27th October 2015. Berenty to Port Dauphin, Madagascar.

Returning from Berenty to Port Dauphin….

Some people, perhaps farms workers, on top of a truck heading in the other direction.   He was asking for water but unfortunately, by the time I worked that out, I was too slow to respond.

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A family in their zebu cart.

I might take this opportunity to quickly summarise a book, In Search of the Red Slave, that I read prior to going to Madagascar.  It uses current on-the-ground research to validate a story first published in 1729 and ghost-written by none other than Daniel Defoe.

The protagonist, Robert Drury, was 15 and returning from India in 1703 when the ship he was in went down on the south coast of Madagascar.  The crew were rescued by a local tribe and well treated but were not free.  They decided to kidnap the local chief as a hostage and made for Port Dauphin, but didn’t make it.  They all ended up killed except for Robert Drury and a couple of other youngsters.  He was taken back to the village and made a slave.  After some years he became a respected warrior and was allowed a wife.

He wasn’t satisfied with this and escaped to a tribe to the west that he had encountered in a joint military campaign.  He was welcomed there but after a few more years he was taken in battle by another tribe further to the north.  Initially he was enslaved again but after some time became relatively free again.  Word of his survival had made it back to London and eventually he was rescued by a ship sent out to look for him.  At this stage he had effectively forgotten how to speak English.  He spent some years in London where Defoe wrote up his journal.  This was widely dismissed as fiction in the following years but this book demonstrates how details can only have been authentic.  Ironically, he became dissatisfied with life in London and returned to Madagascar – but this time not as a slave but as a slave trader.

The book is well worth reading for its account of tribal life at the time and the harshness and perils of life there today.  The area in the South where Drury lived are much further to the west, much more remote and much drier than where I visited.

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A very overloaded taxi brousse.

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Back at the river, where we passed by on the way out.

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Just past the bridge and the river, we are passing through the town of Ambossary Sud.

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Obviously out of town now, passing a village.

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Not far from Port Dauphin now and a herd of zebu on the road.

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Inside Port Dauphin and an enterprising bicycle rider.

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