Like Flashman, other participants in the battle on Skrang river thought it the most hectic and bloody of all the encounters fought by Brooke’s force in their passage up the Batang Lupar. Six hundred pirates in six praus attacked Paitingi’s spy-boat, overwhelming its crew of seventeen; Keppel’s account, quoted by Flashman, testifies to the viciousness of the fighting in the waterway choked by a mass of foundering craft and bodies which broke in two as it floated downstream, enabling Brooke and Keppel to drive their gig through the gap, followed by a rocket-firing boat. In addition to Paitingi’s crew, the expedition lost 29 other dead, with 56 wounded in the battle.
Although Flashman was in no position to appreciate it, this action marked the end of the Batang Lupar operation. With the stream too heavy against them, Brooke’s fleet returned to Patusan, having effectively destroyed or dispersed the pirates along the river in the fortnight’s campaign. Much of the credit for this undoubtedly belonged to Keppel, whose role in the leadership Flashman tends to underrate; otherwise, his account of the expedition is on the whole accurate and fair, although it is as usual a highly individual view, and while he is reliable on dates, names of people, places, and vessels, and the broad conduct of operations, there is no way of verifying his more personal recollections. He seems to have magnified the action at Fort Linga (in which by his own account he played no part), but there is no reason to suppose that the gruesome picture which he paints of Borneo river-fighting, or of conditions along the pirate coast, is in any way exaggerated. (See Keppel, Jacob, St John, Marryat, and Sir George Mundy’s Narrative of Events in Borneo and Celebes, 1848.)
So hostile to foreigners was Madagascar that comparatively few written authorities exist for the first half of the last century, and those named by Flashman are the principal ones in English; they bear out virtually every detail which he gives about that astonishing island and its appalling ruler, Ranavalona I. James Hastie (1786–1826) was a soldier, not a missionary; he was tutor to two Malagassy princes and British agent on the island at a time when Europeans were still tolerated there. His journal is in the Public Record Office. W. Ellis’s Three Visits to Madagascar, 1858, Madagascar Revisited, 1867, and The Martyr Church of Madagascar, 1870, are invaluable sources for Queen Ranavalona’s reign, and the island background and people, as is S. P. Oliver’s Madagascar, 1886. See also H. W. Little’s Madagascar, 1884, J. Sibree’s The Great African Island, 1880, and L. McLeod’s Madagascar and its People, 1865. But none compares with the indomitable and entertaining Ida Pfeiffer, that great tourist whose Last Travels contains a wealth of informative detail recorded at first hand.
Flashman’s is possibly the only eye-witness account of the fearful cruelties and varied means of execution practised in Madagascar at this time, but the other authorities quote evidence in detail to support him, and there can be no doubt that such atrocities as he describes took place, and were part of the Queen’s policy. Ida Pfeiffer, having confirmed Flashman’s figures of tens of thousands dying annually from execution, massacre, and forced labour, sums up: “If this woman’s rule lasts much longer, Madagascar will be depopulated … Blood – and always blood – is the maxim of Queen Ranavalona, and every day seems lost to this wicked woman on which she cannot sign at least half a dozen death-warrants.”
Flashman’s estimate of Laborde was sound; the Frenchman was a tough and resourceful soldier of fortune who in his time had been a cavalry trooper, steam engineer in Bombay, and (according to some sources) a slave-trader. He was shipwrecked in Madagascar in 1831, enslaved, bought by the Queen and became a favourite. Subsequently he was liberated and married a Malagassy girl, but he was still kept in Madagascar where he served the Queen as engineer and cannon-maker. He became an influential figure at court, and was active in promoting French interest.
The few Europeans who met Queen Ranavalona face to face and lived to write impressions of her, confirm what Flashman says of her appearance, although most of them saw her much later in her reign than he did. Ellis, giving a description which is very close to Flashman’s, adds that “the whole head and face is small, compact and well proportioned; her expression … agreeable, although at times indicating great firmness.” Ida Pfeiffer, who apparently did not see her close to, noted that she was “of strong and sturdy build, rather dark”. Both she and Mr Ellis seem to have thought the Queen rather older than she probably was; there is no reliable evidence of her birth-date, and although the Nouvelle Biographie Générale says “about 1800”, which would make her 44 when Flashman met her, it seems more likely that she was in her early fifties.
Flashman’s virtuosity on the keyboard was either highly eccentric or less memorable than he imagined, for years later when Ida Pfeiffer was invited to play the palace piano, she understood Ranavalona to say that she “had never seen anyone play with their hands”. Mme Pfeiffer found the piano sadly out of tune.
These peculiar divination-boards were known as sikidy. According to Sibree, there were three of them, one of four squares by sixteen, a second four by four, and a third four by eight
An unflattering description of Prince Rakota, although not unlike his portrait, which survives. Oliver described him as being like a Greek god, with dark curls and light gold skin, but agrees with Flashman’s estimate of his character, and confirms that he was a moderating influence on his mother.
Flashman is the only survivor of the tanguin, or tangena, ordeal to have written of the experience. His account varies from other descriptions only on minor points – it was customary, when time was available, to starve the patient for 24 hours before the scraped stone of the tanguin fruit was administered, and some historians say that in order to pass the test the pieces of chicken skin had to be regurgitated in a particular direction. The deposit of 28 dollars (Flashman says 24) was normally put up by the accuser of the person undergoing the test – if the accused failed the test, the accuser got his money back, but if he passed, the accuser recovered only one-third of the deposit, the other thirds going to the accused and the Queen.
As a result of its separate evolution, the plant and animal life of Madagascar is unique, and it has been estimated that ninety per cent of its living things exist nowhere else on earth. Among its more celebrated fabulous monsters was the giant Roc bird which carried off Sinbad. The “apes” which Flashman saw were probably sifakas, a type of lemur capable of prodigious jumps.
