PART I. PIRATES AND MOCK KINGS OF THE MALAGASY NORTHEAST
It is very hard to be objective about pirates. Most historians don’t even try. The literature on seventeenth-century piracy is largely divided between romantic celebrations, in the popular literature, and scholarly debates over whether pirates would be best viewed as protorevolutionaries, or as simple murderers, rapists, and thieves.1 I don’t really want to wade into all this here. Anyway, there were all sorts of pirates. Some of the men remembered as pirate captains were actually gentleman freebooters, privateers, official or unofficial agents of one or another European regime; others might well have been mere nihilistic criminals; but many did indeed create, however briefly, a kind of rebel culture and civilization that, though surely brutal in many ways, developed its own moral code and democratic institutions. Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that their brutality was in no way unusual by the standards of their time, but their democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented.
It’s also this latter group—the sorts of pirates most appreciated by radical historians—who appear to be of most immediate relevance to what happened in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Madagascar.
A little background is in order then.
Some early pirate ships were privateers gone rogue, but typically, pirate crews were born in mutiny. Discipline on board sixteenth-century European ships was arbitrary and brutal, so crews often had good reason to rise up; but the law on land was unforgiving. A mutinous crew knew they had signed their own death warrants. To go pirate was to embrace this fate. A mutinous crew would declare war “against the entire world,” and hoist the “Jolly Roger.” The pirate flag, which existed in many variations, is revealing in itself. It was normally taken to be an image of the devil, but often it contained not only a skull or skeleton, but also an hourglass, signifying not a threat (“you are going to die”) so much as a sheer statement of defiance (“we are going to die, it’s only a matter of time”)—which crews making out such a flag on the horizon would likely have found, if anything, even more terrifying. Flying the Jolly Roger was a crew’s way of announcing they accepted they were on their way to hell.
It might be worth pausing for a moment to consider how seriously this kind of defiance—not just of law, but of God— was taken in the North Atlantic world of the seventeenth century. To embrace the devil was no casual business. By the nautical standards of the times, theft, violence, and cruelty were par for the course; blasphemy, and the systematic rejection of religion, was another matter. While sailors’ speech was, then as now, known to be colorful, among pirates it often seemed to pass into a veritable ideology. Hell constantly beckoned. Certainly this was what outside observers invariably emphasized. Clement Downing’s history of a pirate named John Plantain begins:
John Plantain was born in Chocolate Hole, on the Island of Jamaica, of English Parents, who took care to bestow on him the best Education they themselves were possess’d of: which was to curse, swear, and blaspheme, from the time of his first learning to speak.2
The same author, himself a sailor, records his horror at witnessing his crew, on an anti-pirate expedition, being greeted by Malagasy villagers with enthusiastic cries of “God damn ye, John! Me love you!”—the villagers having learned their English from the pirates.3
Plantain himself was later to establish himself for a time in Madagascar, where he became known as “the King of Ranter Bay.” Scholars have long been intrigued by the title. While “Ranter Bay” seems to just be an Anglicization of the Malagasy Rantabe (“big beach”), it also seems hard to imagine it’s not a reference to the Ranters, a radical working-class antinomian movement that two generations before had openly preached the abolition of private property and existing sexual morality. (Blasphemy laws had in fact been largely introduced in England to suppress them.) While there’s no historical evidence of Ranters’ ideas having a direct influence on the buccaneers,* if nothing else this gives a sense of the kind of associations they evoked in the minds of their contemporaries. These were men (the Indian Ocean pirates were almost exclusively male) who lived in a kind of space of death, who were seen by the law-abiding as hell-bound, if not fiends themselves, committed to a perverse embrace of their own demonization.
PIRATES COME TO MADAGASCAR
Buccaneers of what’s come to be known as the Golden Age of Piracy began in the Atlantic, preying on shipping from the New World: the last remains of the Spanish treasure fleets, and the new wealth coming from the plantation economies of the West Indies. Gradually, many discovered that the Indian Ocean, with its European and Asian merchant vessels loaded with spices, silks, and precious metals, afforded much richer prey. Especially tempting prizes were to be found in the Red Sea among Muslims from India and beyond on pilgrimage to Mecca. Madagascar was the ideal base for such raids because it existed in a sort of legal gray zone: the island was not included in the purview of the British Royal African Company, which organized the Atlantic slave trade, but it also fell outside the jurisdiction of the East India Company. While powerful kingdoms existed on the west coast, and to some degree in the south, the northeast was wide-open, and afforded numerous natural harbors: what were later to grow into the port towns of Fenerive, Tamatave, Foulpointe, and Sainte-Marie.
Sainte-Marie, or Saint Mary, is actually the name given by European traders to an island just south of the Bay of Antongil, which had been a common point of call for explorers and marauders since at least the 1650s. Malagasy refer to it as Nosy Boraha. The island is notable for having a good supply of water and a well-protected harbor, which after 1691 became a notorious pirate base, with fortress, refitting center, and emporium, replete with a small town whose population might fluctuate, depending on the season, between a few score and well over a thousand active and retired freebooters, runaways, and escapees of one sort or another, along with their various Malagasy wives, allies, merchants, and hangers-on.
The founder of the town of Sainte-Marie was a man named Adam Baldridge, himself a former pirate wanted for murder in Jamaica, who found himself a position as the commercial agent of an extremely successful, but notoriously unscrupulous, New York merchant named Samuel Philipse. Philipse already knew the area; he had engaged in commissioning ships to purchase slaves on the island in the late 1680s, and this allowed him to pretend that he was establishing a post for “legitimate” commerce (slaves), when in fact the post served largely to supply the buccaneers and dispose of their booty. For a while this resulted in a vigorous trade between Sainte-Marie and New York. Ships making the “pirate round” from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean would invariably stop at Sainte-Marie, often to careen their ship and resupply with food and weapons, then, if successful, return to sell off loot. Crew members wishing to take a break from seafaring, or attempt to return home incognito, would sojourn off there; some would take up permanent residence.
Baldridge was master of the fort and sometimes liked to refer to himself as “the Pirate King,” but there’s no evidence that anyone else did, or that in dealing with other buccaneers he was really much more than first among equals. The town seems to have had no stable government, or even population: this is because for most it was a place of temporary respite; those who did intend to stay longer often ended up dying fairly quickly of tropical disease exacerbated by drunkenness and other indulgences; those who did survive usually ended up settling on the mainland. Over time, the number of retired pirates did increase to several thousand, and the northeast coast was speckled with little pirate settlements.
THE PROBLEM WITH BOOTY
It’s impossible to understand the importance of Sainte-Marie unless one bears in mind that, while pirates operating in the Red Sea often found themselves in possession of enormous amounts of cash, along with gold, jewels, silks and calicoes, ivory, opium, and other exotic products, they often found it quite difficult to dispose of the stuff. One could no more, in the 1690s, walk into a London jeweler’s shop with a large bag full of diamonds and collect, say, a hundred thousand pounds in cash than one could today; the disposal of sums so large, especially by men from obviously modest backgrounds, would immediately attract the attention of the criminal authorities. The larger the sum, the more of a problem it became. Histories regularly report that after a given haul members of a pirate crew ended up in possession of treasure worth £120,000, and dutifully calculate how many millions this would be worth today, but it was well-nigh impossible for a pirate to translate such sums into, say, a stately seaside mansion on the coast of Cornwall, or Cape Cod. Perhaps one could find a corrupt or venal colonial official in the West Indies or Réunion who might offer the life of a settler for the lion’s share of the booty; but otherwise one would have to construct elaborate schemes or false identities just to be able to cash in a portion of the loot.
The case of Henry Avery (aka Henry Every, aka Ben Bridgeman, aka Long Ben), who secured perhaps the greatest haul in pirate history, is instructive. Avery had been elected captain of a privateer called the Charles after the crew mutinied in May 1694.4 Making their way to the Indian Ocean, they ended up joining a squadron that attacked a convoy of heavily armed Mughal ships on the way to Mecca, taking two (the Ganj-i-Sawai and Fateh Muhammed) after prolonged chase and battle, and making off with an estimated haul of £600,000 (according to the claim the Mughal court was later to make on the English authorities). According to one popular version of the story, Avery was the first of the crew to figure out that the jewels covering the furniture on the ships were not just cut glass, and while his crew were gathering up gold and coins, he went about with a chisel securing himself a sackful of diamonds. This is almost certainly a legend; in fact, the treasures were duly shared out among the crew; but disposing of the loot became an intractable problem. Apparently with objects of such value, Baldridge couldn’t help them. As a result, some men departed to Réunion, the ship itself first headed to Nassau, where the governor was rumored to be corruptible.
The problem was that the haul was simply too fantastic. An outraged Aurangzeb, accusing the British government of complicity, seized East India representatives in the country and threatened to expel them; the British government duly declared Avery an “enemy of all mankind” and an international manhunt was announced—the world’s first. Some of Avery’s men scattered across the North American colonies; others returned under assumed names to Ireland; a few were discovered trying to unload their goods, some of those ratted out their companions; and in the end, twenty-four were arrested and six publicly hanged in an attempt to appease the Mughal government. Avery’s fate, however, remained a mystery. He was never apprehended. Some said he died in hiding a short time later. Others insisted that he did eventually find himself a way to cash in, and retired in comfort, perhaps somewhere in the tropics; yet others, that he was systematically fleeced by Bristol diamond merchants, who knew a wanted man couldn’t take them to court no matter what they did, and died many years later, a pauper in some seaside slum, unable to afford even a coffin for his funeral.
Still, it would be too simplistic to conclude that Avery’s international notoriety was simply a burden. The legends that soon surrounded him afforded any number of later pirates, and perhaps Avery himself (we really don’t know what happened to him), the means to figure out a more advantageous way to negotiate with the existing power structure: by claiming to be representatives of a pirate kingdom. Rumors soon began to flow, in many cases clearly encouraged by Sainte-Marie pirates themselves, that Avery was still in Madagascar—that, in fact, he had made off with the Mughal’s daughter, who had fallen in love with the dashing buccaneer after the Ganj-i-Sawai was taken, and that they had founded a new kingdom in Madagascar. Some described Avery as ruling the island from an impregnable fortress with his princess bride, or presiding over a utopian democratic experiment in which all goods were shared in common. (These were the stories that morphed into Libertalia.) Before long, envoys of this imaginary pirate state appeared at courts across Europe, describing a burgeoning new kingdom dominating the southwest Indian Ocean, with thousands of pirates and confederates of all nations, with a vast fleet of warships, seeking allies. They approached the British court in 1707, and the French and Dutch courts in 1712 and 1714, respectively. In these cases they saw little success, but then a few years later won a much more receptive ear in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Sweden. The Swedish government actually signed initial treaties and prepared to send an ambassador before discovering the ruse; Peter the Great contemplated using alliance with the pirates to establish a Russian colony on Madagascar.5
Of course, we can have no way to know if these “envoys” were in any way connected with actual pirates, or were just independent scam artists. But the stories made a profound impact on the European imagination. One of the first writers to take up the cause of the new pirate state was a young Daniel Defoe, who in 1707 published in his journal Review an elaborate case for recognizing Avery’s kingdom: many ancient nations, Rome included, he observed, had been similarly founded by brigands of one sort or another; if the British government did not normalize relations with such a newly emerging power, it might well become a haven for enterprising criminals across the globe, and a danger to the empire. Shortly thereafter the enterprise was revealed to be a hoax. Nonetheless, works of popular fiction appeared, the first, a pamphlet in 1709 under the title The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery; the Famous English Pirate, Now in Possession of Madagascar, by Adrian van Broeck. Ten years later Defoe himself attempted to set the record straight with The King of Pirates: Being an Account of the Famous Enterprises of Captain Avery, the Mock King of Madagascar with His Rambles and Piracies Wherein All the Sham Accounts Formerly Publish’d of Him, Are Detected (1719). The Mughal princess was excised, and his utopian experiment eventually founders. A few years later, probably writing under the pseudonym of Captain Johnson in A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Defoe demotes Avery even further, making him an ineffective rascal who makes off with a heap of diamonds but dies in penury, whose crew descend into misery and Hobbesian chaos on the Malagasy mainland, and transfers the story of the great utopian experiment (now labeled Libertalia) to an entirely imaginary Captain Misson.
THE REAL ECONOMY OF SAINTE-MARIE
The actual history of Sainte-Marie might seem prosaic in comparison, but it was a genuine pirate settlement, and a place where those pillaging Indian Ocean shipping could easily find shelter and compatriots, and, at least between 1691 and 1699, dispose of some of their booty in exchange for some of the comforts of home. Several times a year, merchant ships would arrive from New York laden not just with ale, wine, spirits, gunpowder, and weapons, but with such essentials as woolens, mirrors, crockery, hammers, books, and sewing needles. They would return laden in part with pirate booty; in part, too, with Malagasy captives to be sold as slaves in Manhattan.
Ironically, it was the latter, the actual legal, “legitimate” commerce of Sainte-Marie, which almost led to the pirates’ undoing.
The slave trade was nothing new in Madagascar. Arab merchants had been taking advantage of internal wars to extract captives since the Middle Ages. Still, during the early years of the European presence in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar’s harbors were seen less as places to purchase slaves, than as for the resupply and refurbishment of ships heading back and forth from the cape. Gradually, the island developed something of a reputation in Europe as an exotic island paradise; tracts were published praising the virtues of its soils and climate, and both the French and British governments sponsored attempts at settler colonies: at Fort Dauphin in the southeast (1643–74), and St. Augustine Bay in the southwest (1644–46), respectively. Both failed. Dutch attempts to establish posts in the Bay of Antongil were similarly overwhelmed. In fact, one of the great mysteries about this period was that, while Madagascar had a long history of welcoming and incorporating merchants, settlers, and refugees from across the Indian Ocean region—not only from East Africa but from the Persian Gulf, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and other parts besides—European settlers were almost entirely unable to win a toehold.6
To some degree this was because would-be European settlers did, in fact, begin to get involved in the slave trade, which meant alliance with the most violent and unloved elements in Malagasy society, bandits or would-be warrior princes. But this can’t be a full explanation, since many Arab merchants did the same, and were decidedly more successful. It was also because Malagasy had developed a set of expectations for how foreigners should behave, and Europeans were either unwilling or unable to abide by them. Somewhat different traditions had developed in this respect on the west and east coasts. In the west, commerce was dominated by Arab and Swahili merchants, called the Antalaotra or “Sea People,” who formed their own port towns and remained in constant contact with their home communities. They tended to marry among themselves, but formed close alliances with Malagasy princes, who they supplied with magnificent luxuries, as well as weapons, in exchange for tropical products and slaves. The situation on the east coast was quite different. There the foreign presence seems to have been largely made up of political and religious refugees from across the Indian Ocean, who intermarried with the local population and became the core of new elites: sometimes new dynasties or aristocracies, sometimes magicians, curers, and intellectuals—and sometimes all of them.
European settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not pursue either strategy. They neither formed independent enclaves in alliance with Malagasy potentates, nor were they willing to intermarry and enter fully into the complex games of aristocratic politics. In the first case, European traders were (especially in the beginning) not really in a position to shower Malagasy allies with Oriental luxuries, because they didn’t really have access to Oriental luxuries to shower them with; they were still largely interlopers in the ancient trading world of the Indian Ocean, and their own countries’ products were not considered fit for kings. The one exception was firearms, but this only tended to reinforce the Malagasy impression of Europeans as little more than violent savages. Over time, at first the Dutch, and then the French and English, did manage to supplant the Antalaotra as patrons of the Sakalava kings of Boina and Menabe, but largely by muscling in on existing trade networks in silks, porcelain, and magnificent luxuries by sheer superior firepower. In other words, they were not unlike the pirates, and certainly that was how they were perceived by almost everyone else in the region, for whom distinctions between pirates, slavers, colonists, and “legitimate traders” seemed so many exotic legalistic niceties that had no effective bearing on how those who appeared in a European ship were actually likely to behave. Abbé Rochon notes European ships passing the island,
which would, on more than one occasion, procure provisions by force, by visiting them with unexpected vexations, by burning their villages, or by terrorizing them with their artillery, if they were not quick enough in providing them with cattle, poultry, or rice. One can understand how after such violent acts, the sight of a European vessel would become for the islanders a presage of terror and calamity.7
At the same time, European racism ensured that those colonists who did attempt the second strategy were unable to fully integrate themselves into Malagasy society. The most telling anecdote in this regard relates to the final fate of the French colony at Fort Dauphin. The governors had, for the most part, been sensible enough to marry into important local families, and most of the colonists—almost all were men—had Malagasy wives and, before long, families. This, though, drew them into local politics, sparking behavior that even some French observers described as “atrocious cruelties.”8 Before long the surrounding population grew seethingly hostile, and their Malagasy kin afforded their only protection. Yet the moment French women appeared on the scene, they instantly abandoned those kin, with disastrous results:
The colony’s end came in 1674 when a shipload of young women bound for Bourbon (Réunion) was wrecked in the harbour. The women persuaded the governor to marry them to the colonists; the colonists’ Malagasy wives then betrayed the colonists to the Malagasy forces, who massacred about 100 of them during the marriage festivities. The survivors soon left by ship, having spiked the cannon and burned the stores.9
Given this unfortunate history, to say that the pirates did better than previous European settlers at winning the acceptance of their Malagasy neighbors is perhaps not saying very much. But it also makes clear that the pirates had some real advantages over their compatriots. First of all, they actually did have access to Oriental luxuries with which to regale local allies, and often in considerable quantities. Second, having so absolutely rejected the social and political order of their homelands, they saw no reason not to fully integrate themselves. Before long, foreign observers began reporting Malagasy women at the port of Sainte-Marie “wearing dresses of the most beautiful Indian materials embroidered in gold and silver, with golden chains, bracelets, and even diamonds of considerable value.”10 Baldridge himself married locally, and seems to have fathered a number of children. Many pirates seem to have settled down and become, effectively, Malagasy—or, to be more precise, taken on the traditional role of half-Malagasy foreigners, “internal outsiders,” one might call them, capable of mediating with foreign traders, familiar in that part of the coast.
The path to this was not altogether smooth, however, and here Baldridge’s own fate is instructive. Since his operation on Sainte-Marie was at least semilegal—for most of the 1690s there was as yet no law against trading with outlaws—he was under some of the same pressures from home that sparked some of the worst behavior of earlier European traders. By his own later account, he established a fort on the island and made it a refuge for those fleeing from the endemic minor wars, raiding and counterraiding, that characterized life on the mainland; and then, with the help of the refugees, organized raids of his own, to attain captives to trade for their captive relatives. In the process, of course, some of those captives were sold to the merchant ships regularly arriving from Manhattan. But it would appear their numbers were never enough to satisfy Philipse, back in New York. Baldridge’s correspondence with his patron, some of which has been preserved, is endlessly peppered with indignant complaints about the small numbers and inferior quality of the slaves he did manage to supply.
Despite the endless vituperations, large numbers of Malagasy slaves do appear to have ended up in the city. To get a sense of how many: as late as 1741, when authorities in New York uncovered what they believed to be a network of revolutionary cells planning an uprising in the city, they found them to be organized by language—the most prominent being made up of speakers of West African languages (Fante, Papa, and Igbo), speakers of Irish, and speakers of Malagasy.11
Philipse stepped up the pressure even more as he learned of the sugar plantations then being set up in Mauritius and Réunion, which provided a ready nearby market. It’s not clear what he held over Baldridge’s head, but it must have been something serious, because by 1697, the old pirate was reduced to an act of sheer self-destructive treachery: he lured several dozen Malagasy allies, “men, women and children,” onto a merchant ship and sent them off in chains across the Atlantic.* When word got out, local lineage chiefs seem to have decided the pirates had worn out their welcome, and a few months later there was a coordinated attack on Sainte-Marie and pirate settlements on the mainland. On Sainte-Marie the fortress was destroyed and about thirty pirates’ throats cut—only a handful managed to escape to sea. The pirates seem to have gotten off more easily on the mainland, fending off their attackers (who might have just been trying to send a warning): in some cases they might have been tipped off, and in at least one—which seems to have been the major port town of Ambonavola, the later Foulpointe—because their Malagasy allies were willing to defend them.12
Baldridge was lucky. He was at sea on a voyage to Mauritius when the attacks took place, and, apprised of what happened, departed immediately for America. Six months later another commercial agent, one Edward Walsh, replaced him, and before long reports once again began to speak of a thriving town on the island, full of hundreds of freebooters. Still, the fortress was never rebuilt. The slave trade from Sainte-Marie ceased. But trade in booty became more difficult as well: the international notoriety of Avery, and later Captain Kidd (who had also been based on Sainte-Marie), eventually moved the authorities in London and New York to take more decisive action. The provisioning of criminals was made illegal, and they dispatched a largely symbolic punitive expedition (it failed to find any pirates). By that time, most of the pirates were living on the mainland, and their relations with their Malagasy hosts appear to have changed.13
THE REAL LIBERTALIA I: AMBONAVOLA
In 1697, then, the pirate settlers almost suffered the same fate as all previous European would-be settlers on the island. It was only the good relations the settlers on the mainland had with their Malagasy neighbors that allowed them to survive. Shifts in attitude toward slavers were particularly dramatic. Rather than participate, the pirates along the coast opposite Sainte-Marie ended up effectively defending the coast against the trade: since attacking or surreptitiously taking over slaving ships—often, with the connivance of the crews, who likewise turned pirate—became their principal way of acquiring new vessels. This, and fear of further rebellion, seems to have caused a profound change in the pirates’ attitude toward conflict. Where men like Baldridge thrived on local unrest (which produced captives), and were notorious for stirring it up, the pirates, according to some of Captain Johnson’s sources, gradually realized their interests were best served by doing the opposite.
Copyright © 2019 by David Graeber
