Madagascar and Islands of the Indian Ocean

Almost a thousand miles long and from 200 to 300 miles wide, Madagascar is--after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo--the world's fourth largest island. Separated from Africa by the 250-mile wide Mozambique Channel, it began to drift away from its huge continental neighbor about 145 million years ago. Because of this long isolation without competition from more advanced forms, its evolving plants and animals have developed forms unlike those found anywhere else in the world. As a result, Madagascar has sometimes been called a Noah's ark of ecological riches.

Human beings did not find this lost world and settle on it until the third or fourth century A.D., fifteen hundred years ago. The first settlers were not Africans, as one might expect, but people of Malaysian stock who left their home islands somewhere in the East Indies in search of new living space. Their graceful outrigger canoes sailed across the Indian Ocean before the prevailing trade winds, perhaps hopping from island to island in the same way that the Polynesians fanned east and south through the Pacific to colonize the South Sea Islands. Eventually the pioneering adventurers from the East Indies came to the great island of Madagascar.

Man Changes the Face of the Land

When these early settlers first arrived, Madagascar's eastern highlands, blessed with abundant rainfall, were clad with lush evergreen forests, while the western coastal areas facing Africa had a cover of deciduous forests and wide, grassy savannahs. Its climate was on the whole tropical, with a warm, rainy season from November to April and a drier, cooler season the rest of the year. Most of the center of the island was high plateau, mixed forest, and grassland, with scattered peaks to 9,000 feet in altitude. Today the face of the land has been greatly changed. Most of the original forests have been cut, and the grasslands have been modified by repeated burning, overgrazing, and consequent erosion.

Spreading over their new homeland, the people began to clear the land and raise crops and livestock. They were divided into a number of tribes and kingdoms, and they often warred with one another. As the centuries went by, Arabs and Africans also came to Madagascar, and the island's people became a racial mixture. The language, customs, and flavor of the East Indies, however, remained dominant.

The first European to discover Madagascar was a Portuguese sea captain, Diégo Diaz, who came upon it in 1500 on a voyage of exploration around Africa, searching for a route to the fabled East Indies. French, Dutch, and English explorers followed in the wake of the Portuguese, and a number of smaller Indian Ocean islands were soon discovered as well.

Among them were three volcanic islands lying 500 to 900 miles east of Madagascar--Réunion, Mauritius, and Rodrigues¹. Collectively, they were known as the Mascarene Islands, after Pedro Mascarenes, a Portuguese mariner who sighted the first two in 1513 as he sailed past them on his way to India. These islands were the home of the extinct dodo bird and its relatives.

About 250 miles north of Madagascar lies the Aldabra Atoll--three small islands surrounding a central lagoon. The main island, just twenty miles long, is the natural home of the only giant tortoises that survive in the Indian Ocean islands today. A related but different tortoise is found on Madagascar.

Some 200 miles south of Aldabra lie the Comoro Islands, a volcanic group consisting of four main islands in the Mozambique Channel, about halfway between Madagascar and the African mainland. In the coastal waters of these islands living specimens of the coelacanth--a fish thought to be extinct for seventy million years or more--have been taken by local fishermen on a number of different occasions during the past forty years [actually, since 1938] .

Soon after the discovery of Madagascar by Europeans, trading settlements began to appear along its coasts. During the nineteenth century , the French became dominant, establishing a protectorate over Madagascar in 1888 and later proclaiming the island a French colony in 1896. This protectorate was supplanted in 1960 by peaceful transition to a republic. The people now control their own destiny as the Malagasy Republic².

Madagascar's Unique Plants and Animals

The early Europeans in Madagascar and the islands of the Indian Ocean marveled at the many strange plants and animals that were unlike those found anywhere else in the world. On the Mascarenes they discovered the unique flightless birds, the dodo and solitaire. Every island they visited also had its unique giant tortoise population.

The huge island of Madagascar, however, boasted the greatest variety of peculiar forms of wildlife. Among these animals were the many species of lemurs--a group of primitive primates that evolved and specialized in many directions during Madagascar's long isolation from Africa. Another group of mammals that evolved in isolation into a bewildering variety of specialized forms were the tenrecs--small, primitive insectivores. The only native predatory mammals were a few meat-eaters of the family Viverridae. Largest was the fossa, a sleek cat - like animal with dark chocolate-black fur and a long tail.

Of the birds, an estimated 65 percent of the two hundred or so breeding species are found nowhere else in the world. Madagascar is also the home of three-fourths of the known species of chameleons. Strange as the living animals of Madagascar are today, some that have disappeared, like the elephant bird, were even more striking.

ELEPHANT BIRD, OR AEPYORNIS
Aepyornis maximus

One of the best-known stories of The Arabian Nights is the tale of Sinbad, an Arab sailor who is seized in the talons of a giant bird, the Roc, or Rukh, and transported to a fabled island. The idea for this tall tale may very well have come from Madagascar. Arab ships and sailors have been touching on the island since the early Middle Ages at least--probably long before--and natives had told them of a giant bird that lived there.

The first French governor of Madagascar, Admiral Étienne de Flacourt, heard about a giant bird too. In his Histoire de la Grande Isle de Madagascar, published in 1658, de Flacourt mentions what islanders called the vouron-patra, "a giant bird that lays eggs as big as those of an ostrich. . . .The people keep water in the eggs of the vouron-patra³." From the way he mentioned the bird, it was evidently still living at that time, although he did not claim to have seen one. Later visitors to Madagascar were told that the eggs were much bigger than ostrich eggs, a fact that was finally substantiated when actual eggs were brought forth and examined.

In 1850 , a French seaman, Captain Abadie, secured three such eggs and a number of bones of the giant bird and sent them to Paris. After studying them intensively, the zoologist Geoffroy Saint Hilaire described the elephant bird scientifically and gave it the name Aepyornis maximus, literally "largest of the tall birds."

The elephant bird stood between nine and ten feet in height and weighed in the neighborhood of 1,000 pounds, more than three times the weight of the largest bird living today, the African ostrich. The elephant bird had very thick and trunk - like legs with three toes, all of them directed forward. The legs were rather short and supported so much weight that Aepyornis could not have been a fast runner. Its eggs sometimes measured close to fifteen inches in length and twelve inches in diameter, and they had a liquid capacity of nearly two gallons.

Aepyornis is thought to have survived until the mid-1600s. Man evidently killed it off not only by hunting it and taking its eggs, but by destroying much of the forest habitat in which it lived.

The largest elephant bird was Aepyornis maximus, but at least six other related species--differing mainly in size and weight--have been described from skeletal remains.

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Notes on this text

I was puzzled by the apparent errors in elapsed time & dating until I realized that this selection was probably cannibalized from the author's Lost Wild Worlds: The Story of Extinct and Vanishing Wildlife of the Eastern Hemisphere , published by Morrow in 1976. As a result, much of this is due to sloppiness in preparing the 1997 edition. This illustrates the perils of using relative dates (e.g. "during the past forty years") when an absolute one ("since 1938") would sidestep the limitation.

1. The author is far from alone in spelling the island "Rodrigue z ." In fact, Rodrigue s was named after a Portuguese navigator who was happy with the "-s"; the island is administered by Mauritius today.



2. In 1975, the country was renamed "the Democratic Republic of Madagascar"; sometime since then it dropped the "Democratic" from its name. By the way, this predates the first publishing date.



3. I've never seen this part of de Flacourt's description, but this usage certainly proved to be true.