Lady Pirates: A Poor and Pitiless Death

Some time in the first week of April, 1721, Mary Read died in a Jamaica prison.


This infamous pirate, who had become a sensation on both sides of the Pond due to widely circulated broadsheets, stood at the bar with her now equally infamous mates, “Calico” Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny. After sentence was passed and the three pirates were remanded to the gallows, Read and Bonny pulled their trump card. Both claimed to be pregnant. A quick examination proved them right, and the lady pirates were sent back to jail to await the births of their babies. Thereafter, the sentence of death would be carried out.

According to legend and fact, both women cheated the hangman but in very different ways. Charles Johnson, who was probably Daniel Defoe, says in his History of Pyrates that even he cannot say what became of Anne Bonny. She disappeared from prison, alive and hale evidently, and was never heard of again. Mary Read, on the other hand, meets a much less romantic end. Both Johnson and the legal records available show that she died before she could be hanged, of “feaver.”

At this point the mystery of Mary’s death becomes almost as intriguing as that of Anne’s disappearance. Just what type of illness was it that this by all accounts strapping, even masculine female seafarer succumbed to? Some writers say she died before giving birth. Others split hairs – but very important hairs – by either carefully choosing or carelessly confusing their wording. In these instances Mary died either in childbirth or of childbirth.

While separating fact from fiction is impossible at this late date, short of a body to forensically examine, let us evaluate each of the possibilities. From there, opinions and fantasies can fly away into the ether.

First and foremost, Mary’s situation as a prisoner – and a pregnant prisoner at that – must be considered. Not only Johnson but one of those famous broadsheets tells us that it was Read and Bonny who put up the final fight aboard their sloop, William. The men, according to generally accepted accounts, huddled below decks with their captain, either too drunk or too scared to participate. This would have left both women, at the very least, somewhat weakened as they entered the jail in Jamaica that would end up being Mary’s final home.

The conditions in prison, probably needless to say, would not have been in the least savory. In a tropical climate, dank, perpetually warm cells would probably have been the norm. Whether or not prisoners were kept in individual confinement is not clear, but most probably at the time and place prison would have meant crowded, unsanitary rooms where everyone would have been lucky to be away from whatever part of the space people used as a privy. Lice, fleas, ticks and other parasites would have had a field day. The cases of so called gaol fever probably would have been high.

Gaol fever, also sometimes called ship fever because it was virtually endemic on the prison hulks popular with the British Admiralty, was what we know today as typhus. This disease is caused by a bacteria spread by vermin, usually lice, and encouraged by cramped, unsanitary conditions. The first symptoms are generally flu-like with chills, cough and joint pain. A high fever up to 104 degrees ensues causing delirium, light sensitivity, stupor, low blood pressure and finally death. A rash can develop at any time and in severe conditions this can cause gangrene. Gaol fever, then, may be the thing that took the life of both Mary Read and her unborn child.

Perhaps not, however. In some accounts she did live to give birth which even today is no easy task under the best of circumstances. How and where a birth in prison might have been undertaken is not reliably recorded, but it is probably safe to say that privacy was at a premium. The process of giving birth would have been stressful enough, but the added stresses of unsanitary conditions, bad diet and the potential lack of professional assistance – at the time a midwife – would have compounded the situation.

If the birth of Mary’s child, alive or dead, was successful yet more trouble with “feaver” loomed large. Puerperal fever, also known as childbed fever, was a very real problem. As Judith Walzer Leavitt puts it in her book Brought to Bed:

The raw wound of placental separation combined with the trauma of delivery created a ripe environment for the introduction of infected material and its rapid entrance into the blood stream.

Though cases of puerperal fever were surprisingly uncommon in home births during Mary’s era, giving birth in prison would have created a perfect storm of conditions for contracting and quickly dying of this dreaded condition.

Whatever the case, it is a sad end to a story of an unusual and interesting woman. She may have known the famous “short and merry” life of a freebooter, but she died a poor and pitiless death.

Header: Imaginative engraving of Mary Read from Johnson’s History of Pyrates

People: Fly in the Ointment

Today's Golden Age pirate is famous, not for plunder, seamanship, or success, but because of his actions prior to his execution. He is mentioned briefly in Captain Johnson’s History of Pyrates, dwelled on at length in Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations and written about by Cotton Mather. As is so often the case, we know next to nothing about William Fly’s background, but his death made a splash that resonates into our own time.


Fly, according to Johnson, was born to “very obscure parents” probably around the turn of the 17th to the 18th century. By 1726 he was bosun aboard Captain John Green’s brig Elizabeth headed out from New England for the coast of West Africa. Many who have written about Fly assume that Elizabeth was one of those ships involved in the so called “triangle trade” carrying rum to Africa where it would be traded for slaves. There is nothing specific in the record to confirm this, but it is certainly a possibility. What we do know for sure is that Elizabeth was involved in some sort of merchant endeavor and that Green did not run a happy ship.

Before the ship left for blue water to cross the Atlantic, Fly and his captain were butting heads. At his trial, and even before, Fly complained bitterly of the “bad usage” suffered under Captain Green by him and his mates. Fly’s comments are in line with the classic argument as to why merchant seamen turned pirate. Small crews, low wages, grueling schedules, unreasonable discipline, poor food and a host of other trials sent men over the edge to desertion, mutiny and even murder.

Fed up from virtually the start of Elizabeth’s cruise, William Fly organized a mutiny. One night in the spring of 1726, he and fellow crewman Alexander Mitchell pulled Captain Green out of his cot, dragged him up on deck and subjected him to a beating. When he was half-unconscious, they and others tossed Green over the ship’s side. Still prepared to fight for his life, Green caught part of the rigging and held on tight. One of the mutineers grabbed an ax, several of which would have been kept handy to cut away rigging in foul weather, and chopped off his captain’s hand. The first mate, Thomas Jenkins, followed the captain over the side. The final target of the men’s ire, an unnamed surgeon, was spared as “they might find him useful”. He was shackled in bilboes instead.

Fly was quickly chosen as the new captain of Elizabeth. He immediately changed her name to Fame’s Revenge and he and his men set out a-pirating. They took five prizes in all and each one appears to have been a poorly laden merchant. Fly made it his signature move to torture or in other ways punish the captains he took hostage. He notoriously whipped Captain John Fulker of the John & Hannah so viciously that the man nearly died.

It seems that William Fly was no more popular as captain than Green had been. A group of his men, possibly those pressed into service from prize vessels, rose up and took Fly’s ship. They turned it over to the authorities of Boston in June of 1726. Fly and a dozen of his crew were incarcerated and set to be tried for piracy and murder on the high seas.

At this point, the notorious Puritan minister Cotton Mather enters the picture. Sent by the judge in the case to exact confessions and guide penitence in the pirates, Mather ran into a man that he himself called “a most uncommon and amazing instance of impenitence and stupidity and what spectacles of obduration the wicked will be” in William Fly. Mather writes that, when confronted with the crimes of mutiny and murder, Fly would, no pun intended, fly into an uncontrollable rage. At one point the pirate ranted that he “… would not own myself guilty of any murder, our captain and his mate used us barbarously…” While Fly does not list specific actions, he laments that “… poor men can’t have justice done us…” no matter how badly they are treated by their nominal betters.

Fly continued his obduration straight up until his conviction and execution. While others convicted with him stood on the gallows and “preached” to the crowd – as Mather had hoped – the ills of drink and rebellion, Fly did exactly the opposite. He came to face death with a “smiling aspect” and eyed the crowd “unconcerned”.

Fly even went so far as to chastise the hangman for “not understanding his trade” and stepped forward to retie the noose with which he would be killed. He then addressed the crowd as he had Reverend Mather, saying frankly that he had “wronged no man”. He went on to say that he wanted those who commanded vessels to “… take warning by the fate of [our] captain… and to pay sailors their wages when due, and to treat them better”. It was an ominous warning from a man who had taken the ultimate step in eliminating his tormenter and was facing death because of it.

Some writers and historians, notably Rediker, have used Fly as an example of the underlying reason for piracy as a life pursuit. In this scenario, William Fly and his fellows stand as anti-heroes bucking the “barbarous” establishment. As this post at Executed Today puts it “… the radical doomed sphere of resistance pirates offered to the enormous cruelty of the developing Atlantic economy…” To my mind, this is overstating the case. From Barbary to the buccaneers, through the Golden Age and into the last days of the privateers, most of the men who went out seeking prizes on the high seas were no more freedom fighters than modern day drug dealers. They were in it for the simple reward of cash. While some men may have had good intentions, it is important to note that Fly’s short career as a sea captain turned out to be no more glorious than that of the commander he killed.

Fly’s body and those of his compatriots were gibbeted on the little island in Boston Harbor known as Nix’s Mate as a “warning to other seamen”. To this day, stories of strange lights around the island – particularly on summer nights – lead some to believe that his ghost still haunts the rocky outcropping. While that, too, is probably overstating the case it is a possibility worth imagining.

Header: Engraving from The Pirate's Own Book

People: The Mad Carpenter

John Phillips, who for all intents and purposes was nothing more than a two-bit crook, is remembered in the annals of piracy because of two distinctions. First, Phillips’ Ship’s Articles have come down to us in tact and include a curious and otherwise unheard of passage regarding “prudent” women. Second, Phillips is given space in A General History of Pyrates by Charles Johnson (aka Daniel Defoe), one of the foremost sources of information pertaining to pirates of the Golden Age. Beyond that, Phillips seems to have been a man who started out with a relatively level head, but lost his equilibrium along the way turning into a murderous, vengeful individual who was mad at the whole wide world.


Probably born in Devonshire, England some time in the late 17th century, John Phillips took up the trade of carpentry. It was as a carpenter’s mate that Phillips was traveling from England to Newfoundland when his ship was overtaken and boarded by the pirate Thomas Anstis. As so often happened during that era, Anstis’ ship was without a carpenter and Phillips was pressed, very much against his will it seems, into joining the pirate crew.

Not long after this incident, Anstis had his ship at Tobago in early 1723. After finishing a careening, many of Anstis’ men – including Phillips – were still ashore when Royal Navy ships came into view. In a hurry to save his own skin, Anstis packed on all sail and left the men ashore to fend for themselves. Phillips and a few others escaped into the jungle but the British ships captured many of Anstis’ men. Anstis himself would later be killed by his own crew for his cowardly act; Phillips, however, made it back to England somehow.

According to Johnson, Phillips got word almost immediately that his mates from Anstis’ ship were to be tried for piracy. Fearing his name would come up in the proceedings, he quickly took up a post on another ship bound for Newfoundland. Unable to find work as a carpenter in the New World, he went to work gutting fish among the numerous fisheries on the coast. This job was brutally hard, paid very little and in the dark and cold of the Newfoundland winters, literally drove men and women mad.

Within four month, Phillips was fed up with the fisheries. He and four other like-minded mates stole a boat belonging to a man name Minot or Minors in August of 1723. Their intention was to go a-pirating and they made quick work of a few local fishing vessels, pressing some of the men aboard them into signing their hastily drawn up Ship’s Articles. Though his articles generally follow the pattern of the few others that have come down to us, Phillips included a passage in same that read:

If at any time you meet with a prudent Woman, any Man that offers to meddle with her, without her Consent, shall suffer present Death.

At least two modern writers have speculated that Phillips was witness to brutal incidences of rape while aboard Anstis’ vessel and had no stomach for such barbarism. This is a curious speculation given Phillips’ later dealings not only with prisoners but with his own crew. Of course murder is not rape but rape is torture; to my mind the theory remains only speculative.

At some point, Phillips took John Rose Archer, who claimed to have sailed with Blackbeard, aboard his ship and promoted him to quartermaster. The caused ill will among Phillips’ original four shipmates and that would bubble over in a short time.

Phillips headed south to Tobago where he and his crew suffered three months of near starvation without a single prize. Finally their luck changed; they captured a French merchant and took her over, renaming her Revenge. Other prizes followed, but trouble was brewing. Some of Phillips’ crew, many of them men forced to serve aboard Revenge, began trying to escape. Many were flogged for their trouble and at least one, carpenter Thomas Fern, was shot dead probably by Phillips himself.

By late 1723, Phillips had returned to the waters off Newfoundland where he gutted the local fishing boats almost as soon as they hit the water. One was notably spared because it belonged to the same man from whom Phillips had stolen his original vessel. “We have done him enough injury already,” he told his crew. After this kindness he turned around and tortured a captain who had foolishly tried to run from Revenge.

The success Phillips had in Newfoundland masked the goings-on aboard his own ship. His punishments of even minor infractions became more heinous and already resentful men turned mutinous. In April of 1724, the Revenges had had enough; they rose up and tossed Phillips overboard to drown in the icy water of Notre Dame Bay.

The lack of leadership, no matter how brutal, made quick work of the men aboard Revenge. Johnson says that the ship was overtaken by the Royal Navy and most of her small crew was hanged including quartermaster Archer.

For all his small success, Phillips life at sea did not seem to sit well with him. Unlike others pressed into pirate service who went on to enjoy their new life, freebooting was a short but arguably not very merry one for the mad carpenter.

Header: Engraving of John Phillips from Johnson’s A General History of Pyrates

Lady Pirates: Before the Siren's Song

The story of Anne Bonny (or Bonney, or Cormac, or Fulford) is relatively well known to a wide range of historical interests. Students of women’s history use her as an example of the free-thinking, “scandalous” woman who by her very existence proves that not all of our distaff ancestors were crop hoein’, clothes sewin’ baby machines. Students of nautical history point to both her and her shipmate Mary Read as evidence that more cross-dressing women were aboard ships in the great age of sail than most books would have us believe. Students of pirate history just plain love her and, I will admit, frequently overlook how inherently sad her story is in favor of a swashbuckling, sword-wielding female hero with her boobs out. All of this scrutiny has lost who Anne probably really was and some of that, I think, is due to the fact that her “back story” has been misplaced. It is a shame really, because the story has a lot to recommend it.


In 1724 Captain Charles Johnson published the first proper account of female pirates Bonny and Read in his anthology A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. Johnson, according to many scholars, was a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe who, though not himself a seagoing man, wrote of the sea most capably. Defoe also had a reputation for fact checking in a time when writers rarely bothered to spell the names of their “true life” characters correctly, which brings up a point I feel compelled to make. Whether or not Johnson was Defoe is still and issue for debate and I sometimes wonder if scholars cling to the idea simply so that they can jump to the next obvious conclusion: the stories in Pyrates are reliable because Defoe was reliable.

Regardless of actual author, Pyrates tells us a lot more about Anne Bonny’s family and childhood than any book that came after. According to the book Anne’s father was a lawyer in County Cork, Ireland who lived in comfortable circumstances thanks to the wealth and influence of his lady wife. The details of William Cormac’s personality are missing from the story but one gets the impression that he was a rogue.

Cormac and his wife had no children when they hired a maid named Mary Brennan. Johnson calls her a “handsome young woman” but says nothing of her origins. The girl had suitors calling almost immediately and according to Johnson she attached herself to an apprentice tanner who would visit her frequently. The young man supplemented his income by stealing and one afternoon while Mary was otherwise engaged he “whipped” three silver spoons into his coat pocket.

Mary, who may very well have been given responsibility over a very precious household collection, noticed some of the silver missing. She confronted her boyfriend who denied the theft. She pressed him, even threatening to get the law involved if he did not return the purloined items. Johnson tells us that the tanner relented, though not directly to Mary. Instead, he put the spoons in her bed with the thought that she would find them there. She did not.

Here one must step back and wonder a bit about Mary. She was clever enough to be able to count silver and know when it was missing. Even more to the point, she knew her beau well enough to know that he was the thief and threatened him with reprisal. Yet she obviously continued to sleep with him given that he deposited the stolen goods in her bed and then, as if adding insult to injury, she neglected to find them there. Common sense, as the events that followed will prove, was not one of Mary’s strong suits.

Madam Cormac was away during the affair of the spoons and upon her return Mary reported the theft directly to her. Either word got back to him or Mary confronted the tanner’s apprentice again as he in turn went to Madam Cormac and accused Mary of the theft. Not only did he make the accusation but he told her just where she could find her missing spoons. The lawyer’s wife was incredulous until she entered Mary’s room and found the silver exactly where the tanner said it would be. Madam Cormac, who had clearly read Moliere, then feigned a raging fever and – in a wifely effort to keep her husband from falling ill – told Mary to sleep in the stable while the mistress of the house slept in her servant’s bed.

This is a curious move. Was Madam Cormac trying to find out if the tanner and Mary were in cahoots to rob her blind? Did she imagine Mary would secrete more silver in her bed even as the lady of the house slept there? Had all this bad news really made her ill? Whatever her reason, the lawyer’s wife was about to have far more revealed to her than the name of a petty thief.

William Cormac returned home that evening and evidently asked no questions about his wife. Perhaps he imagined she was still away but whatever his thoughts he went about his evening routine as usual. This routine included sneaking into Mary Brennan’s little room in the middle of the night and calling out softly to the person lying in the bed. Madam Cormac, still awake and alert to any further mischief, recognized her husband’s voice. She did not respond and so, as Johnson tells us, her “… husband came to bed and played the vigorous lover”. His wife, whom he obviously thought was Mary, “… bore it like a Christian.” Although one hates to excuse deception, that last point may explain why William was prowling around the maid’s room in the first place.

When William passed out, Johnson implies due to exhaustion, his wife slipped from her maid’s bed. She returned to the place she had been staying, either her mother’s or her mother-in-law’s house, and called for the Beadle to report Mary Brennan as a thief. Mary landed in jail without further ado.

When William was advised of all these goings on, which may very well have occurred while he snored in Mary’s bed, he became enraged. He managed to get Mary out of prison after some time and then he confronted his wife. To his great surprise, and doubtless in a scene that would have made Moliere laugh out loud, both maid and wife announced they were pregnant. The Cormacs argued, as one might expect, and Madam determined to split permanently from her unfaithful husband. In time she gave birth to twins while Mary gave William a daughter they named Anne.

Of course the problem of his wife’s withdrawal from the marriage was that William was left without a proper income. Madam Cormac did give him an allowance for a time but, when she found that he was living with Mary and her daughter, she cut him off for good. At this point, William seems to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps at long last. He sold his law firm, packed up and took Mary and Anne to the colonial city of Charleston in what would become South Carolina.

Here Cormac prospered as a planter, seemingly finding his niche at last. His happiness was short-lived, however. Mary died, very possibly of the yellow fever that often troubled immigrants from cooler climes, and Anne became an insufferable teenager. While never destined for high society – doubtless the elite class of Charleston knew the story of her family and gossiped about it behind their fans – Cormac hoped that Anne would make a good marriage. Instead, according to Johnson, she beat the first suitor her father offered her bloody then turned around and married ne’er-do-well James Bonny who promised her adventure around the world.

In a sad climax to her family story, William Cormac disowned his beloved daughter, and Anne was faced with the reality of having married a gold digger. Bonny was only interested in Anne for her father’s money after all. He dragged his new bride off to New Providence in the Bahamas, hoping to become a pirate hunter. Instead, Anne fell under the spell of handsome “Calico” Jack Rackham and the rest, as they say, is history.

Anne Bonny probably didn’t give much thought to where she came from as she sailed off a pirating with her lover. All the same, it is clear that her background effected who she became. If Johnson’s story has any truth to it, anyway. Even before the siren’s song of the sea called her to infamy, Anne Bonny was foreshadowing more than a few Americans as a bastard child in a new world who refused to follow her society’s rules.

Header: the classic engraving of Anne Bonny

Home Ports: Saint Mary's Island

Just north and east of the island of Madagascar is a small group of islets that are perfectly situated. Perfectly, that is, for a pirate looking to score some of the fattest prices in the 18th century world. The islets sit on the edge of the Indian Ocean and just south of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Persia. Using any of them as a port, a clever pirate could take a fat East Indiaman returning to England or Holland one evening and then cruise north the following day to snatch the treasure galley of some Ottoman pasha. All this and home in time for supper. Or so the rumors that circulated in places like the West Indies and the Guinea coast said.

Ile Sainte-Marie is the largest islet of the group in question. As piracy became a target of aggressive persecution by the various European powers in the early 18th century, the men who plied the sweet trade turned their eyes to the wealth of the East and set sail for Africa. They found Sainte-Mary quite to their liking. Not only was it abundant in fruits and game, its native people were friendly – particularly when they found that most of the pirates had not come to enslave them – and the island was surrounded by shallow cays and inlets. These were perfect for hiding from aggressors, evaluating a prize or simply pulling a ship up on her keel and giving her a good careening. It seems, at least on the face of it, a veritable pirate paradise.

This idea caught the imagination of European writers and one in particular, the man who fancied himself Captain Charles Johnson, devoted a good deal of paper to writings on the piratical community he call Libertalia. Johnson, the author of A General History of Pyrates, has come down to us as either an eye witness authority on piracy or a complete crank. It just depends on who is commenting on his work. The idea of Libertalia, which is often reputed to have been based on Ile Sainte-Marie, has caught the imagination of many moderns because of its very modern take on community. Whether or not it actually existed is the point that must be questioned.

Libertalia according to Johnson’s book was the brainchild of a merchant seaman turned pirate named James Misson. In his vision, which was spurred on by his association with a “lewd Priest” from Rome named Giacomo Caraccioli, the Frenchman saw all men as brothers, no organized religion as valid, and slavery as the cruelest of human ills. His pirate utopia was established under a white flag and Libertalia’s motto was “For God and Liberty”. The pirates cruising out of Ile Saint-Marie called themselves Liberi and shared all goods and prizes in common. They routinely set any slaves they came upon free and so their numbers were increased rapidly by the grateful Africans joining up right away. According to Johnson’s description, Libertalia lasted 25 years and welcomed such famous and infamous captains as Thomas Tew, Christopher Condent, Henry Avery and William Kidd. The end of Libertalia is as egalitarian as its founding was revolutionary. Eventually the pirates grew weary of their lives at sea and settled down with the local girls to farm land where “… no hedge bounded any particular man’s property…” and the fruits of their labors were “… carried into the Common Treasury”.

No one would deny that the idea of Libertalia is delightful. Of course, we would all like to imagine the lion lying down with the lamb and beating swords into plowshares. The reality, however, is that Johnson chose unwisely in his fantasy populace. Pirates, though in many ways more democratic than the societies they preyed upon, were also ruthless brigands who were far from altruistic. Slaves were more often than not prizes to be sold, other pirate crews could be a threat to the amount of loot each individual might get, and the last thing these sailors were cut out for was farming. In many cases, getting away from the drudgery of agriculture was why they went to sea in the first place. Then, too, there’s the harsh fact that to take a prize or prizes, some killing will probably have to be done and that seems a poor way to treat a brother.

Ile Sainte-Marie was certainly a pirate base during the heyday of the “pirate round” from approximately 1690 to 1725. There can be no doubt that men like Tew, Edward England, Avery and Kidd at least touched at the island and several shipwrecks dating from the era have been found in the waters around Sainte-Marie. One in particular, sunk in Baie des Forbans not far from the island’s capital, is thought by the explorer Barry Clifford (of Whydah fame) to be Christopher Condent’s Flying Dragon. There is also the old cemetery that overlooks the bay (pictured above) known as le Cimitere des Pirates where modern residents continue to leave offerings for their freebooting ancestors. That seems to me a far more factual legacy than any pirate utopia could ever be.

Home Ports: The Big Island

In our modern age, Madagascar is the place where those awesome lemurs come from (your humble hostess is particularly fond of the Nosferatu-like Aye-Ayes). It's touristy, kick back, and the name of an unfortunate series of children's movies. But once upon a time it was a legendary pirate haven where the gold fairly fell off the palm trees, the spirits flowed from bottomless barrels and the women forsook their men to be with freebooters. Or so the stories went.

By the 1690s the days of the great buccaneers on the Spanish Main were drawing to a swift close. The denouement was upon that story of glorious riches and outright terror. The Spanish had lost their grip on the Main - as much due to their own ridiculous greed as the rapaciousness of the sea raiders - and the gold and silver no longer flowed like water from Potosi and Peru. The great boucaniers - L'Olonnais, Le Grand, de Grammont - were all gone. The king of the English buccaneers, Henry Morgan, died in his bed in August, 1688. Piracy in the Caribbean was on the decline.

Of course, a drop in resources doesn't mean a drop in piracy. It just means men who are willing to pursue a short life and merry need to find a new hunting ground and so more than one old school buccaneer looked east.

The slave trade off the coast of West Africa was booming, with ships and human cargo to be had aplenty. On the other side of the continent, the rich merchant trade sailed back and forth from Europe to the East. English and Dutch East Indiamen were frequently so laden with cargo (as were the slavers) that they could not carry cannon. If they did, the guns were more likely to be used as ballast than as weapons. Can't you just imagine our gentlemen of fortune rubbing their hands together with glee?

Smack dab in the middle of this incredible bounty was the big island of Madagascar. She was surrounded by tranquil anchorages that kept a ship safe from storms and navy men-of-war whose drafts were far too deep to follow a pirate sloop beyond the bar. Her weather was fine and her population sparse and friendly (none of those pesky Carib or Darien types who would actually crack a freebooter's head open for disturbing their villages or molesting their women... the nerve!) Finally, fresh water, fruit and meat was readily available. It was the perfect situation that brought a perfect storm of piratical activity.

For twenty years, from approximately 1690 to 1710, Madagascar attracted some of the most famous pirates of the transitional age along with hundreds of their men. Thomas Tew, Edward England, Howell Davis, Bartholomew Roberts, Henry Avery and William Kidd, to name just a few, all used Madagascar as a base. St. Mary's Island, off the east coast of Madagascar, was said to be home to over 1,000 pirates by 1700. Business was booming and none of the European governments seemed capable of putting a stop to the looting of merchants and slavers.

Finally, England took matters in hand and began allotting some of her warships to convoy with East Indiamen returning to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope. Pirate ships were destroyed and pirates killed; the pickings over the course of the first decade of the new century became decidedly less easy. Men slowly turned away from the trade or sailed off to new ports. Some even chose to settle down and farm the rich soil of their new island home. By 1711, British broadsheets reported no more than 100 pirates still active off the coast of Madagascar.

The boom was over, but the legend lived on. Charles Johnson in his A General History of Pirates devoted an entire chapter to French pirate Captain Misson and his pirate utopia on Madagascar, Libertaria. But that's another post all together as Johnson's motives in telling what was really a fairy story were probably - and quite interestingly - political. They eerily foreshadow the Revolutionary age that lay only a few decades ahead, and that's more than we've time for today.

But then pirates have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to liberty, fraternity and equality. Or at least up until very recently indeed.