Paradise Lost?
Mauritius In The Dutch Period (1598-1610)
In September 1998 it will be exactly four hundred years ago that a fleet of five ships of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) landed on the uninhabited, paradisiacal island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. In 1598, Vice-Admiral Wybrant Warwijck claimed the island as a Dutch possession and named it after Prince Maurice of Orange. Mauritius, being full of sources of food and water and free of diseases, became a refreshment station for outward or homeward bound ships of the VOC. Perry Moree, a Dutch maritime historian, is currently writing a book on the Dutch period on Mauritius, entitled A Concise History of Dutch Mauritius, 1598-1610. A fruitful and healthy land.By Perry Moree
It was not until 1638 that the Dutch actually built a fort at Warwijck Harbour (presently Grand Port Bay) and stationed a governor with a small garrison on the island. This period of occupation, which saw the introduction of slaves from Madagas-car and the cutting down of the ebony forests on the island, ended in 1658, when Mauritius was abandoned by the Dutch. The Cape of Good Hope, founded in 1652 by the Dutch, had by that time evolved as an excellent calling place for VOC vessels, leaving Mauritius a superfluous and costly establishment. Six years later, fearful of European rivals, the VOC again occupied the island. During this second occupation, that lasted until 1610, the population of Mauritius consisted of officials of the VOC, several European vrijburgers (most of them farmers), and a number of slaves. Some of the slaves succeeded in escaping Dutch rule and lived as refugees in the interior of the island. Seventeenth-century Mauritius already had a multi-ethnic population, a forerunner of the plural society that Mauritius is today. The Dutch the French occupied the island until it was taken over by the British in 1810. In 1968 Mauritius gained its Independence.In September, at the time of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Dutch landing by Warwijck, my book entitled A concise history of Dutch Mauritius, 1598-1610. A fruitful and healthy land will be published by Kegan & Paul International. The project is financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supervised by the International Institute for Asian Studies. Although in the past various authors from Mauritius, like P.J. Barnwell, A. Toussaint, and A. Pitot, have written histories of the Dutch period, it is curious that Dutch historians have not occupied themselves extensively with this subject. The best Dutch work on this period was published more than a century ago: an article by K. Heeringa on the first period of occupation in the Indische Gids of 1895. The image of the Dutch period is fairly negative. So far the Dutch on Mauritius have gone down in history solely as inefficient rulers and the destroyers of ebony forests and wildlife. They are held responsible for the extinction of the dodo. As most of the works on the Dutch period are now antiquarian there is a need for a new book which is widely available. The hope is that it will stimulate research activities both in Europe and on Mauritius. Dutch and South African archives contain a vast amount of historical sources on the island.
Dodo
During the research for this book I discovered some interesting facts about the flightless bird that has become the national symbol of Mauritius, the dodo (Raphus cucullatus). It is more or less generally accepted that the dodos became extinct on the island itself during the 1640s. Human hunting activities and the introduction of hostile species like rats and monkeys by European seafarers appear to have conspired to finish off the walgvogel ('repugnant bird') or dodaers, as it was called by the Dutch. There is written evidence that the last few surviving dodos were to be found on the small islands off the south-eastern coast until the early 1660s. In his widely acclaimed book The song of the dodo, American journalist David Quammen stresses this point vividly: the last eyewitness account describing a living dodo dates back to 1662 and was written by one of the survivors of the shipwrecked VOC vessel the Arnhem. I have been researching seventeenth-century archives in The Hague and Cape Town, and have found proof of dodos being alive west of Mahébourg in 1689, during the rule of the Dutch governor, Isaac Lamotius (1677-1692).
The well-illustrated book will be divided into four parts: Dutch visits to the island (1598-1638), the first Dutch occupation (1638-1658), the period of desolation regained 1658-1664), and the second Dutch occupation (1664-1610). The careers of the governors like Adriaen van der Stel (1639-1645), who introduced slavery to Mauritius, George Wreede (1665-1672), and Roelof Diodati (1692-1603) will be described in detail.
:Perry Moree, A concise history of Dutch Mauritius, 1598-1610. A fruitful and healthy land, Kegan Paul International, London 1998.