Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius
360
Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius
360eBook
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Overview
Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822386919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Megan Vaughan is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge University. She is the author of several books including Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (with Henrietta L. Moore) and Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness.
Read an Excerpt
Creating the Creole Island
Slavery in Eighteenth-Century MauritiusBy MEGAN VAUGHAN
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESSAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3402-6
Chapter One
IN THE BEGINNING
Doubtless there was a time when the island of Mauritius was uninhabited, but those who landed on it either by design or misfortune from the late sixteenth century found a place full of traces, real or fantastical, of others who had trodden there before. There were traces of those who had come and gone, and of those who had come and died, but the most haunting of all were the traces left by those who might still be there: the real terror faced by the marooned was not that they were alone, but that they might not be alone after all. This small island always had internal islands of habitation within it: an interior which was simultaneously exterior, repudiated. But most exclusion is an illusion, as we shall see.
Mauritius, as it is now known, and as it was known to the Dutch in the seventeenth century, lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This is a simple and obvious point, but it is an important one. This is not an island from which one can see another island, let alone a mainland of any description. It does not sit in the shadow of any large continent. The French island of La Réunion lies some 164 kilometers tothe west; further west (over 800 kilometers away) is the larger island of Madagascar, and beyond that the east coast of Africa. To the east lies the small island of Rodrigues, a dependency of Mauritius. Originally the remains of a volcanic shield in the ocean, Mauritius is an island subject to frequent buffeting from hurricanes that, even in these days of reinforced concrete, have the capacity to undo the landscape. One can feel a little stranded, seasick, despite the fact that the island is now linked, instantly, by millions of threads of communication, to all parts of the world. At its center is a hub of international industrial and financial activity; around the edges a skirt of beaches from the vantage point of which thousands of mostly European tourists lie, facing outward to sea: westward to Africa, eastward toward Australasia, north to the Indian subcontinent.
Throughout its history of human habitation Mauritius has been a profoundly cosmopolitan place (reminding us that globalization has a long history) and a profoundly parochial one. This was an island without natives, and its unique fauna and flora attest to its long historical isolation. Though Indian and Arab seafarers may have periodically landed on it over the centuries, the island did not play any notable role in the rich pre-modern history of the Indian Ocean, unlike neighboring Madagascar with its ancient human settlement from diverse sources. More recent attempts to "inscribe Mauritius into a larger Islamic map" are, as Shawkat Toorawa argues (Toorawa 2000), "wishful thinking," and one of the many instances of Mauritian historical ethnic imagining. The island's lasting inscription on the world map would come only with the Portuguese exploration of the southwest Indian Ocean at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Diego Fernandez Pereira and his sailors landed on the island-from now on it would feature on European charts and sketches (Grove 1995, 130).
Without natives, the island's beginnings were necessarily the product of no one thing or people but of many, more or less foreign, more or less "naturalized." It has always been a creole island. Creole is a notably slippery term, and its meaning in relation to Mauritius shifts historically, as we shall see. But here, by "creole," I simply mean that the island, without natives, has always been the product of multiple influences, multiple sources, which to differing degrees merge, take root, and "naturalize" on this new soil. Without natives there is no recourse to nativism, but this appears to make a concern with origins more rather than less evident. Much vaunted as an island of racial and communal harmony, a "rainbow" nation reflecting its many colors in the ocean, Mauritius earns this reputation only partially, for Mauritian society is in fact deeply anxious and divided, containing many different islands of exile and exclusion, and one "off-shore" one, the even smaller island of Rodrigues.
Concern with origins is also a concern with authenticity. Though everyone on the island speaks a French créole language specific to the island, and although every Mauritian shares in the history of creolization, only one group is designated as the "Creoles." This is both a racial category (those who allegedly look most "African" in their features are members of it, though their descent is likely to be very mixed) and a residual category, and therefore one that signifies lack. The Creoles in contemporary Mauritian terms are those who are not: they are neither Hindus nor Muslims nor Tamils nor Chinese nor "whites" of either the Franco or Anglo variety. The Creole community is the residue of these racial/ethnic/cultural categories, a residue that purportedly lacks a distinct culture and suffers from what is known as "la malaise créole," a "disease" not only of poverty, but of social marginality and abjection. In Mauritius, culture has a very specific meaning closely tied to a narrative of origins. For while every other ethnic and religious group on Mauritius traces its origins, somewhat obsessively and with a great deal of imaginative invention, to an "elsewhere" in India, China, or Europe, Creoles have little in the way of remembered origins. Their origins in West or East or Central Africa, in Madagascar, and in India, China, and Europe have been forgotten. They have no "authentic" culture, since authenticity can come only from origins elsewhere, as if nothing which the island had produced itself, through its own complex history, could be real.
Because there was originally no one there, or so they say, there are no independent witnesses to early accounts of occupation. The instability of these accounts (to say that fact and fiction are intertwined is to simplify greatly), the remoteness of the island from reliable metropolitan scrutiny, the possibilities (and in the case of the slave population, the imperative) of reinvention of self, all produce uncertainty. Which accounts are "real" and which the product of a feverish Robinson Crusoe imagination? It is symptomatic of this anxiety over origins and authenticity, that modern Mauritius has created its own native in the form of the dodo, a native which suffered the fate of so many others-extinction-and which can therefore induce a sense of loss and mourning. We used to have something of our own, this seems to say, but then we lost it. Worse, it was eaten to extinction, consumed by the Dutch. The dodo represents authenticity and so is used as a kind of test of reliability of early accounts: was X really there, and was he a reliable witness, is answered by reference to the supposed accuracy of any description of the dodo within that account. Dodology, as it is called, is a many-faceted science, but there is nothing stable about this native, against which all else is judged. Recently scientists in Britain have suggested that the dodo has been seriously misrepresented: they have even gone so far as to deconstruct the model of the bird which has sat in the University Museum in Oxford since the last century. In their view the dodo was not as fat as we have been led to believe, and they base this view on a piece of evidence that represents the ultimate in late-twentieth-century ideas of authenticity-genetic material from a real dodo's head ("New Light" 1999).
"Under the Blue Sky": Pirates, Maroons, and Dutch Ambitions
In late September 1598 the exhausted and sick crew of five Dutch ships commanded by Rear Admiral Wybrandt van Warwick set foot, gratefully, on an island they knew to be known to the Portuguese, and which had appeared on nautical charts since the beginning of the sixteenth century. They found an island that abounded with fresh water and fresh foodstuffs: coconuts, fish, parrots, doves, and tortoises whose "shells were so large that six men could sit together on a single one." And, of course, the dodos-Walg-vogels (disgusting birds) to the Dutch, who found all but their stomachs hard to swallow. They knew, or at least they believed, the island to be uninhabited, because of the behavior of the birds that, fearlessly, fell directly into the arms of their captors, trusting and willing victims. Uninhabited it may have been, but traces, even inscriptions of earlier traffic remained. They found on the island "three hundred pounds of wax" on which were inscriptions. In some accounts these are Greek, in others Arabic. Recognizing that they were onto a good thing, this first Dutch party set about leaving something more than a trace in the shifting sand, more than a few letters in wax. Not only did their vice admiral fix a wooden cross to a tree and engrave it with the words Christianos Reformados, but also, in an unmistakably colonizing gesture, he began the process of attempting to mark out and domesticate this island wilderness by sowing seeds and leaving behind hens, which he hoped would "naturalize." The wilderness, the native environment into which the Dutch abandoned their hens, was, however, already a creolized environment. The Portuguese sailors had already left rats, monkeys, and goats. Most of the "wild" mammals of Mauritius were, in fact, foreign imports, some of which had gone native with alarming speed (Grove 1995, 130). Goats and pigs went "maroon" in the woods; rats, thousands and thousands of them, were to be the scourge of future human colonists.
On 8 January 1599, the Dutch sailors set sail again, leaving the island once more deserted. But not for long. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so it seems that human society cannot, for long, imagine without extreme unease an uninhabited space. In an oft-repeated, archetypical story said to have influenced Defoe, it is related that when the next party of Dutch sailors landed in 1601 they found a lone Frenchman on the island. The veracity of this incident is perhaps less relevant than the nature of its telling. The Frenchman, we are told, had been traumatized into dumbness and was living without fire. It took some time for the Dutch to coax any words out of him, but when he finally spoke he said that he had been alone on the island for eighteen to twenty months, without fire or clothing, living on dates and raw tortoise flesh; his four English companions (they were all mutineers) had apparently abandoned him after a week and set sail in a junk for England (de Rauville, 1889). In one retelling of this story the Frenchman is rescued into civilization and sanity by a boy, a dog, and a "good" pirate. As this particular retelling makes clear, it is very unlikely that the Frenchman (if he existed) was ever completely alone. The Dutch were not the only ones to come and go-this part of the Indian Ocean swarmed with a very multicultural collection of pirates, and more or less permanent piratic communities existed on the "grande île" of neighboring Madagascar. The lone Frenchman, this version suggests, was far from alone, spending his time avoiding encounters with hostile others. The fear of being stranded alone was nothing compared to the fear of being stranded with alien others. This is a theme that recurs in Mauritian history.
Between 1599 and 1638 there was no formal Dutch settlement on Mauritius. The island was not, however, forgotten. Van Warwick had returned to the Netherlands in 1600, and his expedition was lauded as a huge commercial success. An engraving of 1601 illustrated the activities of his men during their short stay on the island, engraving, perhaps, the image of Mauritius on a number of influential minds: the tortoises "so large that a grown man could stand on one and take a ride. They catch and eat crabs as large as feet"; the dodos; the palm trees "with leaves so large that a man can shelter from the rain with one leaf without getting wet" (quoted in Moree 1998, 54-55). So widely distributed was this engraving and so great the interest in maritime exploration at this time that, according to Moree, everybody in Western Europe with an interest in overseas trade and exploration knew of this wonderful place, this fruitful and salubrious land, blessed with ebony, dodos and tortoises (1998).
In the following years pirates came and went, as did Dutch seafarers, and who knows who else. Despite the undoubted strangeness of the native wildlife-the tortoises "monstrously large," the bats with heads like foxes, and the dodos with their pinions-the Dutch seamen had already begun to treat the place with some familiarity. They left messages for each other in bottles in prescribed places, so that the island became a kind of poste restante in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The earlier colonizing gestures had meanwhile produced an orchard of orange trees and a few cotton bushes, as well as the rats. Finally, in 1638, spurred on by rumors of impending English occupation, the first permanent Dutch settlement came into being. This stab at colonization was to last some twenty years.
Dutch explorations and ambitions in the western Indian Ocean at this time need, of course, to be set in context (see Ross 2000; Chan Low 2000). The Dutch Republic had come into being only in 1581, a federation of states originating from the revolt against Phillip of Spain in 1566. The following century has often been described as a "Golden Age" for the Dutch, a period of economic prosperity and cultural flowering (Schama 1987; Boxer 1977). Though they were barely born as a nation, the Dutch had far-reaching commercial ambitions, evidenced by the phenomenal growth in the shipping industry in the period between 1585 and 1650 and the establishment, in 1602, of the Dutch East Indies Company (the VOC). In the course of the seventeenth century the Dutch, through the Company, would establish bases in Mauritius, Japan, the Cape, India, and Ceylon.
The slow process by which Batavia became "Dutch" has been described by Jean Gelman Taylor (1993). Though the Company aimed to have a total monopoly of trade in the Indonesian archipelago, which would be backed up by naval power, the reality of seventeenth-century European trade expansion was that it involved constant negotiation with existing powers and cultures. The Dutch used both Malay and Portuguese to communicate with the peoples they encountered-outside the narrow confines of the Company offices "neither culture nor language were Dutch" (Taylor 1993, 18; Ross 2000, 9). Indeed, though the Dutch tended to monopolize senior Company posts, many of the other Company employees were not Dutch. In 1622 over half the 143-strong Batavia garrison consisted of foreigners-Germans foremost among them, but also Scots, French, English, Danes, Flemings, and Walloons (Taylor 1993, 6). Furthermore, VOC policy was to recruit unmarried men, who would then be encouraged to engage in unions (both informal and legally sanctioned) with Asian women, both slaves and free (Taylor 1993; Stoler 1991; Blussé 1986). The result was that in the seventeenth century Batavia developed its own complex Eurasian culture, in which locally born women were central actors.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, Dutch maritime power, operating out of the secure base of Batavia, was winning out in Southeast Asia, and their position was strengthened when, in 1652, they occupied the Cape of Good Hope. The point of all this activity east of the Cape of Good Hope was, of course, trade-the linking of the ports of Asia to those of Europe, and beyond to the Americas. With the movement of goods went the movement of people. The VOC employed over a million men in the course of its existence, but also presided over a huge volume of involuntary human migration-a massive trade in slaves in and around the Indian Ocean (Ross 2000, 9-10).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixPreface xi
1. In the Beginning 1
2. Engineering a Colony, 1735–1767 33
3. Enlightenment Colonialism and Its Limits, 1767–1789 56
4. Roots and Routes: Ethnicity without Origins 91
5. A Baby in the Salt Pans: Mothering Slavery 123
6. Love in the Torrid Zone 152
7. Reputation, Recognition, and Race 178
8. Speaking Slavery: Language and Loss 202
9. Métissage and Revolution 229
10. Sugar and Abolition 253
Notes 277
Works Cited 305
Index 329