MADAGASCAR, 
CHAPTER I. 
FROM LONDON TO TAMATAYE. 
In June 1874, I was commissioned by authority 
to proceed to the east coast of Madagascar, in 
connection with work of an educational and in¬ 
dustrial character which had been inaugurated 
amongst the Betsimisaraka tribe by some English 
societies. I shared at the time the prevailing 
ignorance of people at home as to the country and 
its inhabitants, and the island in which I was 
destined to pass several eventful years of hopeful 
labour was then a veritable terra incognita to me. 
I turned at once to the best sources of informa¬ 
tion then available as to the land and its inhabi¬ 
tants, but on my actual arrival in the island I 
found that, after all, no pen however brilliant, or 
pencil however facile, had succeeded in doing 
A 
