The story of Libertalia — the egalitarian pirate utopia supposedly founded on the northern coast of Madagascar by a French freethinker named Captain Misson and a renegade Italian priest named Caraccioli — appears in exactly one source: the second volume of Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates, published at London in 1728. It appears nowhere else. No other European document mentions it. No archaeological evidence has ever been found for it. No Malagasy oral tradition records anything resembling it. The two principal figures, Misson and Caraccioli, do not appear in any other surviving record, and the place they supposedly founded does not exist by that name on any Portuguese, Dutch, English, or French chart of the period.

Most serious historians now accept that Libertalia is, almost certainly, a fiction — either Johnson's own invention or his polished retelling of a tavern story he heard from a former sailor. This is the position taken by, among others, Marcus Rediker, who treats it as a kind of political fable, and Jan Rogoziński, whose Honor Among Thieves remains the most thorough debunking. I find their case persuasive, and I am not going to argue against it here.

What I want to do instead is something rather different, which is to ask what was actually happening on Madagascar in the relevant period — roughly the thirty years between 1690 and 1720, when the island was, in fact, a major centre of pirate activity. The historical reality is more complex than the legend, much sadder, and largely buried under the legend's romantic weight.

Why Madagascar?

The reasons pirates went to Madagascar in the 1690s were almost entirely logistical. The island sits roughly halfway between the Caribbean — where, after about 1685, English colonial governors had begun seriously cracking down on the buccaneers — and the Indian Ocean trade routes, where Mughal pilgrim and merchant ships carried perhaps the richest cargoes in the world. Madagascar was a long way from any European naval power. It had ample timber, fresh water, and food. The local population was politically fragmented, with no single Malagasy state strong enough to expel a determined group of armed Europeans. And the prevailing trade-wind patterns made it almost ideal as a base from which to intercept ships running up the Mozambique Channel or returning from Surat to the Persian Gulf.

Between approximately 1691 and 1698, a series of European-led settlements appeared along the northeast coast — at the islet of Sainte-Marie (Nosy Boraha), at Ranter Bay, and at several smaller harbours. These were not utopias. They were not republics. They were trading posts, run mostly by individual entrepreneurs, of whom the best documented is a New Yorker named Adam Baldridge.

Adam Baldridge's books

Baldridge arrived on Sainte-Marie in late 1691, having fled a charge of murder in Jamaica. By 1693 he had built a small fort, taken three or four Malagasy wives from local political families, and established what was essentially a wholesaling operation: he traded provisions, manufactured goods, and Malagasy slaves to passing pirates in exchange for plundered Indian goods, which he then re-sold to New York merchants — chiefly Frederick Philipse, one of the wealthiest men in the English-speaking colonies — via correspondent ships that called perhaps twice a year.

The remarkable thing about Baldridge is that his books survive. A partial copy of his trading ledger for the years 1691 to 1697, made for the use of a New York lawsuit in 1698, is preserved among the papers of the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies. It is one of the most extraordinary commercial documents of the period.

It shows, among many other things, that pirates calling at Baldridge's establishment were charged London-equivalent prices for goods. That captured Indian silks were sold to him at perhaps one-tenth of their wholesale value in New York. That he held approximately forty Malagasy slaves on his own account. And that the trading post functioned in every meaningful respect as a private commercial concern, owing allegiance to no flag, no sovereign, and no republican principle whatsoever.

Captain Tew came in November and bought 200 weight of cheese, 800 weight of dryed beef, and other necessaries to the value of 400 pieces of eight, paid in such Arabian goods as he had taken. — FROM BALDRIDGE'S LEDGER, ENTRY FOR NOVEMBER 1694

The Malagasy side

What is hardest to recover from the European documents — and what almost no popular account of "the pirate republic" attempts to recover at all — is the Malagasy perspective on the same events. The European settlements existed only by permission of, and in continuous negotiation with, local Malagasy political authorities. The most important of these in the relevant period were the Sakalava kingdoms on the west coast and the Betsimisaraka confederacy on the east, which was itself a confederation only loosely organised until the rise of Ratsimilaho in the 1710s.

Ratsimilaho is a figure whose importance to this story has been systematically underestimated in the English-language literature. He was the son of an English pirate, Thomas Tew (or possibly another Englishman of similar name — the evidence is unclear), and a princess of the Betsimisaraka clans. He was educated in part among Europeans, in part in his mother's court, and from approximately 1712 he set about unifying the eastern Madagascar peoples into a single political entity with himself as king. By 1720 he had largely succeeded. The European trading posts — Baldridge's establishment had been destroyed in 1697 by a Malagasy raid; his successors had built smaller and more cautious operations — operated, from this point on, under conditions set by Ratsimilaho's kingdom.

This is, I think, the historical reality that the Libertalia legend obscures. The Europeans on Madagascar were not founding a utopia. They were not even, after a certain point, really independent. They were tenants in an emerging Malagasy state, who could be expelled or absorbed at the convenience of their hosts, and who were, by 1725 or so, almost completely absorbed. The descendants of the European pirate community on Madagascar — the so-called zana-malata, "children of the mulattoes" — are still identifiable as a distinct cultural group today, integrated into Malagasy society as a kind of historical caste.

The cost

I called this essay "the hidden cost" of the pirate republic, and I should be specific about what I mean. The cost was not borne by the Europeans, most of whom either died of disease, were absorbed peacefully into Malagasy society, or sailed home with modest fortunes when the Royal Navy began cracking down after 1720. The cost was borne by the Malagasy people who lived through it.

The pirate settlements were active participants in the Indian Ocean slave trade. The records show that the European traders bought, sold, and held large numbers of Malagasy slaves — including, in many cases, slaves taken in inter-Malagasy wars that the European arms trade had itself helped to escalate. The estimate by recent Malagasy historians is that between fifteen and twenty thousand Malagasy people were exported into slavery via the northeast coast trading posts during the relevant decades, principally to the Mascarenes (Réunion and Mauritius) but also to the Americas. The pirate trade in Indian goods was, in part, a cover for and adjunct to the much larger and more profitable trade in Malagasy people.

This is the part of the story that does not survive in the legend. Libertalia, in Johnson's telling, is a community of brave men who have rejected tyranny and embraced equality. The historical Madagascar pirate community was, among other things, a small but significant participant in the largest forced movement of human beings in the early modern world. Both of these statements are about the same place at the same time. The first one is the one that has been remembered. The second one is the one that ought to be.

A note on the sources

Baldridge's ledger is reproduced, in part, in J. Franklin Jameson's Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (1923), which remains in print. The standard scholarly history of the period is Arne Bialuschewski's recent monograph Piracy and the Atlantic World, c.1690–1730. For the Malagasy political context, Pier Larson's History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement is indispensable; for Ratsimilaho and the Betsimisaraka, the work of Stephen Ellis remains the most thorough.