Some of these first migrants of fortune married black Malgache women, not slaves but free women of African birth, from the French trading post at Fort Dauphin in Madagascar. Danyel Waro takes pains to underline this fact to me. “They were free spirits,” he repeats, with eager emphasis. “Pioneering women. It was a new society, before the real beginnings of slavery. There was this first intermingling of Indian, Malgache and French that lasted about thirty years, and then slavery arrived with the Compagnie des Indes (The French East India Company) and there was a new workforce, mostly African and Malgache. The first 500 Réunionnais are well known, their names, which boats they arrived on, everything. Then afterwards, the slaves just arrived in the form of loads, like animals, and they were nameless.”