A mutiny by captive Malagasy begins at sea on the slave ship Meermin, leading to the ship's destruction on Cape Agulhas in present-day South Africa and the recapture of the instigators.
A slave mutiny on Meermin, one of the Dutch East India Company's fleet of slave ships, took place in February 1766 and lasted for three weeks. Her final voyage was cut short by the mutiny of the Malagasy captives onboard, who had been sold to Dutch East India Company officials on Madagascar to be enslaved by the company in its Cape Colony in southern Africa. During the mutiny half the ship's crew and almost 30 Malagasy captives lost their lives.
Meermin set sail from Madagascar on 20 January 1766, heading to the Cape Colony. Two days into the trip, Johann Godfried Krause, the ship's chief merchant, persuaded the captain, Gerrit Cristoffel Muller, to release the Malagasy slaves from their shackles and thus avoid attrition by death and disease in their overcrowded living conditions. The Malagasy were put to working the ship and entertaining the crew. In mid-February, Krause ordered the Malagasy to clean some Madagascan weapons, which they used to seize the ship in an attempt to regain their freedom; Krause was among the first of the crew to be killed, and Muller was stabbed three times but survived.
The crew negotiated a truce, under the terms of which the Malagasy undertook to spare the lives of the surviving crew members. In exchange it was agreed that Meermin would return to Madagascar, where the Malagasy would be released. Gambling on the Malagasy's ignorance of navigation, the wounded Muller instead ordered his crew to head for the coast of southern Africa. After making landfall at Struisbaai in the Cape Colony, which the Malagasy were assured was their homeland, 50 to 70 of them went ashore. Their intention was to signal to the others still on board Meermin if it was safe for them to follow, but the shore party soon found themselves confronted by a militia of farmers formed in response to Meermin's arrival; the farmers had understood that as the ship was flying no flags, it was in distress.
Meermin's crew, now led by Krause's assistant Olof Leij, managed to communicate with the militia on shore by means of messages in bottles, and persuaded them to light the signal fires for which the Malagasy still on board were waiting. On seeing the fires, the Malagasy cut the ship's anchor cable and allowed the ship to drift towards the shore, after which she ran aground on an offshore sandbank. The Malagasy could then see the militia on the shore preparing to come to the ship's assistance, and realised that their situation was hopeless; they surrendered and were once again enslaved. Muller, the ship's mate Daniel Carel Gulik and Krause's assistant Olof Leij were tried in the Dutch East India Company's Council of Justice; all three were fired from the company, while Muller and Gulik were also stripped of their rank and wages. The enslaved Malagasy were not tried, but the two surviving leaders of the mutiny, named in Dutch East India Company records as Massavana and Koesaaij, were sent to Robben Island for observation, where Massavana died three years later; Koesaaij survived there for another 20 years. In 2004 a search was begun for the wreck of Meermin.
The Malagasy (French: Malgache) are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the island country of Madagascar.
Traditionally the population have been divided by subgroups (tribes or ethnicities). Examples include "Highlander" (ethnically Austronesian/Malay-Indonesian with minimal Bantu ancestry) groups such as the Merina and Betsileo of the central highlands around Antananarivo, Alaotra (Ambatondrazaka) and Fianarantsoa, and the "coastal dwellers" (ethnically Bantu with minimal Austronesian ancestry) with tribes like the Sakalava, Bara, Vezo, Betsimisaraka, Mahafaly, etc. The Merina are also further divided into two subgroups. The “Merina A” are the Hova and Andriana, and have an average of 30-40% Bantu ancestry. The second subgroup is the “Merina B”, the Andevo, who have an average of 40-50% Bantu ancestry. They make up less than 1/3 of Merina society. [[1]]