its fauna, its unique flora and the daily smile of its population will delude your sunny days. Real little tropical paradise, the Sainte Marie island opens since some years for tourism. It's however an island still authentic, with luxuriant vegetation and occupied by numerous little villages of fishermen with a traditional and secular way of life. The not very vehicles, on account of a poor road-infrastructure, intensify the "intemporal" way of this island of the "back of beyond"...

The size of the island permits to visit it carefully on foot or by cycle.

Nosy Boraha would mean "the island of Ibrahim", a title perhaps attributed by an arab merchant there is a long time. The current french appellation, Sainte-Marie, comes from Santa Maria, the first name given to the island by Portuguese sailors since the XVI^th century. When the Dutch fleet of the admiral Cornelis de Houtman berths there in January 1596, it find there a little colony of arab merchants. The island were then called Nosy Ibrahim, and one said it populated with Jews being descended from Abraham for the simple reason that the inhabitants of this time celebrated and took a day off the saturday.

The women were dressed in little bars striped cloth. The men had only a cloth very skilfully weaved of some herbs of diverse colours. They each wore a reed with salt water. They were tall men, powerful, such as are commonly all those of this island. They have big shields of wood and their weapons are little javelins of a very hard wood covered of silver tips.

Moreover, the island is mentioned under the name of Nosy-Hibrahim, on some very old maps. Thus, it is historically proved that since the higher Antiquity, Jews from the Yemen have frequented the Eastern coast of Africa, the Comoros and the North of Madagascar, but if their descendants mixed with the Madagascan populations, it doesn't subsist nothing more today on some old judaic customs or traditions.

It will be renamed some years later Sainte-Marie by Portuguese sailors.

Judged not very interesting, it lapses into the forgetfulness until 1643. This year, the French Pronis installs a little garrison and some colonists on the islet Madame, in the bay of Ambodifotatra. Mandated by the "Eastern Company", created in 1642 by the dieppois captain Rigault and merchants to exploit the richnesses of the "Great Island of Madagascar and of the neighbouring islands", Pronis had for mission to reconnoitre the South and "to found there colonies and commerces in the name of His Majesty very Christian". What he made in the bay of Sainte-Luce, in the place of Fort-Dauphin. Some months later, he disembarks in Sainte-Marie. The beginnings reveal themselves catastrophic, the fevers decimated the colonists. And whereas in 1654 Colbert create the "East India Company" and that Madagascar takes the name of Dauphine island, the etablishments founded by Pronis sink bit by bit in the lapse of memory and misery.

The pirates take over. Attracted by the ships coming back from the Indies, the holds overflowing of spices and of silks, they find in Sainte-Marie an ideal base for their activities. Them too settle in the bay of Ambodifototra, on the islet Forbans. From the XVII^th to the XVIII^th century, the island will see reside John Avery, William Kidd, Thomas White, Thomas Tew, Olivier Levasseur so-called "The Buzzard" and much other legendary figures. Number of them will found a family. The king Ratsimilaho who, in 1740, founds the Betsimisaraka kingdom including the Sainte-Marie Island and a large part of the East coast, is not other than the son of an english pirate and of a madagascan princess. Bety, the daughter of the king, receives the island at his father's death and, after get married in 1750 with Jean-Onésime Filet, so-called "The Two-Beaked Anvil", sets it under french protection, which sets it under the authority of the French East India Company.

In 1752, the revolt of two princes of Sainte-Marie, Siba and Tsifanda, has provoked the exile of Bety to the island of the Betsimisaraka.

A century will still pass without this counter beginning its real upswing. In October 1818, a certain Sylvain Roux disembarks with 200 colonists and soldiers, quickly mowed by the malaria. Roux will had just enough time to import the clove tree before succumbing in his turn.

In 1826, under the impulse of sirs Blévec and Albrand, the colony counts 73 Frenches, 40000 coffee-trees and 30000 clove trees. And in 1876, it is incorporated to the Réunion, where it develops the cultuvation of the vanilla.

The island lived later on the history of Madagascar which it belongs to.

Go hunting the whale

Narrative of a go hunting the whale of dutch sailors, by the Saint-Mariens in 1598 :

"Gone aboard their logboats, they went there where appeared a whale and, approaching very near, they threw it a fishhook of iron attached to a rope making of wood bark grains, then they irritated it and made it tired, in impressing to this rope violent and frequent jolts.
The beast struggled with rigour and made bubble the sea.
The natives, giving up to its movements, gave it rope back which the other extremity was strongly fixed to the logboat.
When the whale very weakened, flowed on the surface of the water which was tinted of its blood, the fishermen easily took it away where they wanted.
And they divided it in pieces which each one took away what they could."

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