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In Search of the Red Slave by Mike Parker Pearson and Karen Godden, Sutton, 拢14.99, ISBN 0750929383 Reviewed by Mike Pitts

IN 1717 Robert Drury returned to London having survived shipwreck, massacre and 14 years as a slave in Madagascar. His journal was published in 1729 to small acclaim, and almost forgotten until more than a century later, when a French writer suggested it was fiction. Perhaps, literary critics then argued, it had been cobbled together by Daniel Defoe and published under a pseudonym.

For Parker Pearson and Karen Godden, authors of In Search of the Red Slave, the truth of Drury鈥檚 tale lay all around them in the deserts of southern Madagascar. They had been working on the island鈥檚 prehistoric archaeology but became obsessed with vindicating Drury (I did wonder how they phrased their research grant proposal). And they tracked him down, finding evidence for the places where he lived, fought in battles and finally escaped 鈥� even for the shipwreck itself, in the form of two beached cannon.

An enchanting and sometimes shocking book, it鈥檚 distinguished by intriguing anecdotes and insights. Go to Madagascar and you will soon discover the truth of a common saying about the island, that 鈥渘o vehicle is ever full鈥�. Pearson and Godden describe a cattle truck packed so tight that one poor beast was accommodated only by knotting its tail to a slat to lift its rear end up. They note that the journal that forms the core of In Search of the Red Slave refers to such incidents: 18th-century English attitudes to animals then were no different from Madagascan.

Here is a travel story that finds laugh-out-loud humour in the behaviour and culture of both host and explorer. It details appalling cruelty between people, yet judges neither Madagascan nor European. It rescues travel writing from an onanistic self-importance by returning to the heart of the genre with a perceptive, sympathetic interest in other people and places. And it does more, ultimately exploring the complex historical links between Europe, Africa and Asia.