Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: Who was the first European to discover Madagascar?
Europe knew of Madagascar through Arab sources; based on them The Travels of Marco Polo claimed that "the inhabitants are Saracens, or followers of the law of Mohammed", without mentioning other inhabitants. Other than its size and location, everything about the island in the book describes southeastern Africa, not Madagascar. European contact began on 10 August 1500, when the Portuguese sea captain Diogo Dias sighted the island after his ship separated from a fleet going to India.[49][4] The Portuguese continued trading with the islanders and named the island São Lourenço (Saint Lawrence). In 1666, François Caron, the director general of the newly formed French East India Company, sailed to Madagascar.[50] The company failed to establish a colony on Madagascar but established ports on the nearby islands of Bourbon (now Réunion) and Isle de France (now Mauritius). In the late 17th century, the French established trading posts along the east coast. On Île Sainte-Marie, a small island off the northeastern coast of Madagascar, Captain Misson and his pirate crew allegedly founded the famous pirate utopia of Libertatia in the late 17th century. From about 1774 to 1824, Madagascar was a favorite haunt for pirates. Many European sailors were shipwrecked on the coasts of the island, among them Robert Drury, whose journal is one of the few written depictions of life in southern Madagascar during the 18th century.[51] Sailors sometimes called Madagascar "Island of the Moon".[52]
The Bemaraha woolly lemur ("Avahi cleesei"), also known as Cleese's woolly lemur, is native to western Madagascar. The scientist who discovered the species named it after Cleese, mainly because of Cleese's fondness for lemurs and his efforts at protecting and preserving them. The species was first discovered in 1990 by a team of scientists from Zurich University led by Urs Thalmann, but was not formally described as a species until 11 November 2005.
Grandidierite is an extremely rare mineral and gem that was first discovered in 1902 in southern Madagascar. The mineral was named in honor of French explorer Alfred Grandidier (1836–1912) who studied the natural history of Madagascar.
When France lost its colony of St. Domingue in 1803, then the richest European colony in the world, it looked for a substitute suitable for the kind of sugar cane and aromatic plant cultivation it had practiced in the Caribbean. The opportunity came in 1861 when Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar, who had expelled most Europeans from that island, died. It eventually became a French colony in 1896, and remained under their political control or influence until 1960, when Madagascar became fully independent. But the French cultural influence remains to this day. Under French rule, Madagascar became one of the world’s main producers of sugar cane and vanilla (originally from Mexico). The agricultural landscape of this spice island reflects the French endeavor, with serendipitous consequences to the complexity and uniqueness of its rums.
Explorers of routes from Europe towards Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean, include Vasco da Gama (1460–1524), a navigator who made the first trip from Europe to India and back by the Cape of Good Hope, discovering the ocean route to the East; Pedro Alvares Cabral (c. 1467/68–c.1520) who, following the path of Gama, claimed Brazil and led the first expedition that linked Europe, Africa, America, and Asia; Diogo Dias, who discovered the eastern coast of Madagascar and rounded the corner of Africa; explorers such as Diogo Fernandes Pereira and Pedro Mascarenhas (1470–1555), among others, who discovered and mapped the Mascarene Islands and other archipelagos. 
Ranavalona's 33-year reign was characterized by her effort to strengthen the domestic authority of the Kingdom of Imerina over subjugated provinces and preserve the political and cultural sovereignty of Madagascar. These policies were enacted in a context of increasing European influence within her kingdom and competing French and English bids for domination over the island. Early in her reign, the queen took incremental steps to distance Madagascar from the purview of European powers, first putting an end to a friendship treaty with Britain, then placing increasing restrictions on the activities of the missionaries of the London Missionary Society, who operated schools where basic education and trade skills were taught in addition to the Christian religion. In 1835 she forbade the practice of Christianity among the Malagasy population, and within a year nearly all foreigners had left her territory.
The first formal European-style school was established in 1818 on the east coast of Madagascar at Toamasina by members of the London Missionary Society (LMS). King Radama I, the first sovereign to bring about half the island of Madagascar under his rule, was interested in strengthening ties with European powers; to this end, he invited LMS missionaries to open a school in his capital at Antananarivo within the Rova palace compound to instruct the royal family in literacy, numeracy and basic education. This first school, known as the Palace School, was established by LMS missionary David Jones on 8 December 1820 within Besakana, a Rova building of great historic and cultural significance. Within months, classes were transferred to a larger, purpose-built structure on the Rova grounds. 
The first branch of the LDS Church in Madagascar was organized in 1990 with Razanapanala Ramianadrisoa as president. Ramiandrisoa had joined the LDS Church in France while studying there in 1986. The first LDS missionaries to enter Madagascar were Fred L. Forsgren and his wife Eileen who arrived in March 1991. The Church was legally recognized by the government of Madagascar in 1993.
In the Malagasy language, the island of Madagascar is called "Madagasikara" and its people are referred to as "Malagasy". The island's appellation "Madagascar" is not of local origin but rather was popularized in the Middle Ages by Europeans. The name "Madageiscar" was first recorded in the memoirs of 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo as a corrupted transliteration of the name Mogadishu, the Somali port with which Polo had confused the island.
France also set her eyes on Madagascar, the island that had been used since 1527 as a stop in travels to India. In 1642, the French East India Company founded a settlement in southern Madagascar called Fort Dauphin. The commercial results of this settlement were scarce and, again, most of the settlers died. One of the survivors, Etienne de Flacourt, published a "History of the Great Island of Madagascar and Relations", which was for a long time the main European source of information about the island. Further settlement attempts had no more success but, in 1667, François Martin led the first expedition to the Malgasy heartland, reaching Lake Alaotra. In 1665, France officially claimed Madagascar, under the name of Île Dauphine. However, little colonial activity would take place in Madagascar until the 19th century.
By the 15th century, Europeans had wrested control of the spice trade from the Muslims. They did this by bypassing the Middle East and sending their cargo-ships around the Cape of Good Hope to India. The Portuguese mariner Diogo Dias became the first European to set foot on Madagascar when his ship, bound for India, blew off course in 1500. In the ensuing two-hundred years, the English and French tried (and failed) to establish settlements on the island.
In 1500, when leading a second Portuguese Armada of 13 ships to India, Pedro Álvares Cabral discovers and explores Brazil, claiming it for Portugal. In the same year, Diogo Dias, as one of the Captains of the fleet to India of Pedro Álvares Cabral, is separated from the main fleet by a storm while crossing the Cape of Good Hope, and becomes the first European to reach Madagascar.
A sizeable number of French people reside in Madagascar, many of whom trace their ties to Madagascar back to the colonial period.
An estimated 20,000 French citizens live and work in Madagascar in 2011. Currently, approximately 120,000 people, or 0.6% of the total population, are of French heritage. This community is descended from French settlers who arrived in Madagascar during the 19th century.
A further 80,000 people are classified as Réunionese Creole, therefore bringing the total number of people with French ancestry to approximately 1%. The numbers make Madagascar the home of the largest ethnic French population in terms of absolute numbers in sub-Saharan Africa, other than the French "département" Réunion.
Marie Gisèle Aimée Rabesahala was borne May 7,1929 and died June 27, 2011. She was a Malagasy politician and activist who was the first woman to hold a ministerial position in the government of Madagascar. She entered politics at the age of 17, campaigning on behalf of political prisoners, and becoming Madagascar's first woman municipal councilor, before becoming the first Malagasy woman to establish and lead a political party. She was a committed Marxist and co-founded the communist Congress Party for the Independence of Madagascar, which took power in 1975. In 1977 she became Madagascar's first female minister, responsible for promoting revolutionary art and culture, but lost her job in 1991 when her ministry was abolished in the course of Madagascar's return to multi-party democracy. She remained an active political campaigner and journalist until her death in 2011.
The ancestors of the cafres were slaves brought from Africa and Madagascar to work the sugar plantations; these were the first slaves to be introduced to the Mascarene Islands. The slaves came from Mozambique, Guinea, Senegal and Madagascar. Most trace their roots to Madagascar and East Africa (Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia) although some descended from runaways from European pirate ships.
European colonial powers, primarily Britain and France, had ambitions to control Madagascar, a rich island with strategic importance in regard to the sea passage to India. The Merina Kingdom of Madagascar had successfully repelled multiple attempts by both European powers to seize control of the territory throughout the 19th century. Defense of the island was aided by its size and diversity of terrain, the nation's organized military and government structures, and the prevalence of tropical diseases. The first significant European influence in Imerina was the arrival of a handful of British missionaries in the capital of Antananarivo in 1820 during the reign of Radama I, who invited them to establish schools and teach the Merina free populace to read. Several years into the reign of Queen Ranavalona I, which began in 1828, the monarchy became increasingly disapproving of the growing popularity of the Christianity that the missionaries had introduced, and encouraged them to cease teaching religion while continuing to provide technical and vocational training to create a cadre of skilled craftsmen. She successfully repelled French attacks on Foulepointe and other coastal cities. During several periods, Ranavalona's restrictions on the practice of Christianity minimized European presence on the island.
Andrianampoinimerina's son Radama I (Radama the Great) assumed the throne during a turning-point in European history that had repercussions for Madagascar. With the defeat of Napoléon in 1814/1815, the balance of power in Europe and in the European colonies shifted in Britain's favor. The British, eager to exert control over the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, had captured the islands of Réunion and Mauritius from the French in 1810. Although they returned Réunion to France, they kept Mauritius as a base for expanding the British Empire. Mauritius’s governor, to woo Madagascar from French control, recognized Radama I as King of Madagascar, a diplomatic maneuver meant to underscore the idea of the sovereignty of the island and thus to preclude claims by any European powers.
At a short distance from the village is Eiríksstaðir, the homestead of Erik the Red, who was the first European to discover Greenland and whose son Leif Erikson, born at Eiríksstaðir, was the first European to discover America ahead of Columbus.
The First Lady of Madagascar (French: "Première Dame du Madagascar") is the title attributed to the wife of the President of Madagascar. The country's current first lady is Voahangy Rajaonarimampianina, wife of President Hery Rajaonarimampianina, who had held the position since January 25, 2014. There has been no First Gentlemen of Madagascar to date.
The Bahá'í Faith in Madagascar begins with the mention by `Abdu'l-Bahá, then head of the religion, who asked the followers of the Bahá'í Faith to travel to Madagascar. The first Bahá'í to pioneer to Madagascar arrived in 1953 and following native converts the first Bahá'í Local Spiritual Assembly was elected in 1955. By 1963 in addition to the one assembly there were groups of Bahá'ís living in four other locations. In late July 1967 Rúhíyyih Khanum became the first Hand of the Cause to visit the country. In 1972 the Malagasy Bahá'ís gathered to elect the first National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Madagascar. By 2003 there were 33 local assemblies and the Association of Religion Data Archives in 2005 estimated there were about 17,900 Bahá'ís in the country.
Today, the people of Madagascar can be considered as the product of mixing between the first occupants, the vahoaka ntaolo Austronesians (Vazimba</i>and Vezo) and those arrived later (Hova neo-Austronesians, Persians, Arabs, Africans and Europeans).
Madagascar was colonised rather recently compared to other landmasses, with first evidence for humans—arrived from either Africa or Asia—dating to 2,300 or perhaps 4,000 years before present. It is assumed that humans first stayed near the coast and penetrated into the interior only several centuries later. The settlers had a profound impact on the long-isolated environment of Madagascar through land clearing and fire, introduction of zebu cattle, and probably hunting to extinction the native megafauna including, among others, elephant birds, giant lemurs and giant tortoises. The first Europeans arrived in the 16th century, starting an age of overseas exchange. Population growth and transformation of the landscape was particularly rapid since the mid-20th century.
During the reign of Ranavalona I Christians in Madagascar were persecuted and church building suppressed. However, in the succeeding monarchs' reigns, European influence grew and the suppression of Christians was relaxed, with many missionaries, most notably those belonging to the London Missionary Society being invited back in. A turning point in the history of Christianity in Madagascar happened when queen Ranavalona II who had been in part raised by European tutors converted to Christianity.
Local tales of a "song'aomby" (Malagasy for "cow that is not a cow"), or pygmy hippopotamus, led French naturalist Alfred Grandidier to follow a village headman to a marsh in southwestern Madagascar, a site called Ambolisatra, which became the first known subfossil site in Madagascar. In 1868, Grandidier uncovered the first subfossil remains of lemurs—a humerus from "Palaeopropithecus" and a tibia of a sifaka. The "Palaeopropithecus" remains were not described for several decades, and it took decades more for the remains to be correctly paired with other sloth lemur remains. It was not until 1893 that giant lemur species were formally described, when Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major discovered and described a long, narrow skull of "Megaladapis madagascariensis" in a marsh. His discoveries in various marshes of central and southwestern Madagascar sparked paleontological interest, resulting in an overabundance of taxonomic names and confused assemblages of bones from numerous species, including non-primates. Specimens were distributed between European museums and Madagascar, often resulting in the loss of field data that went with the specimens, if the data had been recorded at all.
Pollination is required to set the vanilla fruit from which the flavoring is derived. In 1837, Belgian botanist Charles François Antoine Morren discovered this fact and pioneered a method of artificially pollinating the plant. The method proved financially unworkable and was not deployed commercially. In 1841, Edmond Albius, a slave who lived on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, discovered at the age of 12 that the plant could be hand-pollinated. Hand-pollination allowed global cultivation of the plant. 
Three major species of vanilla currently are grown globally, all of which derive from a species originally found in Mesoamerica, including parts of modern-day Mexico. They are "V. planifolia" (syn. "V. fragrans"), grown on Madagascar, Réunion, and other tropical areas along the Indian Ocean; "V. tahitensis", grown in the South Pacific; and "V. pompona", found in the West Indies, Central America, and South America. The majority of the world's vanilla is the "V. planifolia" species, more commonly known as Bourbon vanilla (after the former name of Réunion, Île Bourbon) or Madagascar vanilla, which is produced in Madagascar and neighboring islands in the southwestern Indian Ocean, and in Indonesia. Combined, Madagascar and Indonesia produce two-thirds of the world's supply of vanilla.