Buried in the archives of a museum in Geneva is an as-yet-uncatalogued collection of time-stained photographs dating from 1931. They show scenes of quayside activity, complete with small boats, barrels, and hoists; piles of dead birds and lobsters; and, in the background, ramshackle sheds and a warehouse. Also depicted are African men, women and children. The location is the island of St Paul in the south Indian Ocean, and the images bear testament to two tragic events. These linked stories tell us much about the expansion of colonial capitalism in the early twentieth century, and its effects on both European and African workers. They also touch on historical justice and the exploitation of labour and natural resources which can so easily be carried out far from sight.
The island of St Paul may not be familiar to many. That is hardly surprising. It lies on the underside of any European globe: midway between South Africa and Australia, with Sri Lanka 5,000 km to the north and Antarctica 3,000 km to the south. It is the tip of a dormant volcano, covering barely 7 km2, with a huge caldera flooded by the sea on the eastern side. It is currently entirely uninhabited.
France became the nominal owner of St Paul in 1843, largely because no other colonial power wanted it, but it was not until fifty years later that the government began to take an interest in it. This was the result of pressure from the Union coloniale française in Paris, a capitalist trading group which lobbied for French enterprises to operate unchallenged in France’s colonial possessions – primarily in Africa and Southeast Asia, but also across its scattered Indian Ocean territories. The French Navy took formal possession of the remote islands St Paul, Amsterdam and Kerguelen in January 1893.
These three islands attracted the attention of two brothers from a family of Breton whalers, René and Henry Bossière, who were granted a fifty-year lease on Kerguelen in the summer of 1893. After a doomed attempt at farming sheep there, they turned their attention to the lobsters of St Paul – the local Jasus Paulensis, which was found there in extraordinary numbers. It was a luxury food for which there was – and is – a ready market in France. By the end of the 1920s, a processing plant, fuelled by endless sacks of coal, was shoehorned into a hastily-constructed building on the island. Cans would be filled with lobster-tails, then sealed and transported back to France on the next supply ship.
In the first lobster season, 1928-29, twenty-eight workers from Brittany erected buildings and trialled the fishing. The results were promising. The following season, another 29 Bretons were joined by 90 Malagasy workers, 60 men and 30 women, whose recruitment reflected French capitalism’s growing reliance on colonial labour as well as the mounting pressures that pushed African labourers to seek work abroad. By 1930, Madagascar had been deeply affected by the Great Depression, catastrophic environmental degradation, and the violent suppression of the territory’s nationalist movement. Many Malagasy people were forced to work in a system of labour camps which were set up in 1930 to keep unemployment and political opposition at bay.
Spending several months processing lobsters on a remote island promised a temporary relief for the Malagasy; but living conditions were still exceptionally poor. Even before reaching St Paul, they were herded into hold No.3 of the supply ship, alongside the season’s fresh meat supplies – 35 cattle alongside some pigs and sheep. After two weeks’ sailing, they were all crammed into overcrowded accommodation. Photographs of St Paul give a strong impression of the island’s only settlement: a narrow, uneven strip of land crowded with huts, machinery, and areas awash with the organic detritus from lobster processing. Just half a dozen wooden buildings housed the island’s 90 to 100 workers.
The 1929-30 season finished profitably. In February 1930, the supply ship arrived and loaded its cargo: 400,000 tins of lobster, and most of the workers. Six Bretons and one Malagasy, all aged between 18 and 28, volunteered to stay behind during the southern winter, to maintain the buildings and equipment ready for the next season. With startling nonchalance, the only person who could operate the long-distance radio was permitted to leave the island. The Bossières’ manager, Henri Fargon, promised that, since supplies were low after an earlier fire in the island’s store, the ship would return within three months. It never did.
Of those left behind, four died before the end of October – three of scurvy – as did a newborn baby. All would likely have survived had the ship returned as promised. Under questioning later, Fargon ignored the fundamental question of why the supply ship did not return, opting instead to condemn the seven workers for not following instructions and being lazy. In reality, the failure to return was almost certainly a question of profit. The one-way journey from France to St Paul took at least eight weeks. To send out a ship – even one sent from Madagascar – solely to provision seven workers on St Paul would have made no financial sense to the company: the workers could surely wait until the next scheduled trip. During the later inquiry, Fargon let slip that he expected that other passing ships would stop at St Paul and provide supplies: evidently, he never intended to make any special voyage.
The ship did not return to St Paul until December; it brought the next shift of 22 Breton and 99 Malagasy workers. Within weeks, another tragedy occurred. Malagasy workers on St Paul typically subsisted on a diet of rice and fish, while fresh meat (from the livestock) was reserved for the Europeans. During the previous season, red rice had formed the staple diet of the Malagasy. In the 1930-31 season, however, this was replaced by white rice, which was cheaper and faster-cooking but less nutritious. After barely two months on this diet, amidst insanitary surroundings, a severe vitamin deficiency known as beriberi broke out. There was no medically trained person on the island, despite what the company had promised, and no one understood how to treat the widespread malnutrition. By the end of February, most of the African men had fallen sick, and thirteen had died. A distress call was sent out, and the company ship loading up at Kerguelen, 1,300 km to the south, was dispatched in haste with a doctor on board. By the time the ship reached St Paul on 1 April, the death toll had reached thirty. There was little the doctor could do except order the evacuation of the island. A further ten men died and were buried at sea, and two more immediately on arrival at Madagascar. In total, 43 Malagasy workers perished as a direct result of their employment on St Paul.
Back in France, the case of St Paul’s abandoned Breton workers quickly became notorious. The liberal and left-wing press latched on to the story: the Communist Party paper L’Humanité condemned the ‘colonialist bandits’, who operated on St Paul ‘in the same way as in Indochina and the jungles of French Equatorial Africa’. A court case was initiated by the families of the ‘Forgotten of St Paul’, as the press now called them, to gain compensation from the Bossières. High-profile lawyers attached themselves to the plaintiffs. Even the government felt obliged to make critical noises. The company’s defence was that the workers should simply have caught fresh lobsters and grown their own vegetables. When the case finally concluded in 1935, four payments of between 10,000 and 70,000 Francs were awarded to the surviving Europeans and the families of those who had died – a derisory amount when the average annual wage was 35,000 Francs. No payments were made to the 18-year-old Malagasy worker in the group, François Ramamonzi, nor to the family of a Breton who had drowned during a desperate attempt to catch fresh fish. The death of the baby was not considered the company’s fault. The official judgement, despite favouring the workers, added insult to injury by implying that poor lifestyle choices by the victims themselves were partly to blame, echoing the company’s accusation that they should have eaten lobster and greens. Due to the liquidation of the Bossières’ company in 1937, no compensation was ever paid. The deaths of the 43 Malagasy workers from beriberi, meanwhile, never generated much interest in France, let alone a judicial enquiry. Such collateral damage was rarely mentioned in the French exploitation of its colonies and possessions.
The story of St Paul is perhaps not unusual. History is littered with cases of callous negligence, including the shameful events on Tromelin Island in the mid-18th century. A modern equivalent is the habit amongst defaulting shipowners of abandoning ships with unpaid and unprotected crews aboard. The events of 1931, in particular, followed a pattern of European exploitation of the global south that continues to this day. In Madagascar, for example, well-educated Malagasy workers are currently paid a pittance for the task of verifying AI inputs.
The fate of the Breton workers was not the same as that of the Malagasy workers. The former were apparently ‘forgotten’ whilst still alive; the latter were forgotten as soon as they were dead. But both groups fell victim to the drive to maximise profits by a company operating far from legal oversight. Cost-cutting – by failing to send a relief ship, or using cheap rice to feed cheap African labour – led to tragedy. Justice was barely delivered to the Bretons, and certainly no compensation. It has never been delivered to the families of the Malagasy men. While the memories of François Ramamonzi and the six Europeans are kept alive by a society based in Brittany, the same cannot be said of the workers who died of beriberi, and whose names remain unknown. All that reminds us of the latter is a clutch of battered and grainy photographs.
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