HISTORY OF MADAGASCAR. 
131 
ful; but the monarch was superior to law, being himself 
the fountain of legislation. 
Nor is it only as relates to the character and habits of 
the sovereign, and the general state of the court and 
capital, that the personal narrative of the first British 
agent, who visited the interior of Madagascar, is peculiarly 
interesting. The account of his daring and disastrous 
journey supplies much valuable information as to the state 
of the country at the time when this journey was under¬ 
taken, in the year 1816 . Although the mind of Radama 
had even then made considerable advances towards civiliza¬ 
tion, yet such was the jealousy with which he guarded his 
capital, that he allowed no roads to be made by which it 
might be rendered accessible; and the best season and 
mode of travelling not being then generally known, the 
agent, Captain Le Sage, was so unfortunate as to fix upon 
the most unfavourable time of the year for an expedition, 
which must, under any circumstances, have been attended 
with extreme difficulty. A spirit less adventurous than his 
would have been deterred by the accounts he heard at the 
sea-coast of the impossibility of travelling to the capital, of 
the extensive marshes inundated by the overflowing of the 
streams, and of the great probability of being intercepted 
between two swollen rivers in a country incapable of fur¬ 
nishing his party with a grain of nourishment. It was not 
amongst the smallest of his difficulties, that the extreme 
apathy and indifference' of the natives rendered it almost 
impossible to engage their services on any emergency, 
while such was the poverty and destitution to which their 
own improvidence subjected them, that though they would 
occasionally, without much unwillingness, vacate their 
miserable huts for the accommodation of his party, they had 
nothing else but their good wishes to offer them. 
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