The Postal Stones of Madagascar

About 2 km off the coast of Madagascar, in the Bay of Antongil, is a small, uninhabited, tropical island called Nosy Mangabe. The island is covered in dense forest and there are no permanent settlements there. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, Dutch ships on their way to the far east, around the Cape of Good Hope, frequently stopped on the island to replenish their supplies of fresh water, repair damaged ship or recover from sickness. Nosy Mangabe has plenty of fresh water from rains that washes the island practically all round the year. More than 160 inches of it falls on this 1,300-acres island in a year. The abundant fresh water running down the sides of the island’s many peaks and cliffs was too good to pass. Photo credit: Mark E. Polzer As ships stopped and restocked their fresh water hold, sailors wandered around the beaches and etched their names on rocks. Some wrote the name of the ship, its captain, their date of arrival and departure. Over time, an ingenious system of messaging began to develop. Sailors began to leave messages, or at times, letters carefully wrapped in canvas and made watertight with tar, which they then buried at the base of the stones. The idea was that the next Dutch ship to anchor on the island would collect the letters or read the message and pass it on to the intended recipient. In the early 1920s, a French colonial adjunct-inspector of waters and forests, discovered about a dozen of these so-called “postal stones” and managed to read them. In 2012, a team of researchers lead by maritime archaeologist, Wendy van Duivenvoorde, from Flinders University in Australia found more. Duivenvoorde and her team found about 40 inscriptions, left by officers and sailors of at least 13 different Dutch East India ships that sailed between 1601 and 1657.