Some ten years later, the maroon chief Sans Souci launched unrelenting attacks against the French. The colonists might have been the victims of the maroons' descendants. ${ }^{11}$  
Île de Bourbon, later renamed La Réunion, was taken by the French, accompanied by the Malagasy people, in 1648 (Barassin, 1957). Desertion also appears to have been widespread there, and was as much a hazard to the French colonial settlers as on Île de France, particularly during the period of the Compagnie des Indes (Company of the Indies) (Ho, 1998, pp. 134-136). On Île de Bourbon in 1705, deserters 'had sufficient time, while we were outside, to make their attack and, after looting the entire contents of the house, seized the Governor's boat before escaping to their own country in Madagascar, from whence all had originated' (Journal of Bourbon, 11 February 1705, Public Library of New York, 1909). Between 1732 and 1767, Bousquet (2011, vol. III, p. 482) listed over 40 raids on the residences of colonial settlers.  
The first desertion in the Dutch Cape Colony occurred within three years of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. This involved an enslaved Malagasy person 'who disappeared quite suddenly in the morning' of 10 March 1655 (Journal of Van Riebeeck, 12 March 1655; Van Riebeeck 1952, vol. I, p. 300). Desertion continued throughout the existence of slave society, adding a genuine element of threat of the type that existed on the Mascarene Islands. Throughout its presence on the Cape, the Dutch East India Company was dogged by the  
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[^0]:    10 Letter from Desforges-Boucher to the Directors, s.l., 30 November 1725; Letter from Nyon to the Directors, Port Bourbon, 11 July 1722. ANOM, COL, C3/4, f. 112-132 and C4/1, f. 5.
11 'Nearly one month since, a band of black deserters attacked and killed Knight Commander de Brossard in his residence on the Grands Bois headland'. Letter from the Council of Bourbon to the Directors, Bourbon, 1 April 1732. Lougnon 1933-1949, pp. 2-6.