10 
HISTORY OF MADAGASCAR. 
an act which rendered him in the highest degree hateful to 
the natives. He was guilty of selling, publicly, to Vander 
Mester, governor of Mauritius, a number of natives engaged 
in the service of the French colony; and the circumstance 
of there being, amongst these people, sixteen women of 
rank, increased the odium already attached to his name. 
The unfortunate victims of his reckless cupidity were 
shipped off in so crowded a state, that the greater part of 
them died on their passage; and the remaining few, upon 
arriving at the Mauritius, fled immediately into the woods, 
where they subsisted ever afterwards in a wild state, eluding 
all attempts to recapture them. 
As soon as the French East India Company were made 
acquainted with the conduct of Pronis,he was dismissed from 
his office, and Flacourt appointed in his stead. Flacourt 
arrived at Fort Dauphin the latter end of September, 1648, 
and was received in a friendly manner by the chiefs; but his 
conduct, like that of his predecessors, is said to have been 
ill adapted to promote a conciliatory spirit. He appears 
to have aimed at reducing the whole island to a state 
of subjection; for soon after he arrived, upon some slight 
provocation, he sent a detachment of eighty men, attended 
by a large number of armed natives, to lay waste, by fire 
and sword, the beautiful district of Franchere. Nothing 
was spared: the houses and huts of the poorer class, as 
well as those of the Roandrians, with the chief part of 
their property, were destroyed, and great numbers of their 
cattle carried away. He sent several parties into the inte¬ 
rior, to explore the country, and obtain a knowledge of the 
customs and manners of the inhabitants; and it is princi¬ 
pally to him we are indebted for the description of the state 
of the natives and the country at that period, his history 
having been published on his return to France, in 1655. 
