Nosy Be, Beyond the Beach

Long before Nosy Be was a beach destination, it sat at the edge of one of Madagascar’s great kingdoms. In the late seventeenth century, Tsimenata, a Sakalava ruler who had acquired firearms through coastal trade, conquered a vast stretch of territory including the vital port of Mazalagem Nova. He became the island’s principal exporter of enslaved people and its most powerful king. The kingdom he founded, Boina, remained the most powerful monarchy in Madagascar for roughly a century, its rulers’ privileged access to guns letting them field strong armies, accumulate wealth, and control trade on their own terms.

The most powerful monarchy in Madagascar, for about a hundred years.

Its later rulers held that power in different ways. Ravahiny, Boina’s last great sovereign, reigned roughly from 1770 to 1808, put down revolts in Ambongo and the north, expanded trade, and kept the peace on her northern border through friendly relations with Andrianampoinimerina, the Merina king building his own empire on the highlands, an alliance that spared Imerina from Sakalava incursions and opened a valuable trade route in return.

Boina’s independence did not survive the rise of the Merina kingdom on the central highlands. In 1824, King Radama I attacked Boina. Its king, Andriantsoli, had converted to Islam, which secured him the support of the Antalaotes but cost him the loyalty of many of his still-pagan subjects, a fracture that helped seal the kingdom’s fall. Merina control over Boina hardened in the years that followed.

In 1839, Queen Tsiomeko, a Sakalava royal, took refuge on Nosy Be and asked France for help resisting her Merina enemies. Two years later, in 1841, the Sakalava formally ceded Nosy Be and the neighboring island of Nosy Komba to France, the treaty that would define the island’s next century.

A queen’s flight to an island became the treaty that defined its next century.

The town that grew from that treaty still carries its name: Hell-Ville, after Admiral Anne Chrétien Louis de Hell, the French governor of Île Bourbon (present-day Réunion) who signed the 1839 protectorate agreement with Tsiomeko. Its streets, Rue Passot, Boulevard de l’Indépendance, still run past colonial-era buildings framed by frangipani and bougainvillea, the physical residue of a queen’s desperate diplomacy.

Nosy Be’s role as a crossroads predates both the Sakalava kingdom and French rule. Its first recorded visitors were Swahili and Indian traders arriving as early as the fifteenth century, drawn by the same sheltered position that later attracted refugees, merchants, and colonists of every kind. The island became, in effect, a magnet for anyone with a reason to arrive by sea and a reason not to be found easily on the mainland.

That same defensibility drew a very different kind of visitor two centuries later. After piracy was suppressed in the Caribbean from the 1650s onward, numerous pirates relocated to Madagascar’s coasts between 1685 and 1720. Late in the seventeenth century, the English pirate John Avery built a fort and established a small colony on Nosy Be, an island easy to defend and hard to surprise. A brisk trade grew up between these pirate settlements and Britain’s American colonies, one grim thread of which carried enslaved Malagasy people to the market in New York.

An island easy to defend, and hard to surprise.

Inland from the beaches, on a remote peninsula in the island’s southeast, the Réserve Naturelle Intégrale de Lokobe protects the last intact primary forest anywhere on Nosy Be, just eight square kilometres, dominated by 455-metre Mont Lokobe. It is a small refuge carrying an outsized share of responsibility: the Nosy Be sportive lemur, Lepilemur tymerlachsoni, is currently known from this forest and nowhere else on Earth, and is classified Critically Endangered. The Nosy Be mouse lemur, Microcebus mamiratra, fares only slightly better, listed Endangered, its complex vocal repertoire and less strictly seasonal breeding only recently documented by researchers. A third, the Lokobe mouse lemur, is known only from this forest and a single patch of mainland forest near the village of Manehoka.

Elsewhere on the island, Mont Passot, Nosy Be’s high point at 329 metres, looks out over eight volcanic crater lakes, remnants of the same Holocene volcanism that built the island itself. One of them, Amparihibe, is described locally as a sacred lake and also happens to be the island’s main source of drinking water, a rare case of a place being protected by both belief and necessity at once.

A single forest carrying the entire world’s population of a lemur.