Posted on Monday 11 November 2002

In 1729, the Englishman Robert Drury published an account of his captivity on Madagascar. For years it was dismissed as fiction but archaeology has now shown that it was true after all.

How many people were fooled by Robinson Crusoe when it was first published? That book - one of the world's first novels - claimed in its preface to be 'a just Story of Fact' and was snapped up by an audience for whom the idea of fictional books was very novel indeed.

Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and, ten years later, the book-reading public were puzzling over another story of shipwreck on a tropical island - Madagascar: or Robert Drury's Journal during fifteen years captivity on that island. This book also purported to be 'a plain, honest Narrative of Matters of Fact' whilst admitting 'of no Doubt of its being taken for such another Romance as Robinson Cruso'. Was this story of warlike tribes, kings and slaves a novel, a true story or, like the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a bit of both?

For the last three hundred years, literary critics have argued over the book Drury wrote after his return to England. Was Robert Drury's Journal true? Or did Defoe write it? Many have judged it to be fiction or, at best, a merging of half-truths and seamen's tales cobbled into a good yarn.

In 1962 a book published posthumously in America presented the results of a lifetime's investigation into Robert Drury. The author, Arthur Secord, had picked up his trail in London and found proof of his birth and death and information about his early life - strangely, we know more about Drury's youth than we know about Defoe's.

Secord located the Degrave's muster-roll, where Robert Drury's name appears among the midshipmen, and also found a letter from Drury requesting the East India Company to employ him on another expedition to Madagascar - if they couldn't find him a job, he wrote, he would go and work for the Swedes.

Until his death in 1735, Robert Drury could be found frequenting Old Tom's Coffee-House in Birchin Lane in central London. Here he was willing to 'confirm those Things which to some may seem doubtful' and 'gratify any Gentleman with a further account' of anything in the book. He was buried in the churchyard of St Clement Danes in the Strand. This evidence that Drury really had existed silenced many doubters - but not all. Some historians and literary specialists still argue that this story of life in Madagascar is a work of imagination.

None of these critics, however, have ventured into the land of the Sakalava in the west or to the far south of Madagascar, the land of thorns. In 1991, by contrast, a small team of European and Malagasy archaeologists started on a journey of discovery - rather than searching through 18th century documents for more information on Drury, why not look for him in the Indian Ocean?

I'd come across Drury's book during research for an earlier visit to Madagascar and was fascinated by the world he described. After many long evenings telling my colleagues strange tales of shipwrecks and pirates, we set off for the forests of Androy. The project's main aim was to study monumental tombs and funerary practices - a tough enough task on its own - and in the applications for funding we hadn't dared mention the hunt for a shipwrecked sailor.

During our years of research in Androy we have learnt a lot about tombs, and about the history of southern Madagascar from its earliest settlement - the island, which is about the size of France, was uninhabited until its discovery by migrants from Indonesia and Africa in the 1st millennium AD. These colonists probably contributed to the extinction of the Elephant Bird, a flightless giant that survived in Madagascar for over 80 million years until shortly after the arrival of people. We have found the traces of a previously unknown civilisation, which rose and fell before the first Europeans reached Madagascar, and investigated the impact (or lack of it!) of the doomed attempts by Europeans to get a foothold on the island in the pre-colonial period - but this all belongs to another story.

Our journey from the highland capital of Madagascar to the scorched south was a voyage across cultures, leaving the red soil and the quietly spoken rice-cultivators of the highlands to enter the world of the spear-carrying Tandroy cattle pastoralists. With our colleague Ramilisonina from Madagascar's national museum, we began to investigate the region's archaeology, working with Retsihisatse, a Tandroy pastoralist and archaeologist.

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The ancient ‘manda’ civilisation

The first part of this season's work was devoted to the study of manda and other large settlements of the 10th-13th centuries. Ever since the discovery of Andranosoa and Mandan d'Remananga in the 1970s, these large and formerly densely occupied sites have been central to archaeological investigations in the south of Madagascar. They bear witness to a vanished civilisation which once inhabited the river systems of the south and imported Islamic sgraffiato and Chinese ceramics but has left no clear traces in oral or written history.