Eight hundred miles east of Africa, the island of Réunion heaves its flanks out of the dark blue expanse of the southern Indian Ocean. Basalt cliffs take the weight of the water as it rolls in, carving and splitting the rock in places, tumbling and beating it into fragments that cannot resist the sea. It was here that I first heard about a slave-boy named Edmond Albius, a few sparse details about a life repeated in varying forms, though scarcely with any pride. There is a souvenir shop beside one of the beaches which calls itself Albius’s Grotto, and a secondary school in one of the small towns bears his name. Yet, I was later to discover, without him the modern trade in vanilla might never have begun.
At the centre of Réunion there are mountains rising ten thousand feet into the clear unpolluted air. Here, steep ridges surround Cilaos, Salazie and Mafate, extinct volcanic calderas lined with thick tropical vegetation. It is wet in the mountains, and the stunted trees of the high slopes are hung with wispy beards of green moss as thin and stringy as angel-hair pasta. So inhospitable is the approach to these craters that in the eighteenth century they were a refuge for slaves, desperate to escape the harsh conditions of the spice and sugar plantations which thrived along the coastal plains. Many were never recaptured, and lived out their lives on the high precipitous slopes, carving out tiny patches of farmland to feed themselves and the families they created with other runaways. From time to time, bounty hunters would venture into the mountains, fierce men with guns and savage dogs who would spend weeks in the forest tracking the slaves, bringing them back to town to face trial. Persistent escapees might be put to death; others received a branding with a hot iron in the shape of a fleur de lys on the shoulder. A second escape would earn manacles and a neck chain for life. Sometimes an ear or a couple of fingers would be lopped, or the hamstrings of one leg neatly cut to show the others what to expect if they too tried to run.
Cilaos, Salazie and Mafate sit side by side, like the chambers in a heart, and there is a fourth crater too, the active volcano Piton de la Fournaise, but it is displaced towards one end of the island where it periodically spews molten lava towards the east coast. Only a few roads trace their way inland towards the interior, curving and twisting like veins across an eyeball, and to this day there is no road into Mafate. This crater is a lost world reached only on foot or, in case of a medical emergency, by helicopter.
This island has sheltered beaches too, protected by coral reefs, and long stretches of sand, a modern beach-chic world of surfers and poseurs where beach bums and playboys, college kids and civil servants rub bare bronzed shoulders.
Réunion seems to fight with the elements. Cyclones sometimes visit and there are days when the volcano spits fire into the air and lava tumbles towards the sea cutting the coast road in two. Men have tried to tame this place, and on the modern dual carriageway leading southwards from St. Denis they have even bound the cliffs with chain mail nets a hundred yards long, tethering the rock face so that boulders will not crush the speeding Renaults and Citroens below. The cars that rush in and out of the capital are mostly made in France, like the islanders. Their bread comes in baguettes and they can buy yesterday’s newspaper from Paris in dozens of small tabacs dotted around the coast. And around the irregular circle of coast the towns are almost all saintly. In the west and south-west they are St. Paul, St. Gilles, St. Louis, St. Pierre and St. Joseph. Go east from the capital, St. Denis, and the saints change sex, albeit briefly: Ste. Marie and Ste. Suzanne are just a few miles apart, and then the men take over again, with St. Andre leading on to St. Benoit. In the sparsely populated interior the towns have earthier appellations, names with a creole past: Cilaos, Salazie and Hell-Bourg.
The mountains are my favourite place. Up there, I have tasted the sweet white wine they make with grapes grown in sheltered valleys. I have heard the jangling notes of a banjo echoing beside mountain streams while villagers in their Sunday best celebrate one of their saint’s days. Above Cilaos I have climbed the steep rock paths towards Kerveguen Ridge on the approach to Piton des Neiges and stopped to rest at six thousand feet while rain clouds flitted across the face of the peak. Tiny finches, the tec-tecs, flit between the branches and wild strawberries poke from the grass at the edge of the path.
Near Cilaos I once met a very small man carrying a shotgun. He had a speech impediment, and hardly any teeth. From his heavily accented creole I could make out that he wanted me to follow him back to his small wooden house. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, and I couldn’t be sure if he needed help, but I decided to follow him anyway. He led me to a typical mountain house made of neat white painted clapboard panelling fringed with daintily carved fretwork around the eaves. Masses of bright red geranium plants grew around the gate and pressed in against us along the narrow path leading to the front steps.
I remember a verandah stuffed with china ornaments, many of them life size dogs of various breeds, and a sitting room crammed with heavy dark nineteenth century furniture. I wondered how these treasures had been safely transported around the two hundred hairpin bends up to Cilaos from the coast. Inside, it was cool and dim and there were framed needlepoint panels embroidered with sayings from the Bible upon the walls. In the dining room there was an enormous heavily carved table with a dozen high-backed chairs arranged around it. The little man leant his shotgun up against the wall and disappeared under the table, from where I could hear him making great efforts to drag something heavy across the floor. A moment later he reappeared with a large plastic tub in which dark red liquid swilled and sloshed against the sides, threatening to spill onto the parquet floor. It was home-made wine, and he wanted me to buy a bottle. An equally tiny old lady appeared from the kitchen, bringing wafts of home baked dough in her wake. Her sleeves were pushed back and she seemed hot and flustered, wiping her hands upon her apron and explaining in slightly more comprehensible French that the wine was for sale. A small glass was produced, and after a little polish on the matron’s apron, I was handed a sample. It tasted like vinegar.
The pair waited expectantly. I stared at the glass, running my tongue around my teeth to remove the taste and wondering what I could say without giving offence.
“Too sweet?” she enquired.
“Yes, too sweet,” I replied. She and the impish man both stared at the tub and shook their heads, nodding in agreement. “Too sweet,” they chorused, as he once again laboured to push the tub back under the table. I didn’t know what to do. I was tempted to buy a bottle of wine just to reward the little man for his effort, but I really didn’t want any. The old lady said goodbye and went back to her kitchen, and the man escorted me to the door, smiling and mumbling his incomprehensible patois all the while. I left him there on his little geranium framed porch in the company of the china dogs.
The mountain creoles are a French creation. Like Seychelles and Mauritius, its Indian Ocean neighbours, Réunion had no indigenous inhabitants when the first European adventurers arrived in the seventeenth century. At first the island appeared on the sea charts as Mascarin, after the Portuguese explorer Pedro Mascarenhas who first visited it in 1516. The French East India Company claimed the island for itself in 1642, renaming it Bourbon seven years later in honour of the French royal family. In the battle between France and Britain for domination of the trade routes to India, Bourbon became an important addition to the French colonial collection. This was the era of the titanic struggle between Britain, France and Holland for domination of the seas—and for control of the spices and commodities which were essential to the growth of European power. Following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, England had been able to break the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly on all manner of valuable commodities, including cinnamon, ginger and cardamom. Unhampered access to India would bring trade in tea, cotton and silks, indigo and saltpetre. All of these things lay across the Indian Ocean, sometimes called the Sea of Spices.
The French were initially slow to formalise their mercantile claims in the Indian Ocean. While the English and the Dutch East India Companies were formed in 1600 and 1602 respectively, the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales did not receive its royal charter until 1664. It owed its creation to Louis XIV’s Finance Minster, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a man desperate to improve the size and power of the French Navy. The trade advantage that first the Dutch and then the British gained from superior ships, and access to the Cape of Good Hope, were a source of frustration to Colbert. Without a base in the southwest Indian Ocean his ships would be vulnerable to attack by his rivals. When he proposed the creation of the French East India Company, Colbert had high hopes that Madagascar might eventually become a viable rival to the Cape as a staging post for French ships en route to India. At first, Bourbon was simply a useful satellite of Madagascar, but the bigger island proved difficult to tame it’s early settlements decimated by fever and massacred by the natives. Five hundred miles east, the tiny colony of Bourbon was mercifully free of troublesome native inhabitants. Meanwhile, the French East India Company was attempting to establish several vital trading bases in India, notably at Pondicherry a hundred miles south of Madras.
The prize of a safe and secure route from Europe to India was great. Merchants and investors could expect a minimum one hundred percent profit on voyages to the spice routes, and as the seventeenth century progressed, bigger and bigger ships were making the voyage eastwards to India from Europe via the Cape. With a return voyage lasting at least six months, the sailing ships depended upon the trade winds, and the timing of a voyage was crucial to its success and duration. Due to the seasonal winds, French ships had to leave home before April if they were to take the fastest route to the Indies. Above the equator the winds blow north and east between October and April, carrying sailing boats towards India, while between May and October the prevailing winds go south and west. Once clear of the Cape of Good Hope on the outward voyage the trading ships would head northwards up the Mozambique channel and then across the Indian Ocean. However, if they left France later than April it was better to avoid the channel and go east of Madagascar to cross the ocean via the island of Bourbon.
Bourbon could serve as a victualling port for French ships en route to India, but only so long as it could provide food or commodities both for visiting ships and for export home to the motherland.
The island has changed its name along with its political fortunes. Only in 1793, after the French Revolution, did Bourbon acquire the less elegant if more politically acceptable label île de la Réunion. The name commemorates the alliance, or union, between the Marseillais and the National Guard which joined forces to storm the palace of the Tuileries in Paris. Generally aristocratic in their aspirations, the island’s wealthy plantocracy were never fond of the new name, and for a brief interlude between 1806 and 1810 they named their island Bonaparte to show solidarity with the Emperor Napoleon. After being captured by the British in 1811, that name would no longer do, and it reverted to Bourbon. Although France regained possession of Ile Bourbon from Britain after the Treaty of Paris in 1815, it was not finally renamed Réunion until the establishment of France’s second Republic in 1848.
After winning the Napoleonic wars, Britain cared little for this small rugged outpost, since she had gained possession of wealthier Mauritius and the more strategically placed Seychelles. More importantly, the British had long since disposed of the threat from France in India, where Pondicherry had fallen fifty years earlier. Small rugged Bourbon, with her smouldering volcano and inhospitable coastline could be left in the hands of the French planters and their slaves.
Today’s population, all of whom have full French citizenship, has evolved from a mix of settlers, soldiers, civil servants and slaves. In Réunion, many of the original French settlers had little money when they arrived, hoping to make their fortunes in the colony by growing any number of agricultural products which were in vogue at the time.
In spite of her slightly less obvious strategic value, all kinds of fruits, spices and staple commodities were imported to Bourbon under the direction of various French governors, and with the help of one remarkable man, Pierre Poivre. Trained as a missionary, Pierre Poivre travelled widely in China, the Philippines, India and Indonesia. In 1745, at twenty-six, his missionary career was cut short after losing a hand to a bullet when his ship was attacked by the Royal Navy in the Far East. Forced to convalesce in the Dutch colony at Batavia, he became obsessed with horticulture and in particular the cultivation of spices. When he was recovered enough to return to France, his ship stopped at Ile de France, and Poivre realised that this island, and nearby Ile Bourbon, might make ideal nurseries for any spices he could gather in the Indies. Such plantings would doubtless be valuable.
In 1753 Poivre returned to Ile de France with a small collection of cloves and nutmeg, plants he had quite literally stolen from under the noses of the Dutch in the Moluccan islands. It was Poivre’s audacious efforts that ended the Dutch monopoly in the precious commodities of cloves and nutmeg. Until then, the Dutch exported nutmeg kernels from the islands only after they had been dipped in lime to stop them sprouting, and they went to great lengths to prevent anyone growing cloves anywhere except on a few small islands where they maintained a military guard on the crops. Agricultural ‘espionage’ of this type was punishable by death, but Poivre was determined that France should not be left behind in the mercantile duel with Holland and England. However, most of these first imports died, and it was later discovered that they had been deliberately poisoned—killed off by a man in the pay of the Dutch East India Company. But Poivre would not give up, and in 1772 he returned to the Mollucas where he succeeded in buying a few more of the jealously guarded spice plants on the island of Patani. His success with nutmeg gave France a ten year lead on the British, who eventually began growing the spice for themselves in Grenada. As a reward for his efforts, Poivre was made Intendant Général for Ile de France and Bourbon, and between 1767 and 1773 he set about turning the islands into a spice repository. Cloves, nutmeg, peppers, cinnamon and allspice were cultivated under his direction, as well as bread-fruit and almonds.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French ships from India and the Middle East, from China and Indonesia, would pass by Bourbon and Ile de France, her sister island further north. Island governors, eager to prove their worth to the French East India Company and the Crown, would gratefully receive anything that might have commercial value. The cornucopia of tropical fruits grew and grew as mangoes, litchis, papaya, pineapples, coconuts, bananas and tamarinds were imported in turn. Red peppers from Brazil, coriander from China and saffron from India came too. Later, as in the Caribbean colonies, coffee, tobacco, cotton and sugar would eventually be the most important cash crops, and their cultivation would shape and alter the very landscape of Bourbon. The island’s moist warm climate also made it suitable for the production of spices and exotic essences. Ylang-ylang, vetiver, indigo, geranium essence and eventually vanilla too, would all become essential exports for the island, products vital to the French perfume and toiletry industry. In all, some sixteen hundred plant species were introduced to Bourbon from around the tropics, some purely decorative, but most with a view to commercial exploitation. An additional benefit for planters in Bourbon or Ile de France was that exports from French colonies were less heavily taxed than the same goods originating elsewhere. But, the sheer physical effort of harvesting these crops would require another foreign import—slave labour.
Like modern day Réunion’s impressive collection of plant life, the mountain creoles have their origins in the colonial developments of the eighteenth century. Ironically, as agricultural plants were imported and blossomed, life for the planters became increasingly difficult. According to French custom at the time, land was inherited equally by all children in the family. What had been a large estate when granted by Royal decree at the beginning of the eighteenth century would gradually become smaller and smaller, divided and sub-divided until poorer and poorer descendants of the original proprietor were gradually displaced to the remote and inhospitable interior.
The system resulted in the creation of a new social class, les petits blancs des hauts— poor highland whites—as they became known. Inevitably, these petits blancs would eventually intermarry, or at least reproduce, with Africans, Indians and other races creating another sub-class, the half-castes or métis. All of them lived in a different world from the land-owning plantocracy, les Grands Blancs, many of whose families are still dotted around the Indian Ocean today. These were the families who prospered enough to buy land for their heirs, making strategic marriages to expand their estates wherever possible. They lived in large houses surrounded by furniture imported from France, and they danced quadrilles on parquet floors made of mahogany. They were waited upon by servants and ladies’ maids, and took coffee from silver pots on their spacious verandahs. They had their portraits painted in oils, and rode around the island by barouche, while slaves tended to the crops on which their fortunes were built.
Modern Réunion tends to hide its slave memories, and heap them onto the name of Bourbon. Local historians claim that conditions here were never as harsh as in the French colonies of the Caribbean, and that the Grand Blancs of Bourbon had a more relaxed attitude to their slaves. Bourbon, they say, was a place where masters would often grant freedom to their slaves, and women who bore children as a result of liaisons with their masters would have their offspring recognised, and granted a surname. Freed slaves could own land, and even acquire their own slaves. By 1815, Bourbon’s population had grown to over seventy thousand people, of whom around twelve thousand were classified as ‘white’, almost three thousand were ‘coloured freemen’, but slaves now numbered more than fifty thousand. As the racial mixture of the island increased it became difficult to know who was a slave and who was free—the colour of one’s skin was no longer a reliable guide. One of the neat distinctions between a slave and a freeman was that slaves were forbidden to wear shoes, or hats.
On the high ground above the modern resort of St. Gilles-les-Bains there are the remains of one of the grandest slave-estates on Bourbon. It has been preserved in a lacklustre sort of fashion as the Musée de Villèle, although few of the surfers and swimmers from the holiday resort ever make the journey to see it.
At Villèle there are the broken down ruins of the old sheds where the sugar cane was crushed and rinsed to release its syrup. Surrounded by large shade-trees a grand house sits at the end of a driveway with a circular approach suitable for turning carriages. Mary Anne Thérèse Ombline Gonneau Montbran, later known simply as the widow Desbassyns, lived here from the time the main house was built in 1788 until her death in 1846. She produced thirteen children with her war hero husband, Henri Paulin Panon-Desbassyns, whom she married at the age of fifteen. After being widowed in 1800 Madame Desbassyns set about managing the estate herself, amassing more and more land and benefiting from the boom years of sugar production for the last forty years of her life. When she died the estate covered one hundred and eighty hectares of forest, and more than a thousand hectares of open land suitable for crops. To service it all, the widow had almost five hundred slaves.
There were no other visitors the last time I visited Villèle, and the air was damp and cool after the rain. The main house is square, and built along the lines of an Indian colonial mansion, a style that Henri Desbassyns was familiar with after spending time in the French colony at Pondicherry. Upstairs, two verandahs give a choice of views: at the front of the house you see the mountains to the east and, at the rear, the distant sea to the west.
Inside, the house was dim, shrouded in gloom which emanated both from the dullness of the day, the lack of modern lighting and the dark panelling on many of the walls. In spite of the sepulchral shade the trappings of opulence were all there, heavy cabinets ordered from the celebrated Parisian ebéniste Magnien on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and a gilt and marble clock made by Berthout. There were marquetry card tables, and side tables bearing blue East India Company porcelain. Heavily carved crucifixes adorned many of the door lintels, and in one room there was a large-bore hunting rifle, a gift from Louis XV to a man named Mussard, a bounty hunter famed for his ability to track down and retrieve escaped slaves in the mountains.
The brightest part of the house was the dining room, panelled with golden panels of jackfruit, litchi and tamarind wood which shone in the light breaking through a pair of half-glass doors leading out onto a terrace.
Like all houses of the period, the kitchens were located outside the main house. A simple cement roof covered the enormous open oven fed with firewood and charcoal. Against the walls stood the accoutrements of a farmhouse kitchen: pestles and mortars, burnished copper cauldrons and wicker baskets for storing grains and lentils. Here the servants and slaves would prepare the meals and scurry across the flagstone terrace into a small pantry area where the food could be served up onto porcelain dishes and plateware before it was carried into the fine dining room.
A hundred yards from the main house there is a row of whitewashed cement outbuildings, slave quarters where many of the household staff would have slept. It is close to the administration offices for the museum, and as I passed by I could hear a gaggle of men and women chattering inside to the accompaniment of a transistor radio, and the unmistakable whiff of marijuana. In the shade of an aged tree a set of crumbling and mouldy coral cement stairs led to an arcade of cool brick alcoves twenty feet deep. This was the slave hospital. Outside, a stone plaque records a copy of the slave-census of 1842. There, known only by their Christian names, is the list of men and women, old and young, fit and infirm, held by Madame Desbassyns. Against each name is their age, and a single word describing their allotted workplace, or status on the estate.
The list goes on and on. It also records runaway slaves who nevertheless ‘belong’ to their owner. Bastin, aged 72, is listed simply as marron—‘escaped’, twelve years earlier. Slaves might also be on loan to others. Madame Desbassyns’ census shows two sixteen-year-old girls, Euphonie and Hortense, ‘working for my brother Charles’. Elsewhere in the slave records I learn that seventy-one year old Veronique had an estimated value of five hundred francs, slightly less than the cost of three cows from Madagascar. It was into this world, that a slave-boy named Edmond was born in 1829.