Another curious feature in this Malay colonization of Madagascar is that, once having reached this great island, the Malagasy immigrants appear to have completely renounced their seafaring life, to have maintained no sea-going vessels of any size (though they had and have still neatly made outrigger boats), and never to have voyaged anywhere from the coasts of their new home. Otherwise they could not have failed to discover and colonize Mauritius or Réunion. In many of its aspects the colonization of Madagascar in prehistoric times by a race coming obviously from Sumatra or Java and allied in physical type and language less to the Malays than to the Malayo-Polynesians and even to the darker Melanesians is perhaps the most puzzling of the unsolved enigmas to be found in the study of the peopling of Africa by foreign immigrants. Judging from local traditions, from time to time fleets of canoes containing Malays were blown right across the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Madagascar. Such was—it is said—the history of the Imérina or Hova tribes who originated mainly from the last accidental Malay colonization of Madagascar. These Hovas found the coast belt so unhealthy that they made their way inland to the high plateaus of Imérina. Here, after long isolation, they acquired strength from their invigorating climate and, obtaining arms from the Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries, spread over Madagascar as conquerors and brought nearly the whole island under their rule. Yet the Sakalavas, the dark-skinned remnant of a far earlier Malaysian invasion, spoke a dialect nearer to the actual Malay than that of the Hova. It remains to be said that the strong negroid element of Madagascar is attributed by some authorities to Melanesian colonists from Malaysia of a relatively ancient date and not to negroes from Africa. There are numerous Melanesian words in the Malagasy language. ----- Footnote 1: