Île Sainte-Marie

The island was settled by people of the east coast who became the Betsimisaraka, and its Malagasy name, Nosy Boraha, is generally explained as referring to Ibrahim or Abraham, a reminder of early contact with Islamised traders on this coast. Its sheltered bay, fresh water and position on the route between the Cape and India gave it an outsized role in the Indian Ocean from the late seventeenth century.

That role was piracy. From roughly the 1690s European pirates used the island and the neighbouring bays as a base for raiding shipping, living ashore between voyages, taking local wives and leaving descendants and graves; the hillside cemetery above the harbour dates from that era, and the legend of a pirate republic on Madagascar grew out of it. In the early eighteenth century Ratsimilaho, said to be the son of an English pirate and a Malagasy woman, built the Betsimisaraka confederation on the mainland coast opposite.

In 1750 the island passed to France through his daughter Bety, and it became one of France's earliest footholds in Madagascar, used as a naval station, a penal settlement and a plantation island for cloves and coconuts; the stone church at Ambodifotatra and the fort above the harbour belong to that period. After independence the island lived from cloves, coconuts, vanilla and fishing, and from the 1990s from visitors, drawn first by the beaches and then by the whales that return to its channel each winter.

Sainte-Marie is Betsimisaraka in language and custom, with a slow, coastal rhythm and an unusual sense of its own story. Pirate lore is genuinely local here — families point to the cemetery and to names in it — and sits alongside Catholic and Protestant churches, some of the oldest in the country, and a strong ancestral practice of ceremonies for the razana with zebu, rum and long nights of music.

Fady, the system of local prohibitions, is taken seriously and varies from village to village: certain days on which no work is done, places in the forest or on the shore that are not entered, foods avoided by particular families. Burial grounds are sacred ground, and visitors are expected to take a guide and follow what they are told. Pirogues, fish traps and pandanus mats are still made by hand, and the island's name for itself, Nosy Boraha, is used as often as the French one.

The sea sets the calendar. Fishing crews leave before dawn and return in the morning; the clove harvest fills the roadsides with drying buds; and the arrival of the whales in the southern winter brings boats, music and a festival that has become the island's main annual event. Evenings are quiet, lit by generators and solar lamps in the villages, and the day's catch is eaten within hours of landing.

About 30,000 people live on the island, most of them in villages strung along the one road and around the bays, with Ambodifotatra the only town of any size. Houses are of timber, palm thatch and woven pandanus, built to be repaired quickly after a storm, and most families keep a plot of cassava, bananas and rice alongside whatever else they do.

The economy is fishing, cloves, coconuts and vanilla, with tourism layered over the top: bungalows, guiding, boat crews, building and transport. Work is seasonal and uneven — the whale months and the European winter bring visitors, while the cyclone season empties the island — and many young people leave for Toamasina or the capital for schooling and work.

Living here means depending on the crossing. Fuel, cement, rice and medicines come by boat, prices are higher than on the mainland, and rough weather or a cancelled ferry is felt immediately. Electricity is limited and often supplied by generators, water comes from wells and rain, and a serious cyclone can take out the clove trees, the roofs and the season's income together.

Sainte-Marie eats what the reef and the channel provide. Fish, octopus, squid, prawns, crab and lobster are grilled over charcoal or simmered in coconut milk with ginger, garlic and tomato, and served with vary — rice — at almost every meal. Small hotels cook the catch the day it lands; village hotely serve the same fish with rice and a broth of greens for a fraction of the price.

The island's own crops flavour the food. Cloves are dried by the roadside and go into sweet dishes, drinks and preserves; vanilla is used in sauces for fish and chicken as well as in rum; and coconut appears in everything from curries to cakes. Cassava, breadfruit, taro and bananas fill out meals, and ravitoto, pounded cassava leaves with pork, is the standard mainland dish that travels here.

Fruit is abundant — lychees in the southern summer, jackfruit, pineapple, mango and papaya — and eaten fresh or juiced. To drink there is coconut water, strong sweet coffee, betsabetsa, the fermented cane drink of the east coast, Three Horses Beer, and rhum arrangé steeped with vanilla, clove, ginger or lychee, which is close to an island institution.