Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World [ebook ed.] 0520958780, 9780520958784

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PIRATES, MERCHANTS, SETTLERS, AND SLAVES colonial america and the indo-atlantic world

Kevin P. McDonald

university of california press

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Fletcher Jones Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

PIRATES, MERCHANTS, SETTLERS, AND SLAVES

the california world history library Edited by Edmund Burke III, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Patricia Seed 1. The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F. Richards 2. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian 3. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho 4. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf 5. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker 6. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, by Jeremy Prestholdt 7. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall 8. Island World: A History of Hawai‘i and the United States, by Gary Y. Okihiro 9. The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz 10. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones, by Gary Y. Okihiro 11. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, by Robert Finlay 12. The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, by Sebastian Conrad; translated by Alan Nothnagle 13. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914, by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi 14. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, by Marcello Carmagnani 15. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900, by Julia A. Clancy-Smith 16. History and the Testimony of Language, by Christopher Ehret 17. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfs, by Sebouh David Aslanian 18. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route, by Steven E. Sidebotham 19. The Haj to Utopia: The Ghadar Movement and Its Transnational Connections, 1905–1930, by Maia Ramnath 20. Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History, by Arash Khazeni 21. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World, by Kevin P. McDonald

PIRATES, MERCHANTS, SETTLERS, AND SLAVES colonial america and the indo-atlantic world

Kevin P. McDonald

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McDonald, Kevin P., 1972– author. Pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves : Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic world / Kevin P. McDonald. pages cm.— (California World History Library ; 21) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28290-2 (cloth)—isbn 978-0-52095878-4 (ebook) 1. Slave trade—United States—History—17th century. 2. Slave trade—United States—History—18th century. 3. Pirates—United States—History—17th century. 4. Pirates—United States—History—18th century. 5. North America—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600– 1775. I. Title. e446.m44 2015 973.2—dc23 2014029707 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30 post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction: The Indo-Atlantic World The Spectrum of Piracy New York Merchants and the Indo-Atlantic Trade Utopian Dreamers and Colonial Disasters Pirate-Settlers of Madagascar Seafaring Slaves and Freedom in the Indo-Atlantic World Conclusion: Specters of the Indo-Atlantic World Appendix 1. Slave Trade Ships in Madagascar, 1663–1747 Appendix 2. Ships at Madagascar, 1689–1730 Notes Select Bibliography Index

vii ix 1 12 37 61 81 99 123 131 141 145 171 197

ILLUSTRATIONS

figures 1. Sutton Nicholls, “A New Map of the Most Considerable Plantations of the English in America,” 1700 / 21 2. Sir Francis Drake and William Dampier, prominent figures in the spectrum of piracy / 30 3.

Johannes Vingboons, View of New York, 1664 / 38

4.

The earliest street plan of New York showing the crooked layout, 1660 / 44

5. A dark and stormy view of More’s Utopia, 1715 / 63 6. Emanuel Bowen’s map of Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century voyages and travels from Venice to China / 66 7. Anthony Van Dyck’s “Madagascar Portrait,” depicting Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, alongside his wife, 1640 / 71 8. Title page of Hamond’s pamphlet promoting Madagascar, 1643 / 73 9. A contemporary closeup of Madagascar from Frederik de Wit’s Totius Africæ accuratissima tabula, ca. 1688 / 86 10. Nicolas de Larmessin’s engraved portrait of Aurangzeb, the powerful Mughal ruler / 95

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maps 1. The Indo-Atlantic World, ca. 1640–1730 / xiii 2. The Atlantic Ocean / xiv 3.

The Indian Ocean / xv

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The Greater New York Harbor / 101

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book, I have acquired innumerable debts of gratitude, both great and small. While I was at Rutgers/NJIT for my master’s degree, Laurie Benton helped launch this project, and she has been an exceptional mentor ever since. My expanding scholarly interest in Colonial America and world history found a fertile and nurturing environment at the University of California–Santa Cruz. Tremendous thanks to Lynn Westerkamp for being a considerate and judicious dissertation director; and Terry Burke, an encouraging guide in the world of world history and a gracious supporter in helping transform this project from dissertation to book. There are likewise many institutions—and individuals within those institutions—to thank for providing research funding. My gratitude goes especially to the Huntington, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for providing short-term research grants. The University of California deserves singular praise for sponsoring this project from the outset, beginning with a Regents Fellowship in 2002 and continuing with numerous research and travel grants in the ensuing years, including a Doctoral Student Sabbatical Fellowship. The critical research phase in the British archives was made possible by a five-month Resident Assistantship with the University of California–London Study Abroad program. The Institute for Humanities Research within the UC system provided multiple travel grants. The Department of History at UC Santa Cruz was a vital and energetic place that helped nurture this project and provided

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funding, in addition to intellectual and emotional support, including an important Dissertation Research Fellowship. Many libraries and archives deserve special thanks, including the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the British Library, the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the Guildhall Library, the Public Records Office at Kew—now known as the National Archives—the Huntington Library, and the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. At an early stage I received generous advice from Roy Ritchie (via Jan Lewis): to follow the sources as outlined in Roy’s landmark book, Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates. Roy’s footnotes became a map of sorts for my own research, and provided a foundation for much of what follows. Early drafts of work in progress were presented at numerous conferences, including the UC Conference in World History at UCLA; the Graduate Student Forum in Early American History at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in Boston; the All-UC Multi Campus Research Group in World History at UC San Diego; the “New Worlds Reflected: Representations of Utopia, the New World and Other Worlds, 1500–1800” conference at Birkbeck College, University of London; the Conference on New York State History at Columbia University in New York; the World History Association Annual Conference at Cal State University–Long Beach and at Queen Mary College, University of London; and the International Congress of Maritime History (IMEHA) at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England. Thanks to Huw Bowen for chairing my panel and inviting me to dine with his Welsh colleagues in the Painted Hall. Conrad Wright, Lynn Hunt, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Laura Mitchell also provided useful comments and suggestions along the way. I thank all the conference organizers, panel chairs, participants, and commenters for helping shape the rough edges of this project into a more polished product. Many other individuals, friends, and colleagues from University of California Santa Cruz helped shape this project—Alan Christy, Chris Connery, Dana Frank, Gail Hershatter, Bruce Levine, Cindy Polecritti, Buck Sharp, and Alice Yang provided thoughtful comments and suggestions at various stages along the way. Anders Otterness, Maia Ramnath, and Nat Zappia deserve thanks as my cohorts; the Friday Forum at Santa Cruz was a valuable early sounding board; and the conversations that continued at the Red Room and the Poet & Patriot were equally rewarding.

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For field research, I am indebted to my Malagasy guides, Manitra, Julian, Luc, and Andre Mabily of Île Sainte-Marie, for their generous assistance during my time spent in Madagascar. At later stages, I was invited to present my work in progress at a number of important venues, including the Atlantic World Workshop at New York University, the Department of History at UC Santa Cruz, and the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. I would like to thank Karen Kupperman, Lynn Westerkamp, and Kate Lynch, respectively, for these invitations and for the invaluable comments and suggestions from the various participants. Special thanks also to Bill Germano at the Cooper Union; and David Christian, who provided a vital moment of encouragement and conversation toward the end of this long process. The editing and final research phase was enormously assisted by an A. W. Mellon post-doctoral fellowship in the Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University. I thank especially Joe Trotter, Caroline Acker, Edda Fields-Black, Wendy Goldman, Kate Lynch, Scott Sandage, John Soluri, Donald Sutton, and Tim Haggerty for their insightful comments and suggestions. Portions of this book have been published elsewhere. I thank Randy Head for his instructive comments on my “Thomas Tew” essay, which was published as a working paper in the California Digital Library. Special thanks to Chloë Houston, who helped edit previously published sections of chapter 3, and to Ashgate, the original publisher of portions of the same chapter. I thank the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University for providing a generous first book subvention award. My colleagues at LMU have been extraordinarily gracious and supportive; special thanks go to Paul Zeleza, Amy Woodson-Boulton, Nick Rosenthal, and Carla Bittel. Andrew Devereux and Traci Voyles were instrumental in reading and commenting on final drafts. Cynthia Becht at the Hannon Library was extremely generous with her time in helping me gather images for production. My students at New York University and Loyola Marymount University deserve special recognition for compelling me to think systematically about pirates and piracy in my seminar and survey courses. My RAINS research assistants, Colin Arnold and RJ Larrieu, assisted in proofreading portions of the manuscript. Without a publisher, this project would remain just that. I thank especially the University of California Press, including Niels Hooper, Dore Brown, Pamela Polk, Kim Hogeland, Elizabeth Berg, and Bradley Depew, for their

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assistance, and Bill Nelson for producing the maps. Thanks also to the National Portrait Gallery in England, the Library of Congress, Wikimedia, the Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University, and the Huntington Library for image reproduction rights. A special note of gratitude to Carla Pestana and the anonymous readers who provided critical feedback before publication. Any residual faults with the book remain solely my own. The last and greatest plaudits are reserved for family and friends, too numerous to name—but I’ll single out a few. My father and brother have been especially inquisitive allies from the outset. Growing up in Belmar, New Jersey, established a deep and abiding interest in the Atlantic and all things oceanic. I am extremely fortunate to still live by the sea, which provides a continuing source of inspiration and energy. Despite our best efforts—or perhaps because of them—life goes on as we pursue our scholarly endeavors. I will remember with great joy that the writing was interposed by the birth of my first child, providing me with an amazingly fresh perspective and a new source of motivation (his brother should arrive before this book hits the shelves . . . ). The joy of new life has been tempered with the lingering sadness over the passing of my mother, and more recently, the unexpected departure of my father-in-law, Dr. Jae Ook Park, whose kindness and generosity knew no bounds. In the end, this book would never have been completed without all of the above, but most especially, the unending support of Dr. Park’s daughter, my wife and partner, JP. This book is dedicated to her. Kevin P. McDonald Manhattan Beach, California September 2014

London

N New York

AT L A N T I C OCEAN

Mecca

Mughal India

Barbados

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Saint Helena Saint Augustine Bay

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map 1. The Indo-Atlantic World, ca. 1640–1730

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Bahamas Tortuga Hispaniola

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Jamaica Curaçao Gulf of Honduras

Cape Verde Islands Barbados Bight of Benin

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Introduction The Indo-Atlantic World

In 1694, Captain Thomas Tew, an infamous Anglo-American pirate, was observed riding comfortably in the open coach of New York’s only six-horse carriage with Benjamin Fletcher, the colonel-governor of the colony. Captain Tew, a Rhode Island native, had recently returned from a profitable pirating venture based in Madagascar, ten thousand miles away in the Indian Ocean, and his appearance in New York should have raised some officials’ eyebrows. The pirate and the governor, cavorting through the crooked streets and exchanging gifts, were in fact keenly observed by many of the seaport’s inhabitants, including its numerous slaves. The pirate, later accompanied by his wife and daughter, both splendidly clad in Eastern silks and exotic jewels, was to be entertained by the governor and some of New York’s wealthiest merchants. Captain Tew was the vanguard of some thousand Atlantic-born pirates who poured into the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tew and his crew helped launch an informal global trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, connecting the North American colonies with the rich trading world of the East Indies. This commerce was not directed from London or Lisbon by a chartered trade company or the state. Instead, colonial merchants in New York entered an informal alliance with Euro-American pirates, who functioned as cross-cultural brokers in settlements they founded in Madagascar. This book explores a global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires, exposing the ways informal networks created by pirates and merchants enabled American colonists to satisfy their consumer desires for East India goods—including slaves. Slaves 1

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functioned both as commodities and laborers in this network, some eventually obtaining their freedom as a result of their participation in the Indo-Atlantic maritime world. The “Indo-Atlantic world” is both a conceptual framework and an interoceanic space that connected the North and South Atlantic basins with the Indian Ocean: an integrated circum-Atlantic/western Indian zone of crosscultural, social, and economic exchanges. The Atlantic world itself developed in the wake of the Columbian voyages, evolving by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a dynamic oceanic zone that connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as adjacent islands, into a coherent region of ever thickening demographic, economic, cultural, and social interactions and exchanges. The most notable development in the Atlantic world was the establishment of the plantation complex system, which integrated EuroAmerican capital, African slave laborers, long-distance trade networks, and specialized commodity markets. Though the Atlantic world emerged as a result of Columbus’s discovery, it should be remembered that his objective was to reach the East Indies and make a direct connection with rich markets in exotic goods, especially spices. Prior to the sixteenth century, luxury goods from the East—spices, silks, cotton textiles, porcelain, perfumes, jewels, and drugs—arrived in Europe only after a very long overland journey on the Silk Road and other Asian caravan routes, or via the Persian Gulf and Red Sea routes connecting to the eastern Mediterranean, which was dominated by Venetian merchants. To the dismay of Christian Europe, most of the circuits in these ancient trade networks were controlled by Muslims, as Islam came to culturally unify most of the Indian Ocean littoral and interior Asia, including the Red Sea region, by the eighth century. The price of Eastern luxury items grew exponentially the farther one traveled from the points of production, and the Iberians wished to circumvent the Muslim brokers, as well as the Italian middlemen connecting the Levant to the western Mediterranean. While Columbus sailed west in this attempt, after nearly a century of piecemeal exploration along the coast of Atlantic Africa, the Portuguese established a more direct route by sailing east around the Cape of Storms (the Cape of Good Hope), reaching India in 1498—only to find the city of Calicut dominated by Muslim traders (though ruled by a Hindu zamorin). When the zamorin dismissed Vasco da Gama and his European trade goods as worthless, the Portuguese carracks departed

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Malabar with their bombards blazing, returning again in following years to inflict more significant damage. The traditional rhythms of nonviolent free trade in the Indian Ocean were ruptured, “no doubt confirming in the minds of the Malabaris that the Portuguese were merely pirates,” as one historian recently stated. The voyage of da Gama thus marked the beginnings of a nascent Indo-Atlantic world characterized by the armed European trading model, which merchants of the Indian Ocean world identified as piracy. The full blooming of this Indo-Atlantic world would arrive not just with the chartered Dutch, English, and French East India trading companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but with actual pirate settlements in Madagascar and the Atlantic-style sugar and slave plantation complex in the nearby western Indian Ocean islands by the eighteenth century. From the sixteenth-century Portuguese voyages on, European ships and sailors began making regular interoceanic connections in these regions, but until recently, academic historians, with some important exceptions, have been generally disinclined to systematically follow them. When they have followed in their wake, the historiography has tended to focus exclusively on the official state and monopoly trading companies. Illegal traders, or interlopers, have received far less attention. At the same time, most historians have tended to focus on discrete ocean regions, as if the ships, and the winds and currents that carried them, did not connect the seas. Pirates remapped the oceans as interconnected, destabilizing any contemporary notions of oceans as isolated or separate. Later literary writers and scientists have arguably been more cognizant of the indivisibility of the oceans—most expressively in Melville’s Moby Dick, with its famous interoceanic search for the great white whale. The environmentalist and poetscientist Rachel Carson, meanwhile, has admonished that “there is . . . no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. . . . [I]t is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one.” Pirates were certainly active in the eastern Pacific along the Spanish American coast during the period under review, and among the first pirates to reach Madagascar were those who circumvented the globe via the vast Pacific Ocean in 1689. The Pacific, the largest of the world’s ocean basins, has many important global histories to reveal. But the “South Sea,” as it was known to contemporaries, did not develop a significant pirate slave-trading nexus, nor did pirates establish any lasting Pacific settlements during this period, and so the present study follows by charting the Indo-Atlantic

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movement of pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves in the deep, hidden currents of interoceanic history. The traditional, localized parameters of colonial American history have expanded greatly in the past few decades in the wake of Atlantic world studies. But the boundaries of this field can and should be stretched even farther to encompass interoceanic and global historical narratives, patterns, and processes. The Indo-Atlantic framework provides an expanded historical perspective that goes beyond the limiting notions of Atlantic history that have become prevalent in Atlantic studies. This book begins to answer the challenge to avoid the interpretive and analytical constrictions that have bounded traditional Atlantic approaches, necessitating a more complex, nuanced, and global perspective than most present Atlantic frameworks allow. While the Atlantic and Indian Oceans form the broad canvas of this study, the sailing ships that traversed this maritime seascape are just as significant. The sailors themselves were an “Indo-Atlantic” hybrid, with Euro-American, African, and Malagasy laborers working on most voyages. In addition to the crews, the cargoes, such as cotton textiles, silks, spices, jewels, ivory, silver, gold, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, were likewise Indo-Atlantic in nature, as was the circulation of people, including not just sailors but adventurers, pirates, merchants, and slaves. The Indo-Atlantic trade world thus spans from South Asia via Madagascar and Africa to the Caribbean and North America (and vice versa). As a global network, the Indo-Atlantic flows were multidirectional, multidimensional, and multinational. This global trade network took shape in an early modern maritime world of blurred boundaries, elastic edges, and shifting definitions that challenges our broader understanding of pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves. In this liminal world, these categories were not static and fixed but unstable and permeable, at times even interchangeable. Legitimate merchants could slip into piracy, while pirates could transition into merchants, settlers, and slave traders, occasionally finding themselves enslaved in the process. Perhaps most striking, slaves could gain incremental degrees of independence and through extraordinary efforts might actually become freemen. Much as these categories were fluid, so too was the watery realm in which they were encompassed: a maritime world of ships and shorelines, ports and docks, coves and inlets, mangroves and beaches—an amphibious environment connecting the sea and the seashore, and linking ocean to ocean.

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To understand this world in motion, this book combines a colonial American, maritime, and interoceanic approach that is not bound by national or local constraints. To follow Captain Tew and related pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves, we need a world historical perspective focusing closely on colonial New York, then expanding outward from the local North American outpost and its neighboring colonies to a broader perspective beyond the geographic boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean. This book thus presents a complex interoceanic network of pirate activities above and beyond the numerous more limited portrayals of pirates as a local or regional phenomenon. The major themes explored here—piracy, colonialism, slavery, interoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions—have been examined to some degree by historians in the past, but rarely have they been woven together in a single coherent monograph. By doing so, a hidden history of an Indo-Atlantic trade world is uncovered, showing that pirates were deeply entrenched and played multifaceted roles in the overall colonial project; that New York merchants maintained extensive involvement with pirates in an early modern global trade network; that Madagascar, its pirate settlements, and its slaving stations played a surprisingly outsized role in the colonial imagination; and that slaves were absolutely central, not just as commodities but as integral components in IndoAtlantic trade in particular and maritime trade networks more generally. Understanding this illicit Indo-Atlantic trade network also underscores the significance of a global perspective in examining important yet understudied aspects of colonial American history—including consumer desire. As both an institutionalized and a haphazard project, early modern colonialism cannot be fully understood without comprehending the central role of maritime plunder, including privateering and piracy. As Europeans encountered new regions and sea-lanes, these new “discoveries” became contested zones of maritime control for the Europeans, as well as indigenous sailors and local authorities. In these commercial contests for wealth and power, plunder and trade went hand in hand. Overseas territorial enclaves were initially conquered and new markets opened by the consistent application of maritime violence. The legality of such actions was often slippery and ill defined, and often depended on the perspective of the perpetrators and victims. Sources and networks of social and political power were multiple, intersecting, and overlapping. As Thomas Tew’s story attests, persons declared to be pirates by officials— that is, illegal marauders at sea—were far better integrated into colonial

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societies and cultures than we might expect. Rather than being outcasts, rogues, and renegades, many pirates—especially captains—were married and maintained familial connections with colonial society and cultures. New York in particular—but not exclusively—developed an early contraband trading culture with the East Indies much more intensely than historians have allowed. New York merchants, both individually and collectively, sought to circumvent monopolistic controls on their liberty to trade both for slaves and for East India goods. Slaves were not merely commodities, numbers, or statistics; they were also integral individual laborers in the Indo-Atlantic network. In fact, this network cannot be understood without comprehending their role as commodities, laborers, and perhaps even as trusted extended kin within the New York maritime merchant community. As one of the first pirate-adventurers to connect the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Thomas Tew—particularly his reappearance in New York—did eventually raise the alarm in not one but two imperial and interrelated settings: Stuart England and Mughal India. As Tew and other Euro-American pirates shifted their hunting grounds from the Atlantic basin to the Indian Ocean, their targets shifted in kind. No longer attacking Spanish and other European foes, these pirates were now assaulting the rich merchant vessels of the Indian Ocean, a great many of them belonging to subjects of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. News of these assaults by English-speaking pirates naturally infuriated the Mughals, who in turn applied pressure on the English East India Company, the de facto ambassadors of the English realm. That North American officials and colonists were supporting such activities caused deep consternation among London’s political and economic power brokers. Against this tense contextual backdrop, this book will explore an informal and interloping Indo-Atlantic pirate trade network. This network threatened the existing imperial order across two oceans, launching or diverting commodities and people in illicit global exchange circuits, creating social and political upheavals in various flashpoints around the globe, and enriching as well as endangering colonial merchants and privateers in the process. The focus on the role of pirates in this trade network provides an important counterbalance to both scholarly and popular portrayals of pirates. The first chapter examines pirates and piracy in the longue durée, arguing that piracy is best understood along a fluid spectrum rather than as a static category. Some individuals legally defined as a pirate might commit a single act of piracy while others spent their entire lives pillaging on the high seas, with still others fall-

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ing somewhere in between. Piracy was merely one of many alternate maritime vocations undertaken by similarly situated groups in patterns depending on local, regional, and global circumstances. Presenting an overview of the colonial project as state-sponsored piracy, I develop an analytical framework termed “the piracy/slave-trade nexus.” This first chapter provides a case study of the pirate-slave ship Margaret, to demonstrate the significance of the pirate/ slave-trade nexus for the colonial New York economy. Examining the passengers, crew, cargo, correspondence, and other relevant documents of the Margaret unveils a fascinating social and cultural world of the Indo-Atlantic pirate trade network. This case study provides detailed evidence that rather than rogues and outcasts, pirates maintained familial and economic connections within established and traditional colonial hierarchies. Euro-American pirates and privateers did not limit their activities to the Atlantic basin. Increasingly toward the end of the seventeenth century, a variety of push-and-pull factors caused the Indian Ocean to become their preferred domain. Enterprising merchants in New York decided to sponsor them there. Chapter 2 provides a broad overview of the geographical, social, and cultural conditions in New York that brought it to prominence as the major colonial Atlantic hub in the Indo-Atlantic trade network. An examination of the merchant families involved in this trade demonstrates that they represented a broad cross-section of colonial New York’s polyglot population. Most of the family patriarchs—and matriarchs—were born in Dutch, English, or French regions of Europe, eventually migrating to the colonies under a variety of circumstances. In part through their involvement in the IndoAtlantic trade, they died as wealthy colonial merchants, leaving their heirs both material wealth and, perhaps more importantly, a tradition of flouting imperial authority that reemerged during the Revolution. Chapter 2 also offers a fresh perspective on colonial New York by examining the role of merchant families through the prism of Indo-Atlantic trade. Many prominent New York merchant families, including the Philipses, DeLanceys, and Van Cortlandts, built their fortunes on the Indo-Atlantic trade, while the success of smaller merchant investors and pirate-adventurers was variable. Most intriguing perhaps is the trove of letters and legal documents that crisscrossed the Indo-Atlantic world, linking pirates in Madagascar with their wives, sisters, and brothers in New York. Despite the great distance, Sarah Horne of New York, for example, wrote her husband, Jacob Horne, in Madagascar that there was “abundance of flying news” about the

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activities of their kith and kin ten thousand miles away, that she had sent two letters and received one, that his friends were inquiring for more news, and that as “[his] true and faithful wife til death,” she was praying for his safe return, “giving [her] prayers to almighty.” Though Euro-American women did not physically make the Indo-Atlantic voyages, colonial women were spiritually and materially invested in their successes and failures, as the correspondence of Sarah Horne and others makes clear. By risking heavily in this global trade network, Frederick Philipse, a former carpenter of the Dutch West India Company, became the “richest Mijn Heer in that place.” Lesser New Yorkers, seeking to emulate their social betters, clamored for the luxuries bestowed on the wealthy. Unable to acquire East India goods from London, New Yorkers led by Philipse and others turned to direct contraband trade with Indo-Atlantic pirates to satisfy their demand for rich silks and cotton textiles, as well as jewels and drugs. That East Indian textiles and cowrie shells were invaluable commodities in the West African and Malagasy slave trades only further deepens the significance of understanding Indo-Atlantic trade networks. This chapter outlines the development of the piracy/slave-trade nexus within the context of colonial New York, demonstrating the genealogical continuities of Caribbean buccaneering and Indian Ocean piracy. The inclusion of Madagascar, detailed in chapters 3 and 4, expands the geographical boundaries that typically limit our understanding of colonial America. Chapter 3 traces the early European attempts at colonizing Madagascar and the promotional materials that accompanied these efforts, which explicitly juxtaposed Atlantic world schemes with counterparts in the Indian Ocean. Many of these projects developed within a decidedly utopian framework, including the central but often overlooked significance accorded slavery in the original model of More’s Utopia. That these early schemes ended in disaster provides a worthwhile counterbalance to the pirate settlements that appeared at the end of the seventeenth century, detailed in chapter 4. One of the most intriguing aspects of this global trade network was the creation of these settlements from below, by Euro-American pirates and local Malagasy allies. Both groups, the official English settlement in the 1640s and the Euro-American pirates of the 1690s, had clear intentions to settle, and comparing their successes and failures provides an interesting overview of varying forms of colonial endeavors in the early modern period. Composed of Euro-American pirate-settlers and Malagasy locals, the main pirate settle-

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ment of Saint Mary’s was a fascinating outpost on the fringes of both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. While piracy and slaving were the main economic activities, chapter 4 examines the social and cultural aspects of this community and demonstrates that this outpost was in fact well connected with the North American colonies. The settlers maintained many colonial social and cultural norms, including legal, cultural, and religious practices. At the same time, the infusion of the local Malagasy culture produced the formidable Betsimisaraka foundation, a unique blending of Euro-AmericanMalagasy society and culture. Chapter 4 examines the pirate settlements, tracing the precarious balance among various factions that eventually led not only to massacre and desertion but also rebirth and ethnogenesis. This mapping of ethnogenesis goes beyond the recent call for new research in the early modern Atlantic and necessarily includes a global perspective. The island of Madagascar, on the doorstep between the Atlantic and western Indian Oceans, became a dominant subject of colonial discourse, not only as a potential utopian settlement but also as a source of slaves beyond metropolitan monopoly controls. Most tellingly, in official circles, Madagascar became widely feared as a potential pirate republic, while from below, renegade sailors whispered “Madagascar” as a byword for mutiny and desertion. The final chapter, on seafaring slaves, demonstrates the surprising centrality of enslaved seafarers in the daily functioning of the Indo-Atlantic trade network. Though archival material on individual slaves is notoriously sparse, my research has uncovered both specific and composite stories of maritime slaves. This chapter provides case studies of Calico Jack and several other seafaring slaves who labored in the Indo-Atlantic trade network. The research in this chapter reveals that, more than being mere commodities, as many slave studies suggest, a number of slaves were critical to the everyday functioning of this trade. Calico Jack and other individual slaves were able to manipulate this trade network to their advantage, some even obtaining their freedom through flight or self-manumission, or by testifying against their former masters. This chapter not only recovers the lost histories of enslaved individuals but also demonstrates that their role as seafaring slaves in the IndoAtlantic trade offered extraordinary opportunities for manumission and freedom. Despite the impressive achievements of these seafaring slaves, the dismal fact remains that most slaves suffered and endured their lives as chattels until the bitter end. Because of the sheer numbers and available sources, most

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Atlantic slavery studies have focused on West and Central Africa and their diasporic communities. This regional bias relegates East Africans and Malagasy to the shadows. Most scholars have overlooked this Indo-Atlantic diaspora, creating a misleading impression of a uniform Anglophone Black Atlantic. The conclusion of this chapter sheds important light on the enslavement and forced migration of tens of thousands of East Africans and Malagasy from Bencoolen (Sumatra) in the eastern Indian Ocean to Barbados and Boston in the Atlantic. A detailed appendix provides further quantitative analysis. Practitioners of world history have long recognized the importance of examining cross-cultural exchanges and encounters beyond the constraints of national boundaries. Some Americanists and Atlanticists have been thinking in transoceanic terms. This book enhances our understanding of interoceanic encounters and exchanges by exploring Indo-Atlantic pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves. They were not only quintessentially cosmopolitan but also important and underexamined actors in early modern cross-cultural exchanges. They were not sovereigns but informal interlopers who connected peripheral regions of the globe. Historians of empire often exclude, misunderstand, or overlook connections between the peripheries, and Madagascar remained for the most part outside any official imperial networks until the nineteenth century. Thus a global network spawned by common seamen and laborers with financial and political support from wealthy merchants and colonial administrators was created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Financed by wealthy New York merchants to circumvent metropolitan monopolies and grow the slave trade in the northern colonies, the network and settlements were likewise shaped by maritime laborers and pirate slavers from Western Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. Settlements established in Madagascar, initially modeled upon the European slave factories of West Africa, were intended as trading and raiding posts for Malagasy slaves but developed “from below” into more complex colonial spaces. Pirates must be understood as multidimensional and amphibious historical agents who maintained close connections with colonial society, even as they established complex settlements in coastal enclaves of Madagascar. This project stretches the field of Atlantic history beyond its current framework and explores broader theoretical conceptions like fugitive geographies and maritime subversion.

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To understand these settlements and the Indo-Atlantic trade network, we must return our gaze to the fascinating scene of the pirate Thomas Tew with Governor Fletcher, negotiating the streets of colonial New York and the hazards—and opportunities—presented on the fringes of imperial peripheries. Were pirates not rogues, hostes humani generis, enemies of all mankind? Why was a renowned pirate being openly courted by the colonial governor in New York and feted by the community? What kinds of gifts did they exchange, and why? Did New York (and indeed, much of the countryside) harbor fugitive pirates, and if so, why? And finally, what, if any, was the role of slaves and the slave trade? To answer these queries is to uncover the Indo-Atlantic trade world, and to do so, we must first examine a most basic but fundamental and often misunderstood question: who or what was a pirate?

chapter 1

The Spectrum of Piracy

Western accounts of pirates and piracy, ranging from the fantastical to the historical and everywhere in between, have been recorded since antiquity, when trading vessels were first constructed to move people and goods via waterways. By definition, a pirate was, and is, a person or ship that plunders or robs at sea. Pirates plundered periodically throughout the ancient Aegean, but it was Roman jurisprudence that first characterized the watery brigands as hostes humani generis, “enemies of all mankind,” in a bid to protect a claim of imperial sovereignty upon the seas that linked their cross-continental empire. This legal designation, notably absent in the Hellenic era, was reinvoked two millennia later by the courts of the early modern mercantile empires for similar imperialistic objectives. As these new maritime empires expanded beyond the familiar local waters of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, the jurisdictional claims of sovereignty and the desire to control the seas followed in the wakes of their carracks and caravels, galleons, fluyts, and frigates. Regulating and enforcing this tenuous authority, however, was a herculean task, and pirates from all regions demonstrated over time that they were indeed not enemies of all humankind, but instead nearly always found friendly ports of call in which to trade their looted cargoes, spend their equitably divided shares, and at times debauch themselves in drunken orgies. Sometimes, like the pirate settlements of Madagascar, friendly ports would reach out to them. More often than not in the early modern era, pirates acted in the interest of, and at times at the behest of, merchant communities. Socioeconomic conditions on the peripheries of 12

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colonial empires often encouraged piracy, and the contraband trading and smuggling that accompanied piracy belie the labeling of pirates as enemies of all mankind. In this view, the designation of pirates as hostes humani generis becomes one of the most enduring legal fictions of all time. Though pirates at times exhibited erratic behavior, an overriding logic compelled their actions. They consistently displayed patterned behavior over three centuries of Caribbean piracy, including clustering around choke points, singling out straggling ships, and repeatedly attacking known bullion storage ports. Though they often frittered away their ill-gotten gains as quickly as they could return to port, this very return to port is crucial to understanding the role of pirates and piracy in the early modern era. Merchant communities, particularly those on the fringes of the nascent colonial world economies, were especially willing to abide the dubious nature of the pirate trade because of their own marginal status within the mercantile system. The geographical location of these willing merchant communities shifted over time. In the English Atlantic world, Port Royal, Jamaica, became known as “the most wicked city on earth” in the midseventeenth century, but by the 1690s, the pirates’ most favored fencing community could be found in New York. The shift occurred for a host of reasons, including a new imperial alliance between England and Spain. Most emblematic of this trend, Henry Morgan, the most infamous Jamaican buccaneer, was knighted in 1674 for his exploits in the Caribbean against the Spanish. When Sir Henry returned to Jamaica as newly appointed lieutenant governor, however, his personal allegiances had shifted, and he oversaw the trial and execution of many former pirate colleagues. Together with these political changes, the formerly marginalized Jamaican economy had matured beyond its frontier phase. As the merchants of Port Royal became more deeply embedded in the sugar-slave-plantation complex, they no longer depended on the goods and treasure brought in by pirates, and the buccaneers formerly based in Jamaica moved on to friendlier ports. Further complicating the picture was the ubiquitous presence of privateers, who emerged in the seventeenth century to supplement the royal navies in an era of perpetual maritime warfare. Privateers were privately owned vessels licensed by the government to cruise against an enemy in time of declared war. Even as true European navies began to emerge, royal leaders continued to rely upon privateers, issuing official commissions, or letters of marque, to individual mariners and vessels in support of marauding missions. In times of peace, the commissions were called letters of reprisal, which allowed injured subjects to

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steal from the subjects who had injured them. Since there were not yet any formal methods of insurance in place, this crude policy demonstrates the chaotic nature of international relations at the time. This institutional weakness allowed enterprising merchants, captains, and seamen many opportunities for economic aggrandizement. Metropolitan and colonial commissions were thus granted to ships and crews to plunder and rob other ships at sea, usually vessels that belonged to a belligerent nation. In the early modern era, national alliances shifted regularly, navies were underdeveloped, admiralty courts were few and far between, and war was a recurrent fact of life, especially “beyond the line.” Further blurring the bounds was the wink-and-nod approach common to the various English colonial governments when privateers exceeded the limits of their commission by plundering the ship of a nation that was not explicitly incorporated in the letter of marque or by capturing a ship after the commission had expired. As a preponderance of evidence suggests, pirates were well aware of these systemic complexities and used them to advantage whenever possible, carrying multiple commissions or letters of marque and a myriad of national flags, and by forum-shopping for friendly ports. The latter was performed by maintaining informal yet sophisticated networks of information, written as well as word of mouth. They shifted their bases accordingly along the North Atlantic seaboard, finding refuge at different times in places like Charleston, New York, and Newport, while expanding their hunting grounds and networks to the South Sea and the rich trading world of the Indian Ocean region. Pirates, furthermore, did not exist solely on the ships that carried them to sea. Indeed, some of the major spaces in which they operated were beaches, swamps, and jungles on the coastal littorals of the Indo-Atlantic world—the loci of many of the cross-cultural interactions that occurred in the early modern world, yet spaces that have been often overlooked by historians. And while periodization and chronology are important aspects of this project, “space,” as historian K. N. Chaudhuri has observed, “is a more fundamental and a priori dimension for social action than time-order and succession.” On a macro level, the space of this project is the Indo-Atlantic world of Western Europe, the Americas, Africa—especially Madagascar—and India. On the micro level, one of the primary goals of this book is to examine landed pirates—that is, pirate settlements located in a number of geographical locales within the broader Indo-Atlantic world. These spatial dimensions are incorporated not only to better understand pirates and piracy in and of themselves,

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but also to obtain a fuller and more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural interactions in the early modern world. Finally, piracy was merely one of many alternative practices and vocations undertaken by these mariners. In addition to the murky area between privateering and piracy, many individuals who at one time or another committed acts of piracy were still considered by their contemporaries, depending on the circumstances, to be legitimate traders, slavers, settlers, salvagers and wreckers, logwood cutters, military defenders, and even scientists and lawyers. Individuals assumed these multifaceted roles both before and as often after committing legally defined acts of piracy. Perhaps the best way to understand early modern piracy is to view it along a continuum, with hardcore pirates, or lifers, on one end and individuals who committed a single act of piracy, or one-timers, on the other. Persons deemed pirates could be found anywhere along this spectrum. There were also activities connected to piracy, with privateering being the closest: it was basically legalized piracy, but privateers could and did commit acts of maritime aggression outside the bounds of their official commissions. Smuggling and contraband trading were closely related but fell outside the legal definition of piracy. In this very broad scheme, the process of early modern European colonization and expansion might itself be properly framed as piracy, state-sponsored or otherwise. On his first voyage, Columbus waylaid a canoe full of Taino natives in a river, seizing seven terrified women and children. Before returning to Europe, additional native captives were taken, yet only a few survived the transatlantic voyage to be presented to the royal court as the newest “subjects” of the Crown. Later, on his fourth and final voyage in 1502, Columbus seized a great trading canoe off the coast of Honduras, “long as a galley,” and plundered its indigenous cargo, again taking hostages, including the native captain. Was Columbus a pirate? The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, for one, harshly denounced these episodes as a breach of the law of nations. The definition of piracy can shift dramatically when flipping the perspective from the aggressor to the victim. As fellow residents of the Iberian peninsula and frontrunners in European overseas expansion, the Portuguese followed a more systematic piratical enterprise on the other side of the world. In the early sixteenth century, upon reaching Columbus’s intended destination, the Portuguese announced their arrival in the East Indies by blasting broadsides into what had formerly been peaceable Indian Ocean entrepôts. With nothing of value to trade for the

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luxurious spices and calicoes of the region, the Portuguese followed up on their initial violence by imposing the extortionate cartaz system, whereby all trading vessels were required to purchase a pass (i.e., protection) to trade in ports and sea-lanes controlled or patrolled by the Portuguese. Indigenous rulers and local merchant communities were not to be the only victims of European aggression. As the Dutch, and later the French and English, followed the Portuguese into these rich trading grounds, they competed fiercely with one another, emulating and adapting in varying degrees the Portuguese armed trading model in this region of the globe that had arguably been—with the significant exception of local endemic piracy—a free sea. The European legal theory that emerged from their competition in the Indian Ocean was the notion of Mare Liberum (1609), or “the free sea.” Its author, Hugo Grotius, was initially recruited to defend the Vereenigde OostIndische Compagnie (VOC) attack on a Portuguese carrack in the Straits of Malacca. Grotius’s tract, however, had wider effects. As David Armitage has recently commented, the treatise “had implications no less for coastal waters than it did for the high seas, for the West Indies as much as for the East Indies, and for intra-European disputes as well as for relations between the European powers and extra-European peoples.” Its translation into English by Richard Hakluyt, moreover, not only supported the English East India Company’s claims against the Portuguese and the Dutch but also demonstrates the IndoAtlantic nature of early modern jurisdictional claims. In the Atlantic world, observant contemporaries unambiguously recognized piracy to be the modus operandi of all the Europeans in the region. This was perhaps stated most succinctly by the English diplomat Sir Robert Southwell, who considered the French to be “great interlopers . . . the Dutch small ones; while the Spaniard both in his islands and his continent lies there as the great carcass upon which all the rest do prey.” Though Southwell was writing at the end of the seventeenth century, the earlier exploits of Drake, Raleigh, Cavendish, and Hawkins were conspicuous examples of state-sponsored piracy from the inception of English overseas expansion. The abandoned privateer staging post at Roanoke was another obvious marker. Less notable but equally revealing indicators included the French settlement attempt at Fort Caroline in La Florida, the Scots’ failed effort at colonizing the Darien peninsula, and the Puritan scheme of settling Old Providence Island near the Spanish Main. Throughout the seventeenth century, French, English, and Dutch boucaniers operated, with tacit support if not official sponsorship, throughout the

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Caribbean basin. They attacked Spanish ships and towns and sold their plunder in bustling pirate havens like Port Royal, Jamaica. The real costs they inflicted on the Spanish empire are difficult to decipher, but in addition to the actual damages from successful incidents of marauding ships and the pillaging and ransoming of towns, any assessment must include the onerous costs of outfitting the biannual flota, the widespread construction of fortifications, and the individual or private expenditures (as opposed to state expenditures) of the avería and situado taxes. Once the lucrative sugar trade began to take hold, merchants and administrators became less tolerant toward the freebooters. By the end of the seventeenth century, rather than raiding Spanish towns and pillaging ships as they had done in Morgan’s era, English vessels on their way to the Americas were now passing through Cadiz as trade partners. In connection with establishing new economic ties, these formerly mortal protonational enemies were now formal military allies, as evidenced by the contents of English cargo holds bound for Cartagena: cannons and small arms to defend against further depredations by their new common enemy, the French. Broad economic and political shifts thus had a direct impact on the strategies and culture of piracy.

the pirate-slave trade nexus An important subtext to the function of piracy in early colonization schemes is the role of pirates and privateers in the slave trade. Historians are only now beginning to realize the intricate and fundamental role played by pirates in supplying the colonies with slaves. Indeed, the first African slaves to reach the English colonies arrived via Anglo-Dutch privateers. The creation of English and Dutch colonies in the Atlantic during the early seventeenth century made it possible to sell slaves captured at sea to these fledgling colonies, rather than attempting to sell them as contraband to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean or South America (as Hawkins had done). The English colony of Bermuda became an important center in this new trade, and Virginia was not far behind. Meanwhile the governor of Jamaica, a perennial center of piracy and smuggling, reported that more than 1,540 slaves had been delivered by smugglers in 1610 alone. Spanish fears of Bermuda becoming an English pirate base were supported by the activities of the colony’s principal backer, Robert Rich, the second Earl of Warwick. Rich and his associates were deeply committed to war against

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Spain and to privateering, and they were allied with Dutch militant colonizers like William Courteen and Jan De Moor. In 1615, Rich’s ships created an international scandal when they captured a rich Mughal prize in the Indian Ocean. Rich would bring this same piratical bent back to the Atlantic, demonstrating the Indo-Atlantic nature of piracy, slave trading, and colonization. In 1617, Captain John Powell captured “a good store of Negroes,” likely from a Portuguese prize, and carried them to Bermuda—the first large group of African slaves brought to that island. Within the next year, Powell and Daniel Elfirth brought four more cargoes of slaves captured at sea to Bermuda. By 1620, Bermuda’s population included over a hundred slaves, nearly all delivered by pirates. These slaves helped the island’s tobacco industry take off, and they were also active in public works projects and salvaging operations. Pirates continued to supply Bermuda with slaves at least through the mid-1640s, when the privateer William Jackson delivered a large number of slaves to the island after a series of successful cruises from 1642 to 1645. Daniel Elfirth’s consort, John Jope’s White Lion, was the source of the first African slaves brought to Virginia in 1619. The slaves, taken from the Portuguese ship Sao Joao Bautista, were Angolan. Elfirth’s first slave shipment was soon followed by another pilfered slave cargo, this time by the pirate Captain Kirby; Virginia’s deputy governor, Miles Kendall, received a share of fifteen slaves. Bermuda and Virginia were not alone. Anglo-Dutch settlements in the Amazon and Para river basins in South America were also supported by African slaves captured at sea by pirates. The same was true of the English Caribbean colonies of Saint Christopher’s, Barbados, Providence Island, and Association Island (Tortuga). When the Dutch West India Company (WIC) seized Pernambuco and Bahia from the Portuguese and held it in the 1620s and 1630s, they supplied the colonies with hundreds of slaves taken from Portuguese slavers captured at sea by Dutch privateers. Pirates continued to capture slave cargoes at sea, often selling them; at times, the fate of the slaves at the hands of pirates was far worse. Pirates often kept slaves to do the heavy labor at sea, like rowing (if a galley) and manning the pumps in rough seas or on leaky vessels. Pirates who were injured in battle, moreover, were to be compensated with slaves: eighteen for the loss of both hands, fifteen for the loss of both legs, six for the loss of one leg, five for a severe wound to the body, and one for the loss of an eye or a finger. The northern mainland colonies followed a similar pattern. The first large cargo of slaves to arrive in New Amsterdam did so aboard the Bruynvisch, a

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Dutch privateer. The Bruynvisch captured an inbound cargo of Angolan slaves off the Cuban coast in 1627, then brought them to the Dutch settlement at New Amsterdam. The WIC promised to supply the New Amsterdam settlers with “as many blacks as it possibly can . . . out of the prizes in which Negroes shall be found.” In 1655, two Dutch pirates, Captain Sebastian Raeff and Jan van Campen, captured a Spanish ship near Jamaica that was carrying at least forty-five slaves, origins unknown. Nine of the slaves belonged to the Spanish pilot Juan Gallardo Ferrara, a native of Lucar de Barrrameda, and thirty-six slaves belonged to Antonio de Rivera. Rivera was killed during the attack, and the slaves were taken to New Amsterdam and sold. Raeff was later captured but freed on bail in Amsterdam. As later chapters will demonstrate, the pirate/slave-trade nexus existed in New Amsterdam from the outset and continued unabated after the English conquest. It was a pattern recognizable in many English and Dutch colonization ventures in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Pirates and privateers were not just involved in plunder, looting, and the slave trade. Another significant area overlooked by historians was their role as military defenders on the periphery of empire in the early modern age before the full blossoming of the national navies. Jamaica is perhaps the most infamous example of an English colony dependent on piracy from its early existence. The island, located in the center of the Caribbean—lying just south and equidistant from western Hispaniola and eastern Cuba, two of Spain’s most important New World islands—was in a direct path of Spanish treasure ships leaving the Main for the islands and Europe. The trade winds that dictated the course of Europe-bound ships ensured their passage would approach Jamaica. During the interregnum, Cromwell sent a fleet of raw recruits to attack the Spanish Main in a campaign known as the Western Design. Their only achievement was capturing Jamaica, a minor Spanish outpost abandoned by Spanish forces in 1655. This seemingly minor event would be the bane of the Spanish empire for the remainder of the century, as the island of Jamaica would become a central base for English buccaneering activities during the seventeenth century. A similar pattern would be repeated in Madagascar in the 1690s, beginning with Thomas Tew’s crew. By 1662, there were well over 3,500 English settlers on Jamaica (2,600 men, 645 women, and 408 children) and 550 “negroes,” not including the hundreds of Maroons, former slaves who had escaped to the mountains when their Spanish masters fled. There were few navy vessels to defend the fledgling

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colony, yet 12 privateer ships manned by 740 now-seasoned veterans of the Western Design were anchored in the harbor. The neighboring island of Tortuga had an additional 5 privateers and over 350 men. There were thus 17 privateers with a total of 125 guns and nearly 1,100 men ready to defend the colony, but also ready and willing to attack the Spanish at a moment’s notice— which they did in spades. While other, less protected English colonies like Antigua were constantly harassed and even sacked on multiple occasions, there were no serious attempts to attack Jamaica. As a bonus, the merchants of Port Royal grew rich on the plunder extracted from buccaneer raids upon Spanish ships and towns. This would be a model for English defensive measures in the northern colonies at the end of the century. In the last decade of the seventeenth century, during King William’s War, the governors of many North American colonies came to depend on pirates for military defense against the French because the English government was lax in providing the necessary defenses. The governor of the Bahamas, Nicholas Trott, was quite specific in employing this argument when he defended himself against charges of aiding and abetting pirates, specifically Henry Every and the pirate crew of the Fancy. At the time of Fancy’s arrival in 1695, New Providence (Nassau) was under siege by three French vessels, which had already taken the “choicest salt pond.” In the midst of their assault, Every’s great ship of forty-six guns arrived, scattering the smaller French fleet in the process. With no small exaggeration, Trott exclaimed, “Otherwise they had certainly attacked the island of Providence and had taken it, and therefore certainly it was better to invite a known pirate to save a place than by denying them suffer the enemy to be master of such an island fortified.” Trott’s invitation to the pirates not only staved off a French conquest but also may have saved the Bahamas, at least temporarily, from becoming a pirate haven. While the Fancy was at anchor, the pirates were well behaved, and no French vessels returned to attack. Trott’s claim that the Fancy’s owners went after him to recoup their losses does not ring as hollow as it might otherwise sound. On the mainland colonies, pirates were equally welcome during the 1690s. The governors of Carolina, the Jerseys, Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island were all under suspicion by the metropole of harboring pirates. Many of these governors had granted privateer commissions to individuals and ships that subsequently exceeded the terms of their commission and “turned pirate,” but commissioning privateers was their only recourse in the war against the French. Some governors were more intimately tied to the pirates, such as

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figure 1. Pirates were actively engaged in all the English “plantations,” or colonies. Their role as military defenders and economic contributors was often embraced by local officials and merchant communities during the developmental phase of colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Map by Sutton Nicholls, “A New Map of the Most Considerable Plantations of the English in America” [London, 1700]. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Governor William Markham of Pennsylvania, whose daughter was reportedly married to a pirate named Brown, of Captain Every’s crew. Though Markham eventually lost his office, the proprietor of the colony, William Penn, was a staunch defender of his policies. In New York, colonial governors and officials were active in hiring privateers who were later accused of piracy. In 1690, Jacob Leisler gave commissions to William Mason, Samuel Burgess, Robert Culliford, and William Kidd to attack the French at the outset of King William’s War (the War of the League of Augsburg); all were arrested for piracies committed in the Indian Ocean at the end of the century, but not before they assisted in defending the colony or capturing French prizes in the Atlantic. Governor Fletcher granted letters to Captains Coats, Tew, and Hoar, and all fulfilled their commissions of tak-

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ing French prizes before committing piracy in the Indian Ocean. Fletcher’s successor, Lord Bellomont, was one of the sponsors of Kidd’s commission and actively solicited Burgess in a scheme to trade at Madagascar. Commissioning pirates as privateers was clearly a systemic issue in the early modern Atlantic world. Colonial English governors were not alone in welcoming pirates to defend their vulnerable coastlines. In 1701, for example, French officials in Martinique spread a false rumor that Jamaica had been destroyed by an earthquake to hinder the buccaneers from assembling there at the start of a new conflict, known in the English colonies as Queen Anne’s War (the War of the Spanish Succession). The report received in Holland stated that “the French use all possible means to persuade those buccaneers to tarry with them in case of war with England.” Colonial French officials, like the English and Dutch, understood and accepted the military value of pirates. Military defense was one of many activities in which pirates took part when they were not out “a-pirating.” Another important activity was cutting logwood in the frontier zones of Spanish America, especially the Bay of Honduras and the Bay of Campeche. Logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum) was an important item in international trade circuits, its primary use in the textile industry as a protoindustrial dye. The logwood trees grew only in the outlying mangrove swamps of the Spanish American frontier, where English, Dutch, and French pirate bands used it as firewood in their temporary settlements before discovering its commercial value. After realizing they could get 100 per ton, pirates first sought to capture Spanish cargoes but then began to cut the wood themselves. The first of a number of settlements was located in Cape Catoche in the northeast corner of the Yucatan Peninsula; by 1670, there were approximately seven hundred settlers in half a dozen settlements. Governor Modyford of Jamaica recommended that the English government give recognition and assistance to these “new sucking colonies,” especially since most of the settlers were former privateers, and English officials were now moving away from their sponsorship. If the pirates were settled and working the land, went the English argument, they would then be less likely to turn back to the sea to pillage for their livelihood. Spanish officials, however, were loath to follow this line of argument, and the logwood settlements caused continuous tension between the Spanish and British governments throughout the eighteenth century. As one anonymous author wrote, “Great numbers of English sailors [lived] . . . on the continent

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of New Spain . . . where they cut up as much logwood as will load a ship. . . . [T]he sailors from the woods . . . share for themselves of the profit of the logwood when sold in Europe, they all assist in loading the ship and take their passage back to Jamaica.” The settlement efforts by these “sailors of the woods” formed the seed of what would eventually become British Honduras and later Belize. The logwood settlements of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries provide a central nexus around which swirl many of the themes and arguments of this book. As a seasonal activity, the settlements reveal the occasional nature of piracy, as many pirates became temporary settlers in frontier zones of Spanish America (i.e., Belize, Honduras, Yucatan, etc.) to cut logwood. Logwood cutting also demonstrates the protoindustrial productive capacity of pirates when they were not pillaging at sea. The commercial significance of logwood was summarized in the declaration of one British official in 1714, who deemed it “so essentially necessary in dying our manufactures that it would be of the last and worst consequences to be deprived thereof.” In addition, because the logwood cutters relied on collaborative efforts with the local indigenous populations, their settlements demonstrate how pirates served as important cross-cultural brokers in the early modern world. Local indigenous populations not only allied themselves with the logwood cutters against their mutual enemy, the Spanish, but they also supplied indigenous technologies to the interlopers. For example, logwood cutters and pirates both adopted the indigenous dugout canoe, whether for traversing the littoral mangroves and creeks or in turtle-hunting expeditions, a favorite pastime of the mariners. At other times, however, the logwood-cutting pirates captured, enslaved, and sold members of the local populations, thereby engaging in an additional arena of piratical activity. Finally, as the geographical area of the logwood settlements came under territorial dispute between Spain and England, it demonstrates the legal acuity of pirates during the ensuing political negotiations. The Baymen, as the pirate-settlers came to be known, utilized a twopronged argument when pushing for status as British citizens during the early eighteenth century. First, they argued that the land was unoccupied, and therefore no Spanish sovereignty attached to the region. Second, if any sovereignty existed, it belonged to the true owners of the land, the Mosquito Indians, and the Baymen claimed the Indians had ceded the land to them willingly. Spanish authorities disputed these arguments, and their guardacostas searched and seized any British ships carrying logwood (as it was only

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found in Spanish territories). In addition, the guarda-costas occasionally raided and destroyed the pirate settlements, inevitably followed by retaliatory attacks by English privateers. The back-and-forth continued for over a century (1667–1783), with negotiations between Anglo-Spanish diplomats occurring regularly, albeit without a satisfactory resolution. By the end of the eighteenth century, the price of logwood had fallen precipitously, and mahogany replaced it as the most valuable exotic wood export from the region. By this time, too, piracy had ceased to be a regular pastime of the settlers. These settlements are an important space for examining landed pirate culture, as they provide a prototype and comparison for some of the settlements established in Madagascar in the 1690s. First, slavery was a central theme in the logwood-cutting settlements: the pirates sporadically made alliances with or fought former African slaves who escaped from the Spanish and established maroon communities in the mangrove swamps, and pirates either enslaved some of the maroons or enslaved some of the natives. Pirates could also find themselves enslaved, and not just by the swamps, swarming mosquitoes, and sand flies that continually plagued them. When Spanish authorities raided the settlements, they carried the pirate-settlers back to their towns and used them as slaves. The enslavers could thus become enslaved. Second, there was a social and economic hierarchy similar to that aboard the ships, as identified by John Atkins: “A servant, which is the first step with seamen into the trade, is hired at ton of logwood per month, and has one day in seven for himself, making together about 10 [dollars] a month to him; hence, if thoughtful and sober, they in time become masters, join stock, and trade independently.” There were some important differences, though, from seaborne pirate culture: these settled pirates were working for a wage and were involved in intensive protoindustrial labor, as opposed to marauding at sea for a share in the prize system. Contrarily, an argument could be made, and was made at the time in Madrid, that they were pillaging Spanish property and were therefore still parasitic rather than being producers. A more distinct difference was the cross-cultural nature of the settlements, again described by Atkins: “They have a king, chose from among their body, and his consort is styled queen, agreeing to some laws by common consent, as a guide to them.”  The election of the king can be traced to protodemocratic principles among the buccaneers and pirates, who elected and deposed their captains by common consent—and yet they continued to use the traditional political language of monarchy. The presence of indigenous women in the

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settlements, however, was far removed from the almost universally male social structure in the wooden world at sea, and points to an affinity for cross-cultural interactions that would become more pronounced in Madagascar at the end of the century. That there were similarities between the Bay settlements and those on Madagascar is traceable to individuals who straddled both worlds, including Every, Dampier, Plantain, and Captain Jenkins, whose ear was severed by a guarda-costa in 1731 (belatedly launching the War of Jenkins’ Ear seven years hence). The connection between Madagascar and the Bay settlements was further demonstrated in the 1720s and early 1730s, when the South Sea Company began to exchange logwood cut by the Spanish in return for Malagasy slaves. Logwood was thus an important commodity in global trade circuits as a dying agent for English textiles, which were increasingly shipped to the Indian Ocean and dumped on a distant consumer society. A number of piratical personages along the spectrum of piracy were involved in its cutting and shipping. It was purchased and shipped to Europe by New York merchants, who undoubtedly became familiar with the piratical ways of the logwood cutters; the merchants and “sailors of the woods” continued this relationship in the Indian Ocean. Another activity closely related to piracy was salvaging the wrecks of Spanish treasure ships that littered the reefs and coasts of the Caribbean and Bahamian islands. One historian has listed Charles II, James II, Prince Rupert, the second Duke of Albemarle, Sir Francis Nicholson, Lord Fairfax, William Penn, the Earl of Clarendon, Thomas Neale (Master of the Mint), and Edward Harley (Lord Treasurer) as prominent Englishmen who financed salvaging operations of sunken treasure ships. Governor Hasket of the Bahamas wrote, “Whatever they plunder they give the name of wreck goods.” This speculative venture was also carried out by some wealthy colonial merchants, including Frederick Philipse and William Beekman of New York—a business that was certain to bring them in contact with pirates. As their salvaging vessels were leaving New York harbor, they were stopped by customs officials and cleared only after they promised several shares to Governor Dongan. When pirates began settling in Madagascar at the end of the century, a number of individuals, like Edward Welch and Sion Arnold, became well known for their ability to dive the numerous wrecks and salvage goods, an activity they more than likely learned in the Caribbean. Diving and

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wrecking activities were also sites of intersection for pirate and slave communities. The geography of piracy pulsated in time with the activities of the Spanish American empire. Because the early seventeenth-century Atlantic economy was still dominated by Spanish American trade, Dutch, French, and English piratical activities were heavily concentrated in the Caribbean basin near the “Spanish Main.” The situation began to shift in the 1680s as the English and Dutch became trading partners with Spain and the sugar economy took root in the Caribbean islands. Pirates could now be found operating far away from the torrid zone of the tropical Atlantic (i.e., the Caribbean). In August 1686, for example, Governor Treat of Connecticut reported to New York’s Governor Dongan that a pirate lying between Rhode Island and Martha’s Vineyard had recently taken three vessels, one belonging to Carolina and two from Boston. The seas closer to the European metropoles, moreover, were equally subject to marauders. As a telling sample, between 1698 and 1700, London newspapers reported thirty-five instances of Atlantic-based piracy. A specific geographical location was identified in twenty-nine events, and a surprising majority took place in the seas surrounding Europe, especially near the coasts of England. Nineteen incidents occurred in European waters, fourteen of which would be considered English seas—including, incredibly, two incidents on the Thames itself. The English Channel and its islands were typical danger zones, with Scilly and the Isle of May specifically named in a number of instances. The pirate vessel was identified in only four of these accounts, though the name of the captain, or his supposed country of origin, was reported in ten accounts. The pirate crews, when identified by ethnic or national origin, were always English, Irish, Scots, or French, most often a medley of these. In the overwhelming majority of these instances, the pirates corralled their target and took provisions, food, alcohol, rigging, masts, and other equipment without causing excessive harm to the vessel, the captain, or the crew. On occasion, the reports indicate that members of the captured crews were also taken by the pirates, although it is unclear if these individuals were forcibly seized or if they voluntarily joined the pirates, which was often the case. In a number of instances, the pirates set ashore the crews of their prizes, a strong indication that any individuals remaining with the pirates did so by choice. Exceptions to this rule might include skilled seamen, such as carpenters and pilots. On two occasions, the pirates seized the commanders, though their subsequent fate is unknown.

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While the overwhelming majority of these events were relatively free of extreme violence—complaints of being “roughly used” appeared only once— there were occasions when the pirates set fire to the ships or killed the crews of their prizes. One incident, reported in all three London newspapers, was particularly gruesome. In June 1700, an unidentified pirate ship (or ships) was wreaking havoc near Ushant Island in the English Channel. The Post Man reported, “Several pyrates cruising off of Ushant and . . . great many bodies miserably used by those villains driven on that coast.” The Post Boy further elaborated that “several pirates lie off of Ushant and that many dead men are driven ashore on that coast who upon view appear to have been murthered and they often see great fires at sea by which tis conjectured that after they have plundered the ships they take they set them on fire.” The Flying Post repeated these reports with additional detail: “Some pirates lie off the Ushant, that many dead corpses cut and wounded have been lately drove ashore on that coast . . . that they see fires frequently at sea from thence, whence tis believed the pirates burn the ships after they plunder them.” A few weeks later, even more graphic details of the assault were provided by the Paris division of the Post Boy: “Several dead bodies, all mangled with blows of axes, have been thrown ashore by the sea, which makes us presume there are pirates at the mouth of the Channel, for they use commonly to do so to avoid discovery and orders are sent to give them chase in order to render navigation more safe.” Three frigates were reportedly sent out to chase the offenders, but the pirate ship or ships were never discovered. Piratical violence, moreover, was not always limited to the prize targets. At times, pirates turned upon themselves. Two London papers reported that a small English ship was seized and boarded by a crew of eleven Irish pirates near Saint-Malo on the French coast. After the seizure of the English vessel, contrary winds pushed them ashore at Rosco, near Morlaix. The more detailed report found in the Post Man stated that upon landing, during the sharing of goods, the Irish pirates “fell out amongst themselves,” whereupon six of the eleven pirates were killed. Though the remaining five pirates escaped into the French countryside, it is clear from the reports that piracy could be a selfdefeating pastime. Despite the violent flare-ups, pirates were overwhelmingly rational actors operating within formal legal systems that they often manipulated for their own benefit. In addition to manipulating these broader institutional structures, pirates existed within informal networks they created with their own

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rules and boundaries. It is only when these informal rules and boundaries exceeded rationality—that is, when pirates began attacking ships of all nations, wantonly killing captains and crews—that pirates became enemies of all mankind, hunted down and executed by imperial powers, especially Great Britain. But this, indeed, was for only for a short period, roughly 1720–1726. Since these men were excellent sailors with knowledge of longdistance trade routes, who could command ruffian crews on the long, arduous journeys, often spoke multiple languages, and possessed acute military skills— all critical components of trade in the early modern world of which they were a fundamental part—it was more likely for colonial governments and longdistance trading companies to co-opt pirates than it was for them to meet their end by a hangman’s noose. The first Atlantic pirate ships to arrive in the Indian Ocean, the Cygnet and the Batchelor’s Delight, were not necessarily there by design—but they did establish a direct connection between Caribbean-based piracy and the “new piracy” in the Indian Ocean. This new piracy is distinguished from the early Portuguese and East India Company (EIC) ships (which also technically committed piracy) because these later English vessels arrived in the Indian Ocean specifically to pillage and were unaffiliated with any state or trading companies. Many did have commissions to attack the French, but none that expressly allowed them to pillage in the Indian Ocean (Kidd excepted). In 1685 the Cygnet and the Delight had sailed in consort to the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Panama, attempting to capture the Spanish treasure fleet on its way to Manila. The mission failed, and while the Delight returned to Jamaica before eventually setting out for Madagascar, the Cygnet chased the galleons across the Pacific and eventually arrived at Madagascar after an extraordinary three-year journey. The captain and crew of the Cygnet had prominent buccaneering pedigrees. The original commander, Charles Swan of Jamaica, participated in the sacking of Panama with Henry Morgan in 1671. Also among them was the “piratescientist,” William Dampier, a former logwood cutter and a veteran of many buccaneering campaigns against the Spanish. Dampier kept a written journal throughout his adventures and described his circumnavigation in the bestselling travelogue A New Voyage round the World (1697), which he dedicated to the president of the Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific organization of its day. There is no denying Dampier’s scientific and cartographic achievements; his ability to write a journal and the great efforts he made to

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keep it dry were extraordinary in themselves. Dampier left detailed accounts of the logwood settlements, which would be used by English officials for the next century. More immediately, he testified before Parliament in 1697 on conditions in the region. He drew detailed maps and outlines of numerous coastlines never before visited by English vessels, including the Galapagos Islands and Australia, which were utilized on Cook’s voyages a century later. But there is also no denying that Dampier was, by legal definition, a pirate: in 1683, before transferring to the Cygnet, he had been among the crew that seized the Batchelor’s Delight, a Danish slaver, off the west coast of Africa, converting it to a pirate ship. Rumors suggested the ship was so named because of the sixty female slaves on board at the time of its seizure. The incident of piracy, and perhaps acts more vile, appear nowhere in Dampier’s publications, though the episode was widely reported elsewhere. The Cygnet and the Delight committed multiple acts of piracy in their voyages, though Dampier does not speak of them. Indeed, once his circumnavigation was complete, Dampier instantly became a national hero: his travelogue went through numerous editions, and he was the toast of London. When news began to arrive that he had been involved in acts of piracy, Dampier’s reputation was staunchly defended by the scientific community and the London literati. One example should suffice: A malicious report industriously spread about this city . . . as if Capt. Dampier . . . had betaken himself to that wicked trade of pirating . . . that Capt. Dampier was always telling his men what a brave life it was to be a Pirateering. . . . [S]o famous for his several voyages, particularly that round the world . . . those that know Dampier can harbor no such thought of this great traveler, he being always aversed to that pernicious employ, as it appears by the 2 volumes he writ of his several voyages . . . [in the search for Terra Australis] that Dampier may have the honour to do as much as Christopher Columbus did in that King Ferdindand and Queen Isabella of Spain; but with this difference, that King William frees and protects all he subdues, whilest the other ruined and enslaved such as they conquered.

In the English imaginary, Dampier could now accompany Drake and Hawkins in the heroic pantheon of great national “pirateers” (alongside Columbus, the preeminent state-sponsored Italo-Hispanic pirate). The very word pirateering, an amalgam of privateer and pirate, legal and illicit, serves to indicate the blurred nature of this business for contemporary observers. Dampier abandoned the Cygnet when it reached the Philippines. After failing to capture the Spanish treasure ships, Swan was also set ashore and

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figure 2. Sir Francis Drake (left) and William Dampier, embraced as national heroes in England, were prominent figures in the spectrum of piracy. (Drake: frontispiece in John Harris, Navigantium Atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca [London, 1744–48]. Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University; Thomas Murray’s portrait of William Dampier © National Portrait Gallery, London.)

replaced by Captain Read. With Read now in command and half the crew gone ashore in India, the pirates captured a rich Portuguese prize near Ceylon (Sri Lanka). They then attempted to sail to the Red Sea for further attacks, but they came up against the westerly monsoon winds and instead sailed for Madagascar. The monsoon cycle would help establish Madagascar as a seasonal pirate settlement, a place to rest and recuperate during the winter months. The Cygnet arrived at Saint Augustine, Madagascar (Anatsoano), in 1689, and the crew joined with a local “prince” to fight and raid in a local war. A small vessel from New York arrived to purchase slaves, and the timing was impeccable, as the pirates and their local ally had done well. For the Malagasy prisoners captured in the war, it meant not local enslavement but a long Middle Passage to Barbados or New York. The slaver undoubtedly belonged

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to Frederick Philipse—perhaps it was the Philip, which had been to Madagascar in 1682 (other options include the pink Charles or the bark Margarett). With the Cygnet in port, its old consort, the Batchelor’s Delight, rode into the bay. Like the Cygnet, many of the Delight’s crew were buccaneers who had raided Panama and other Spanish territories, and they soon unleashed their buccaneering skills in the Indian Ocean when they cruised off East Africa and looted two Portuguese prizes. They then sailed for India, where they seized the Unity, a wealthy EIC merchantman. The EIC officers were set adrift, and the entire crew of the Unity joined the pirates. The Delight returned to Madagascar, but instead of Saint Augustine’s, they went to a new pirate settlement at Saint Mary’s, founded by Adam Baldridge. There were now hundreds of pirates in Madagascar. This number fluctuated over time, depending on the number of ships in port, but there would always be a base settlement at Saint Mary’s during the next few decades. The pirates sank the Cygnet, riddled with holes after its long tropical journey, in the bay—the beginnings of an ever-expanding pirate ship graveyard. Captain Read and five or six more of the crew “stole away . . . and went aboard [the] New York ship” that was there to take slaves. When they arrived in the colonies, the news of their circumnavigation—and the potential profits to be made in the Indian Ocean—would contribute to the frenzy that was about to take place. Over the next decade, a direct network between New York and Madagascar would be established through the activities of Adam Baldridge, Samuel Burgess, and a host of other New York–based pirates and traders.

the case of the margaret The Margaret was constructed in New York in 1695 and was individually owned by Frederick Philipse for use in the Indo-Atlantic trade, including transportation of slaves. It was likely christened after Philipse’s second wife, Margaret Hardenbroek. Listed as eighty tons, the square stern bark was much smaller than the East Indiamen making the same journey from Europe. Its small size notwithstanding, the Margaret made a successful maiden voyage in 1695. The Margaret’s second Indo-Atlantic voyage cleared the port of New York in June 1698, its papers signed by the governor, Lord Bellomont. Although the governor had been sent to the colonies specifically to suppress piracy and illegal trading, he nonetheless cleared the ship for a voyage to Madagascar, which he understood to be a pirate lair because of his connections

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with Kidd. Despite Bellomont’s public posturing against the pirate trade, his clearance of the Margaret clearly indicates his commitment to the IndoAtlantic trade, legitimate or otherwise, just like his much-maligned predecessor, Governor Benjamin Fletcher. The travel time between New York and Madagascar averaged four to six months. As with any journey in the age of sail, the longer the voyage, the higher the proportion of sickness and death. After weeks of preparation in port— loading the cannon, small arms and ammunition, casks of water, victuals, pipes of rum, barrels of beer, shoes, clothes, seeds, books, slave-trade items (beads, iron bars, weapons, shackles), and assorted seafaring equipment—the vessel would set sail east across the Atlantic, following the prevalent trade winds and currents. In about four weeks, the ship would stop at Madeira to take on water and wine, then continue to either the Canary Islands or the Cape Verde Islands opposite Senegal on the west African coast for salt, wood, and water. This was the last available stop in the North Atlantic before entering the doldrums, the vast equatorial vacuum between the northern and southern hemispheric wind and current systems. Sailing vessels had to tack south southwest back across the Atlantic toward Brazil to catch the eastsoutheasterly winds that dominated the South Atlantic. At around thirty degrees south latitude, the winds turned west-northwest late in the year, making possible a straight run to the Cape of Good Hope and beyond. The only reliable stopping point south of the equator was the island of Saint Helena, a lone rocky outpost in the middle of the vast South Atlantic. Saint Helena, controlled by the English East India Company since 1673, could be bypassed on the outbound trip if the voyage had gone smoothly; on return voyages from the East, nearly every single ship put in there to rest and refit. Vessels illicitly carrying proscribed East India goods in their holds, however, had to avoid the English customs agents located in Jamestown, the port of Saint Helena. Though customs agents made Saint Helena a dangerous place for contraband traders and pirates, another potential port of call, Cape Town, could be equally hazardous. Given the prevalence of major storms in the South African region, however, putting in at the Cape was sometimes unavoidable. This is probably what happened to the Margaret on its return voyage to New York in December 1699, when Captain Burgess, the crew, and the passengers were arrested by Captain Matthew Lowth. Although only a handful of names appear in the list of seamen’s wages found among the confiscated documents of the Margaret, the ship’s clearance

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papers from New York indicate that the bark departed with a sixteen-man crew. Captain Burgess’s first mate, Weybrand Larinbey, was given, in addition to wages, a one-slave allowance. The only names found in the seaman’s wages are Lawrence; Harrison; Nicholas Hoar; Franck, “a negor” owned by Mr. Courtland of New York; and Maramitta, a Malagasy cook owned by Philipse. When they were seized by Lowth at the Cape on the return trip, the records indicate that there was a twelve-man crew; four jumped overboard, swam ashore, and disappeared in Cape Town. The pirates had done well on their raids, for in addition to the cargoes of spices, textiles, porcelain, and one hundred slaves, Lowth discovered “all Coynes in the Universe”—a solid indication of the depth and breadth of the East Indies trade. For the historian, another rich and fascinating treasure was also found on board. Because the English government had become adamant about suppressing piracy in Indo-Atlantic waters and was interested in gathering information about the participants for trial, they gave extraordinary extralegal commissions to all EIC ships to seize any crew and vessel suspected of piracy in Indian Ocean waters. Captain Matthew Lowth not only seized the cargo, crew, passengers, and slaves, but also the trove of documents that was located on board. If these documents only included letters between the ship’s owner, Frederick Philipse of New York, and the captain, Samuel Burgess, they would be an invaluable resource to historians. But there is far more. Included among the detailed instructions and cargo lists are dozens of letters from wives, last wills and testaments, and powers of attorney, which provide fascinating insights into the world of the Indo-Atlantic pirates. Because these very personal documents were never meant for the authorities, they should be counted among the most impartial and revealing sources. After reviewing them, it becomes readily apparent that rather than being renegades and rogues as they are often characterized, these pirates maintained Anglo-American social, legal, and cultural practices that were far more mainstream than radical. One of the first things to note is that correspondences were maintained tens of thousands of miles across the globe between Indian Ocean pirates and North American colonists. The documents collected on board the Margaret, dated between 1695 and 1699, indicate five continuous years of contact. Many letters reference receipt, further indicating the successful maintenance of direct communications between New York and Madagascar. Braudel may have remarked that distance was enemy number one in the early modern trade

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world, but correspondence regularly found its way from Madagascar to New York and back again. Given the tremendous difficulties associated with early modern time and distance, coupled with the illicit nature of this network, this is a most remarkable feat. Since a post road was not constructed in Long Island until late 1700, it is not unreasonable to argue that residents of New York City had established a regular written communication network with Madagascar before it had one with the island on its own east flank. A second point is the complex role played by slaves as laborers and cultural brokers in the Indo-Atlantic trade. A third revelation is the maintenance of legal norms, including contracts, wills, and powers of attorney. A final, related point is evidence of literacy among the pirate community of Madagascar. The presence of books and writing paper in the cargo lists provides confirmation that at least some of the pirates were better educated than we might otherwise expect. As written texts, wills demonstrate the type of material possessions owned by Indo-Atlantic pirates residing at Madagascar in the 1690s. These objects indicate what was considered valuable to the pirate-settlers on Madagascar, and they often included everyday Anglo-American items that could not be readily found there. The wills also indicate who were the most intimate and important persons in these pirates’ lives and, perhaps more importantly, represent a distinct marker of the maintenance of Anglo-American social and legal norms. In written formula, the pirate wills were identical to legal documents of their colonial and metropolitan contemporaries. They often begin with the lines, “In the name of God . . . ,” the boilerplate language of AngloChristian wills still in existence today. Cornelius Dorrington, seaman of the Margaret, for example, “sick of body but of a sound and perfect memory,” appointed Captain Samuel Burgess his executor and divided his belongings among seven of “his loving friends,” Burgess among them. There were two signed witnesses, one of whom received nothing. The other, Weybrand Larinbey, first mate of the Margaret, was bequeathed a pair of “pumps” (i.e., shoes). Burgess received a gold ring and a gun; seaman Nicholas Hore received a waistcoat and a pair of breeches; Thomas Ransford, the boatswain, received a watch coat, a waistcoat, a pair of breeches, and a pair of silver buckles; Joseph Wheeler was bequeathed two waistcoats, one flannel and one striped (most likely a calico coat). Moses Dawson, the Margaret’s surgeon, originally from London and clearly a close companion of Dorrington’s, received two coats, a pair of breeches, a “Holland

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shirt,” a hat, a pair of shoes, a pair of pumps, a carbine, and a gourd of powder. John Powell received a gold ring. Any items not enumerated were to be divided between Hoar and Dawson. Most of these individuals were fellow sailors aboard the Margaret, a good indication of the strong social bonds among the crew. Some information is available about Moses Dawson, who was one of the men arrested on board the Margaret by Captain Lowth in 1699 on the return from Madagascar. When still in Captain Lowth’s custody, he was examined on board the Loyal Merchant and gave a written deposition, which provides some personal and community background. As a surgeon from Saint Bride’s, London, he arrived in Madagascar after deserting from the Windsor at Saint Helena some years earlier. His claim to have gone to Madagascar strictly as a salvager may not be dubious, as there were other settlers, like Sion Arnold, whose main capacity while living in Madagascar was salvaging the many wrecks that littered the coasts. As trading factor and captain to Frederick Philipse, Burgess maintained an important position in the Madagascar pirate settlements. He was granted power of attorney a number of times, he witnessed many contracts and agreements among the pirate-settlers, and he was the receiver and holder of valuable goods for colonial relatives of deceased pirate-settlers. Though thousands of miles from the North American colonies, the settlements at Madagascar remained in their sociocultural sphere. Another factor and captain, Adam Baldridge, filled a legal niche much like Burgess’s in the pirate settlements. One particularly intriguing case involves Ann Read of Bristol, whose husband, John Read, a mariner, had been in Madagascar for nine years before he died there. When he left to go slaving and pirating in the Indian Ocean in 1689, the couple had been married four years and had a son and daughter. Ann learned of her husband’s fate through letters delivered via the Indo-Atlantic trade network, and she received information that John Read had left her some money in Madagascar, which was in the custody of local pirate middleman Adam Baldridge. After learning of John’s demise, Ann remarried a local cordwain (or cordwinder), John Carterell, in May 1693. To receive her rightful inheritance from her first husband, John, Ann sent a legal dossier to Madagascar, which included a civil court document drawn up in Bristol, a letter of attorney designated for pirate-settler John Powell of Madagascar to represent her, and a copy of the certificate of marriage to John Carterell, together with the information regarding her inheritance from John Read.

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While the outcome of this proceeding is unknown, given the fate of the Margaret, it is doubtful that Ann ever received any of the inheritance intended for her. More importantly for us, the fact that she sent this complete legal dossier to a “pirate settlement” ten thousand miles away, complete with a power-of-attorney letter, is evidence in the case being made here for a connected Indo-Atlantic world. Though Madagascar may have been situated in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles distant from the North American colonies and the metropole, it is apparent from the archival records that its settlers maintained many Euro-American social, cultural, and legal norms. As the following chapter will demonstrate, the most important Atlantic node in maintaining this Anglo-American network was the port city of New York.

chapter 2

New York Merchants and the Indo-Atlantic Trade

Historians have long established that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the tumultuous seas of the North Atlantic had been transformed by and large into an English pond. What many of these historians fail to stress, however, is that before this impressive transformation took place, the North Atlantic, and its extensive western littoral, were contested spaces among the expanding European states and the indigenous coastal peoples. On the western edge of this vast North Atlantic region, situated at the northern end of a grand and deep harbor, was the island of Manhattes, bounded to the west by the great Mahicanittuk River, a regular meeting place for local Amerindians at the time of the European arrival. The legendary European names have replaced many of the Algonquian designations: the Hudson River, Verrazano Narrows, Staten Island, and New York itself all appear on our modern maps and road signs; Europeans have left their mark on the places they explored and settled some five hundred years earlier. Historians once thought these explorers sailed to the New World to claim it in the name of their distant monarchs; in the case of Hudson, we now know that although the merchant financiers were connected with the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), his 1609 voyage was underwritten as a private venture outside the VOC charter. Risky speculation thus characterized the city from its founding. At first encounter, the Algonquian peoples who lived, fished, and hunted alongside the great harbor and the mighty Mahicanittuk may have believed the great ships were Manitou, supernatural beings, but the explorers on board soon revealed their human nature. Violence erupted, but the most fundamental threat 37

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figure 3. The Dutch West India Company created a compact town at the southern foot of Manhattan (the fort is the largest structure visible on the left near the windmill). (View of New York by Johannes Vingboons [1664], Koninklijke Bibliotheek [National Library of the Netherlands], Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.)

to the indigenous people, disease, was invisible and unknown even to the European carriers—and far more lethal than their blunderbusses and bombards. Initial hostilities led to negotiations, and the Dutch purchased the island of Manhattes for the price of some precious wampum, more valuable than silver or gold to the Algonquians. The island became New Amsterdam, and Mahicanittuk, the North River (later changed to Hudson). It was not the last time Manhattan would change hands. In these volatile times, possession fluctuated often, but by then it was among competing Europeans. In 1664, the island, along with its hinterlands to the north, became a possession of the English crown, and the important beaver-trading settlement to the north on the Hudson, known as Beverwjick, became Albany. It was not secured for long. The cycle of mercantile wars between the Dutch and English meant a return to Dutch rule in 1673–1674, before reverting again to English control. The situation remained in such flux that in 1679, five years after the English resumed possession, a Dutch visitor

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to the region remarked, “As soon as they saw a ship coming up [the harbor], they raise a flag. . . . [A]ccording to the colors of the sovereign to whom they are subject . . . they now flew the flag of the king of England.” In these days of sailing ships and incessant imperial wars, governments could and sometimes did change hands in the time it took to complete a transatlantic voyage. This was a lesson later gleaned by pirates who would forum-shop along the colonial coasts in search of a friendly port of entry. The flag of England would fly over New York for another century. In 1688, William of Orange became king of England, which ushered in a period of exceptional amity and unity between the previously hostile English and Dutch mercantile states. Imperial conflict resumed again at the end of the seventeenth century, when the competition in the North Atlantic was increasingly marked by conflicts between the Stuart and Bourbon crowns. There had been early signs: just as New Netherlands was ceded to the English in 1664, Colbert was attempting colonial consolidation farther north in the name of the Sun King, and New France was named a province with Quebec as its capital. The French would thus gradually supplant the Dutch as England’s foil in the European quest for imperial hegemony in the North Atlantic basin—a campaign that remained undecided until 1763. Meanwhile, maritime vessels from the competing powers traversed the seas as privateers and pirates, pillaging one another’s merchant ships and rival settlements. These pirates and privateers did not limit their activities to the Atlantic basin. Increasingly toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Indian Ocean became their preferred hunting grounds, and enterprising merchants in New York decided to sponsor them there. This chapter provides a broad overview of the geographical, social, and cultural conditions in New York that gave rise to its prominence as the major colonial Atlantic hub in the Indo-Atlantic trade network. An examination of the merchant families involved in this trade demonstrates that they cut a wide swath across the ethnic spectrum of colonial New York. Most of the family patriarchs were born in Dutch, English, or French regions of Europe, then emigrated to the colonies under a variety of circumstances, and in the end died incredibly wealthy as a result of their involvement in the Indo-Atlantic trade. New York developed a notorious reputation as a pirate haven in the 1690s. That pirates were closely associated with New York is indeed borne out by the documents. The conventional story is that the sole reason for the presence of pirates was corruption by Governor Benjamin Fletcher (1692–1698). This

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interpretation has been accepted on its face because Fletcher’s successor, Richard Coote, Lord Bellomont (1698–1700), sought to tarnish the reputation of his predecessor before he ever stepped foot in New York. Pirates were indeed present in New York, and they played a far more significant and broader role than contemporaries, and later historians, have allowed them. Bellomont, for all his grandstanding, was equally if not more guilty of accessory to piracy, not only by his sponsorship of Captain Kidd’s voyage to the Indian Ocean, but for his efforts to establish a trade settlement at Madagascar, the world’s greatest pirate haven. Bellomont, who was specifically sent to New York to expurgate the pirate trade, was instrumental, along with a syndicate of London peers, in commissioning William Kidd, who turned pirate in the Indian Ocean. Bellomont’s political connections with the peerage are what most differentiates the Kidd scheme from the privateer commissions granted by Fletcher. The class difference between Fletcher, a professional soldier who had spent a number of years colonizing Ireland for the English crown, and Bellomont, a lord of the Irish peerage, was clearly central in this personal feud. Personal animosities ran deep between Fletcher and Bellomont. In an age when social status and patronage meant everything, Bellomont could not abide the pretensions of Fletcher, a military man, and his claims of high social standing. This feud may have spread beyond these two individuals, as evidenced in the suspicious death of Lord Bellomont’s nephew in the streets of London in 1698. These personal details are nonetheless subsumed in the broader Atlantic picture, where colonial governments’ commissioning of pirates as privateers was both necessary and widespread. As for the commerce of New York, an examination of Philipse and the lesser merchants reveals the significance of New York family networks in the Indo-Atlantic trade and demonstrates how minor merchants became power brokers in New York’s political and social scene through their involvement in the Indo-Atlantic trade.

the indo-atlantic trade network The Indo-Atlantic trade network was about slaves, East India goods, and pirate booty. African slaves had been brought to New York since the Dutch period, and pirates and privateers were often the suppliers—indeed, as noted earlier, the very first cargo of slaves delivered to the American colonies was brought

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to Virginia by Dutch pirates in 1619. The first known slave voyage to Madagascar occurred in 1663, when the Wapen van Amsterdam purchased 354 Malagasy slaves, 265 of whom survived and were sold in New York. The grim mortality rate of 25 percent was more salubrious than many subsequent IndoAtlantic slave voyages, where death rates for slaves often exceeded 30 percent. New York merchants were more active in venturing to West Africa in the 1670s. In the 1680s, colonial merchants began again going to Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa—a much longer journey, but the large island lay outside the geographic charter enjoyed by the RAC monopoly, and the slaves were cheaper. The East India goods and pirate booty were two sides of the same coin. Under English mercantile laws, direct trade between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic colonies was proscribed by the EIC charter. English East Indiamen, meanwhile, departed the Atlantic from London docks and returned directly to Europe heavily laden with rich cargoes of raw and manufactured silks, woven cotton textiles (colloquially called “piece goods”), pepper, cinnamon, coffee, tea, saltpeter, and chinaware, in addition to jewels and assorted drugs. These luxury items were extremely desirable and expensive in the cities of Europe, and very rarely did they find their way to the provincial countryside, let alone the peripheral colonies. The most direct way for these goods to reach the colonies was not by trade but via piracy. Colonial pirate ships would pillage these valuables from country ships, vessels indigenous to the Indian Ocean (although often captained by Europeans). Less frequently, pirates might attempt the much larger and well-armed Indiamen. In addition to East India goods, pirates (and colonial merchants) were interested in silver, the most common form of exchange in the Indian Ocean and the only medium of European exchange that was accepted in the Indian Ocean. Silver money came in a variety of shapes and sizes: ducatoons were highly pure silver discs minted in the Netherlands expressly for the East India trade. Similar but lighter and more common were Dutch “lyon dollars” named for the heraldic lion stamped on the coins. Most commonly in circulation were Spanish and Mexican piastres, also known as “eight reales” or “pieces of eight,” and “mark reales,” an unsorted mixture sold by weight. The ducatoons were sometimes melted down into rupees or other local currencies, and there was usually a variety of all these coins on any single trading vessel in the region (hence Captain Lowth’s reference to “all Coynes in the Universe” in the preceding chapter). The value of these coins fluctuated in the colonies: in 1695,

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merchants preferred pieces of eight; in 1698, “lyon dollars” were preferred over reales and “Arabian coins.” Whatever their value in the colonies, they were scarce, especially in the 1690s. While the Indian Ocean was flush with silver, there was a fundamental shortage of coin in the North American colonies. Utilizing Indo-Atlantic pirates in the colonies could alleviate the dearth of valuable East India goods and infuse a much-needed dose of bullion into the depressed colonial economy. In return for these valuable goods and luxuries, colonial merchants supplied the pirates based in Madagascar. They sent grain, peas, flour, seeds, shoes, clothing, books, paper, guns, ammunition—in short, everything needed in a colonial settlement. Most importantly, they sent liquor and beer, which sold at a premium to the pirate-settlers. The morality of the trade was never questioned as long as the pirates targeted non-Christians, especially since New York’s own citizens were periodically taken captive by Barbary pirates in North Africa. Colonial governments had to regularly solicit ransom money from the local citizenry for the release of these captive neighbors. An official of the Admiralty perhaps summed it up best: “The discourse was generally that they were bound to Madagascar [and] . . . to the Red Sea where the money was a plenty as stones and sand. . . . [T]he people there were infidels and it was no sin to kill them.” Though widely accepted among the colonists, the Indo-Atlantic trade was technically in conflict with the EIC monopoly and the Navigation Acts. Because of its illicit nature, the vessels carrying East India goods had to proceed with caution to avoid seizure by colonial or imperial authorities. English officials were aware of the smuggling but had few resources in either region to do much about it. There were a number of proposals to “man the rivers and inlets used to smuggle,” but of the more than 260 first-rate through sixth-rate vessels in the English Royal Navy, less than a handful were stationed in the North American colonies, and none greater than a fifth-rate. The HMS Richmond was the only vessel stationed to patrol the numerous rivers, bays, inlets, and creeks in the New York region. And the Richmond was only active from March through September, as the harsh winters during the Little Ice Age ensured that few ships would attempt to sail or row across the ice-filled waters. The Richmond’s captain, John Evans, ran an alehouse and a bakery to supplement his meager wages. It even appears that Evans was involved in the smuggling end of the Indo-Atlantic trade: he received generous land grants in Long Island from Governor Fletcher, and in 1698 he was able to purchase

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250 acres along the East Jersey shore on Sandy Hook Bay. A fully professional navy had not yet arrived. The dearth of English naval vessels in the colonies had another chilling side effect: the lightly defended coasts might prove a tempting target for the enemy. To the north of the city, there were continuous threats from the combined French and Iroquois forces, which razed Schenectady in 1690, a mere twenty miles from the major fur-trading center of Albany. In 1693, the French privateer John Reaux was captured in Long Island Sound and claimed he was “well acquainted with this coast,” adding that “700 recruits were sent to Canada this last summer, and he was in company of the fleet.” The French threat was persistent: in 1700, a fifty-gun man-of-war commanded by the chevalier d’Iberville came into New York Harbor under “pretense to wood and water,” but instead was believed to be sounding the harbor and scouting the terrain. New York’s lieutenant governor, John Nanfan, was informed that some French officials believed King James had made “an absolute gift” of New York to the French crown. Nanfan suggested to the governor that it was “time to refortify, for the French are men of too great diligence to slip any advantageous opportunity.” Refortification was likewise a continuous problem. Fort James (later renamed Fort George), which housed the governor as well as the soldiers, was strategically located at the southern tip of Manhattan but remained in constant disrepair. Governor Dongan (1682–1689), for instance, found “most of the guns dismounted . . . the breast-work upon the wall . . . so moultered away,” and he further lamented he was “forc’t every day by reason of the roteness of the timber & boards to be making reparations in the soldiers quarters and my own.” In addition, there were perpetual difficulties in manning the few vessels that were there to protect the coast. During wartime, most of the able-bodied men were sent to the frontier to defend against the Franco-Iroquois raids. For all English navy vessels, impressment was the official procedure for getting men aboard ships, and New York was no exception. Even Dr. Benjamin Bullivant, a London emissary to the colonies on official government business, expressed deep concern with being pressed by Captain Evans when he passed through the narrow Hell-Gate on his arrival in New York. With little manpower, defenses in want of repair, and French invasion fleets rumored or actually near the coast, it should come as no surprise that Captain Evans requested that the governor allow him to man the Richmond’s crew with known

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figure 4. The earliest street plan of New York showing the crooked layout, 1660. The left side of the plan is roughly due south and the top is west, with the Hudson or North River at the top of the image. Wall Street is visible at the right center portion of the map, intersected by Broadway (Brede Wegh). (Attributed to Jacques Cortelyou, general governor of New Amsterdam [1660]. New York Public Library, Digital Gallery. Digital ID: 54682, Digital Record ID: 118555.)

or alleged pirates. This request was pragmatic, given the circumstances, and even shrewd, as pirates made excellent sailors and fighters. The issue of granting privateer commissions to individuals with piratical histories was also raised in New York, to which the previous discussion likewise has relevance. With regard to privateers, New York was similar to other English colonies. Indeed, the precedent for utilizing pirates and privateers was established at the outset and continued throughout the seventeenth century. The earliest attempts at English colonization in the Americas were characterized by overwhelming reliance on piracy against the Spanish (Roanoke, Bermuda, Providence Island, Jamestown). The governors of Jamaica, which had been seized from Spain in 1655, had actively encouraged pirates, known as buccaneers, to utilize Port Royal as a base in the hope that the presence of heavily armed pirate ships would discourage a Spanish counterassault or a French attack on the island. This policy proved remarkably

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successful. While less protected English colonies like Antigua were constantly harassed and even sacked on multiple occasions, there were no serious attempts to attack Jamaica. As a bonus, the merchants of Port Royal grew rich on the plunder extracted from buccaneer raids upon Spanish ships and towns. In another sense, the use of pirates and privateers indicated an immature and underdeveloped colony. As colonies matured and established their own local economies—sugar, in the case of the Caribbean—the need for piracy abated and the value of pirates diminished. The Port Royal earthquake in 1692 scattered any remaining buccaneers far and wide, but Caribbean pirates had shifted to North American ports much earlier. Veteran privateers of the Caribbean and the Anglo-Dutch wars during the 1660s and 1670s began to make regular visits to Charles Town, Carolina, in the 1680s. They were a welcome sight on the periphery of empire, as they paid for their supplies with gold and silver, and several Carolinian merchants made their fortunes in the pirate trade. These merchants, mostly recent immigrants from Barbados, settled on Goose Creek, a tributary of the Cooper River, and were deeply invested in both the slave trade and trafficking with pirates. The Goose Creek men controlled the local government and enjoyed considerable popular support in the colony. After Governor Quary was dismissed for trading with pirates in 1684, his successor, Joseph Morton, continued to condone the trade. In 1686, James Colleton was sent from England to govern this unruly colony and, upon arrival, dismissed the Goose Creek men from the council and declared martial law. It was only after this drastic step that Colleton could boast, “There have been no pirates nor other Sea Robbers . . . in this province without being brought to condign punishment.” With South Carolina under martial law in the 1680s, the pirates tried their fortunes farther afield. Many found the climate of New York to the north much more hospitable. One important reason pirates found New York so appealing was the vast Hudson estuary, with its numerous rivers, creeks, and inlets, and the jurisdictional confusion that accompanied such a vast area. On the southern and western littoral of New York Harbor lay the colony of East Jersey, which had become politically separate from the Hudson estuary when the English seized control of New Amsterdam. This unnatural separation was the root cause of significant commercial, political, and jurisdictional complications ever after, which pirates and smugglers used to their advantage. Governor Dongan and many of his successors petitioned the crown to have East Jersey reannexed.

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Dongan complained, “Privateers and others can come within Sandy Hook and take what provisions and goods they please from that side.” A few years later, Governor Fletcher’s frustration was more visceral: “I am really just jaded with writing the same thing over and over. . . . East Jersey prohibiting a trade with New York, appointing a sort of free port even in the mouth of the Hudsons which must destroy the trade of this place where customs are paid to the King and Acts of Trade and navigation strictly observed.” It was this utter lack of interest from the metropole that likely contributed to Fletcher’s transgressions: he was eventually recalled on allegations of corruption, including excessive grants of land to favorites and trade with pirates. Fletcher was no rogue, however, and he enjoyed the steadfast support of the grantees and the many merchants who favored the pirate trade, even after his recall. In addition to East India goods, slavery was the other important piece of the Indo-Atlantic trade. Enslaved Africans had been imported to New York since 1626 by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which established the southern tip of Manhattan as a trading outpost. The first eleven company slaves were of Afro-Iberian lineage, most likely Angolan, and were utilized in a variety of public projects, including the first paved street in Manhattan, construction of the wall that became Wall Street, and the Boston Post Road; more significantly in the imperial Atlantic context, they were crucial in construction of the fort. Historian Leslie Harris has noted that the presence of Afro-Iberian slaves in New Amsterdam resulted from the WIC’S aggressive attempts to gain dominance in the Atlantic slave trade. This proactive policy would be continued by a number of Dutch merchants—as well as French and English—after the “conquest” in 1664, but rather than harming the Spanish and Portuguese, it came at the expense of the Royal African Company (RAC). The entrepreneurial vigor of New York’s colonial merchants proved so successful that in combination with RAC imports, the number of slaves living in New York City in the eighteenth century was surpassed only in New Orleans and Charleston. When the Duke of York assumed control of the region, there were a few hundred Africans and African Americans living in Manhattan, and under the more lenient policies of the WIC, many had obtained their freedom— including the original eleven (though not their children—the Dutch system was not that lenient). The WIC’s allowance of “half-freedom” for company slaves enabled many of the earliest African Americans to hire themselves out after they had completed company tasks, and with money earned on their own accounts they purchased farms, or “boweries,” north of the city proper. The

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half-freedom policy was not continued after the conquest. Indeed, the Duke of York’s controlling interest in the RAC ensured that his province would be a major colonial market for slaves. To improve the African trade, property taxes on slaves were eliminated and tariffs on incoming slaves favored African over intercolonial (i.e, West Indian) importation. The written instructions to New York’s governors, furthermore, included a clause that explicitly gave “all encouragement and invitation to merchants and others who shall bring trade unto our said province . . . in particular the Royal African Company of England.” The RAC, however, proved more efficient in serving the more demanding markets in the southern and Caribbean colonies, where the intensive labor regimes and high mortality rates of the plantation complex required a greater supply of laborers. The demand for slaves in New York, therefore, was not matched by the RAC’s inadequate supply. To make up for the shortage and to challenge the overall royal monopoly held by the RAC in supplying the colonies, a number of the city’s wealthiest merchants and councilmen (often one and the same)—as well as some small-to-middling ones—took up the trade with the cooperation of an equal number of New York’s officials and governors. English vessels began importing Malagasy slaves into the Atlantic world, including the West Indies, Massachusetts, and New York, as early as the 1670s, which provided a temporarily legal alternative to the RAC monopoly on the West African coast. There was also profit to consider: whereas an outlay of 3 to 4 was required on the west coast of Africa, where the RAC’s slave factories controlled the English trade in human chattel, it cost only ten shillings in goods to purchase a Malagasy slave. In the 1680s and 1690s, vessels from New York engaged heavily in this trade. In a remarkable display of entrepreneurship during the economically depressed 1690s, New York merchants, aware that pirates were utilizing Madagascar as a base, decided to supply them, provide regular ferry and mail service to and from New York, and employ them as cross-cultural brokers in the slave trade. The principal merchant involved was Frederick Philipse, a long-standing member of the New York Council, and by the 1680s, the wealthiest merchant in New York. Philipse would parlay this wealth into a high-risk/high-reward investment in the Indo-Atlantic trade, but he would not have been able to accomplish it on his own. Indeed, Philipse surrounded himself with a network of family members and slaves, who became vital components of the IndoAtlantic trade network.

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the philipse family network Though he became the patriarch of New York’s Indo-Atlantic trade network, Frederick Philipse began his life and career under much humbler circumstances. He was born Frederyck Flypsen in 1626 in northern Holland and may have had an English mother. During his early years, Philipse was trained in carpentry, and in the 1650s, he emigrated to New Amsterdam as a carpenter for the WIC. In 1662, at the age of forty, he married twenty-five-year-old Margaret Hardenbroeck de Vries, the widow of a wealthy merchant, Peter de Vries. The marriage seems to have been personally rewarding, and it was without a doubt financially shrewd. Under Dutch law, the authority of married women and widows within the family was significant. Dutch men shared property in common with their wives, which in effect postponed their children’s inheritance. Under the custom of boedelhouderschap, if one of the partners died, the surviving spouse became heir to all property that the first to die might leave behind. If either party wed again, he or she had to relinquish control over half the boedel, or estate, to the couple’s children, since the “commonality of interest” was broken if the party remarried. Margaret and her infant daughter, Maria de Vries, were thus the heirs to Peter de Vries’s considerable estate, which included property in the village of Bergen across the Hudson in East Jersey, four substantial building lots in Manhattan, and an active tobacco trade business, including one ship. Before marrying Philipse, Margaret sold some of the real estate to purchase two more ships, and Frederick thus had a small fleet at his disposal after the wedding. Upon his marriage to Margaret, Frederick also adopted Maria, who was raised in the Philipse household as Eva Philipse. Under the generous surrender terms offered by the English in 1664, the Dutch-born Flypsen anglicized his name and swore a simple oath of allegiance to the crown, thereby qualifying as a loyal subject with all the rights and privileges of an English citizen. Once the English annexation of New Netherland was consummated, Philipse, with his wife’s small fleet, found the entire English empire open for trade. The Philipse family was involved in a plethora of wide-ranging local and regional economic activities, including the upriver Indian fur trade, the transshipment of Virginia tobacco, and the sale and shipment of wheat and butter grown on their plantation in Westchester. Philipse also had his eye on broader schemes, always with a view to turning a tidy profit, even in high-risk ventures.

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Toward this end, in 1682, he sponsored a salvage operation for sunken Spanish treasure in the Bahamian islands, over a thousand miles south of New York City. The salvage crew abandoned the difficult work on the reef and decided instead to raid the Spanish town of Saint Augustine in Florida. Following their return to New York, Philipse kept the loot in his house until it was time for the division of spoils. This venture led to a legal dispute between Philipse and Captain John Cornelisen. The complaint stated that Philipse fit out the brigantine Delaware Merchant, including provisions, in return for one-fifth of the spoils recovered from the wreck. Cornelisen claimed that he paid out 145 to Philipse, who demanded a higher share. The complaint was complicated by the fact that a portion of the initial money was paid in Dutch guilders, and colonial exchange rates fluctuated wildly—an indication of the complexity of the colonial currency situation. The initial complaint was dismissed by the court, but Philipse proved persistent and filed another claim on a related matter regarding the disputed sale of an anchor. During the expedition, Cornelisen had sold one of the brigantine’s anchors without reimbursing Philipse; the captain argued that it was necessary because of “extreme fatigue and distress.” The court awarded Philipse 24. Philipse continued to finance salvaging operations; in 1697, for example, he and fellow New York merchant William Beekman became involved in a legal dispute with the English Admiralty over a sunken Spanish plate ship near Hispaniola. During the 1680s, the Philipse family was involved in the transshipment of logwood, an important dying agent in the European textile industry. As explained in chapter 1, the logwood trees grew only in the Spanish-controlled mangrove swamps in the Bay of Campeche and the Gulf of Honduras. These regions were only nominally under Spanish control, and English buccaneers had established seasonal logwood-cutting settlements in the 1660s. These settlements were not yet officially recognized by the English crown, though the buccaneers’ claims were supported by the government in Jamaica. As disputed territory, the region was characterized by frequent clashes between Spanish authorities and buccaneers, and any vessel carrying logwood was seized by the guarda-costas. Despite the potential imbroglio when cutting and shipping it, logwood maintained a high value in the European marketplace. Philipse’s interest in salvaging and logwood is a strong indication of his inclination toward high-risk/high-reward projects, as well as his increasing camaraderie with pirates. Philipse’s immediate and extended family shared in the high-risk ventures. Margaret and Frederick had four children: Eva (adopted), Philip, Adolph, and

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Annetje (a fifth, Rombout, died young), and all contributed in some degree to the risky family enterprises. When the Philipses sent their slaving vessel, the Charles, on its maiden run to Africa in 1684, Margaret sailed to Barbados to assist the crew when they reached their return destination. The ship arrived in Bridgetown with a cargo of 114 Angolan slaves, 105 of whom were sold on the island, while the 9 remaining slaves were taken to New York where they became the first chattels to be owned by the Philipses. Margaret and Frederick’s oldest son, Philip, became the point man for the Philipse network in Barbados. Philip married Maria Sparkes, the daughter of a Barbadian planter, and became head of the family property in Barbados, which had been purchased in 1674. The Philipses’ Barbados property, Spring Head, was located on the island’s least fertile area and was likely a base for the family’s mercantile and slaving interests rather than a sugar plantation. The records indicate that Philip did not spend all his time in the Caribbean: in 1690, he was commissioned by Governor Leisler to cruise for French vessels along the coast of Long Island. Frederick’s second son, Adolph, was also a consummate sailor and acted as middleman in the smuggling operations. When ships returned from their long homeward bound voyages, Adolph would rendezvous with them at Sandy Hook or Cape May and unload the illegal contraband onto lighter sloops, sometimes sailing across to Europe to sell East India goods. Under his father’s tutelage, Adolph developed a taste for luxuries that were rare in seventeenth-century New York; for example, he specifically requested that Captain Burgess, their Madagascar factor, acquire for him the finest china and an equally splendid cabinet in which to display it. When Margaret died after thirty years of marriage, Frederick married another wealthy widow, Catherine Van Cortlandt, in 1692. Catherine’s deceased husband, John Dervall, had been Frederick’s partner on a number of business ventures, and they had served on the New York Council together. Catherine was certainly aware of, if not complicit in, Philipse’s illicit activities, as Dervall and Philipse were prosecuted together for smuggling in the 1680s. Frederick was slightly younger than Catherine’s father, Oloff Van Cortlandt, who arrived in Manhattan in 1638 and died extremely wealthy in 1684. Catherine’s oldest brother, Stephanus, was even closer to Frederick. He was the first native-born mayor, elected in 1677 at age thirty-six, and he and Frederick had served on the council together since 1675. The deepest bond, however, was reserved for Catherine’s younger brother, Jacobus Van Cortlandt, who married

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Frederick’s stepdaughter, Eva, in 1691. Jacobus would become equally vested with Frederick in the Indo-Atlantic trade to Madagascar. Frederick’s other son-in-law, Philip French (married to Annetje), was also intimately involved in piratical scheming. In August 1695, French, Robert Livingston, Captain William Kidd, and Captain Giles Shelley surreptitiously gathered for an informal meeting in London; the topic was the present governor, Benjamin Fletcher, and his possible replacement, Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont. (This entire cohort had been or would become involved in piracy and slave trading, and Bellomont would later become Kidd’s major backer before eventually turning on him). Despite his surname, French was from Suffolk, England. He emigrated to New York and married Philipse’s daughter, Annetje. He became speaker of the assembly in 1698, and mayor of the city in 1702. Frederick Philipse was undoubtedly at the center of New York’s mercantile community and the prime sponsor of the Indo-Atlantic trade. One historian has called Frederick Philipse the “undoubted king of the pirates,” and advancing age did not appear to slow him down. Philipse, however, was far from alone in financing and actively participating in the Indo-Atlantic trade. Not only was he assisted by his extended family—including some slaves—but the following survey of New York’s Dutch, English, and French merchant families demonstrates a wide swath of merchant interests in the Indo-Atlantic trade, including many fabled names immediately recognizable to New Yorkers of the twenty-first century. The profits earned from their interoceanic slaving and piracy ventures helped propel them and their descendants to the highest rungs of New York’s political, social, and economic ladders and, for some, to national preeminence. Many of the sons and daughters of New York’s fabled families intermarried, thereby securing and increasing the fortunes they built in some measure on the Indo-Atlantic trade, creating interlocking kinship and business networks that lasted until the revolutionary era—and sometimes beyond. Starting from a list in Cathy Matson’s detailed monograph on colonial New York merchants, my research adds to her assessment by noting that at least ten, or over one-third, of the city’s top twenty-nine traders in 1695 were moderately to deeply invested in the Indo-Atlantic trade. These merchants were Joseph Bueno, Stephen, Jacobus Van Cortlandt, Charles Lodwick, Rip Van Dam, Caleb Heathcote, Ounziel Van Sweeten, Philip French, Robert Lurting, and Thomas Wenham. In the 1680s, according to Matson,

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councilmen William Nicholl and Nicholas Bayard also traded with IndoAtlantic pirates, and merchants Caleb Heathcote, Barent Rynderston, Thomas Lewis, and Josiah Rayner “threw in with the famous Red Sea pirates,” during the 1690s. In a list separate from the inventory of top merchants, Matson includes John Barberie, John Cruger, Ounziel van Sweeten, Richard Lawrence, Stephanus Van Cortlandt, Stephen DeLancey, Philip French, William Pinhorne, Thomas Marston, and Frederick Philipse as Indo-Atlantic traders. Perhaps more importantly, she definitively states that the merchants “used profits from piracy to buy shares of city and Westchester County real estate, wharf space, and newly constructed ships,” clearly demonstrating a connection between the slave trade and capital growth. Other Indo-Atlantic merchant importers of Dutch and English descent included Gabriel Ludlow, Philip Livingston, Abraham Van Horne, Robert Lansing, Rip Van Dam, and Anna Lynch—the only woman I have found in the records independently involved in this trade. Van Dam’s modest estate of 330 in 1695, when he was an assistant alderman, grew enough for Matson to state that he “was one of the very wealthiest traders in New York City by 1701,” by which time he had become a city councilman. Van Dam owned many plots of city real estate after 1700, including a mansion where six slaves also resided (two of whom were hanged for their role in the 1712 slave revolt). He served as the city’s mayor and then temporarily as a provincial governor, as well as president of the city council in 1731. Another member of the city council, Caleb Heathcote, arrived from London in 1692 and, along with Governor Fletcher, became a key founder of Trinity Church. (Fletcher, in fact, was so proud of his role in the construction of the church that he hung his coat of arms there, as his adversarial successor wryly remarked, “like a sign post before an inn.”) Heathcote was co-owner, with Stephen DeLancey, of the Nassau, which returned from Madagascar in May 1699 with twenty-three slaves and over seventy retiring pirates. Along with Dutch and English merchants, New Yorkers of other backgrounds were likewise involved in the Indo-Atlantic trade. Joseph Bueno, a Jewish merchant, had a partial share in the Prophet Daniel (two hundred tons with forty guns) with John Cruger, John Abeel, and Van Sweeten. Cruger was aboard the ship in 1699 and actively participated in the slaving expedition, going twenty-five miles inland from the coast of Madagascar to obtain slaves with a local pirate-trader. This individual, Abraham Samuel, or “Tolinor Rex,” was a former West Indian slave who had established an impressive fiefdom at

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Fort Dauphin, the former French settlement at the southern end of the island. While Cruger and Samuel were traversing inland, the Prophet Daniel was seized while at anchor by another pirate captain, Evan Jones, a consort of Samuel’s. It appears to have been a carefully planned ruse, and there are indications that it may have been planned as far away as New York by another “pirate king,” Frederick Philipse. The Prophet Daniel was in competition with Philipse’s ship, the Margaret, which was in Madagascar at the same time to take slaves. The first vessel back to New York would set the price for slaves; the one that followed would find a glutted market. At least two of the pirates, Thomas Cullins and Robert Hunt, were former residents of Westchester and would certainly have known Philipse, and they may have even been among his tenants. The case of John Leggett, another mariner from Westchester, serves as a particularly valuable example. In 1679, when Leggett was relocating to Port Royal, Jamaica, he named Philipse the executor of his will. Leggett’s “half-ketch,” the Royal, was built in Westchester, likely with the assistance of Philipse, the best carpenter in the region. The will stipulated that Leggett’s son and sole heir, John (age unknown), was to receive the vessel after his father’s demise. Most significant is the final stipulation, which stated, “I desire [Frederick Philipse] to take care of my son John and bring or cause him to be bred to the sea for his livelihood.” A stronger statement on the centrality of Philipse in this maritime community would be hard to find. As for Cruger, he and his crew—at least those who did not remain with the pirates—eventually found passage back to New York on one of the many colonial vessels now trading in the region. Cruger would be elected alderman from the Dock Ward every year from 1712 until 1733, and then served four consecutive terms as mayor. Merchants of French descent also profited in the Indo-Atlantic trade. Stephen DeLancey, a Huguenot refugee, arrived in New York in 1686 following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Born Étienne de Lancy in 1663, he was stripped of his titles and estates in Caen and fled first to Holland, then to London, before making the transatlantic journey to New York. In five years time he was elected alderman of the West Ward, and by the end of the 1690s, he was financing a number of expeditions to Madagascar, earning the opprobrium of Bellomont, who referred to DeLancey as “a hot headed saucy Frenchman.” Despite Bellomont’s reproach, or perhaps because of it, DeLancey was elected representative to the Provincial Assembly in 1702, where he served more or less continuously until his death in 1741. His marriage to Anne Van

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Cortlandt, daughter of Stephanus Van Cortlandt, cemented his family’s standing in the community, and their eldest son, James DeLancey, became a member of the New York Assembly, a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, and eventually, the lieutenant governor of the province. After Philipse, DeLancey was among the most heavily invested Indo-Atlantic merchants. Another Huguenot refugee, Augustus Jay, had direct experience in the slave trade as early as 1683, when his father pulled him out of school in England and sent him to Africa. Jay also had connections with the East Indies through his aunt’s marriage to the director of the French East India Company. Jay continued his active involvement in the slave trade, as indicated when Philipse’s vessel, the Frederick, was seized in Hamburg in 1698 for illegal trading, and Jay was on board as supercargo. Despite this minor setback, by 1728 Jay, along with Frederick Philipse II, were assessed as top personal and real property holders in the city. Jay’s grandson, John Jay, became the first chief justice of the New York Supreme Court, the first secretary of state of the United States, a chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and governor of New York. Though both his grandparents—Jay’s maternal grandfather was Jacobus Van Cortlandt—not only owned slaves but were slave traders, this founding father, unlike many of his Revolutionary cohorts, was forceful and eloquent in his denunciations of slavery at a time when most American statesmen held conflicted, if not diametrically opposed, viewpoints. Perhaps Jay, intimately aware of his family’s slave trading and owning history, reflexively recoiled from the paradoxical nature of a newly independent nation that was based on the ownership of other human beings. While financing the Indo-Atlantic network was vital to its function, the long-distance trade could not be carried out without inserting trading factors, or agents, “on the ground.” Thus each merchant in New York had an agent or agents operating in Madagascar who often also acted as pirates and slave traders on their own accounts. During the 1690s, colonial ships were regularly sent out, correspondences were maintained, and transport service was available back to New York, if pirates retiring from the Indian Ocean could afford the price. An interesting part of this network that has received little to no attention from historians was the maintenance of correspondences and connections by family members left behind by the pirates and traders who went abroad. The notion of pirates corresponding with their wives and families, as well as merchants, provides a strong counterbalance to some prevailing depictions of pirates as antiauthoritarian revolutionaries and anarchic rebels.

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That they were also slave traders likewise countervails the view of pirates as liberators who “ruptured the Middle Passage.” One of the most infamous Indo-Atlantic pirate-traders, Captain William Kidd, not only traded slaves but regularly utilized slave labor on his pirate vessels, and his torture of crew members, including lascars, is well documented. Kidd’s New York connections, with a house and family on Wall Street and a pew in Trinity Church, are likewise well established. And though his participation in the Indo-Atlantic trade proved temporary, Kidd did bring a wealth of East Indian goods back to New York in 1699, including diamonds, cash, calicoes, and slaves, and his story has proved to be the most enduring and best known to historians and laypersons alike. And while he did abuse and sell slaves, he also relied on his former quartermaster, “a little black man,” to help him unload his cargo while anchored off Gardiner’s Island. Kidd made only one Indo-Atlantic voyage before he was turned in by his former sponsor, Governor Bellomont. He was then tried, condemned, and executed in London. In the broader pirate mythology, the legend of buried treasure can be attributed in part to the hysteria following Kidd’s return to New York, his numerous landing points along the way, the dispersal of booty, and the notoriety of his trial and execution at Wapping in 1702. Burgess and Shelley, also New Yorkers, were far more prolific. Burgess not only was born and raised in New York but was said to have received a “better than average education for his time.” He joined a Caribbean privateer during his early years and held commissions from Governors Beeston of Jamaica and Fletcher of New York; when his commissions expired, like so many others, he slipped over the thin line into outright piracy. Burgess arrived on Saint Mary’s around 1694, became involved in cattle wars, plundering, and slave trading, and was a key link with New York merchants—as well as some of the families of New York’s pirate-settlers. In a clear instance demonstrating that pirates not only maintained connections with the colonies and their families but also, in many ways, lived within early modern social norms, Burgess was named executor in trust for the widow and child of pirate companion Edward Halsey, as well as exercising power of attorney for Richard Lawrence, as signed and witnessed by two other New York pirate-traders, Adam Baldridge and Thomas Mostyn.

giles shelley Though not nearly as wealthy or prominent a figure as Frederick Philipse, the surviving historical record indicates that Giles Shelley was a central figure in

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New York’s maritime community. Shelley, the principal Indo-Atlantic factor of Stephen DeLancey and master of the sloop Nassau, spent a number of years at Madagascar and made at least two Indo-Atlantic voyages. Along with fellow Indo-Atlantic pirate traders Samuel Burgess and John Barbarie, Shelley was named a witness to the will of New York mariner, Robert Griggs, thus demonstrating that involvement in piracy and slave trading were no hindrance to his standing in the New York community. The will, dated April 26, 1695, was written as Griggs prepared to go to sea and a few months before Shelley’s trip to London for the meeting with Livingston, French, and Kidd. Captain Shelley appears again in the surviving historical record, and not just as a witness. The will of Captain George Fane provides an example of this, while also demonstrating Shelley’s continuing connection with the Philipse network, even after Frederick Philipse’s death. Captain Fane, commander of the HMS Lowstaff, wrote his will on March 31, 1709, bequeathing his entire estate, value unknown, to his brother in Reading, England. Although Fane’s heir lived in England, he appointed Captain Shelley as one of two executors. Adolph Philipse, Frederick’s son, was one of three witnesses. In addition to Captain Fane, Shelley was named executor of at least one more will, that of Abraham DePeyster, one of the wealthiest merchants of New York. DePeyster was a first-generation New Yorker, having been born in New Amsterdam in 1657. As a firmly entrenched Leislerian, DePeyster was selected as an alderman in 1685 and served as mayor from 1691 to 1695. Under Governor Bellomont, DePeyster was selected as a judge of the colony’s supreme court but was later suspended under Lord Cornbury when political fortunes changed. That Shelley was named executor of this significant estate in 1702 clearly indicates his significance in the New York community. The significance is all the more riveting because Shelley was arrested, imprisoned, tried, and convicted of trading with pirates in 1701. Though he was eventually pardoned, the experience apparently left his family life in tatters, as evidenced in his will. The Shelleys appear to have been happily married when Giles’s career as a pirate and slave trader began in the 1680s. A letter written by his wife, Hilligout, dated June 27, 1689, indicates that Giles was then residing in Madagascar. Though brief, it contains affectionate language, with Hilligout praising God for her good health and telling Giles that her mother, brother, and sisters send their love to him. She ends the missive by praying for his safe return, signing it, “Your dutiful and loving wife.”

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Over the next decade, Shelley spent much of the time in Madagascar, and while it is clear that these years of pirating and slaving were incredibly profitable, they also took a toll on his marriage. In 1702, when Shelley wrote his will, any affection between him and his wife had vanished. Despite spending much of his time in Madagascar, Giles appears to have taken up a relationship with another woman in New York—and a married one at that. The will indicates that Giles had no children with Hilligout, but he may have produced a son with his mistress, Mary Peters, the wife of Charles Peters: there was an adopted son named Edward Antill. Though it is unclear who Antill’s parents were or the circumstances of his adoption, the will states that Shelley brought him up, apparently from a young age, suggesting that Antill was Shelley’s biological son. Rather than bequeath his estate to his wife, Shelley left all his real estate and livestock holdings in the Bowery, which included rich farmlands, to his friends, fellow merchants, and executors, Robert Lurting and Robert Watts. The goods and “household stuff ” from the Bowery property were to be given to Mary Peters “in trust for her to occupy and enjoy.” Mary was also to be granted 50 at Shelley’s death, and 50 annually for ten years, as well as Shelley’s three “Indian slaves,” named Symon, Betty, and Jenny. The will specifically stipulated that all of Mary’s bequests “are to be free from the control of her husband,” Charles Peters. Perhaps shedding some light on the origins of Edward Antill, the will declared that after Mary’s decease, all her bequests were to be given to Antill, “and to his heirs and assigns forever.” Shelley clearly had great affection for his adopted son, as Antill was not only to receive Mary Peters’s bequests but to be immediately given Shelley’s two houses and land in the city proper, located on Pearl Street, as well as other unspecified lands and tenements, and the rest of Shelley’s personal estate. In addition to leaving him these substantial material holdings, Shelley was likewise concerned for Antill’s cultural upbringing, as the will also stipulated that the executors, Watts and Lurting, had full authority to sell any bits of Shelley’s considerable property and use the proceeds toward Antill’s formal education. If Antill died and left no heirs, the city properties would then fall to Shelley’s “loving friends,” Anthony Lane and John Lane, merchants of Barbados. Shelley even left a bequest of 20 annually to his aunt, Elizabeth Clarke, of Gravesend, England, as well as 50 to one John Tudor, Jr., when he turned eighteen. And what of Giles’s wife, Hilligout Shelley? The 1702 will makes their strained relationship brutally clear: “I leave to my wife twenty pounds and no more.”

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Shelley’s philandering and years of pirating and slaving may have ruined his relationship with Hilligout. Upon his return from Madagascar on the Nassau in 1699, rather than informing his wife directly, he instead wrote DeLancey, “If you think fit you may acquaint my wife of my arrival.” While his marriage may have suffered, Shelley acquired a small fortune and maintained the respect and social standing of his fellow New York merchants. He secretly unloaded part of his illicit cargo of East India goods and slaves at Cape May, and his fifty pirate passengers scattered throughout the Jersey and Pennsylvania countryside. Shelley, Edward Buckmaster, Jonathan Evans, Paul Swan, and Otto Van Toyle continued to Sandy Hook, where they were met by Stephen DeLancey and unloaded the remainder of their cargo. The vessel, leaky and rotten, was beached at Red Hook on Long Island (Breukelen), across the East River from lower Manhattan. Within a few days, as news of their great success spread throughout the city, Shelley was summoned before Lieutenant Governor Nanfan, and then the council, to account for himself. Shelley maintained his composure, admitting nothing. When a 5,000 bond was put under him for good behavior, the money was easily raised. Shelley’s arrest was not an isolated event. With the change in government from Fletcher to Bellomont came a concerted campaign against illicit trade. Frederick Philipse’s son Adolph—an active participant in the Indo-Atlantic trade—lamented the new statutes and economic stranglehold wrought by Bellomont: “They are so extreme sever and strict at New York that we are lost to import . . . there. And though that trade be free as any other (the Company not having such authority and privileges as formerly) yet we are unwilling to let a cargo of that value come in the clutches of some greedy officers.” Within three months of his arrival, Bellomont claimed that “the people” clamored against him because he had hindered 100,000 worth of illegal trade in IndoAtlantic goods—an astonishing sum that reveals the extraordinary wealth flowing illicitly from the Indian Ocean to the peripheral North Atlantic colonies. This campaign was not greeted kindly. When customs agents raided the home of Ounziel Van Sweeten in search of East India goods, an angry mob, led by the King of the Pirates, Frederick Philipse, and his son-in-law, Philip French, arrived to relieve Van Sweeten. The mob freed Van Sweeten and turned the tables on the agents, imprisoning the officials in the house. Soldiers from the garrison were called out to disperse the crowd. Long Island, with its hundreds of inlets and coves, was singled out by Bellomont as “a great

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receptacle of pirates. . . . I take that island, especially the east end of it to exceed Rhode Island. The people there have been many of them pirates themselves.” The Bayshore region, on the southern end of New York harbor on Sandy Hook Bay, was also provoked into a frenzy. In 1701, Moses Butterworth was put on trial in nearby Middletown Village for smuggling and assisting Captain Kidd. With Governor Hamilton presiding as judge, a mob of one hundred residents, including the local militia, stormed the courtroom, shredded the court papers, seized the justices, and released the prisoner. When one of the rioters was wounded in the melee, the mob imprisoned the governor and his colleague, Lewis Morris. They released the officials only after the wounded rioter recovered four days later. The New York region was not alone, as systemic political change was taking place in the colonies that was fervently antipirate. Some of Every’s crew who escaped into Pennsylvania were seized by Major Snead and imprisoned. They did not remain there long. The governor of West Jersey complained that there was “no secure gaol in the country.” In Virginia, when officials arrested and imprisoned the pirate Day, Colonel Ockman reported, “The inhabitants so resented their proceedings about Day, they treated him [the official] very ill and threatened to put him in prison.” The pattern was repeated up and down the western Atlantic littoral. The political shift in the colonies was initiated directly from the English metropole, but the true impetus came from the Indian Ocean. The Mughal rulers, exasperated with the spectacular piracies against their vessels, had begun to imprison EIC officials and threatened to dismiss them entirely from the region. These officials, with powerful connections in Parliament, pressured the government to move against the pirates and their bases in the North American colonies, and a change went into effect, with a number of wellpublicized trials and executions. For about a decade, the Indo-Atlantic trade had been extremely lucrative for colonial merchants, but the loophole was now closing. The historian David Hancock has examined the integration of the Atlantic economy through the prism of London merchants in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This chapter has demonstrated how colonial merchants like Frederick Philipse, operating three to four generations earlier, attempted to integrate an Indo-Atlantic economy in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The activities of Philipse and the lesser merchant families were more than forerunners of later Atlantic-wide exchanges; perhaps even more than

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Hancock’s London merchants, Philipse and his factors at Madagascar were more worldly in their global networking. The fortunes of the merchants, both figurative and literal, varied considerably. For some of the lesser merchants, like Van Dam, Heathcote, and Abeel, investment in the Indo-Atlantic trade helped fill their coffers and propelled them to positions on the New York Council, where they could secure their continuing economic and political fortunes. The merchant family most deeply embedded in the network, the Philipses, continued to prosper throughout the eighteenth century, with Adolph reinvigorating the Madagascar trade between 1715 and 1721, when a legal loophole in the East India Company’s monopoly, affirmed in 1698, created a temporary opening to resume the network with New York and the colonies. The Philipse family, whose considerable wealth was, in some measure, acquired by flouting English law, chose the losing side during the Revolution. Frederick’s granddaughter, Mary Philipse, famously spurned the nuptial advances of George Washington, the family remained Loyalist, and they lost everything. The empire built by Frederick Philipse, the Pirate King who rioted in the streets against English officials, dissolved in the aftermath of another revolution. That revolution, the War for American Independence, was in the all-too-distant future. To fully understand this Indo-Atlantic trade network and the significance of Madagascar, we must shift our gaze to Europe, farther in the past.

chapter 3

Utopian Dreamers and Colonial Disasters

In the early modern era, overseas colonization projects dreamed up in Europe were often accompanied by promotional literature cloaked in the sanguine garb of classic utopian ideals. Many of these colonizing schemes, and the attendant literature, focused on territories situated in the “New World” of the Americas, such as Virginia and New England. Not all utopian dreams however, were confined to the Atlantic basin. One region in particular, just beyond the Atlantic littoral, continued to beguile European schemers over the course of the early modern era: the island of Madagascar. Situated in the western Indian Ocean beyond the Cape of Good Hope, Madagascar, the world’s fourth-largest island, began to emerge in the seventeenth century as a potential golden land of opportunity for would-be colonizers. Yet despite its unique geographical location and distinct history, the colonizing schemes for Madagascar mirrored transatlantic colonial designs in the Americas. During the midseventeenth century, in the midst of great turmoil at home in the English isles, colonizers crafted plans for new communities all across the globe. Many well-placed individuals of all political stripes provided both financial and moral support for various far-off schemes, uncertain which region of the globe would prove most profitable. Many of these settlement efforts developed along the northwest Atlantic littoral, from Newfoundland in the north, to Providence Island near Nicaragua, down to the Guianas on the South American mainland. Lesser-known schemes to settle places like Madagascar arose simultaneously, and much of the promotional literature for settling Madagascar both mirrored the contemporary campaigns in the 61

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Americas and explicitly compared the two. As propaganda tools of the colonial sponsors, the literature hyping both regions was steeped in illusory images that promised vast mineral wealth, boundless natural resources, and pliable native peoples. Silver mines, silkworms, and noble savages were thus conjured up on every far-flung shore upon which colonizers cast their dreamy eyes. When colonists arrived on the distant shorelines of Madagascar, the excitement engendered by the glowing accounts was quickly dampened by monsoonal rains, and the veracity of the literature was found wanting. This chapter juxtaposes Madagascar with contemporary English colonizing schemes in the Atlantic, situating the settlement efforts in an IndoAtlantic framework and exploring some of the contradictions between the promotional literature and the actual activities of the colonists. By including Madagascar, this study expands the traditional geographic parameters of Atlantic world history to include the western Indian Ocean. With this expanded focus, we begin to see an interoceanic zone with thickening layers of integration and connections. At a more fundamental level, the focus on Madagascar allows us to situate the Great Island in its proper historical and geographic contexts. In the seventeenth century, many promoters of Madagascar colonization described it as “the most famous island in the world” ’ and claimed it was part of Asia. When Madagascar is situated in its proper geographic and historical contexts, some surprising and illuminating findings are revealed, as this chapter demonstrates. For the colonists, the lack of fundamental knowledge about the island and its people would contribute to the disasters that followed. Because the first English attempt at colonizing Madagascar was an unmitigated disaster, it offers an interesting parallel not only to English and other European failures and successes in the Atlantic world but also to the pirate settlements that sprang up throughout Madagascar, especially on Saint Mary’s Island on the northeast coast, in the latter half of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth centuries. These pirate settlements developed their own utopian characteristics, especially when later fictionalized by Defoe. The settlements also reveal a deeper, more complex layering of Indo-Atlantic connections beyond the officially sanctioned ventures, as most of the pirate-settlers were veteran buccaneers and privateers from the Atlantic and its tropical extension, the Caribbean Sea. One final dimension of early modern colonization schemes that was often hidden yet deeply embedded in the strategies of colonial settlement was the

figure 5. A dark and stormy view of More’s Utopia (1715). Slavery and slaves were fundamental to Utopian society. (Leonard William Longstaff Saint Thomas More Collection, Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.)

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dual role of piracy and slavery. The importance of slaves to the leaders of the Madagascar project demonstrates the entangled nature of colonization and slavery, with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) providing an early blueprint. David Brion Davis, one of the leading scholars of the history of slavery, has suggested that “Western Judeo-Christian culture [has] transmitted a deep tension or unease over slavery,” adding that there was “a fairly common belief that the institution . . . could not be tolerated in a truly perfect or ideal world.” Yet slaves and slavery were fundamental components of More’s Utopian society, for every family in the country had at least two slaves. In both countryside and city, slaves were forced to perform “all the chores which are somewhat heavy or dirty,” and slaves “not only keep constantly at work but also in chains.” On More’s idyllic island, slaves were mutilated for easy identification and “egged on by the lash.” The punishment for crimes was enslavement, and “the rebellious and unruly” slaves were executed, “slaughtered like wild beasts.” More’s Utopia thus presaged early modern colonial societies, which eventually enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples to perform all sordid labors. The utopian literature surrounding the ventures in Madagascar mirrored New World colonial ventures in Bermuda, Virginia, and New England—the first English colonial ventures to utilize slaves. Most tellingly, the first African slaves to reach the English colonies arrived via Anglo-Dutch pirates and privateers. The specular images of Utopia—colonization, piracy, and slavery—were in turn reflected in the English schemes to colonize Madagascar. A double-prism mirror thus emerged with new worlds reflecting old, old worlds reflecting new, creating an early modern hall of mirrors that blended previously separate worlds into one.

england, europe, and the east indies trade In the early sixteenth century, a number of independent English merchants traveling in English vessels traded directly with the Levant. But it was Venetian merchants who dominated the trade of East Indian goods to England, and their vessels fi lled with Turkish, Persian, and Indian merchandise were eagerly received upon their annual arrival in Southampton. To compete with the Venetians, the English state stepped in when Queen Elizabeth sent merchant William Harburn to the Ottoman court of Sultan Amurath III in 1579. After reaching Constantinople, Harburn received the requisite permission for English merchants to trade freely in the sultan’s kingdom.

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Within two years, the Levant Company was founded, but it lasted only twenty years. The Mediterranean had long been the traditional pathway for East Indian goods to reach Western Europe, but the Portuguese had demonstrated a more direct route in the early fifteenth century when they rounded Africa and gradually erected a fortified trading-post system at strategic points along the way. Dutch, English, and French adventurers soon followed. The first direct English voyage took place in 1591 under the command of George Raymond and James Lancaster. Raymond died and Lancaster returned to England in 1594, having lost all three of their ships. But this venture established a pattern of piracy among English adventurers when they captured several Portuguese ships during the voyage. Because the journey from Europe to the Indian Ocean was time consuming and dangerous, it was not long before schemes to establish a local settlement were imagined, and the island of Madagascar, strategically located on the doorstep of East Indian riches, soon became the focus. From the earliest times in the Common Era, Madagascar had witnessed cyclical yet continuous waves of Antaloatra, “people from across the seas,” so the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century was not an entirely new phenomenon. While the origin of the first Madagascar inhabitants still remains the subject of some academic dispute, it appears fairly certain that they were people of Indonesian origin who had gradually migrated around the Indian Ocean rim, likely touching the East African coast before settling in Madagascar. This process probably took place over a considerable period of time, beginning in the earliest centuries of the Common Era. A second wave of migration occurred during the second half of the first millennium, when Arab expansion along the east coast of Africa pushed some East African coastal groups across the wide channel to Madagascar. Though continued Indonesian migration ended by the twelfth century, the language and culture remained predominantly Indo-Malay. Arab traders arrived sometime in the first millennium, further influencing the cultural mix. By the thirteenth century, competing and mixing groups of Indianized and Shi’ite Indonesians, Arabo-Persians, and Bantu from East Africa were settling throughout the island. Early modern European maps depicted the island as Saint Lawrence, or São Lourenço, so named by the Portuguese who were the first Europeans to encounter the region. Portuguese sailors began making contact with the island in the early sixteenth century, mostly by mishap. After rounding the

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figure 6. Emanuel Bowen’s map of Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century voyages and travels from Venice to China. Europeans were fascinated with Eastern luxury goods, especially spices, since ancient times. After 1500, the Portuguese monopolized Indo-Atlantic trade for over a century. (John Harris, Navigantium Atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca [London, 1744– 48]. Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.)

Cape, the seas of southern Madagascar could be treacherous, and the Portuguese—and later the Dutch, French, and English—suffered many shipwrecks on its southern shores (and elsewhere). Though nearly all of the surviving European reports, beginning about 1500, indicate that the large island was fragmented into small riverine sovereignties, an early dynasty known as the Zafiraminia existed in the western and southern regions, but they were never able to unify the whole. On the northwest coast, Islam provided both a unifying and a disruptive force, as Arab slave raiders had settled well before the Portuguese arrival. As slaving activities increased, internal upheavals ensued. The island had long been established as the rice granary of East Africa, but slaves were becoming the major export by the time of European contact. Having established a foothold in Mozambique, across the channel from Madagascar, the Portuguese became interested in tapping into the newly burgeoning slave market and were frequent visitors to the northwest and southern

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ports. Despite their attempts, however, the Portuguese were never able to establish lasting settlements in Madagascar. As the Dutch, French, and English entered the Indo-Atlantic trade in the seventeenth century, each in turn encountered Madagascar and its people. Like the Portuguese before them, they inevitably found their way to the shores of the large island as their ships rounded the Cape and entered the rich trading grounds of the Indian Ocean. Before any official colonizing efforts, these merchant ships often made contact with the local population, and they repeatedly met with disastrous results. In 1527, for example, about seventy Portuguese survived a shipwreck on the southern coast, only to be attacked and slaughtered by the Zafiraminia as they prematurely celebrated the completion of a stone fortification. Flacourt reports another massacre of Portuguese sailors in 1550. These violent interactions did not augur well for would-be colonizers. The Dutch met with initial success when Van Houtman’s voyage anchored in Saint Augustine’s Bay on the southwest coast in 1595. But after trading some pewter spoons, according to the Dutch captain, “they fell at variance . . . and the natives keeping away, no more provisions were to be had.” Further mishaps with the locals combined with sickness caused the death of over a hundred sailors on this expedition. The Dutch sailed away, though not before exacting brutal reprisals on the local population. When Captain Houtman returned three years later, the inhabitants of Saint Augustine’s Bay refused to trade at all. There were a number of English seamen on the crews of Houtman’s ships, and they would certainly have provided information to any interested parties among the English mercantile elite. The dubious nature of trade with the Saint Augustine locals did not dampen adventurous spirits, and English ships belonging to the East India Company (EIC) began to put in at Saint Augustine’s Bay on both their outward and homeward journeys to and from trading factories in India and Sumatra. They filled their water casks, cut firewood, and traded with the locals, especially brass wire, beads, and calicoes in return for rice and cattle. These exchanges did not always go smoothly, as in 1608, during the EIC’s fourth voyage. The English captain and five crewmen ventured ashore “upon friendly invitation” but were then attacked and killed by the locals, “who . . . surprised the ship with their boats.” It is often assumed that Europeans held a technological edge, especially in maritime affairs, in early modern cross-cultural encounters, but this incident, and many others to follow, prove otherwise. In Madagascar, the local populations were very

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active on the water; the island’s first human inhabitants most likely arrived from far overseas in Indonesian outrigger canoes. Europeans may have had larger ships and more powerful weapons, but these advantages were neutralized in shallow waters, where the Malagasy held the advantage of surprise, local knowledge, and numbers. During the early seventeenth century, there is no evidence of plans to establish permanent settlements in the region, and indeed, most members of the EIC were strongly opposed to funding such a project. Although they held a national monopoly on trade in the East Indies, the EIC was only the latest European newcomer to the region, following the Portuguese Estado da India and the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), which had well-established trading ties and factories in the region since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. But unlike the rival Dutch who, like the Portuguese before them, had substantial numbers of soldiers, squadrons of armed ships, fortified castles, and numerous merchant settlers throughout the Indian Ocean, the English company, as one contemporary observer noted, was “for the present profit, not future emolument,” and thus skimped on expenditures whenever and wherever possible. Establishing settlements generally had high overhead costs that investors in the English company were not yet willing to bear. Critics of the EIC, pointing to the success of the Dutch, argued that the best chance of supplanting their rival was to emulate their methods. The EIC’s excuse—that such large expenditures were unavailable— opened the door just wide enough in the 1630s to allow competing English firms to circumvent the national monopoly. On the grounds that the EIC had neglected to establish fortified factories or seats of trade to which the king’s subjects could resort with safety, a rival company, Courteen’s Association, secured a royal charter in 1635 to compete with the EIC for the East Indies trade. Not only was Sir William Courteen, Sr., the syndicate’s namesake, a great merchant, but as partner in the AngloDutch company De Moor-Courteen, he “soon enjoyed a remarkable position in the commercial world of the early seventeenth century.” The De MoorCourteen House was active in many Atlantic colonial ventures, including the Groenewegen settlement on the Essequibo River in Western Guiana in 1616. It was also the sponsor of the first settlement at Barbados, investing 10,000 in the venture and sending two shiploads of colonists under the command of Captains John and Henry Powell in 1627. Courteen did not grant these initial settlers any land but instead paid them wages, expecting them to return all

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proceeds to the syndicate. It was perhaps for this reason that, although Courteen held the original royal patent for the Barbados colony, he lost the charter to the Earl of Carlisle in 1629. This is just one interesting indicator of the sundry workings and haphazard approach of seventeenth-century English colonizing efforts. The individual patent holders could change willy-nilly, and the backers of these ventures could and did alternate their sights from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, transferring the experience gained in one region to the other. After making assurances that the association would not engage in trade within the EIC’s jurisdiction, Courteen immediately procured four vessels and the services of Captain John Weddell, a former and apparently disgruntled employee of the EIC, as well as a number of other EIC mercantile servants as officers and supercargoes. Though legitimate trade had been promised, it was not long before two association vessels plundered a dhow in the Red Sea. Since the Moguls did not distinguish between rival Englishmen, the EIC president and council at Surat were imprisoned. And so began a pattern of interloping and piracy followed by strong Mogul reaction against the EIC, followed in turn by EIC political pressure in Parliament, which would continue throughout the remainder of the century. This pattern reached its peak at the end of the century, when Atlantic-based pirates entered the region en masse and established Madagascar as their base of operations. In addition to Courteen, a network of merchants involved in somewhat obscure Atlantic world projects, including William Claiborne and Robert Hunt, also fitted out their ship Dragon for Courteen’s use in the East as part of a separate interloping fleet in 1635–1636, providing further evidence of IndoAtlantic trade aspirations emanating from the English metropole. Despite the previous episodes of piracy, William Courteen, Jr., and associates received a new charter following the death of Sir William Courteen, Sr. The receipt of a new charter after openly committing piracy further demonstrates that pillaging was inextricably intertwined with “legitimate” Indo-Atlantic trade. An expedition was sent in spring 1636, equipped at a cost of 12,000, again under the command of Captain Weddell. The voyage was a commercial success, but the interlopers continued to harm the EIC’s reputation via further piratical episodes and made no attempt to settle in Madagascar. The following year, tentative plans were set in motion to found a settlement, but this endeavor never went beyond the drawing room. This venture involved Prince Rupert, the king’s seventeen-year-old nephew, and was put forth by

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Endymion Porter, a favored courtier, who sought to persuade Charles I that the colonization of Madagascar promised rich profits. The project, however, was deferred when the boy’s mother, Elizabeth Stuart (the Winter Queen), objected, pleading to Rupert’s overseers, including Sir Thomas Roe, to put “such windmills out of Rupert’s head.” Despite the project’s seemingly quixotic nature, the prince proved serious about the venture, and attempts were made to raise funds, with the king’s approval, in the spring of 1637. The EIC was even invited to join in but respectfully declined. Given the recent episodes of piracy by interlopers, moreover, the company privately considered the proposed settlement an invasion of its chartered rights, though they still had not “fortified” any lands on or near Madagascar. Nevertheless, the necessary funds never materialized and the project languished. Sir Thomas Roe, former ambassador to the Mughal court, wrote to Elizabeth, “The dream of Madagascar, I think, is vanished, and the squire must conquer his own island.” The idea of colonizing Madagascar, however, continued to provide fodder for the dreams of English adventurers in the seventeenth century. The proposal was revived again the following year, this time by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who announced his intention of proceeding to the island in person. King Charles promised to assist by lending a vessel from the royal navy, and John Bond was appointed captain-general. Shares were offered to all willing subscribers, and interested parties were invited to sign on as colonists—those able to afford a 20 fee were to be given passage as freemen-adventurers, and all others would serve a four-year period of indenture, terms comparable to those offered in the Chesapeake and other Atlantic colonies. The EIC was again approached to freight Arundel’s ships and to carry some of the colonists to Madagascar on its outward voyage, an offer the company unsurprisingly declined. The court of committees furthermore protested strongly to the Privy Council that the scheme would cause the EIC much prejudice, and the king eventually withdrew his support. Arundel’s intended voyage, as well as a parallel settlement project for Mauritius being planned by Lord Southampton, was thus quashed. Though aborted, the Arundel scheme engendered the most extraordinary and lasting symbol of English desires for Madagascar: the so-called Madagascar Portrait, painted by the baroque master Anthony van Dyck. The commissioning of the portrait alone announced the significance of Madagascar in the eyes of Arundel and his circle. The portrait, which depicts the earl standing behind a globe and pointing at Madagascar, both advertised the venture

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figure 7. Anthony Van Dyck’s “Madagascar Portrait” (1640) depicting Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, alongside his wife. There were many dramatic schemes to colonize Madagascar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

to Arundel’s contemporaries and bestowed on it an imaginative shape. Because Arundel’s scheme for Madagascar never materialized, the Van Dyck portrait is perhaps the most utopian of all things Anglo-Madagascan, as it literally depicted a place that was nowhere—except, perhaps, in the minds of the artist and his patron. While no settlement attempts had yet been made, the evidence is clear that Madagascar and the Indo-Atlantic trade world had excited the imagination of the English merchant class.

the noble savage of madagascar Through a series of literary writings and publicity pamphlets from a number of wide-ranging authors, the “Red Island” continued to remain in the forefront of English merchant-adventurer consciousness, if only as a utopian fantasy. The first and potentially most useful of these works was Gotard Arthusius’s Dialogues, translated into English from the Dutch by Augustine Spalding, an EIC factor at Bantam, and published in 1614 at the behest of Richard Hakluyt, who was the central promoter of English colonization in the Atlantic World. Once again relying upon the groundwork laid by the Dutch, the Dialogues attempted to provide phonetic translations of greetings, trading terms, and

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practical exchanges from English into the “Madagascar tongues,” the most ominous perhaps being sahey marary oulun: “We have many sick men.” The translation of Dialogues was seemingly neglected by English adventurers, and the ensuing literature on Madagascar took a decidedly more fantastical and utopian bend. The most widely distributed was fashioned by poet laureate and playwright Sir William Davenant, whose poem “Madagascar” (1638) depicted an extraordinary dream in which Prince Rupert took flight and conquered the far-off island—a feat that proved far easier in heroic couplets than it would in reality. In praising the natural bounty of Madagascar, from ambergris to gold mines, the poem prefigured the promotional pamphlets that would soon follow. The overt desire of Davenant’s dreamer, however—who declared, “I wish’d my Soul had brought my body here [Madagascar], / Not as a Poet, but a Pioneer”—would be severely countered by the experiences of the actual colonists. Davenant intended his poem, written in the wake of the loss of the Palatinate by Rupert’s father, Elector Frederick V, as an epic to boost his credibility as laureate and to curry favor with the royal court. The failure of the Stuart monarchs to recover the Palatinate during the Thirty Years’ War remained a source of resentment among many Englishmen for decades. By imagining Rupert’s founding of a new colony in Madagascar, Davenant envisioned an epic victory poem for the prince who had lost his ancestral homeland. To many contemporaries, however, including the Winter Queen, the poem and the schemes it engendered were nothing more than the fanciful longings of romantic dreamers. The Madagascar disaster would prove these critics prescient. Following Davenant’s elegiac efforts, a more prosaic but no less utopian promotional pamphlet was written in 1640 by Walter Hamond, a ship’s surgeon and, like Captain Weddell, a former employee of the EIC. Hamond had served on several voyages to India under Weddell, and he spent four months in Madagascar in 1630. He appears to have left the EIC at the same time as Weddell, and Courteen’s Association was also eager to poach him. Hamond’s pamphlet, A Paradox, Prooving, That the Inhabitants of the Isle called Madagascar, or St. Lawrence, (in Temporall things) are the happiest People in the World . . . , was significant for a number of reasons. First, it was an early argument from an English perspective on the virtues of primitive society, foreshadowing the works of British writers Hawkesworth and Carlyle by almost two centuries. Second, it was a landmark document in the effort to break the EIC monopoly on trade and development in the Indian Ocean. Finally,

figure 8. Title page of Hamond’s pamphlet promoting Madagascar, 1643. Many promoters explicitly and favorably compared Madagascar to contemporary Atlantic colonies, such as Virginia, where mortality rates were still very high. (Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.)

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Hamond’s pamphlet should be seen as an effort to compete with contemporary English colonizing projects in the Americas, especially given the continuing demographic problems like “seasoning,” omnipresent in the Chesapeake and Caribbean colonies. Hamond specifically refers to the “harvest” of Madagascar as “better than the gleanings of America.” The colonizing project nevertheless continued to languish in the midst of political turmoil in the metropole, and Hamond’s Paradox was followed three years later by his second promotional pamphlet, Madagascar, the Richest and most Fruitful Island in the World. Hamond’s efforts were later joined by a third pamphlet, A Briefe Discovery or Description of . . . Madagascar, written by Richard Boothby, yet another discharged employee of the EIC, in which he likewise laid out the many advantages, both colonizing and commercial, of a Madagascar plantation project. Of all the writers, Boothby was most explicit in his Indo-Atlantic perspective: Without all question, this Country far transcends and exceeds all other countries in Asia, Africa, and America, planted by English, French, Dutch, Portugal, and Spaniards, and is likely to prove of far greater value and esteem to that Christian prince and Nation that shall plant and settle a sure habitation therein, then the West Indies is to the King and Kingdom of Spain. . . . [T]he land . . . floweth with milk and honey, a little world of itself adjoined to no other land within the compass of any leagues or miles . . . the chiefest paradise this day upon Earth.

Furthermore, Boothby specifically cited prior English experience with the “salvages” of Virginia and New England when he parenthetically tempered his praise of the Malagasy by stating, “Yet it’s dangerous to trust them too far.” Most importantly for the future settlers, Boothby’s panegyric on the “healthfulness” of the island derived from his four-month visit in 1630 during the dry season—a crucial detail that would prove fatal to most of the Saint Augustine Bay settlers.

colonization and disaster The promotional materials had their desired effect. In August 1644, three ships carrying 140 men, women, and children departed the Downs for Madagascar under the command of Captain John Smart, a cousin of one of Courteen’s partners. The number of colonists actually increased on the voyage, when only one passenger died and “four brave boys” were born, with others soon expected. After brief stops at the Canary Islands in September and

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the Cape in January, the ships reached their destination on the south side of Saint Augustine Bay, Madagascar, in early March, where they proceeded to form a settlement at the mouth of the Onilahy River. Per his instructions, Smart’s first order of business was to dispatch one of the three ships, the Sun, on a voyage of exploration around the island. If possible, the crew was to obtain from the Malagasy a grant of land for the establishment of a second colony together with an exclusive trade concession, and at all places visited, the crew was to make inquiries regarding minerals. These tentatively promising beginnings proved fleeting. The Sun returned in less than two months with dismal results: the French were found settled in three different sections of the eastern coast, “at all which places they are fortified,” while the Dutch “were settled and fortified at Antongill,” the deep harbor bay on the northeast coast that was often shrouded in the mists of the surrounding rainforests. Worse still, the English were viewed by their European rivals with hostility and fear, and indeed, were threatened with violence if they continued their efforts to traffic with the natives. Though not explicitly highlighted in the charter, slaving was clearly a key component of Courteen’s project. The Sun’s orders had included a provision to purchase slaves, not only to assist in the labor of the fledgling settlement but also for the wider Indo-Atlantic trade. Smart sent a second ship, the James, on a longer voyage to take slaves, rice, and timber to Muscat, Gambroon, and other Indian ports in return for calicoes, foodstuffs, silkworm eggs, and seeds for use in the Saint Augustine plantation. The Indo-Atlantic nature of the slave trade is evidenced by the plantation’s intent of sending a cargo of Malagasy slaves to Brazil in exchange for sugar that would then be sent to England, though this plan was frustrated by the Sun’s inability to actually acquire any slaves anywhere on the island. It was only later in the century, through the brokerage of piratesettlers, that this Indo-Atlantic slave-trade component would be fulfilled. The settlement site was not carefully chosen, as Saint Augustine Bay is located in one of the most arid regions of Madagascar. Smart, the governor of the would-be plantation, soon reported it “altogether unfitting for our residence, as not affording anything for or of subsistence, the earth being barren salt, and not producing any thing of seed, plants, or roots that have been sown.” The colonists managed to purchase some lean cattle from the locals, but because there was no significant pasturage near the settlement, the settlers were forced to leave the cattle in distant fields, where they were often stolen by natives under the rule of local chief Dian Brindah. The colonists had not

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necessarily yet done anything to provoke their hosts, as cattle raiding was widely practiced throughout Madagascar. This lack of knowledge regarding Malagasy cultural practices further exacerbated the increasingly acrimonious situation between the newly arrived antaloatra and their local hosts. A glimmer of hope arrived in October 1645 with the ships Rebecca and Friendship from England. But after the colonists welcomed the new settlers, their hopes quickly faded when they realized the ships’ cargo included neither substantial provisions nor brass wire, which was now the chief item of trade interest to the locals. Dian Brindah offered to assist the settlers if they would join him in battle against a neighboring clan. This was probably an early example of an indigenous slaving raid, which would become increasingly more common over the course of the seventeenth century as more and more EuroAmericans arrived in Madagascar to obtain slaves. Smart agreed but then planned a tried-and-true ruse in revenge for the cattle that Dian Brindah’s followers had allegedly stolen. Emulating a maneuver that had been practiced in the region since the days of Da Gama—and used widely by European explorers and conquistadors throughout the Americas—Smart plied the chief with liquor until he passed out. Brindah and his three sons were then seized and carried out to sea on the ship’s boats. The subterfuge may have proved temporarily successful—Brindah and his sons were ransomed for two hundred head of cattle—but for all intents and purposes, this moment signaled the beginning of the end of the English settlement at Saint Augustine Bay, as relations between the colonists and Malagasy became positively acerbic afterward. Worse still, when the inevitable monsoonal rains began to fall, so too did the settlers, from “tedious and violent burning agues . . . [and] fluxes.” By December, only a hundred colonists out of 143 remained. In the midst of this dire time, with a rapidly depleting and diseased population and supplies nearly gone, Smart resolved to abandon the colony in the only remaining vessel, the Friendship, for yet another slaving voyage to Assada, where he hoped to purchase slaves for transportation to Achin (Sumatra) and arrange, if possible, to transfer the colony’s survivors. This voyage proved doubly unsuccessful, as the locals refused to trade and the ship struck a reef. Following repairs, the Friendship limped back in March to the English settlement, which had decayed further in the absence of its captain-governor. Its population now numbered sixty-three, two-thirds of whom were women and children (thus leaving only twenty “able-bodied men”).

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As might be expected, relations with Brindah’s clan had grown increasingly violent in the aftermath of the king’s capture and ransom. Two colonists were waylaid and killed as they returned from the distant cattle pasture, and the settlers responded in kind by executing two prisoners they had taken. Two more Englishmen were ambushed and murdered, and the Malagasy cut adrift one of the boats, burned another, and set fire to the smith’s forge. Another settler strayed too far into the forest while gathering watermelons and was found with his throat slashed. The dream of Madagascar was proving a nightmare. With provisions almost depleted and the situation truly desperate, the remaining settlers, by now utterly disillusioned, agreed to abandon the colony in May 1646. The settlers’ houses, “many and well built,” were burnt to the ground to prevent Brindah’s clan from enjoying them. Yet Smart, ever aware of the larger Indo-Atlantic trade picture, spared one that had a chimney and ovens for the future use of any English ships that might touch there. The settlers left the king’s colors flying over a rock, under which they buried letters justifying their evacuation and naming the chiefs who had damaged English expectations, pleading with any subsequent visitors to exact revenge. After a brief stop in Mayotta (Comoros), where all the women settlers and many of the men chose to remain, Smart arrived at Courteen’s impoverished factory at Achin in August with only twenty-three of the original 140-plus colonists. Though he appears to have retained his health the entire time in Madagascar, Smart was dead by February, having suffered a fatal bout of dysentery. The surviving settlers at Mayotta were picked up and brought to Rajapur in September 1646, where some made their way to Goa to seek their fortunes with the Portuguese, apparently convinced, perhaps with good reason, that the English were entirely clueless in the Indian Ocean region. All told, less than a dozen of the adventurers returned to their native England; the rest were dead or scattered about the Indian Ocean basin, the flotsam and jetsam of the Indo-Atlantic world.

“captain johnson” and the madagascar pirates Four decades after the demise of the Saint Augustine’s Bay colony, a more dynamic generation of Euro-American settlers returned to Madagascar and proved far more successful than the Courteen-Smart collection. Saint Augustine would continue to be a stopping point for Atlantic vessels plying the

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Indian Ocean, but a more successful settlement developed on the opposite side of Madagascar, on an island off the northeast coast. This island, Nosy Boraha in the local dialect, came to be known as Saint Mary’s to locals and settlers alike, and was a much more suitable locale than Saint Augustine. The island had a protected harbor for safe anchorage, sloping sandy beaches for careening wooden ships, reliable sources of fresh water, and a natural abundance of fruit, rice, honey, chicken, turtle, fish, and beef. Most importantly, the local inhabitants of Saint Mary’s willingly invited the pirates to settle in return for their assistance in the local slaving wars. Pirates, who began to arrive and settle Saint Mary’s around 1690, were the linchpins of the Indo-Atlantic trade network between Madagascar and New York. For almost half a century, they existed in similar form in a number of communities on Madagascar, until about 1730, when they seem to have disappeared, died off, or been subsumed by the dominant Malagasy culture. During their time, they were important cross-cultural brokers, often marrying local women and producing offspring known as zana malata, who became powerful local princes possessing real and symbolic authority in their communities. These pirate settlements provided delicious fodder for authors like ”Captain Charles Johnson,” the best-selling pseudonymous author of A General History of the Pyrates (1724). Johnson, who may have been Daniel Defoe, romanticized the cross-cultural communities through his invention of the pirate Captain Misson, who founds a socialist utopia called Libertalia on the island of Madagascar. Unlike More’s original vision of Utopia, however, slavery is banished by Johnson’s Captain Misson, and former slaves are schooled in the principles of freedom. Misson informs his men, “The trading of our own species could never be agreeable to the eyes of divine justice: that no man had power of the liberty of another, and while those who profess’d a more enlightened knowledge of the Deity, sold men like beasts . . . they differed from the barbarians in name only.” But as with all utopian dreams, the reality did not measure up to the fantasy. Through the intervention of the actual pirate-settlers, Madagascar would be slowly drawn into the Atlantic economies across the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, once described as “the happiest people in the world,” would be dispersed as slaves in an Indo-Atlantic diaspora that stretched from Bencoolen to Boston. By the late eighteenth century, moreover, Madagascar and nearby western Indian Ocean islands developed an Atlantic-style plantation complex dedicated to

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cash crops like sugar, the huge fields toiled by thousands of slave laborers. It took several generations longer, but the western Indian Ocean had finally begun to mirror the New World. The lost colony of Saint Augustine and the later pirate settlements of Madagascar might merely be curious footnotes to history if not for the larger issues exposed by these episodes in colonization. The Courteen promoters, cognizant of the competition for resources, financing, and willing colonists, were either outright deceptive or wilfully ignorant of the potential pitfalls that awaited the colonists, especially regarding the alleged healthfulness of the island and the willingness of the Malagasy to accommodate them. Yet they framed their Madagascar scheme in the most glowing terms, especially in relation to other ventures. As Boothby stated in his dedication, “Glory of Almighty, Your Majesties Honour, and the Commonwealth’s happiness may redownd to all the world, as well out of Asia as Affryca (or rather more and better) in hopeful or assured expectations as out of America.” The stated intent of the Courteen Association had been “to settle Factories and plant Collonies after the Dutch manner”—in other words, to provide sustained financial and material support to its Madagascar colony. But once launched, the Saint Augustine settlement was left to fend entirely for itself. The instructions given at the outset by the company’s London backers and the attendant actions of its leader, Captain Smart, expose the piratical nature of this early English colonizing effort and demonstrate the centrality of slave trading—at least in theory—to the venture. As for the settlement itself, the poorly chosen locale in combination with hostile interactions with the resident locals created further difficulties, and endemic disease proved the death knell. Any one or two of these factors might have been surmountable, but the combination proved fatal to the colony. Perhaps most revealing is the Indo-Atlantic nature of these ventures, including many of the participants and backers, and especially the promotional literature that accompanied these early ventures. Juxtaposing the North American colonies with those of Madagascar reveals the sundry workings, in multiple directions, of early modern English colonizing projects. The focus on Madagascar also provides a comparative interoceanic perspective on the traditional exceptionalist narrative of early America. Like many English colonial schemes, this episode reveals the continual tussle between old and new, with the new constantly reworking the fringes of older exploited areas— in this case, an interloping company challenging the monopoly of the EIC.

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This pattern was repeated in the 1690s by a competing royally chartered company, by enterprising American colonial merchants, and by Atlantic-based pirates. The historiography of empire often excludes connections between the peripheries, and Madagascar itself remained for the most part outside official imperial networks. The agents that connected Madagascar to the IndoAtlantic world were not sovereign but informal interlopers, an important if elusive group that scholars continue to misunderstand or overlook. When Madagascar is placed in its proper geographic and historical context, surprising and profound early modern global interactions are revealed that linked the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Indeed, a new kind of Indo-Atlantic world was born of the trading networks created by pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves. These early modern European interventions in Madagascar should remind us of the centrality of slaves and slavery in Utopia, the ways both slavery and piracy were reflected in early modern colonization schemes, and finally, how the double-prism reflection of new worlds and old worlds eventually dissolved separate world regions into one. In the wake of these official European schemes, an enterprising, yet clandestine, network of American merchants, pirates, and slaves would span the oceans again, this time with more success.

chapter 4

Pirate-Settlers of Madagascar

Atlantic voyagers to the Indian Ocean frequently commented on the heavy surf and tumultuous seas while rounding the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese suggestively christened the “Cape of Storms.” Many a ship’s log has an entry to the effect that “a great swell came in from the sea . . .” The colossal waves were caused by the collision of two massive ocean basins and the “roaring forties,” the persistent westerly gale-force winds that helped propel Atlantic vessels into the region—but also might wreck them. Pirates were akin to the great groundswells that arrived annually in the Indian Ocean—broad, deep swells caused by a distant storm or gale that traveled over a long swath of ocean. At the end of the seventeenth century, one such wave of pirates, born in the tempestuous seas of the colonial Caribbean, rolled across the Atlantic, swept around the Cape, and spilled onto the shores of Madagascar. Like a great swell coming in from the sea, this piratical wave crashed violently upon the Malagasy shore and profoundly shifted the terrain beneath its force. The ensuing riptide, equally great, rushed out beyond the local reefs to all corners of the globe, inspiring terror and awe from Whitehall to the Uru-Muhalla (Mughal palace). The world’s fourth-largest island, strategically located on the doorstep of the rich Indian Ocean, was on the threshold of becoming a cross-cultural colony composed of Atlantic pirates and Malagasy locals. The Indo-Atlantic pirate settlements that arose in the 1690s resembled earlier colonial ventures in their emphasis on maritime marauding and the slave trade. Like prior English efforts (e.g., Roanoke, Bermuda, Jamestown, 81

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Providence Island), the Madagascar pirate settlements were predatory, albeit much more successful than many of their Elizabethan predecessors. What separated the Madagascar settlements from prior colonial ventures was their organic nature. Rather than being planned, financed, and maintained from above by the state (viz. the Estado da India), joint stock companies, or merchant-adventurers, the settlements emerged from below through the crosscultural interactions of Atlantic pirates and Indo-Malagasy locals. A number of factors coalesced around 1690 that gave rise to the settlements. First, privateers with commissions to pillage in the Caribbean and Atlantic basins began venturing to the Indian Ocean in search of plunder, and they met with great success. The Indian Ocean had always been the richest trading ground in the world for silver, silks, and spices. The country ships carrying these cargoes, owned and built by local merchants, were a tempting target for the Atlantic marauders, though they were not legal prizes under the terms of their commissions. As such, the privateers technically “turned pirate” under English law, but because the victims were “Moors,” many colonial Americans openly supported their activities, and the pirates remained connected to the colonies through a vigorous Indo-Atlantic trade network. Following a series of spectacular attacks on country ships near the Red Sea, the pirates returned to Atlantic ports with unimaginable treasure, and a swarm of pirate ships soon followed in their wake. The reputation of these “Red Sea Men” reverberated throughout the Indo-Atlantic world. Next, the coastal Malagasy peoples allowed the pirates to use Madagascar as their base. The island’s geographical location, lying due south of the Red Sea, was an ideal strategic location for launching their raids and a relatively safe place to rest, refit, and divide their plunder. The internal political situation of Madagascar, moreover, encouraged the arrival of the newcomers. At the end of the seventeenth century, Madagascar was politically divided among dozens of competing kingdoms, and captives in the internecine warfare became slaves to the victorious parties. For many coastal inhabitants, the pirates represented a welcome presence as potential allies in the increasing internal warfare. The pirates were excellent warriors and had access to firearms, important factors in the slaving wars that were spreading rapidly throughout the island. At the same time, colonial merchants who had been sending slave vessels to Madagascar, especially from New York, decided to provision the pirates at their settlements in Madagascar, a situation not unlike the early colonist-

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adventurer model. The merchants hired pirates as middlemen or sent factors to Madagascar to broker pirate goods and slaves. Because of the distance and the scarcity of European goods in Madagascar, pirates paid a premium for the colonial cargos, especially liquor and beer, as long as the prices were not too outrageous. The slaves, however, came cheap. Surprisingly, in the early 1690s, supplying pirates was not an illegal activity, and the interloper slave trade, though anathema to the English East India Company and the Royal African Company, was openly debated in Parliament. The long-distance provisioning was a risky but potentially highly lucrative enterprise, and a number of New York merchants dove into it. The pirates who sailed to Madagascar at this time came out of the Jamaica– New York buccaneer/privateer nexus. They were universally male, and their national background was mainly English and Dutch, with a mix of French and, increasingly, African and African American. Many were veterans of the Caribbean and Pacific campaigns against the Spanish, including members of the Cygnet and Batchelor’s Delight, the first of over thirty Atlantic pirate ships that would sail to Madagascar. Many members of these crews would settle at Madagascar and sustain elements of the buccaneer culture they had developed in the Caribbean. The Madagascar settlements, however, were more than an offshoot of their oceanic raids, as has been suggested by some historians. Over the course of the 1690s, the Madagascar pirates developed a distinct identity as the “Red Sea Men,” notorious throughout colonial and metropolitan seaports. The Board of Trade in London, fearing the creation of a pirate state, reported 1,500 men, forty to fifty guns, and seventeen ships at the settlement of Saint Mary’s alone. Though these numbers may have been exaggerated, the settlements, especially the prominent community at Saint Mary’s, developed their own hybrid culture, blending the rites and rituals of the Caribbean buccaneers with the customs and culture of the coastal Malagasy peoples. The settlements were truly Indo-Atlantic in nature, a mix of Atlantic and Indian Ocean cultures. The Caribbean-born custom of matelotage, for example, where two buccaneers signed a contract to share everything in common, was continued in Madagascar, but the presence of Malagasy women and their willingness to join the pirates created new kinds of bonds, some multigenerational. Culinary practices developed in the Caribbean, like curing beef, were likewise continued and augmented by local rituals; the Malagasy relationship with cattle and cattle raiding had deep roots, similar to that of the buccaneers. The pirates’

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preference for alcohol and symbolic toasting likewise continued, and the shipments of rum sent to them from the American colonies were augmented by arrack and the local honey liquor, known as toke. There was no dominance, no hegemony; instead, a fragile balance was reached on the beach. When this balance was upset, the middle ground could, and did, become a killing field, as evidenced in earlier European colonization attempts. Rather than repeating these colonial disasters, the Red Sea Men established a more permanent legacy just offshore on the island of Saint Mary’s.

saint mary’s island Forty years or so after the collapse of the Saint Augustine Bay colony, a more successful generation of Euro-American settlers returned to Madagascar, this time to settle on Saint Mary’s island. It was an ideal space for a pirate settlement. If Cape Town and Saint Helena served as transoceanic ports for the VOC, EIC, and other formal trading networks, then Saint Mary’s was to be a refreshment zone for pirates and other interloping traders. Saint Mary’s was (and is) a long, narrow splinter of land ten miles off the coast of northeastern Madagascar. A small but sufficient harbor and lagoon located on the westward or leeward side near the southern end was exceptional as one of the few safe anchorages on the entire eastern shoreline of Madagascar. The remainder of Madagascar’s east coast, exposed to the open Indian Ocean, suffered the brunt of the tropical cyclones that battered the region every year from December through March. A small islet at the mouth of the harbor served as an ideal defensive position for the lagoon behind it. Sloping sandy beaches on the edges of the small islet and the adjacent harbor were perfect for careening wooden ships. Toward the back of the lagoon sat another small, hilly islet, which provided an elevated vantage point ideally suited for sighting approaching vessels. Next to this islet, also within the lagoon, was a reliable source of fresh water. The natural abundance of the land included a range of antiscorbutic citrus fruits, bananas, coconuts, yams, rice, taro, and honey; chicken, turtle, fish, and beef were likewise readily available. A more perfect pirate base could hardly be imagined. Pirates, who began to arrive and settle around 1690, were central components of the Indo-Atlantic trade network between Madagascar and New York. For over four decades, they settled on different parts of the island, until about 1730, when their presence fades from the historical record. As suggested ear-

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lier, they either died, left the island, or were incorporated into the local Malagasy society and culture. During their time, they were important crosscultural brokers in the pirate trade, especially as middlemen in the slave trade. The first of these brokers was Adam Baldridge, a seasoned Caribbean pirate, who arrived at Madagascar in 1690. His background, like that of most pirates, is somewhat shadowy, but one account says he killed a man in Jamaica in 1685, and sometime thereafter turned pirate. When he was later arrested and examined by the authorities, Baldridge gave a long, somewhat confusing account of his activities on Madagascar over the course of the 1690s. His testimony, in combination with other depositions, court papers, Admiralty records, letters, and ships’ papers, paint a vivid portrait of the cross-cultural pirate settlements on Madagascar, especially at Saint Mary’s. According to Baldridge, he arrived at Madagascar on the Fortune, probably a slaver, which foundered on the rocks near Fort Dauphin on the southern end of the island. Before the wreck, however, Baldridge had jumped ship with his apprentice, John King, to settle among the local population. Baldridge arrived at a time when internecine warfare was becoming more commonplace in Madagascar, and raiding for people and cattle, rather than inflicting mortal damage, was the object of the game. By his own admission, Baldridge came to Madagascar specifically to trade and raid for slaves, and he immediately proved adept at raiding and making local alliances. Baldridge returned from his first “war” with seventy head of cattle and an undetermined number of slaves. More importantly, he had earned the allegiance of some local people, and his new allies, or more likely, the slaves, constructed a house for him on the island of Saint Mary’s. Baldridge’s base on Saint Mary’s would become the center of the illicit Indo-Atlantic trade for the next thirty or so years. At the time of Baldridge’s arrival, Saint Mary’s was thinly populated. When he returned from war, this situation had changed; he reported that a “great store of negroes resorted to me from the island Madagascar and settled the island Saint Mary’s.” Baldridge further stated that he “lived quietly with them helping them to redeem their wives and children that were taken before my coming to Saint Mary’s by other negroes to the northward of us about 60 leagues.” While this was hardly quiet living, there was a moral economy to the local slaving situation. To redeem the wives and children of his new allies, Baldridge would have to continue going to war, and this meant not only redeeming the local wives and children but stealing those of more distant families. In Madagascar, enslaved persons (and cattle) were regularly swapped

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figure 9. Detail showing Madagascar from Frederik de Wit’s Totius Africæ accuratissima tabula (ca. 1688). Pirates were arguably the most successful “Atlantic” settlers to arrive in Madagascar. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

back and forth among the local competing clans, and the “60 leagues” mentioned by Baldridge was well within striking range, at Antongil Bay just north of Saint Mary’s. For the most part, the long-distance slave trade that preceded the arrival of the pirates had been centered on the west coast of Madagascar. With the arrival of the new wave of pirates in the 1690s came an increase in Euro-American slavers, and the northeast region of Madagascar was on the brink of becoming a major source for the Indo-Atlantic slave trade. Adam Baldridge was not the only pirate-broker to settle at Madagascar in the early 1690s, but he was the most successful. In 1691, the privateer Jacob, of New York, arrived in Madagascar. Samuel Burgess, also of New York, left this ship and attempted to settle at Saint Augustine, but like the English colonists of a half century earlier, he did not fare well with the locals.

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When the Jacob returned from a cruise in the Indian Ocean, Burgess admitted failure in establishing a trading post: “I went [back] on board of them being glad to see a whigt faise having lived hard amongst the Blacks, not having anything to eat but what I was forst to begg of them.” The Jacob, meanwhile, before returning to Saint Augustine, had stopped at Saint Mary’s and traded some of the ship’s cannon to Baldridge for much-needed food. Upon departing, about half the Jacob’s crew chose to remain at Saint Mary’s, further increasing the pirate-settler population of the island. Burgess had obviously fared much worse than his counterpart on the opposite side of Madagascar, demonstrating the vastly different conditions and local complexities on the island. Burgess returned to New York on the Jacob but would not remain there long. The news of Baldridge’s pirate-settlement at Saint Mary’s reached the ears of Frederick Philipse, who decided to embark on a major entrepreneurial venture to supply them there. As Philipse was already sending ships to Madagascar to take on slaves and had the financial wherewithal to provision the pirate-settlers, the decision to supply them was relatively easy. Incredibly, provisioning the Red Sea Men was not illegal at this point under any English statute. By the end of the decade, this loophole would close, as would the ability for colonial slavers to encroach on EIC territory in Madagascar. Baldridge expanded his initial working capital of slaves, cattle, and a house into a burgeoning pirate settlement. In some ways, the trading post crudely resembled the slave factories and forts that had already been established on the west coast of Africa, except that pirate ships were generally welcome at Saint Mary’s. Nearly every pirate ship, in fact, that sailed to the Indian Ocean stopped at Saint Mary’s at some point to rest, careen, and exchange their loot for local food and provisions from the North American colonies. Alcohol, which arrived in barrels of beer, casks of rum, and aqua vitae, was much favored by the pirates, and they gladly paid exorbitant rates for their swill. This proclivity for alcohol consumption was a carryover from the colonies. Governor Bellomont of New York, for example, complained that his colonists were “generally so very idle and drunken that they would part with their land for a gallon of rum.” With provisions aplenty, the pirate ships, as well as the slavers, often deposited crew members at Saint Mary’s, so that there was a continual replenishment of settlers on the island. The Euro-American population of the Saint Mary’s settlement thus fluctuated over time between

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a few hundred and over a thousand persons, depending on the number of ships in port. An examination of the cargoes sent from New York indicate the intention to establish a long-term settlement. In addition to the expected manufactured goods, clothes, cases of rum, and barrels of gunpowder to be exchanged with the pirate-settlers for their plundered cargoes of textiles, silks, calicoes, drugs, spices, jewels, gold, and hard currency, the cargo included bibles and catechism books, as well as seeds and gardening tools. These are items that indicate a much more complex colonial space than a mere pirate haunt. But things did not always go swimmingly on the beach. While the Atlantic pirates and Malagasy locals reached accommodation on most occasions, there were also moments of uneasiness, conflict, and death. Some settlers died of tropical disease, others fought among themselves over the division of spoils, and brawls could erupt if too much alcohol was consumed. The division of booty was a legacy from the Caribbean days, and there were rules to fall back on should a dispute arise. In one instance, fourteen pirate-settlers, unhappy with their share of 1,200 each, divided themselves into two groups of seven to fight to the death on the beach, winner take all. The two survivors of the death match then split the booty as the blood of their felled comrades pooled around them. Violence on the heels of alcohol abuse was hardly unique to the pirate community, however. In 1698, for example, the City of London was considering a law to regulate tavern hours “in order to prevent murders committed by people in drink, and other abuses.” The difference, and the danger, of the Malagasy beach was the ever-present threat of cross-cultural miscommunication. The biggest opportunity for such missteps involved the slave trade. As discussed above, slavery was endemic to Madagascar when the pirates arrived, and specific local conditions and expectations shaped the trade. Warring factions, for example, often exchanged prisoners after a battle; if no exchange was forthcoming, the prisoners were usually taken to a neighboring village and maintained there as slaves. The defeated faction could regroup and later raid the village in an attempt to free their comrades (and possibly take other slaves), as Adam Baldridge had done when he arrived in 1690 and joined the war party against the Antongil Bay clans to the north of Saint Mary’s. By the end of 1697, Baldridge had been living among the Malagasy for seven years, and by many accounts, it was a relatively harmonious existence. A slaver visiting Saint Mary’s in 1693, for example, testified that Baldridge and the pirate-settlers “had ingratiated themselves with the Negroes of the Island who

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submit to Baldridge as their king.” The visitor, John Finlinson of New York, added that “those negroes are a peaceable people and do not sell any slaves. But Baldridge directed the master of the ship to a bay in the island of Madagascar . . . where they got what they wanted.” The only bay in the area is Antongil Bay, the same region to the north that Baldridge had been pillaging for slaves since his arrival. While Baldridge was on a similar slaving mission at the end of 1697, the harmony at Saint Mary’s was violently shattered. Though several descriptions diverge on the details, they all agree that without warning, the Malagasy inhabitants of Saint Mary’s rose up and destroyed Baldridge’s fort, pillaged all the pirates’ goods, and massacred up to thirty pirates. Because Baldridge was at sea when the uprising occurred, he was spared the violent wrath of his former local allies. He was met by Captain Mostyn of New York upon his return to Saint Mary’s and informed of the brutal events that had occurred. He was still alive, but his fiefdom on Madagascar had ended. Baldridge’s last slaving mission may have saved his life, but it also appears to be the root cause of the massacre. When testifying two years later, Baldridge wove a tale of innocence, blaming the other pirates for abusing the natives and stealing their cattle. But at least one deponent, William Kidd, gave a more likely reason for the uprising: Baldridge had sold his own people into slavery, and not just to a neighboring village. Kidd stated that Baldridge “inveigled a great number of the natives of Saint Mary’s, men, women, and children, on board a ship . . . and carried and sold them for slaves to . . . Mascarine.” The latter is a reference to the French- and Dutch-controlled Mascarene islands of Bourbon and Maurice, located hundreds of miles east of Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean. Like the Caribbean islands, the Mascarenes were developing into productive sugar colonies, and Madagascar was on its way to becoming the source of many of its slave laborers. Though Baldridge was the point man on the ground in Madagascar, he was still following orders from the colonies. When Frederick Philipse and the other New York merchants became aware of the developing sugar plantations in the western Indian Ocean, they gave specific orders (to Baldridge and their other captains) to acquire slaves on Madagascar and carry them away and sell them at the Mascarenes. For seven years, Baldridge had maintained a fragile peace with his Malagasy allies on Saint Mary’s. The peace was broken by orders from New York and the inexorable force of the Indo-Atlantic slave trade.

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christian pirates? Shackles and iron bars were not the only items sent from New York to the pirate settlements on Madagascar. The presence of bibles and catechisms in the cargo lists raises significant questions regarding their anticipated use, whether for the maintenance of Christian belief among these pirate-settlers or for attempts to convert the local Malagasy. There is anecdotal evidence of Christian practices among the pirates in Captain Johnson’s account, including a reference to “an Invitation from one Ort Van Tyle, who liv’d on the Main of Madagascar, to come to the Ceremony of christening two of his Children.” Furthermore, Governor Fletcher, who was instrumental in establishing the Anglican church in New York and providing it with public support, allegedly proselytized to Thomas Tew during their carriage ride, admonishing him for “a vile habit of swearing” and presenting him with a bible or catechism book to help him mend his ways. At least some Catholicized slaves arrived from Madagascar in New York in the 1680s, indicating successful proselytizing efforts by the Portuguese or French among a segment of the Malagasy population that was eventually transported to the Americas. When Euro-American settlers died in Madagascar—a not uncommon occurrence given the prevalence of disease and warfare—Johnson often notes their burial with the “usual ceremony.” Yet we need not rely solely on the elaborations of the mysterious Captain Johnson. There is a strong indication in the archaeological record that pirates did, in fact, practice a form of Christian burial on the island of Saint Mary’s. There exist today the remnants of what Malagasy villagers call “the Pirate’s Cemetery.” It is located on a secluded hillside above the lagoon that overlooks Pirates’ Island (Île aux Forbans). A stone path has been constructed to allow foot access to this area, but at high tide the cemetery can only be reached by pirogue. In the days of the pirates, the only access to this secluded area would have been by boat. Numerous tombstones remain from the nineteenth century, some marked with the quintessential pirate symbol: the “death’s head,” or skull and crossbones. The names on the tombs commemorate French corsairs who arrived in the region a century after the demise of the Red Sea Men, but there are strong indications that the burial ground has much older origins: a separate section of the cemetery contains dozens of crude markers, single stones or rocks, some unmarked, others with engravings long faded by centuries of erosion.

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Perhaps one of these forgotten, unmarked graves belongs to Joseph Jones, a privateersman who signed aboard the Pelican, out of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1696. The Pelican had a commission to take prizes in the West Indies, but within two weeks of setting out, the master, Captain Robert Coley, and the majority of the crew voted to “turn pirate”—to round the Cape of Good Hope, “intending to cruise only Moors.” At the start of the voyage, Jones made a mariner’s share contract with Jonathan Green, a fellow privateer aboard the Pelican, granting one-quarter of all “prize, purchase, or plunder” to Green, who had evidently paid for Jones’s provisions at the outset. Neither individual could write, so each left his mark on the agreement. The Pelican, a ship of ten guns and 120 men, made a successful pirate cruise, taking two “Moors” before retiring to Saint Mary’s to careen, supply, and divide the spoils. In May 1698, Jones became fatally ill, but before passing from this world, the illiterate pirate from Rhode Island made a written will. It begins: In the name of God Amen . . . being very sick and weak of body, but of perfect mind and memory thanks be given to God. . . . [F]irst and chiefly I give my soule into the hands of Almighty God who gave it to me and my body I command to the earth to be buried in Christian burial . . . nothing doubting but at the General Resurrection I receive the same again by the Mighty Power of God.

Having dispensed with his spiritual estate, Jones next bequeathed his worldly possessions among his fellow pirates. His most prized earthly assets—his guns, pistols, ammunition, cartouche boxes, and clothes—were divided between Francis Reed and John Bevis. He next made good on his contract with Jonathan Green for a quarter share of his plunder. Though the amount of Jones’s share was not stated, the Pelican’s cooper, Joseph Wheeler, made two thousand pieces of eight “plus some toys” on the same cruise, so Green likely made a good investment on provisioning his fellow mariner on the outbound voyage. Lastly, one piece of gold each was left to John Watson and Michael Hicks, the executors of his will. Michael Hicks was a hardcore pirate from Jamaica, a consort of Captain Robert Culliford, another lifer, and he had been cruising on a number of pirate ships between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans since 1690. Hicks was aboard the Margaret as a paying passenger on its return voyage to New York when the ship was seized by Captain Lowth at the Cape in 1699. Hicks was arrested and taken to London, where he was indicted on multiple counts of piracy, to which he pleaded guilty. (Joseph Wheeler, meanwhile, was tried and acquit-

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ted.) Hardcore pirates like Hicks could be not just literate but also executors of the last wills and testaments of Christian pirates, like Jones. Pirates and piracy were clearly more complex than we have been allowed to believe. Euro-American pirates died at Saint Mary’s. If in life these pirates acted within the realms of acceptable social and cultural practices, would it not be strange indeed if they did not continue these practices in their death rituals? A Christian culture—or at least a semblance of typical Euro-American religious practices—appears to have played an important role in the lives of many pirates, and perhaps some locals, of Madagascar. In colonial New York, when individuals died, their wills declared, “Their Corps to ye Earth and Christianlike Buriall for a blessed resurrection at ye Last day.” When pirates died in Madagascar, their brethren continued the traditional cultural ritual of placing “their corps to ye earth” in a “Christianlike Buriall.” Their stories are being resurrected, in part, right here on these pages. The maintenance of Christian practices, however, was not universal among the pirate-settlers on Madagascar. There is evidence that some pirates converted to Islam, including former pirate captain James Kelly (also known as Gillam), who spent at least one and a half years in Madagascar. Many colonial transplants engaged in significant concubinage relationships with Malagasy women. Captain Johnson’s assertion that the pirates of Madagascar married “the most beautiful of the Negro women, not one or two, but as many as they liked, so that every one of them had as great a Seraglio as the Grand Seignor at Constantinople,” might be an example of scintillating poetic license by the best-selling eighteenth-century author, but there is little doubt that such relationships were not uncommon. In one insightful passage that elucidates both the prominence of local women and the centrality of slaving, an English deponent testified that both Baldridge and his assistant, Lawrence Johnston, were married to “country women,” adding that, “many of the others are married at Madagascar. . . . Their design in marrying the country women is to ingratiate themselves with the inhabitants, with whom they go into war against other petty kings. If one Englishman goes with the Prince with whom he lives to war, he has half the slaves that are taken for his pains.”

ethnogenesis of the betsimisaraka Though many survivors of the Saint Mary’s Massacre fled the island, others remained behind, and subsequent waves of pirates would follow. Even during

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the massacre itself, the complexity of the cross-cultural settlements was manifest. During the surprise attack on Baldridge’s fort, a simultaneous coordinated attack was launched against a different settlement of pirates, which was successfully repelled with the assistance of Malagasy allies, including women. Alliances could cut against, across, and through the cultural grains of the Madagascar settlements. A unique cross-cultural environment was developing that would have profound effects on the internal dynamics of Madagascar. Some marriages between Anglo-Europeans and the Malagasy women produced “pirate princes,” who became known locally as zana malata. These men had a considerable impact on the local political organization. Because of the pirates’ access to firearms, they and their offspring began to act as mediators among the various Betsimisaraka clans, so that two privileged groups developed on the east coast of Madagascar in the early eighteenth century. The first comprised local clan chiefs whose inherent supremacy was reinforced by their access to guns; the second group was composed of Euro-American pirates who coexisted and intermarried with the Malagasy but were nonetheless seen as possessing an exterior, superior power. The introduction of European weapons changed the internal dynamics of the domestic slave trade in Madagascar, and the presence of large numbers of pirates who cooperated with slavers drained the island of thousands of its people, funneling them to plantations in the Americas, at the Cape, and across the Indian Ocean littoral. The interloping Euro-American slavers began to ship Malagasy slaves away from their native land to offshore islands, especially the Mascarenes and the Cape Colony (South Africa). The lucrative trade opportunities brought by contact with Europeans, particularly resulting from the introduction of firearms, further sparked an internal transformation and created the Betsimisaraka foundation, the genesis of which lay in internecine tensions among different ancestries on the east coast. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the group of ancestries known as the Tsikoa (an alliance of multiple Antatsimo groups) grew jealous of the lucrative trade and control of ports enjoyed by clans farther to the north, near Saint Mary’s. Under the leadership of Ramanano, a warrior chief, the Tsikoa attacked the northern clans, looting and pillaging the area to the north of Tamatave, which included areas controlled by members of the Antavarata and zana malata groups. One member of the latter, Ratsimilaho, the son of an English pirate named Tom and Rahena, a princess from Fenerive, was in

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England at the time of the attack. When Ratsimilaho returned bearing gold and arms, he found his people enslaved by the southern clans. At a meeting called by local chiefs to debate their next move, Ratsimilaho, after deploring their submission to Tsikoa tyranny and calling for war, was named filoha be, or “big chief.” He launched a surprise dusk attack against the enemy, who were exhausted from a long day’s work plowing the rice fields. Henceforth the Tsikoa became known as the Betinimena, or “Covered with Red Mud,” from the rich red laterite soil that covered their bodies. Ramanano counterattacked, however, and Ratsimilaho was forced to make an alliance with one of the other southern chiefs. At the ceremonial meeting, this alliance became known as the Betsimisaraka, “the many who will not be sundered,” and Ratsimilaho took the name Ramaromanompo, or “he who is served by many.” The Betsimisaraka foundation, which originated from a Euro-Malagasy creole population, lasted for two generations, its demise owing to the death of Ramaromanompo in 1750, as well as continuing internecine squabbles provoked by foreign traders. The ethnogenesis of the Betsimisaraka unveils the complexity of the colonial experience at Saint Mary’s and the pirates’ impact on the internal dynamics of Madagascar. Ramaromanompo, accompanying his father to England, hinted at an intimate relationship between an English pirate (known only as Tom) and his creole son, while his return to Madagascar indicates his continuing ties to his kin relations. Furthermore, the Malagasy women were crucial, since it was only through their recent unions with Euro-American pirates that the Betsimisaraka became real. As to the paternity of Ramaromanompo, for a long time his father was thought to have been Thomas Tew, but this is unlikely since Tew spent only a short time in Madagascar on his first voyage and then returned to the North American colonies, not England. Though Tew sailed back to the Atlantic in the Amity, sailors from his crew remained at Saint Mary’s to provide a reserve of men from which future visiting pirate ships could, and did, draw. Following Tew’s lead, these pirate crews pillaged a host of Mughal ships, many on pilgrimage to Mecca. For local merchants, pilgrims, and their crews, the Bab el Mandeb strait (Gate of Tears) was living up to its name. All this violence and plundering eventually drew the wrath of the Mughal leaders upon the EIC, and they imprisoned company servants in Surat and other port towns. These imprisoned officials then petitioned Parliament for more effective measures against the pirates. These measures were momentarily effective; some pirates, like Captain Kidd, who

figure 10. Nicolas de Larmessin’s engraved portrait of Aurangzeb, the powerful Mughal ruler. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

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had become politically expendable, were publicly executed to mollify the Mughal court. Many more received a royal pardon. Still others continued their life on Madagascar. The name Madagascar became synonymous with pirate lairs and mutiny. Meanwhile, official proposals to settle Madagascar appeared regularly in the royal courts of Europe. As one proponent asserted, “That tempting island must bid fair once more to be appropriated.” The Admiralty occasionally sent a squadron to visit Madagascar and reconnoiter the island, but they never actually settled there, nor did they attack the pirate settlements; indeed, Captain Warren’s expedition completely bypassed the island on its way to India in 1698. On one occasion, the pirates destroyed their own ships in the Saint Mary’s harbor rather than be taken captive—a somewhat drastic measure, given the navy’s reluctance to engage them. On another occasion, when the crew of the HMS Scarborough arrived in Antongil Bay in 1704, the local Malagasy greeted them in canoes and whaleboats with a symbolic discharge of firearms. Afterward, as one member of the crew reported, “According to the custom of the country they swore one of each party by mixing several ingredients with each other blood and then drink it.” This “custom of the country” was an example of the Indo-Atlantic blend of Caribbean buccaneer and local cultural practices. When Commodore Matthews arrived at Madagascar in 1722, he was startled to find “negroes” in war canoes rowing out beyond the reef to meet his ship. His surprise turned to astonishment when the dark-skinned locals, men and women, greeted the English crew with “G—d d—n ye, John” and “Me love you,” phrases “they had learnt of the Pyrates.” A midshipman, Clement Downing, who wrote a detailed narrative of these encounters, added “that these Expressions may be a Terror to every English Christian, to think that their Nation is distinguished by such wicked Execrations.” Downing and the English crew were pleased to find an abundance of East Indies goods at Saint Mary’s, including “a China Punch Bowl filled with Pepper,” which was later traded for fresh beef. The local “king” made the captain and officers “swear by the Sea, that they would be Friends to them, and not molest them.” This oceanic oath was sealed with a symbolic toast, as the captain and officers were “compelled” to drink a strange concoction of saltwater and gunpowder with their local hosts “in token of Friendship, it being a Ceremony they had learned from the Pyrates.” When the king next presented his two daughters to the captain, Downing reported it “as a Present, being what they used to offer amongst the Pyrates; for they thought we were all alike.”

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Like the Mughal rulers in India, the Betsimisaraka of Madagascar were thought to believe that all Englishmen were pirates. Given their experience of the Indo-Atlantic world, could they possibly think otherwise? As the ceremonial drinking rituals of the Betsimisaraka so clearly symbolize, the blood of the English and of the Malagasy was literally mixed with saltwater and gunpowder and consumed by the ever-increasing Indo-Atlantic slave trade. In a final marked illustration of these literal and symbolic Indo-Atlantic mixings, one officer died and another became “well peppered” with venereal disease as a result of these interoceanic exchanges. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, colonial pirates and privateers became significant transcultural brokers in the Indian Ocean region, spanning the globe to form an Indo-Atlantic trade network between North America and Madagascar. More than just criminals on the high seas, as they have traditionally been designated, these were early modern transcultural frontiersmen. In the process of shifting their theater of operations from the Caribbean to the rich trading grounds of the Indian Ocean world, they established settlements, married local Malagasy women, raised cattle as well as children, and traded and raided for slaves. In many ways, these Madagascar pirate settlements fit within Philip Curtin’s “broader pattern of culture change on and just beyond the frontiers of European expansion—a pattern that appeared in the seventeenth century in widely scattered parts of the world.” The settlers mirror most especially “the transfrontier cow killers” of the 1660s Caribbean—the boucaniers of western Hispaniola, who lived on cattle hunting and trading between bouts of piracy, though there are some important differences. In Curtin’s framework, the Caribbean buccaneers “flourished for a time . . . suppressed and dispossessed by the forward movement of European settlement colonies.” The pirate-settlers of Madagascar also flourished for a time but were suppressed and dispossessed by a different combination of factors. The “forward movement of European settlement colonies” took place not in Madagascar but 8,000 nautical miles away in the mid-Atlantic and New England colonies, which supplied most of the settler population in numbers well over a thousand. More importantly, not merely local resistance but actual indigenous control of the region was the primary determining factor in the demise of a number of the Madagascar settlements, while the political influence exerted by the Mughal emperor on the English Parliament, particularly

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regarding the East India Company, acted as an additional important suppressing factor. From the perspective of distant New York, the pirate settlements at Madagascar presented an opportunity to make a fortune in a high-risk, highreward enterprise. For the pirates, the settlements were a liminal space where they could live by their own inherited codes and laws—as long as they complied with local customs and mores. And though the pirate settlements and the network that connected them to the colonies were fueled by the slave trade, they were also, remarkably, contested spaces where enslaved people could sometimes find their freedom.

chapter 5

Seafaring Slaves and Freedom in the Indo-Atlantic World

Sometime in 1694, a “very tall” and “remarkable” mulatto named Calico Jack, a seafaring slave, slipped away from his owner’s plantation on the Upper Mills at Philipsburg Manor. Jack initiated his escape on the Pocantico, a tributary of the Hudson River just north of New York City, and traveled eastward along the Long Island Sound. Jack’s owner, Frederick Philipse, tracked him to Stratford, Connecticut, a small port town on the northern coast of the Sound, where the trail disappeared. Philipse was convinced that Jack had continued navigating to Rhode Island, where he would have utilized his considerable maritime knowledge and language skills—he was said to speak English as well as Dutch. According to his master and corroborated by the fragmentary record, Jack found his way to Newport and enlisted as a privateer on one of four ships, possibly Captain Tew’s, that were fitting out to pillage the Red Sea region. Years after Jack’s escape, Philipse, the wealthiest merchant in New York, was so intent on recapturing this slave that he ordered two of his captains and trading factors to “make a strict inquiry after him” at Madagascar and, if found, to “take him up.” Philipse instructed his captains t hat if they were unable to apprehend the slave, he would “stand to whatever agreement you make with him, of which you may assure him.” This account of a runaway slave, brief yet rich in detail, reveals a number of surprising facets of a global trade network as remarkable and audacious as Calico Jack himself. Frederick Philipse’s continuing search for Jack half a decade after his escape and his willingness to abide a negotiated agreement with him clearly indicate the enhanced status of this enslaved sailor and the 99

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importance of his role in this lucrative interoceanic trade network. It also demonstrates that slaves possessed a perceptive understanding of longdistance colonial trade and, in this instance, of a particularly extraordinary network that connected New York and other North American colonies with the Indian Ocean world via the collusion of pirates, merchants, officials, and even the slaves themselves. Calico Jack’s ability to escape enslavement by fleeing his plantation and navigating across the northern colonies to an outbound vessel, and then halfway across the globe, reveals more than the existence of this remarkable early modern global trade network; it demonstrates that enslaved New Yorkers were knowledgeable about its intricate workings. Most importantly, slaves knew that the network provided an opportunity, however slight, for emancipation. In addition to the merchants, governors, and pirates who profited mightily from this trade, enslaved Africans and African Americans were vital components in the everyday functioning of the Indo-Atlantic trade network and not merely its principal commodity. Indeed, some slaves received the greatest bounty of all: their freedom. Though slaves were one of the major commodities traveling east to west in the Indo-Atlantic trade network, one remarkable aspect of this system worked in a counter direction: a number of enslaved individuals were utilized in various capacities on the ships and shorelines of the Indo-Atlantic trade world. More significantly, some were able to use the network to obtain their freedom, whether from their owner, through self-manumission, by running away, or through their eyewitness testimony regarding the illicit activities of pirates and smugglers.

thom hicks and local seafaring slaves Accurate information and local knowledge were critical components of the Indo-Atlantic trade. Before vessels set sail and upon return to the colonies from their long-distance voyages, they needed detailed information about the local political situation, since it was likely to have changed in the months and years since their departure. The illicit nature of this trade meant that much of the East Indian cargo was considered illegal under admiralty and mercantile laws, many ships were manned by pirates or carried paying pirate passengers, and the slave cargoes were potentially proscribed under the charters of the Royal African Company and East India Company. The need for accurate local information, and for secrecy, was therefore paramount. When Frederick Philipse’s ships were ready to sail and when they returned from

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these Indo-Atlantic voyages, the man he sent to deliver this vital information was Thom Hicks, a slave. On multiple occasions, Hicks was entrusted with delivering Philipse’s correspondence and the captain’s orders, which contained the instructions and intelligence essential for a successful conclusion to a precarious longdistance voyage. After surviving the numerous potential hazards of the IndoAtlantic trade—shipwreck, seizure by the Admiralty, or capture by nonnetworked pirates—this last leg of the voyage, within sight of the home market, was especially important. Hicks, a seafarer, would have initiated his journey either from Philipse’s plantation on the Hudson thirty miles north of the city or, more likely, from one of Philipse’s slips near the family residence on Stone Street in lower Manhattan. Hicks would have sailed a coastal vessel designed for local waters, perhaps a small sloop, and he would have been knowledgeable about the local tides and weather conditions. To reach Sandy Hook and the watering place in the lower harbor, sailing vessels left the relative protection of the upper

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harbor and depended on wind and tide to negotiate the shifting currents, especially at the harbor mouth, which connected the upper harbor with Sandy Hook Bay and the open Atlantic. Conditions here were treacherous and ever changing, and even skilled mariners were prone to disaster. Hicks was also the messenger on outbound voyages, when accurate local intelligence was just as crucial. As the Margaret lay at anchor in the lower harbor in July 1697, Hicks arrived with a letter that informed Captain Burgess that an English man-of-war was in the area and had just seized the master of a sloop bound for an illegal voyage to Madeira. On this same mission, Hicks was also responsible for delivering nautical equipment integral to the outbound voyages: a half-hour glass for keeping time, particularly on watches, and for soundings; one “deep sea lead” for gauging depth in unknown waters; four wooden bowls and plates for the crew, indicating that dinnerware was shared among free and enslaved crew members; and three sails to replace the inevitable damage to the canvas sheets on these difficult long-distance journeys. When the Margaret returned to New York the following summer, Thom Hicks was in the lower harbor to greet the captain and crew with their master’s orders and instructions. Thom Hicks was not the only colonial slave involved in the local operations of the Indo-Atlantic trade. The owners of the Peter of New York also relied on slaves for a successful completion of these risky voyages. In their sealed written orders to the master and the chief mate of the Peter, the owners warned them not to rely on local townspeople when unloading their cargo. Instead, they should depend on “Andrew” and “Alexander,” both of whom were “acquainted” with Barnegat Bay, located on the central coast of East Jersey. Barnegat was one of the many local inlets used by pirates and contraband traders to circumvent customs officials. The insistence on using Andrew and Alexander indicates not only that these slaves were more trustworthy than the white townspeople but that that they were familiar with the local conditions and topography of the bay. The dependence on local seafaring slaves reveals much about the intricate workings of the Indo-Atlantic trade network and, more broadly, about the social and cultural situation of these laborers in the wider colonial context. To obtain their intimate knowledge of the local waters, these slaves would have had to spend the bulk of their time on the water, meaning less time, or none at all, tilling fields or carting goods in town. That independent black seafaring slaves would not raise the suspicion of neighbors or customs officials also indi-

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cates that the sight of black sailors was common. Finally, these slaves were more than skilled seafarers, as their owners’ reliance on them makes clear. They were integral components of the Indo-Atlantic trade network, and they shared the same duties as trusted family members. Along with Thom Hicks, Frederick’s son Adolph was sent to the Margaret as it lay in the lower harbor, to give “his service to [Captain Burgess] and the whole ship’s company.” For Philipse, “my negore” and “my sonn” shared similar trust and responsibilities.

the lowliest slave or a malagasy forerunner? marramitta the cook Every blue-water sailing ship needed a cook, and on board slavers this generally thankless task was especially important. Twice a day, under harrowing conditions, the cook aboard slavers had to feed not only the captain and crew but also hundreds of anxious captives. On most vessels in the seventeenth century, the cook was either an older seaman or a wounded sailor unable to perform the heavy labor required above deck. As the eighteenth century progressed, the “black cook” began to emerge as a familiar figure aboard sailing ships, slavers included, so that by the early nineteenth century, the position of ship’s cook was almost exclusively the preserve of black men. In 1698, aboard Frederick Philipse’s ship the Margaret, there was an early forerunner of these black cooks: Marramitta the cook. It is clear from the Margaret’s account ledger that Marramitta was not a free man and was placed aboard the ship as cook by his master, Philipse. While there is no direct information about his background or origins, his name makes it almost certain that Marramitta was from Madagascar and had likely been enslaved and purchased by Philipse on an earlier voyage. In this time period, the term marmite began to appear in the western Indian Ocean lexicon as a creolized derivative of the Malagasy word for “cooking pot.” On Île de France (Mauritius), Malagasy traders in slaves and other commodities were known as Marmites. In the early nineteenth century, maromita referred to slaves in Madagascar who were used as porters. These later maromita developed a collective identity and sense of community, cemented by a kind of blood brotherhood that signified a common ancestry. Marramitta, aboard the Margaret, was an early predecessor. The position of cook aboard the Margaret was no doubt a difficult one. It required working in a cramped galley and preparing increasingly decaying

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provisions for the sixteen-man crew, dozens of retired pirate passengers, and hundreds of anxious and disoriented slaves. Yet if we take the case of Joseph, a cook on the Dragon (1742), as representative of many black cooks in the early modern era, then perhaps Marramitta’s situation was not as lowly as it might seem. Joseph was the only black seaman aboard his vessel, which sailed for more than a year between London, Jamaica, and Boston. Jeff rey Bolster has justifiably asserted that Joseph “felt the isolation of being the only black, the only slave, and the only cook” aboard his vessel. The conditions for Marramitta were arguably a cut above Joseph’s. Marramitta, sailing fifty years earlier, was one of at least three enslaved crewmen aboard the Margaret, and thus had companions with whom to commiserate about his condition. Though the galley was indeed cramped, likely no more than five feet square and five feet high, it would have been clearly designated as his own personal space. For Marramitta, the status of cook aboard an Indo-Atlantic slaver was no doubt harsh, but perhaps, for an enslaved Malagasy bound to a master in North America, it was worthwhile and meaningful. The annual voyages from New York to Madagascar would have given Marramitta a regular chance to set his eyes and feet on his homeland, to interact and speak with his fellow countrymen, and possibly to visit his family. As cook, Marramitta was responsible for the daily provisioning of the captain, crew, and slaves while the ship was at sea. In his detailed outgoing written instructions, Philipse ordered his captains to purchase rice and yams while in Madagascar as provisions for the slaves, rations that were daily staples throughout Madagascar. The victuals, at least at the beginning of the return voyage, would have been fresh and familiar to the newly enslaved Malagasy. Marramitta was likely instrumental in the purchase of these provisions, as he would know the local language and customs better than anyone else on board. Poultry and beef, traditional culinary favorites of the pirates, were also readily available on the island and would likewise have been purchased, slaughtered, and prepared for the pirate passengers and crew. By the midway point in the return voyage, the initial provisions would be consumed or rotting, and fresh turtle would be taken aboard for the crew and slaves during the required stop at Saint Helena. For the Malagasy slaves, the crew’s adherence to these orders might mitigate some of the horrors of enslavement and the exceptionally long Middle Passage from Madagascar to New York. For the historian, at the very least, the instructions provide a shred of insight into the ethics and morals of a late seventeenth-

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century slave trader. Philipse’s placement of his personal Malagasy cook aboard an Indo-Atlantic slaver was no doubt intended both to ensure the effective provisioning of the return voyage and to alleviate the suffering of the newly enslaved—if only to ensure the owner a tidy profit. For the enslaved individuals below decks, however, the very presence of a fellow countryman who twice daily provided their only meager sustenance may have also been a source of solace in the midst of this frightening new existence. Over the course of the six-month journey, the cook could have conversed with the slaves in their native tongue, explaining their situation. With rumors of white cannibals rampant on the shores of Africa, perhaps the knowledge of their true situation was a bitter but reassuring consolation. As for Marramitta, his appearance in the Margaret’s account ledger among the rest of the crew strongly suggests that he earned wages on these voyages, but because the vessel was seized at the Cape on its return voyage in 1698, the ledger remains blank (unlike the sailors, the enslaved crew did not receive advance wages before the voyage). The average wage for a cook in this period was about 2 per month, and the records indicate that Philipse paid his IndoAtlantic crews slightly above the average rate for deep-sea sailors in this period. If Philipse was paying half the average rate to his enslaved crew, and the price of manumission was 30, then two or three Indo-Atlantic voyages would have provided enough money for Marramitta to purchase his freedom. So while Marramitta the cook may have felt small consolation in providing familiar nourishment to his enslaved countrymen and women, he probably relished the opportunity that these long, difficult voyages provided. His ultimate fate, however, is unknown.

slaves who enslaved: nicholas cartagena While the details of Calico Jack’s case are exceptional—he is one of the few documented cases of a New York slave to run away and sign onto a privateer in the seventeenth century—a number of other slaves not only labored on Indo-Atlantic ships in a variety of capacities but also received their manumissions as a result. Nicholas Cartagena is one example. Nicholas’s surname reflects a Spanish patronymic association with either the Mediterranean port or the major Spanish depot in South America (Colombia). The Caribbean Cartagena was sacked on a number of occasions by buccaneers, including a

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major siege in 1697. There is a third possibility: Nicholas’s surname may have derived from the Philippine port of Cartagena, which was sacked by buccaneers aboard the Cygnet in 1688. Members of the Cygnet’s crew came to New York in 1690, possibly accompanied by Filipino slaves. Whatever their origin, Spanish slaves were not uncommon in New York, especially those sold by privateers operating in the Caribbean; a number of Spanish slaves were later implicated in the New York slave revolts of 1712 and 1741. Nicholas, however, had been a personal servant to Philipse’s eldest son in Barbados. The elder Philipse noted that since his son’s marriage, Philip “put a value upon him beyond any other slave.” He further stated that if he had wanted, he could have sold Nicholas for upward of 60, an extraordinary price for a slave in the 1690s. Nicholas’s great value was due to his position as “linguistor,” or translator, aboard Philipse’s ships in the Indo-Atlantic trade. Like Calico Jack and many other Atlantic creoles, Nicholas was multilingual—an important asset in this global network. He was placed in this capacity on board the Charles, bound for Madagascar, in 1693. Philipse was wary of the dangers of kidnapping and reenslavement that awaited dark-skinned sailors, especially in the pirate-infested regions surrounding Madagascar, and told Burgess he would not part with Nicholas for any amount. Nicholas, however, had already been “taken by force,” by Adam Baldridge. Philipse paid Baldridge one hundred pieces of eight to deliver Nicholas to Captain Mostyn, but requested that he do so in “secret . . . lest he [Nicholas] should be unwilling to come to be a slave again. . . . [W]hen the ship is just ready to come away, it will be best to send him onboard.” This bondsman, however, did not have to fear re-enslavement for much longer. The day before New Year’s Eve, 1696, Nicholas Cartagena was sent a letter of freedom, written, signed, dated, and sealed by Frederick Philipse. Nicholas’s newfound independence, however, came at a terrible cost to the Malagasy. In private orders to Captain Burgess dated June 1698, Philipse stated that Nicholas’s freedom was contingent upon a contract made with Captain Mostyn that promised delivery of nine slaves, which Nicholas had previously “paid short.” Philipse added that Nicholas “promised to pay the same to Captain Jacobs, and to do all other services in getting slaves.” Baldridge had taken “him [Nicholas] away by force” in February 1695, so Nicholas “could not perform” his duties then as an enslaved slaver. That he was freed in June 1698 indicates that he had eventually made good on his promise of “getting slaves.”

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slave testimony and freedom: “franck, mr. cortland’s negroe, cooper” In the days of sailing ships, coopers were skilled laborers responsible for the packing and maintenance of the casks and hogsheads that held the most essential elements of any outgoing cargo: sugar, tobacco, liquor, and beer. In the Indo-Atlantic trade, in particular, merchants who shipped goods and provisions to the pirates of Madagascar received extraordinarily lucrative returns on these items, especially the alcohol. Records indicate that coopers aboard merchant ships in the early eighteenth century made 2–3 per month. “Franck” was an enslaved cooper—a highly skilled laborer—aboard the Margaret. As in the case of Marramitta, the account ledger of the Margaret, written in advance by Philipse, held a place for Franck’s wages, but because the vessel was seized, the funds were never paid out. There is an indication that some of the regular crew’s wages were paid in advance, a common practice at the time, but it appears that this allowance was not granted to enslaved laborers. If Philipse was paying his enslaved crew, which appears likely, then Franck, like Marramitta, could have earned enough wages to purchase his freedom by participating in these Indo-Atlantic voyages. But Franck would not need to wait so long. Franck’s full Christian name was Francisco Domingo, and he was the property of Jacobus Van Courtland, the son-in-law of Frederick Philipse. Franck was also the second individual among the New York–based crew with a Spanish patronym. We do not know where or when he received this name or how he came to be owned by Van Courtland, but many if not most New York City slaves came from Iberian ships seized in the Caribbean. His Christian name is a reference to Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of merchants; his surname reflects the Sabbath, a day of rest, perhaps an irony not lost on the slave. Francisco had served aboard Van Courtland’s vessel New York Merchant on a prior Indo-Atlantic voyage. On this round, aboard the Margaret, Francisco spent almost a year at the pirate settlement of Saint Mary’s in 1698–1699. As such, he would possess exceptionally detailed information about the Margaret—its owner, the crew, its passengers, and its cargo— and he would be knowledgeable about the trading and raiding activities taking place in Madagascar. Francisco Domingo, in short, was at the very center of the Indo-Atlantic trade at a time when the English government was desperately trying to gather information and suppress the pirate-slave network.

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Thus, when Captain Matthew Lowth seized the Margaret at the Cape on December 19, 1699, he hit the proverbial jackpot. The ship was owned by Frederick Philipse, the wealthiest merchant in New York and the reported ringleader of the Indo-Atlantic trade. Its captain was Samuel Burgess, a suspected murderer and a former “pirate king” of Saint Mary’s. In addition to being a contraband merchant vessel and interloping slaver, the Margaret provided passenger ferry service between New York and Madagascar, and there were over a dozen presumed pirates and illegal traders on board. Many of them gave depositions on the day they were captured, on the deck of Lowth’s ship, the Loyal Merchant, as it lay at anchor in Table Bay. We do not know if Lowth was aware of any precedents for slaves testifying against pirates in the colonial setting. There had been a recent case with connections to Madagascar pirates, although the events in that particular instance occurred just prior to the pirates’ arrival in the Indian Ocean. Before the Batchelor’s Delight sailed to Madagascar in 1690, the crew had done quite a bit of damage in the Atlantic and Pacific basins. The vessel had been a Danish slaver seized off the west coast of Africa. Under the command of Edward Davis, the Delight spent the next three years capturing merchant ships and pillaging Pacific coastal towns. It returned to the Caribbean in 1688, and Captain Davis, along with Lionel Wafer, continued north to the mainland colonies. Accompanying Davis was his personal slave Peter Cloise, who had been on board the Delight throughout its early piratical career. The men were sailing a small shallop in Chesapeake Bay when they were sighted and arrested by the commander of the HMS Dumbarton, put in chains, and taken to Jamestown. Much to Davis’s chagrin, Cloise turned against his master and recounted the piratical raids to the authorities. For Cloise, this testimony came at a very high price—he died under suspicious circumstances soon after his deposition. Nor did Cloise’s testimony sink Davis or end his piratical days. After a long and tedious legal struggle, both Davis and Wafer won their freedom—and even recovered their loot, minus 300 used toward the founding of a new college in Williamsburg (the present-day William and Mary). Like many former Caribbean-based pirates, Davis sailed to Madagascar in 1697 before returning to New York with William Kidd in 1699. Davis was captured and arrested again but received a reprieve of his death sentence when he testified against Captain Kidd. In 1690, the testimony of Peter Cloise, a slave, was not enough to convict a truly felonious pirate—and Cloise’s testimony against Davis, a lifelong pirate, may have been the slave’s undoing. By 1700, times had changed. On the

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second day of the Margaret’s seizure at the Cape, Francisco Domingo gave a solid deposition to Captain Lowth that implicated his master, Jacobus Courtland, and his master’s father-in-law, Frederick Philipse, in trading with pirates. Francisco also gave testimony implicating a number of the individuals who lay in chains on board the Loyal Merchant under suspicion of being pirates. Francisco’s testimony occurred on the second of two days of depositions; only Francisco and Captain Thomas Warren were deposed on December 20, which strongly suggests that some kind of deal was struck with Francisco in return for his testimony. In the official record of his account, Captain Lowth indicated that Francisco was “until now a slave to Jacobus [Van] Courtland of New York,” suggesting that Francisco was a slave no more. It appears that Francisco’s knowledge of the Indo-Atlantic trade, his testimony against his former owner and Philipse, and his information regarding pirate activities on Madagascar were worthy of manumission. Like most slaves, Francisco Domingo was illiterate, but he clearly left his mark.

the case of calico jack Frederick Philipse’s orders to his captains, Cornelius Jacobs and Samuel Burgess, offer just enough information to piece together a tentative sketch of this runaway slave, who was introduced at the beginning of this chapter. With other historical evidence regarding slaves and sailors in the early modern maritime world, it is possible to provide a composite overview of Calico Jack and a number of other slaves who labored in the Indo-Atlantic trade. Though no records have survived indicating when, where, or how Philipse obtained Jack, his name alone, as well as other extant documents related to Philipse’s involvement in the slave trade, provides some clues. Philipse first financed a slaving venture in 1684, to the kingdom of Kongo (present-day Angola), where the commander of the Charles, Thomas Codringham, purchased 146 slaves at Soyo on the Zaire River in West Central Africa. Most of the survivors of this Middle Passage were sold at Barbados, but eight slaves continued with Codringham to Rye, New York, where they were received by Frederick’s son Adolph. The slaves were most likely prisoners of internecine wars rather than local inhabitants of Soyo, and there is a possibility, though remote, that there were Akan-speaking peoples among them from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana).

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Like all African slaves who were forcibly transported to the Americas, Akan speakers (referred to as Coromantees by slave owners), preserved their cultural heritage in a number of ways, including maintaining their African names in the colonies. Akan speakers often utilized the days of the week in their naming practices, and the name Quaco, sometimes shortened to Quack (derived from the Akan word for “Wednesday”), was often transformed into Jack by Euro-Americans who were either unwilling or unable to pronounce the strange dialect. Based on statistics regarding the average age of colonial deep-sea sailors and the brief physical description provided by Philipse, Jack was likely a young man between fifteen and thirty, which would put his date of birth sometime between 1660 and 1675. If Jack was purchased in West Africa on this 1684 voyage, he would have been somewhere between six and twenty-one years old, and if he was twelve or older, he would have commanded the highest asking price on the Soyo market—perhaps another reason for Philipse’s continuing desire to recapture him. While Akan or Kongolese origins are one possibility for Jack—and Akans, in particular, were especially known for their seafaring abilities—there are other plausible scenarios. Jack was a common name among Atlantic creoles, and the simplest explanation—that as a sailor, his name derived from the ubiquitous Jack Tar (a term used by the English for sailors, regardless of race)—is tempered by Philipse’s assertion that his name was “Jack or John,” suggesting an Anglo rather than Akan origin. That Jack was a mulatto does not preclude a birthplace in West Africa, since many European traders operating from the numerous coastal slave castles took African mistresses and had few qualms about selling their own progeny into bondage. The possibility remains, nevertheless, that Jack was born in the colonies, and while there is no direct evidence to support it, perhaps he may even have been a child of Frederick Philipse and one of the female slaves living on his Westchester patent or in his house downtown on Stone Street. Philipse would have been between thirty-four and forty-nine at the time of Jack’s birth, and Jack’s fluency in Dutch and English, both spoken in the Philipse households, might suggest a personal intimacy with the family. Philipse’s strong desire to find Jack, moreover, and his willingness to allow him generous bargaining leverage—including freedom—if Jack would return to his employ, perhaps point to this scenario. A fourth possibility, which does not preclude Akan or B’Kongo origins, is that Jack was shipped from the Caribbean colonies to New York. While the

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Royal African Company (RAC) did not begin re-exporting slaves from the West Indies to New York until the early eighteenth century, preferring direct importation from Africa instead, a steady trickle of slaves entered New York through private traders. Philipse’s eldest son, Philip Philipse, lived in Barbados on the family estate, Spring Head, and was married to the governor’s daughter. Between 1679 and 1687, over two thousand Malagasy slaves were imported directly to Barbados, and with Philipse’s strong family and trade connections to the isle, it is possible that Jack came to New York in this manner. Another slave, Nicholas Cartagena, certainly came to Philipse from Barbados. In addition to Barbados, Philipse was also heavily invested in West Indian trade with the Dutch colonies at Curaçao and Surinam. Jack’s fluency in Dutch might point to one of these latter places as birthplace. Furthermore, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Caribbean planters became notorious for transshipping their most troublesome slaves, especially chronic runaways, from the islands to the mainland colonies. The final clue in unpacking the mystery of Jack’s origins resides in the sobriquet “Calico.” Calicoes, or cotton textiles, were principal items in the Indo-Atlantic trade, not only found in the hold of every Indo-Atlantic pirate ship but absolutely vital for carrying on the slave trade in West Africa, where local slave dealers demanded the highest-quality fabrics. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these calicoes were manufactured in the East Indies; indeed, East Indian textiles constituted 40 percent of textiles and 27 percent of all goods shipped to Africa in English bottoms between 1699 and 1800. So there is a distinct possibility that Jack’s origins lay in the East Indies, perhaps Madagascar, and there is sufficient and intriguing evidence to support this scenario. Though details are scarce, there were two Indo-Atlantic slave voyages from the 1680s on a ship called the Margarett, originating from New York. The two combined voyages resulted in the purchase of 425 Malagasy slaves. The principal points of sale on these voyages were the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica, respectively. The vessel returned to its owner in New York after each voyage, so it is possible, even likely, that a few Malagasy slaves landed in New York in 1685 and 1687. The owner was likely Frederick Philipse, who had used the name Margaret for his ships at least as early as 1675. In April 1693, the privateer ship Jacob, commissioned for Captain Henry Coates and eponymously named in honor of interim governor, Jacob Leisler, returned to New York after a four-year cruise to the Indian Ocean. Colonial

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New York governors—like their counterparts throughout the far-flung English Atlantic empire—commissioned privateers in times of war to defend the colonies and take in enemy prizes, since the Royal Navy had few ships designated for the periphery of its expanding empire. The crew elected a spokesman, Edward Taylor, to approach the new governor, Benjamin Fletcher, and seek approval for landing and unloading their illicit cargo, since importing East India goods—let alone pirate goods—by interlopers was officially proscribed under the royal charter of the East India Company. The shares taken were so valuable that each crewman donated between seventy and one hundred pieces of eight, and to ensure that their proposal would not be refused, they upped the ante with the offer of the Jacob as a gift. It is possible, even likely, that Madagascar slaves were unloaded from the Jacob, along with the pirate booty, though the nature of the transaction ensured that there was no paper trail. Around the same time, the pink Charles, owned by Frederick Philipse, returned from Madagascar, and documents have survived indicating that more than thirty slaves were unloaded in New York—though fifteen were listed as children. So it is also possible that Jack was one of the adult slaves who arrived in New York in the mid-1690s on the Charles. This was perhaps the first sizable group of Malagasy slaves to arrive in New York, though the remainder of the decade, as well as a number of shipments in 1716–1721, would see thousands more of the “Red Island” people forcibly transported to the colonies in the Indo-Atlantic trade. The Malagasy people had been exposed to Europeans of all stripes— including Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English—and there were numerous settlements scattered throughout the island. It is therefore possible that Calico Jack was the offspring of one of the numerous cross-cultural marriages between Euro-American pirate men and Malagasy women that would eventually transform the northeast region of Madagascar. If Jack did make it to Rhode Island and sign aboard a privateer that sailed to the Red Sea, there were at least four possible vessels on which he might have signed. Each of these was commanded by an individual who would become notorious for pillaging in the Indian Ocean. The first was the eightyton, seventy-man Black Bark, commissioned by Major John Green, deputy governor, whose crew eventually joined with the infamous mutineer-pirate Henry Every and later returned to Providence after a tremendous Red Sea haul in the Fancy (formerly HMS Charles). Captain William Mase, with a

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sixty-ton brigantine and a crew of forty, was also commissioned by Green. The largest vessel, one hundred tons and equal crew, came out of Boston and belonged to Captain Thomas Wake. The last and most intriguing possibility is the second (and final) privateering voyage of Captain Thomas Tew. In the summer of 1694, Tew had returned from a successful voyage to the Red Sea and visited New York seeking a new commission from Benjamin Fletcher— indeed, the entire city observed them riding comfortably together in the open coach of New York’s only six-horse carriage. As a member of Fletcher’s council, Philipse would have been privy to the conversations that took place between the governor and the pirate, though this proximity hardly mattered, as the entire coast was buzzing with news of the impending voyages. Nathaniel Coddington of the admiralty courts later reported, “Many men came to them from all parts of this country and the discourse was generally that they were bound to Madagascar but comes so they were to go to the Red Sea where the money was a plenty as stones and sand,” adding further that, “great was the commotion . . . servants from most places of the country ambling from their masters, sons from their parents . . . going against their wills . . . report was till the vessels sailing some was hid . . . several great merchants and no cost spared by the company for the cost of the small army.” The allusion to runaway servants and great merchants suggests that this was the very occasion of Calico Jack’s escape. While there is no certainty regarding the outcome of Jack’s escape, a few intriguing reports in the scattered historical record allow for a number of possible outcomes. In 1704, there is mention of a “Madagascar Jack” belonging to Roger Baker, a New York City innkeeper. If Philipse had been able to recapture Jack before he shipped out to the Indian Ocean, perhaps he or his son Adolph sold him off to avoid future loss. A more intriguing scenario, however, is that Jack did escape to Madagascar in 1694, and was indeed “taken up” there by Captain Burgess, as ordered by his owner. When Captain Lowth seized Burgess and the Margaret at the cape in 1699, he eventually returned to England with more than a prize ship in tow. Lowth’s vessel, the Loyal Merchant, arrived in London with a host of prisoners. Besides the pirates, Burgess, Culliford, and others, Lowth carried back “a tall slender negro,” aged about thirty years, who spoke some English and was dressed in calicoes. If this physical resemblance is not enough evidence to ensure that this was Calico Jack, the behavior of the individual tilts the balance in favor of a positive identification. The person described had escaped from his new

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master near the East India docks along the Thames. He appears in a London newspaper in an advertisement for a runaway slave. The crew of the Margaret set out from New York in 1698 on an Indo-Atlantic voyage with a crew of sixteen. At least three of the crew, or 19 percent, were slaves—numbers that correlate nicely with the population of New York City overall. For Frederick Philipse, the New York merchant who financed the voyage, the use of slaves was second nature. By the end of the 1690s, Philipse was the wealthiest merchant in the colony, with a number of properties in the city and a large manor, or plantation, in Westchester. Slaves were a common sight on all of Philipse’s properties, and many of them shared the same roof as the family. Having come up through the Dutch West India Company (WIC), Philipse (or Flypsen, as he was then known) witnessed firsthand how vital slave labor could be in building an enterprise. The WIC slaves quite literally built New Amsterdam: they constructed the wall of Wall Street, laid the stones on Stone Street, and filled land on the watery edges of the lower island to grow the city outward. As a WIC servant, Philipse was also familiar with the more lenient system of slavery under the Dutch, where slaves could earn their freedom by hiring themselves out on their own time. Philipse’s use of slaves in the Indo-Atlantic trade network should be viewed, then, as a continuation of old WIC policies and procedures in Philipse’s new private ventures, as New York transitioned from Dutch to English rule. Though at times difficult to reconcile, slave owners must also be understood in their historical and social contexts. Philipse was far from alone in owning slaves, yet there are indications that his attitudes and behavior regarding slaves and slavery were liberal. Philipse’s use of slaves falls within Dutch cultural patterns and practices, such as half-freedom. Perhaps more revealing was his decision to sell Spring Head, the Barbados estate, upon the birth of his grandson there in 1701, “that the property might not afterwards be an inducement to his grandson to settle in that island.” Given that Barbados was a full-blown plantation slave society, “manned by armies of black slaves,” and as a result a “disastrous social failure”—as opposed to New York, a society with but not dominated by slaves—is it possible to read Philipse as progressive on this issue? In the final accounting, perhaps it is best not to forget that even halffreedom meant also “half-slavery.” The presence of slaves as seafaring laborers in the Indo-Atlantic trade can be seen in multiple lights. Though the labor could be intense and the condi-

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tions at sea difficult, seafaring slaves might arguably experience a taste of freedom, or at least its approximation. Jeff rey Bolster has noted, “Voyaging between the West Indies, Europe, and the American mainland enabled enslaved seamen to observe the Atlantic political economy from a variety of vantage points, to subvert their masters’ discipline, and to open plantation society to outside influences.” Randy Sparks has similarly commented that seafaring slaves enjoyed “greater independence than most field hands,” and many were able to trade on their own accounts, making possible self-manumission. Seafaring slaves in the Indo-Atlantic network had even more opportunities than their cohorts who operated solely in the Atlantic. The Margaret and other Indo-Atlantic sailing ships were floating hybrid spaces of intercultural and cross-cultural dynamics. The fact that the Margaret was a slave ship created further tensions. The presence of Africans and Atlantic creoles as laborers in the slave trade was not uncommon. Afro-Portuguese communities of traders called lançados were active in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Cape Verde Islands. Another community, known as gromettos, was even more prevalent and would become more intertwined with pirates over time. Composed of boatmen, seamen, soldiers, and others (including women), gromettos worked with Europeans and Afro-Portuguese but often lived in their own villages and practiced a form of Africanized Catholicism. The presence of enslaved laborers on the Margaret can be seen as a variation of this practice. In addition, Europeans used gromettos, usually slaves brought from other parts of Africa, as supervisors in their slave castles through the duration of the trade. It was standard practice of the RAC until 1730 or so to use Gold Coast guardians on their slave ships operating on the Slave Coast, and differing configurations were the norm elsewhere on the coast. Why was there no sense of kinship among the supervisors and their cargo? As David Eltis has noted, “Through most of the early modern period . . . Europeans benefited from the slow development of Africanness or even blackness,” and enslaved slavers like Nicholas, Franck, and Marramitta were therefore not uncommon. The Indo-Atlantic trade, and the slave trade in general, relied on these individuals for success. It is perhaps one of the more insidious aspects of slavery, which corrupted everyone it touched. The seizure of the Margaret at the Cape meant incarceration and death for many of its passengers and crew, a long and costly legal battle for its owner, and a life of servitude for the one hundred Malagasy slaves discovered in its

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hold. For some slaves, like Francisco Domingo (“Franck”) and Calico Jack, it meant freedom. The impending closure of the Indo-Atlantic trade, however, not only ended the potential for enormous profits among the merchants and pirates who carried it out, as well as the officials who condoned it, but closed one of the most promising avenues of escape for many enslaved New Yorkers. If Joyce Goodfriend’s estimates are correct, that only a dozen slaves were freed in New York between 1664 and 1712, then the findings here that at least three slaves—Calico Jack, Nicholas Cartagena, and Francisco Domingo—gained their freedom through participation in the network are worthy of note. The connection of these seafaring slaves with pirates and piracy, however, was just beginning. As more and more Atlantic-based pirate ships sailed to Madagascar, they began recruiting sailors among the gromettos. When the Royal Navy fought its famous battle against Captain Bartholomew Roberts off Cape Lopez in 1721, 45 of the 157 men captured or killed among the pirates were gromettos. When the cycle of piracy ended in the mid-1720s, moreover, the navy not only turned to former pirates to fill their crews but recruited Malagasy sailors trained by the pirates. For example, in 1750, William Medway, “a Madagascar negro,” was among a group of lascars banished to Marshalsea prison in London. The lascars had been promised but had not yet received their pay from Captain Vincent and Admiral Griffin. Instead, they were offered passage home to the Indian Ocean aboard the Triton, complete with beds, clothes, and victuals. The offer was repeatedly refused. When the Navy Board, incredulous, queried the reasoning of these “obstinate men,” the answer appeared obvious: “They absolutely say that they rather would be hanged than go without their prize money.” The lascars had been well trained indeed.

the malagasy diaspora Through a combination of determination and good fortune, Calico Jack and other enslaved maritime laborers forged a means of escape from a lifetime of servitude via the Indo-Atlantic trade network. The melancholy truth remains that most slaves were not so fortunate. Like their West and Central African counterparts, hundreds of thousands of Malagasy faced a difficult life of subjection and enslavement in regional and global dispersals from their homeland. Most slaves from Madagascar were shipped to regional outposts in the neighboring Mascarene islands (Mauritius, Bourbon) and South Africa, and Malagasy speakers formed the largest single group of slaves dispersed into the

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western Indian Ocean and the Cape. In these regions, Malagasy dialects served as a lingua franca for persons born in Madagascar and those with no direct connection to the island. As historian Pier Larson has recently argued, the importance of the Malagasy language in the Mascarenes is one distinctive manner in which the western Indian Ocean plantation complex differed from the Atlantic basin. As the following section suggests, significant concentrations of Malagasy slaves in the Indo-Atlantic world await further research. In all corners of the Indo-Atlantic world, Malagasy slaves developed a staunch reputation for disobedience, resistance, and running away. From the 1720s through the nineteenth century, an organized maroon community, composed mostly of Malagasy drosters (escapees), took root at Cape Hangklip, False Bay, South Africa. Their fires, set atop Table Mountain, were “frequently seen, even at midday.” They survived in part by exchanging wood for food and other supplies with the extensive urban slave community. In 1766, 147 Malagasy slaves aboard the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) slaver Meermin revolted, seized the vessel, killed half the Dutch crew, and ran the ship aground in Struis Bay, only to be killed or captured and re-enslaved by the local authorities. The Dutch crew triggered its own demise when a senior crewman made the stunning decision to allow some of the captives to clean the spears and other weapons acquired as souvenirs in Madagascar. These slaves did not hesitate in violently asserting their freedom. In Saint Helena, the South Atlantic island outpost of the East India Company (EIC), Malagasy slaves were transported early and often. Licensed EIC vessels were in fact required to carry slaves from Madagascar on the return voyage—specifically, nine slaves for every 500 worth of goods exported from England. The desired ratio was typically two-thirds male to one-third female, ages sixteen to thirty, and “every way merchantable.” Slave insurrections, both planned and rumored, were not uncommon, with executions, lashings, and brandings to follow. One such plot in 1695 called for the slaves to kill their owners, take the Lemon Valley fort, and then escape by sea on the next available ship. The EIC also carried many Madagascar slaves to its pepper factory in Bencoolen (Sumatra). Between 1687 and 1688, forty of the company’s sixty-two slaves “came direct from Madagascar.” The bulk of their labor seems to have been in constructing military defenses, where they were considered “of absolute necessity to work upon Fortifications.” The Sumatran jungle at the edge of the company forts was a tempting avenue of escape, and the directors had

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difficulty, it seems, in getting the slaves to work, as a number of officials were dismissed for their lackluster efforts. In 1694, the slaves protested the grounds apportioned them for planting, and the agent in charge ordered that they be fed from the company’s stores (for which he was soon dismissed). Given the early French interest in Madagascar, it is perhaps not surprising that among the first Malagasy slaves to cross into the Atlantic was an individual who arrived in Quebec in 1628. From there, the trickle throughout the rest of the Atlantic began in earnest, spiking at times in specific regions. In the northern Atlantic, slave numbers were much lower than in the temperate and tropical zones. While a number of slaving voyages to Madagascar originated from New England ports, in general these embarkation points were not the most likely destination for Malagasy slaves. Nonetheless, there is evidence that at least dozens of Malagasy slaves arrived in Boston in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Bradstreet informed the Council of Trade in London that “forty to fifty Negroes . . . most women and children” returned on a small vessel from a twenty-month Indo-Atlantic voyage in 1678 and were sold in Boston for 10–20 apiece. Bradstreet further reported that on occasion “two or three Negroes are brought . . . from Barbados” and sold for 20 apiece. He suggested that there were in all one hundred to two hundred slaves in the colony. Given that at this time many Barbados slaves were imported from Madagascar (see below), it is likely that the Malagasy were also well represented among Boston’s slave population at the end of the seventeenth century. In New York, as the preceding chapters attest, a number of merchants were heavily invested in the Indo-Atlantic trade, and slaves were major commodities. While most slaves were destined for Caribbean plantations, a number of Malagasy individuals ended up in New York City and its hinterlands. The first documented case was in 1686, when the Mariner’s Adventure was permitted to enter New York harbor and discharge her cargo. During the 1690s, at least eight vessels arrived in New York from Madagascar to unload hundreds of slaves. As a duty-free port, Perth Amboy, located within the greater New York harbor, was a lucrative zone for unloading slaves. At least one cargo of Malagasy slaves was legally discharged in Perth Amboy in the late seventeenth century. A dispute is recorded in 1683 between the collector of the port and a master just returned from Madagascar with an indeterminate number of slaves. The master, fearful that his cargo would be seized as contraband or interloper trade

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if it entered at New York, instead disembarked the slaves and sold them in Perth Amboy. Cooper’s Ferry and Burlington were the main ports for slaves disembarking in West Jersey. Runaway slave advertisements throughout the Jerseys frequently mention the Malagasy origins of the runaways, typically identifying them as multilingual and “yellowish” in complexion. The first documented case of Madagascar slaves being sold in Virginia was 1686, when over two hundred slaves arrived at the Chesapeake. From 1718 to 1721, at least seven slave vessels are known to have disembarked from voyages to Madagascar, and these were difficult journeys. After a harrowing five-month Middle Passage, the Bristol slaver Prince Eugene dropped anchor in the York River in early 1719, with 77 of the 417 slaves, mostly boys and girls, having died during the voyage. This voyage appears typical, with slave mortality averaging 19 percent on the passage from Madagascar to Virginia. The largest single shipment arrived in 1720 on the London slaver Mercury, with 466 slaves disembarking in the Rappahannock River. This voyage, too, suffered a mortality rate of 19 percent. The details of the London slaver Gascoigne Galley are even more gruesome, with some or all of the 133 Malagasy slaves arriving in the York with “distemper in their eyes,” blindness, and “some of the Eye Balls come out.” The Prince Eugene made a return voyage to Madagascar in 1720, returning to the Chesapeake in 1721 with 103 of 126 slaves still alive. This return voyage is among the strongest indications of the continuing viability of the Madagascar slave trade in the 1720s and, in the eyes of the ships’ owners, the acceptability of near 20 percent mortality rates. Here, too, we see signs of the continuing activity of pirates as cross-cultural brokers in Madagascar. Following its disembarkation in Virginia, the crew of the Prince Eugene was tried but acquitted of piracy in London. The British slavers Rebecca Snow and Henrietta arrived in Madagascar in 1721 with 59 and 130 slaves, respectively, but they represented the end of this wave of Indo-Atlantic slaving. While the slaves were sold and dispersed among the tobacco plantations, both vessels joined the Prince Eugene in being condemned for illegal trading. In this intense burst of slaving activity, within a few years, some 1,361 Madagascar slaves arrived in the Chesapeake, making this among the most concentrated diasporas of Malagasy in the Atlantic. Though the information on Carolina slave imports in the seventeenth century is scanty, there is very suggestive anecdotal evidence that a great number originated in Madagascar. Since many of the original Carolina settlers had migrated from Barbados with their slaves, it is likely that a great number

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of these slaves were of Malagasy origin. It likewise follows that these Malagasy slaves were instrumental in the establishment or continuation of rice production in the Carolina Low Country. As nearly every account of Madagascar in this period attests, rice was the major food source in many regions of the island and was cultivated widely throughout the region. There are further indications that additional Malagasy slaves arrived in Charles Town between 1693 and 1696 via Indo-Atlantic pirates returning from Madagascar. Of all ports of call, Barbados imported by far the most Malagasy slaves in the Atlantic basin. The first two English slavers to have success at Madagascar, the Lion and the Eagle, were destined to disembark at Barbados. As the wealthiest English colony and boasting a lucrative sugar plantation complex, Barbados planters were in continuous need of replenishing their supply of slave laborers, and Madagascar became an important source for supplying laborers to the Caribbean cane fields. The RAC and EIC could not deliver enough slaves to keep the sugar plantation complex churning, so colonial and metropolitan interlopers moved in to fill the gaps. In 1678, for example, the RAC factors in Barbados reported that three ships from Madagascar had arrived with a total of 700 slaves. A few years later, interlopers continued to flood the island with Malagasy slaves, as reported by RAC factors Edwyn Stede and Stephen Gascoigne: “We are apprehensive the trade that is of late drove to Madagascar for Negroes which they bring hither may in time be some inconvenience to the company’s trade. And it is no small quantity have been imported being 900 and 1000 that have been brought and sold here in about 2 months time so that if no remedy be found they and the interlopers will give a full supply of negr’s to this place.” From 1679 to 1718, no less than twenty-seven Indo-Atlantic voyages ended at this tropical island, delivering tens of thousands of Malagasy slaves to Barbados—twenty-one of the voyages taking place between 1679 and 1687. A census at the end of the seventeenth century counted 32,473 slaves, half of them from Madagascar. Barbados therefore had the highest concentration of Malagasy slaves in the Atlantic world. While we have few names to go with these distressing numbers, at least two Malagasy women, Frost and Sara, were manumitted by their owner before the end of the century, an extremely unusual practice in Barbados during this time. Were Frost and Sara a mother and daughter? Was their owner also the father? One can only surmise . . . As a burgeoning sugar island, Jamaica, after Barbados, received the highest number of Malagasy slaves. The extant records indicate approximately two

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thousand Malagasy slaves imported from 1685 to 1719, a relatively low figure given the accompanying anecdotal evidence. Malagasy slaves were clearly highly regarded, as purchases and imports rose rapidly in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The brother of an Indo-Atlantic slave captain, for example, valued Alexander, his “Madagascan slave,” at 20. At the time of the owner’s will in 1690, Alexander had run away. In the 1730s, the Jamaican “slave king,” William Beckford, pleaded to the House of Commons to resume private trading: “Many gentlemen here know that formerly the sugar islands were supplied with negroes from Madagascar, a vast island abounding with slaves, from whence the colonies drew large quantities.” Among the infamous Jamaican maroon communities was a strong contingent of Malagasy slaves who escaped when their ship wrecked near Morant Point on the eastern end of the island in 1669–1670. In 1718, a Madagascar slave led a successful uprising on Down’s plantation and escaped into the mountains, where he battled Cudjoe, a Coromantee maroon leader, for control of the various maroon communities. The Madagascar maroons were considered distinct in appearance, language, and presumably other cultural practices. One of the plums Great Britain received at the Treaty of Utrecht with Spain in 1713 was the asiento, a slave-trading monopoly with the Spanish American colonies. This rich prize was turned over to the direction of the South Sea Company until the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739. The South Sea Company transported approximately 75,000 slaves in these years, and Madagascar played a small part. Of all the Spanish American ports, Buenos Aires became the most prominent entrepôt for Malagasy slaves. The Eltis database records six major slave shipments from Madagascar to Buenos Aires between 1717 and 1731, all emanating from London (when the point of origin is known). Like the Chesapeake runs, the company slaving voyages to Madagascar experienced an average mortality rate of around 19 percent. One particularly horrific voyage aboard the Saint Michael lasted 449 days. Four hundred Malagasy slaves were loaded into the cargo hold, and only 282 emerged—a ghastly mortality rate of 29 percent. In total, 1,898 Malagasy slaves were forced onto South Sea Company ships, and 1,503 survived to be sold in Buenos Aires, La Plata. Palmer records that the company delivered over 16,000 slaves total to Buenos Aires, meaning Malagasy slaves constituted approximately 11 percent of the Rio de la Plata slave population in the period of the asiento. To be sure, Euro-Americans were not alone in slave trading and raiding in the western Indian Ocean, and Madagascar was not the only source of slaves.

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But the intersection of Euro-American pirate-slavers and Madagascar appears to have had a new and profound effect. For the first time, toward the end of the eighteenth century, slave raiding and trading were brokered by Betsimisaraka zana malatas, who carried out long-distance oceanic raids on the East African coast and Comoros Islands in twelve-meter canoes carrying up to sixty warriors. It appears that they, like William Medway and the lascars, had been well trained in the customs of their pirate forefathers.

Conclusion Specters of the Indo-Atlantic World

By the end of the eighteenth century, a truly Indo-Atlantic world emerged, connecting the North and South Atlantic basins with the western Indian Ocean. Like the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds in earlier times, this interoceanic region was integrated by an armed trading and raiding model and marked by the establishment of the plantation complex system. The plantations were most extensively developed in the Mascarene islands, which by this time resembled the tropical islands of the Caribbean, with massive sugar plantations owned by Euro-American planters and worked by tens of thousands of African slave laborers. As the previous chapter illustrates, the violence and oppression of these plantations did not deter Malagasy and other slaves from resisting and running away. On nearby Mauritius, Malagasy slaves often attempted to escape by boat, while others took refuge in maroon communities in coastal caves and on the summit of Le Morne mountain. Many of the pirates who linked this world would eventually suffer the same maritime violence they wrought upon their victims. Thomas Tew, whose significance was global and lasting, returned to the North American colonies and helped create an enduring hysteria for all things Indo-Atlantic, entangling governors, merchants, and commoners alike. Like many successful pirates, Tew had sailed the Amity to a narrow strategic maritime chokepoint—in this case, the straits of Bab el Mandeb (Gate of Tears) at the mouth of the Red Sea. There, as anticipated, he encountered richly laden Muslim vessels bound for the Arabian ports of Jiddah and Mocha, for trade as well as pilgrimage. He intercepted a vessel that belonged to the Great Mughal, Aurangzeb, 123

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without suffering a single loss. Sailing due south to Madagascar to rest, refit, and divide the spoils, many of Tew’s crew remained to form the nucleus of the pirate settlements at Saint Mary’s. When Thomas Tew returned to the North American colonies in 1694, he was first denied a new commission by the Rhode Island governor, “Honest” John Easton, and was eventually seen riding in the carriage with Governor Fletcher. Undoubtedly, Tew must have told Fletcher that upon his return he had reimbursed Amity’s majority owners in Bermuda at fourteen times their original investment, a detail that surely would have interested the financially strapped governor. Forum-shopping was a popular pirate pastime, as was gift exchange—yet Tew’s bequest remains a mystery, described only as “a present which was a curiosity and in value not much,” at least according to Fletcher. In return, the governor gave Tew a gold watch, “to engage him to make New York his port at his return,” an admission later made by Fletcher to the Plantation Lords. But Thomas Tew would never return. After purchasing a privateering commission from Governor Fletcher for 300, Tew sailed again to the Red Sea, where he suffered a death so horrible that his crew immediately surrendered to the Mughal vessel they were attempting to board. Captain Tew, once described by Fletcher as “a man of courage and activity,” had dropped to the deck in agony, his midsection torn open by a well-placed Mughal shot. For Tew and his crew, the straits of Bab el Mandeb, which had been a “Gate of Tears” for so many victims of Euro-American piracy, had swung the other way. The death of Tew, whose early success inspired a legion of North American colonists to follow in his wake, exemplifies the very real dangers inherent in becoming a pirate. Yet the freedom that piracy offered in an authoritarian and hierarchical world and the dream of fabulous wealth ensured that many would continue to heed its siren call. Governor Fletcher was aware of this when he stated in reference to an outgoing Indo-Atlantic voyage, “Many flockt . . . from all parts, men of desperate fortunes and necessitous in expectation of getting vast treasure, a great part of them are of this province. . . . [I]f [the captain] misses the design intended . . . ’twill not be in [his] power to govern such a hord of men under no pay.” A number of the horde would end up buried in the Pirates’ Cemetery at Saint Mary’s. The shot that killed Thomas Tew was neither the last nor the most significant fired from the Mughals’ direction. Atlantic pirates continued to stream into

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the Indian Ocean, preying on the rich vessels plying local waters and hoping to emulate the tremendous success of Tew’s first voyage rather than the disaster of the second. As the Mughal rulers applied increasing pressure, imprisoning East India Company officials and threatening to dismiss the English entirely from trade, the English state in turn began a concerted campaign to eliminate the pirates through a series of carrot-and-stick measures of varying effectiveness. Those measures included establishing admiralty courts in the North American colonies, unifying the disparate piracy laws, and attempting to monopolize maritime violence through more expansive naval expenditures. It was this context in which the fate of William Kidd was enmeshed: sent as a privateer to hunt down and capture the “Red Sea Men,” he instead became a pirate and was captured, tried, and executed in 1701—all to mollify the Mughal court. At the same time, the English government continued to intermittently offer pardons to pirates, demonstrating the limits within which the state was able to assert itself. By 1698, observant company officials in India had pointed out the importance of Atlantic supply ships to the flourishing pirate settlements on Madagascar, and the EIC directors requested the Trade Board obtain a royal proclamation prohibiting His Majesty’s subjects in Europe and America from trading or corresponding with the pirate-settlers. The same group began a powerful lobbying campaign in Parliament, which resulted in the East India Act of 1698, which temporarily halted the transport of Madagascar slaves to the North American colonies. The new, more powerful East India Company had established parliamentary sanction for monopolistic control over the trade of all English subjects “beyond the Cape.” Powerful economic interests in both Madras and London thus triggered tighter political control in the North American colonies, and the illicit Indo-Atlantic trade was on the verge of suppression. With increased legal and jurisdictional attention to piracy came its attendant demonization. Legitimate English merchants in the Red Sea region, though uncommon, were inevitably brushed in the same piratical shades by local rulers. Whether legitimate or not, insinuations of piracy might also help line the pockets of Muslim officials. When William Daniel, an independently wealthy EIC dispatcher, was sent to India in 1700 to inform company officials of the amalgamation of the two companies, he was accosted by a local ruler. The Turkish governor alleged that English pirates had recently taken one of his ships, Daniel reporting further that “he was inform’d I was a pyrat and a

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spy, going to joyn and give information to those of Madagascar, who had lately taken a ship near Mocha.” Daniel was forced to pay the governor’s janissaries “several pieces of gold and several pieces of eight,” while the governor himself was given “100 Venetian chequeens” (sequins) and additional presents of “rice, honey, sugar, coffee, and tobacco for his wives and slaves.” In the end, Daniel states, he was “glad I came off so.” The reputation of Madagascar as a notorious pirate haven, by now global, could thus be manipulated by many parties for various ends. Madagascar itself, despite the changing imperial politics and the local insurrections, continued to both beguile and bemuse pirates, merchants, and settlers. Reports that the pirates had “dispersed” proved premature, and the Indo-Atlantic trade continued for some time. After the Saint Mary’s Massacre and the departure of Adam Baldridge in 1697, another cross-cultural broker, Edward Welch, who had arrived in Madagascar from New England as a boy, emerged to fill his place. As long as Frederick Philipse and other colonial merchants continued to finance excursions, the trade would continue apace. In New York, the whiff of venality and the influence of the new EIC combined with a change in political fortunes in the metropole to force the recall of Governor Fletcher. His replacement, the prickly Governor Bellomont, was sent to stamp out the Indo-Atlantic trade. He railed upon his arrival, “This city hath been a nest of Pirates.” Another resident testified, “Some hundreds of Pirates have had Protection from Colonel Fletcher . . . but the number thereof is not exactly known.” Bellomont further complained that the “pirates” continued to have support from within his own council, “because they are most of them Merchants, and several of themselves the persons concerned in the breach of these laws.” Fletcher, for his part, suffered no criminal charges whatsoever, the Tory investigation was dropped, and he retired to his small patrimony in Dublin, perhaps a little wealthier for his troubles. Even with the change in power, the larger jurisdictional complexities of a fragmented empire remained. Because Fletcher had offered lawful protection in his official capacity as governor, a legal dilemma arose as to how to handle the pardons of pirates who remained within the province. Much to the vexation of Lord Bellomont, Fletcher’s pardons of known pirates were allowed to stand. Similarly, disputes between New York and East Jersey over admiralty court jurisdiction allowed for further confusion, and in at least one instance, captured pirates were mistakenly freed on bail. Until 1698, there was no

conclusion

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127

standard legal remedy for the restraint and suppression of pirates. An act was passed in Jamaica that same year and copies sent to all the North American colonies with the instruction that “all his said Governours respectively . . . use their utmost endeavors with the Assemblies in each of his said Plantations, for the passing of acts there to the same effect.” In 1700, the Piracy Act was modified and made uniform, with a procedure for staffing a seven-man court that could operate anywhere. Furthermore, the Navigation Acts of 1696 indirectly helped royal officials extend maritime authority. The welcoming climate for pirates was taking a dramatic turn. Frederick Philipse, the wealthiest man in New York, died in 1702, relentless in his support of the Indo-Atlantic trade until the bitter end. After Matthew Lowth seized the Margaret at the Cape, he sold the hundred slaves that Philipse had legally purchased and kept the vessel as a prize, forcing Samuel Burgess and the crew to sail her to Bombay. The ship and cargo had an estimated value well over 20,000. In Bombay, Lowth sold part of the cargo and the vessel for fourteen hundred rupees. Thirteen of Lowth’s pirate prisoners died while confined in the Bombay jail. Burgess survived and was taken back to London, shackled in chains like a slave, aboard the Loyal Merchant. The Philipses resolved to both support Burgess and press their legal claims for the recovery of their vessel and its cargo, and they had a compelling case. Burgess had left New York in June 1698, with clearance from Bellomont and before the new East India Act went into effect, and therefore he could not be convicted for trading in EIC waters. The actions of his pirate passengers, illegal or not, prior to boarding the Margaret at Saint Mary’s, were also outside his culpability. The passage money, furthermore, belonged not to Burgess but to the owner of the vessel, which was Philipse. The antipirate climate was rising, however, and the English government focused on an incriminating statement Burgess had made about his Caribbean buccaneering days in the early 1690s. The statement was corroborated by Robert Culliford, a hardcore pirate, who found himself locked up in the Marshalsea prison alongside Burgess. With the patriarch too frail to make the journey, Adolph Philipse sailed to London to throw the family weight behind their case. They were supported by James Graham, the attorney general of New York, who provided a letter of introduction to the English commissioner of trade, William Blathwayt. Burgess, in the meantime, had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Following the intervention of the Philipses, however, Burgess was pardoned in 1702. But the lure of piracy

128

.

conclusion

remained strong. He died in Madagascar in 1715, poisoned during a honey toke drinking ritual by a local Malagasy ruler. The case against Captain Lowth and the disposition of the Margaret, meanwhile, continued until 1706, when it was finally dismissed. Through the duration of the proceedings, Lowth never turned over any money from his seizure and sale to the Admiralty, showing himself to be closer in spirit to the pirates than to the law. Pirates themselves were well aware of the shifting political and jurisdictional complexities in the colonies. In late 1698, the Board of Trade reported that “five sayle ships have been seen hovering the coast, who may reasonably be suspected to have been either pirates, or such as had trade with pirates; but having by landing some men on the Jerseys understood the change of affairs in the government of New Yorke, steered away and have not since been heard of there.” Perhaps they eventually arrived in Norwich, England, as the following report suggests: Last week their came ashore at Cromer . . . a spruce vessel of about 80 tuns, loaden with hides, skins, logwood and some sugar, supposed to be from the West Indies. We can’t imagine the occasion of her coming in there, the weather being very fine and the wind offshore; the men being 16 in number of diverse nations, left the cargo behind them untouched. They cut down the masts as soon as she struck. Two lords of manors have unloaded the goods. We hear they were first at Dover, then came to Yarmouth Roads, and took in one Bennet for a pilot to Amsterdam. Some think them to be pirates because they carried off bags of money and told some people that they were bound for London. There are four guns in the ship and a great many well-fixed small arms.

Piracy is best understood as a cyclical phenomenon, rising up in underdeveloped regions of the world economy, such as Jamaica in the 1670s, and New York and other North American colonies in the 1690s. In these peripheral regions, pirates served a fundamental economic function, bringing in goods and cash that were wanting or undersupplied by more formal trade networks. In the early eighteenth century, piracy was closely tied to cycles of imperial warfare, with privateering commissions granted in times of war (King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, King George’s War), followed by spikes of piratical incidents after the declaration of peace, as privateers continued to roam the seas beyond the expiration of their legal commissions. The fortunes of these pirates swung like a pendulum, not because they altered their pillaging practices but because their practices were no longer acceptable to the English authorities. As the imperial noose tightened, pirates became more

conclusion

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129

ruthless, attacking any vessel regardless of nationality or origin. Captured pirates were tried in the jury-free courts set up by the new laws, and the hundreds who were found guilty taken “to the place of execution . . . to be hanged by the neck, till . . . dead, dead, dead,” their bodies left rotting in the gibbets as a warning. The English state’s increasing attempts to assert and consolidate its power were driven in large measure by the waxing influence of the new East India Company and its benefactors in Parliament. The eminent historian of the Portuguese empire, Charles Boxer, quoted an official from an earlier era: “Wars at sea are merchants’ affairs and of no concern to the prestige of kings.” By the turn of the eighteenth century in Hanoverian England, power had diverged from singular monarchical rule to plural parliamentary control, backed by concentrated and powerful economic interests. With the devolution of power away from the king, merchants’ affairs and state affairs were merging to become one and the same. The “Red Sea” pirates, peregrinators of the globe, early modern rovers, wanderers, nomads of the sea—call them what you will—were well aware of the peripheral status, the jurisdictional complexities, and the political and mercantile encouragement that made New York such a welcoming place in the 1690s. As English naval power expanded alongside the commercial and legal state apparatus, the defining line between privateer and pirate was sharpened and the ambiguity began to slip away. The island of Madagascar and nearby Mauritius became refuges for the “Red Sea Men” who refused to return to their homelands in the Atlantic. Was an opportunity lost for the British to co-opt the pirate-settlements of Madagascar, as they would the logwood settlements of Belize and Honduras? In reading the accounts of British naval commanders in the eighteenth century, at least one scholar has been struck by the continual sense of vulnerability they expressed when entering the Indian Ocean. After Saint Helena, British vessels possessed no other naval bases or outposts for their Indo-Atlantic voyages until they captured the Cape from the Dutch in 1806. Given the developing complexities of the Euro-Malagasy settlements, one might ponder an alternative history of Madagascar, for better or worse, within the British sphere of influence. Returning to the crooked streets of New York, the last of the original WIC merchants were disappearing by the turn of the eighteenth century. In 1703, the body of Frederick Philipse, “the pirate king” of New York, was placed in

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a crypt beneath the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, the stone chapel he had constructed with the labor of his slaves some two hundred yards from his great manor house along the Pocantico, where Calico Jack had made his escape. While the English government was suppressing the informal Indo-Atlantic trade, laws constricting the movement and increasing the surveillance of slaves also began to take effect in New York. As the system of slavery became more institutionalized and oppressive, opportunities for manumission and freedom became increasingly scarce, and slaves in New York would take matters in their own hands. In 1712, and again in 1741, New York experienced major slave insurrections, organized by slaves owned by the descendants of Frederick Philipse and other major participants of the Indo-Atlantic trade world. The insurrections were planned and organized around the cisterns dug by slaves during the Dutch era. Perhaps as they gathered around these wells, they told spectral stories passed down from previous generations, about the lives of the slaves who came before them. Frederick Philipse and other seventeenth-century New York merchants paved the way for subsequent generations to continue and increase their share of global trade markets—licit or otherwise. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), merchants of New York, like their forefathers, smuggled contraband goods and traded with the enemy. As colonial consumer tastes for coffee and tea expanded dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century, East Indian goods—especially tea—again played a central role in a conflict between colonists and the metropole. Less well known is that during the Revolution, American prisoners of war were forcibly transported to Bencoolen (Sumatra) by the British, an Indo-Atlantic diaspora that rivaled that of the Malagasy slaves in distance if not in numbers. After the Revolution, American vessels in record numbers again sought direct access to Eastern markets—this time by sailing across the Pacific. By 1800, the East India Company was once again complaining about “interlopers,” but these Americans proved far too efficient. The American merchants not only enriched themselves, as did their colonial forebears, but they also contributed to the economic and financial development of the new nation. The complaints of the EIC soon gave way to cooperation and investment in the American East Indies trade, and after two hundred years, the death knell of monopoly was nigh.

appendix 1

Slave Trade Ships in Madagascar, 1663–1747

131

Date 1663

Ship’s Name

Origin

Owner/Captain

Destination

No. of Slaves No. of Purchased Slaves Sold

Amsterdam —

New York

354

265

1664

Wapen van Amsterdam Lion

—

Capt. John Howard

Barbados

200

138

1664

Eagle

—

Barbados

135

93

1671

Katherine

—

Capt. Robert Houwert Capt. South

Barbados, Jamaica —

304

210

1675–76

Bristwater

—

—

1675–76

Society

—

1675–76

—

1676

Sea Flower [Zeeblom] Rebecca

Capt. Thomas Edwards —

—

1676

—

Disposition /Notes — “Starving and naked children” — —

Eltis 21508; Armstrong, 218 Eltis 21509; Armstrong, 218 Eltis 25686

177

—

—

Armstrong, 219

61

42

—

—

—

—

—

Eltis 21510; Armstrong, 219 Armstrong, 219

—

304

210

—

Boston

Boston

53

45

—

Sea Flower [Zeeblom] March 1679 —

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

Barbados

—

700

“Good trading” at St. Augustine’s —

1679

Boston

—

Jamaica

149

126

—

—

Eltis 11294

—

Capt. Daniel Bird —

1678–79

Source

Eltis 21511; Armstrong, 219 Eltis 25151; Platt: Edward Randolph, customs (CSP) Armstrong, 219 Platt: PRO/Treasury Grp; Donnan Eltis 28043

1679

—

Boston

—

Jamaica

149

126

1679

—

—

—

Barbados

337

233

Eltis lists this as Eltis 25685 two separate voyages but clearly it was the same as above (28043=25685) Eltis lists this as Eltis 25680 three separate voyages but clearly it was the same as above (25680=25681) 31% mortality rate Eltis 25681

1679

—

—

—

Barbados

337

233

1679

—

—

—

Barbados

337

233

1679–80

Bridgewater Merchant Daniel and Thomas Roebuck

—

Capt. John Cribb

Barbados

427

295

—

Capt. Samuel Davies

—

—

122

—

Capt. Robert Bybee

Barbados

376

260

Shipwrecked, all slaves lost —

—

Capt. Christopher Bostill Capt. William King Capt. Roberts (James Barre?)

Barbados

420

290

31% mortality rate

Barbados —

362 118

250 100

— —

— —

— 200

31% mortality rate Eltis 20009 Morondava Eltis 20113; (“Lightfoots”) & Saint Armstrong, 219 Augustine’s Morondava Armstrong, 219 — Armstrong, 219 (continued)

1680–81 1680–81 1681 1681 1682

Friend’s Adventure Change Philip

— New York

1682 1682–83

Dartmouth Firebrace

— —

— —

25680 = 25681 = 24310? 31% mortality rate

Eltis 24310 Eltis 21384; Armstrong, 219 Eltis 21512; Armstrong, 219 Eltis 20016; Armstrong, 219 Eltis 20010

Date 1682–83

1683 1683 1683 1683 1683 1683–84 1684 1684 1684–85

Ship’s Name Living Friendship / Love & Friendship Oxford Speedwell

Origin London

Owner/Captain

Destination

No. of Slaves No. of Purchased Slaves Sold

Disposition /Notes

Source

Capt. Thomas White

Barbados

289

200

200–230 slaves

Eltis 20029; Armstrong, 219

Capt. Thomas Cary Capt. Philip Varle

Barbados Barbados

289 289

200 200

31% mortality rate 31% mortality rate

Eltis 20105 Eltis 20026

Capt. John Coatham — — Capt. William Deeron

Barbados Barbados Barbados Cape, Barbados

347 304 304 146

240 210 210 31, 70

31% mortality rate Same as 20977? 31% mortality rate —

London London —

Capt. David Hobson Capt. Stephen Bradly —

Barbados Cape, Barbados —

232 168 —

160 11, 105 180+

31% mortality rate — —

Eltis 20028 Eltis 20978 Eltis 20977 Eltis 20066; Armstrong, 219 Eltis 20072 Eltis 20067 Armstrong, 219

New York

Cape, Barbados

240

12, 166

26% mortality

Barbados Barbados

304 150

210 217

31% mortality rate 31% mortality rate

Jamaica Virginia Barbados

31 304 260

20 210 180

30% mortality rate 30% mortality rate 31% mortality rate

— Dartmouth, England Firebrass London — — — — John and Mary London

1685

Providence Francis Tonqueene Merchant Margarett

1685 1685–86

— — John and Mary London

Capt. Oliver Cransborough — Capt. John Cribb

1686 1686 1687

— — Pelican

— — Capt. John Hicks

— — London

Eltis 21382; Armstrong, 219 Eltis 21043 Eltis 20076; Armstrong, 219 Eltis 21078 Eltis 25683 Eltis 21383; Armstrong, 219

1687 1687 1688 1689–90 1689–90 1689–93 1690 1690

— — — — — — — —

— Capt. William Deeron — — — — — —

— Jamaica Montserrat — — — Nevis —

— 29 303 — — — 304 —

— 22 210 10 — — 210 100

— 24% mortality rate 31% mortality rate — — — Same as 21095? —

Armstrong, 219 Eltis 24312 Eltis 21095 Armstrong, 219 Armstrong, 219 Armstrong, 219 Eltis 21107 Armstrong, 219

1692–93 1693

Fortune John and Mary — Pearl John and Mary Jacob — Tonqueene Merchant Little Josiah Charles

— New York

— —

— 181

— 155

— 15% mortality rate

Armstrong, 219 Eltis 37011

1695

Katherine

New York

—

181

155

Crew of 20

Eltis 37012

1697

—

New York

—

181

155

Crew of 20

Eltis 37013

1697

Margaret

New York

—

123

101

18% mortality rate

Eltis 36998

1698

New York Merchant

New York

—

83

70

—

Eltis 36999

1698

Fortune

New York

— Frederick Philipse, Capt. John Thurber Frederick Philipse, Capt. Thomas Mostyn Frederick Philipse, Capt. Cornelius Jacobs Frederick Philipse, Capt. Samuel Burgess Frederick Philipse, Capt. Samuel Burgess Frederick Philipse, Capt. Thomas Mostyn

—

181

155

15% mortality rate

Eltis 37015

(continued)

Date

Ship’s Name

Origin

Owner/Captain

Destination

No. of Slaves No. of Purchased Slaves Sold

1698

—

New York

—

—

149

126

1698

—

New York

—

—

149

126

1698 1699

Peter Beckford

New York London

Capt. George Revlry Capt. John Harris

— —

149 303

126 210

1699

Margaret

New York

—

115

104

1701

Betty

—

Barbados

59

1700

Fidelia

London

Frederick Philipse, Capt. Samuel Burgess Robert Corlett, Capt. Langhorne Charles Noden

—

1717

Sarah Gally

London

1717

Hamilton Galley

London

1718

Mercury

London

South Sea Company, Buenos Aires Capt. Bloom Sir Randolph Knipe, Barbados Sir John Fryer; Capt. Charles Burnham Capt. Henry Mackett Barbados

Disposition /Notes 25678=25679= 70202 15% mortality rate

Source Eltis 25678; Van Cortland MSS Eltis 25679; Van Cortland MSS Eltis 70202 Eltis 25684

— 305 tuns, 24 guns; captured by pirates Captured by Lowth

Eltis 70201

47

Slave insurrection

Eltis 20248

—

—

Donnan 1:94; CSP, B to T&P, Oct. 24, 1699

502

347

CONDEMNED; Tempest Rogers of Fidelia (London) seized in Bahamas 31% mortality rate

257

220

15% mortality rate

189

158

16% mortality rate

Eltis 77050 Eltis 76496 ; Platt: Barbados Naval Lists Eltis 76501; Platt: Barbados Naval Lists

1718

Henry

London

1718 1718

— Arabella

Brazil London

1719

Drake

London

1718

Swallow

1718

Capt. John Harvey

Barbados

491

420

Bahia Buenos Aires

406 266

356 208

South Sea Company, Capt. William Hamilton —

Barbados

—

540

London

William Harris/Capt. Thomas Hebert

Jamaica (Kingston)

—

320

Turnbridge Galley

Bristol

Capt. Stretton

Jamaica (Kingston)

—

243

1718

Duckinfield

Bristol?

Duckinfield?

Jamaica (Kingston)

—

280

1719

Robert and Rebecca Elizabeth

London

—

Barbados

—

340

Liverpool

Capt. Webster

Jamaica

600

385

1719

Unlicensed; 15% mortality rate 13% mortality rate Captured by Spanish after disembarkation —

Eltis 76503; Platt [3] Eltis 46681 Eltis 77052

Platt: Naval Office Lists From “Africa”, but most Platt, 558n22 for likely Madagascar; detailed Hebert gets explanation busted later. . . see below Ibid. From “Africa”, but most likely Madagascar; Stretton later captains the unlicensed Prince Eugene From “Africa”, but Ibid. most likely Madagascar — Platt: Naval Office Lists 36% mortality rate Eltis 20662; Platt: Naval Office Lists (continued)

Date

Ship’s Name

Origin

Owner/Captain

Destination

No. of Slaves No. of Purchased Slaves Sold

Disposition /Notes

Source

1719

Prince Eugene

Bristol

John Duckinfield; Capts. William Stretton, James Goodall

York R., VA

492

340

1720

Lisbon

Costa, Adrião Moreira da

Brazil

386

267

1720

NS do Paraíso S Antônio e S Francisco Xavier Mercury

Eltis 16224; Platt, 31% mortality rate; 559n24: EIC owners attribute MSS, Misc. Ltrs, “heavy mortality” to Naval Office Lists the “inadvertency of our master in purchasing boys and girls instead of men.” 31% mortality rate Eltis 47453

London

674

466

31% mortality rate

1720

Coker Snow

London

Chamberlaine, Francis Sitwell Capt. Richard Taylor

—

—

1721

Crown Gally

London

240

120

Rappahannock R., VA Dingley, Ireland (goods smuggled), then Altona, Germany Richard Janaway, Isaac New York Levy, William Walton, Nathaniel Simpson; Capt. Dennis Downing

£2150 in passage money

Eltis 75866; Platt: Naval Office Lists Platt: CO, Dep. of Taylor

50% mortality rate

Eltis 75307

1721

Gascoigne Galley

Bristol

Master Chaloner Williams; Capt. Thomas Bryan

York R., VA

192

133

31% mortality rate; Eltis 21910; Platt “distemper in their eyes,” blindness and “some of the Eye Balls come out.” Eltis 16272; Platt 31% mortality rate; condemned (piracy allegations; 4–5 pieces of muslin belonging to the crew—but not slaves) Vessel condemned Eltis 16274; Platt (but not slaves)

1721

Prince Eugene

Bristol

Master Joseph Stretton;[4] Abraham Hooke, John Duckinfield

York R., VA

149

103

1721

Rebecca [5]

Bristol

York R., VA

72

59

1721

Henrietta

London

York R., VA

188

130

Vessel condemned (but not slaves)

Eltis 75630; Platt

1721

—

—

Capt. Timothy Tyzack; Abraham Hooke, John Duckinfield Capt. Thomas Hebert; co-owner /supercargo: Henry Baker Private trader

New York

—

117

—

1723

Dunkirk

Mathieu de Wulf

St. Domingue

386

267

31% mortality rate

1727

Comte de Toulouse St. Michael

Donnan, #351, p. 444 [6] Eltis 31842

London

Buenos Aires

412

340

17% mortality rate; slave insurrection

Eltis 76203

1728

Sea Horse

London

South Sea Co.; Capt. Charles Burnham South Sea Co.; Capt. White

Buenos Aires

450

150

67% mortality rate

Eltis 76158 (continued)

Date

Ship’s Name

Origin

1730

Rudge

London

1730

St. Michael

London

1735 1739

St. Michel Grevinden af Laurvigen Grevinden af Laurvigen —

Lorient Denmark

1747 Total

Owner/Captain South Sea Co.; Capt. Francis Williams South Sea Co.; Capt. Charles Burnham

Destination

No. of Slaves No. of Purchased Slaves Sold

Disposition /Notes

Source

Buenos Aires

277

245

12% mortality rate

Eltis 77047

Buenos Aires

320

283

12% mortality rate

Eltis 78951

Capt. Hoist

St. Domingue St. Thomas

386 42

267 21

31% mortality rate 50% mortality

Eltis 33770 Eltis 35107

Denmark

Capt. Hoist

—

—

—

Shipwrecked

Eltis 35164

—

—

—

18124

—

—

—

sources: David Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); James C. Armstrong, “Madagascar and the Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Omaly sy Anio, nos. 17–20 (1983–84): 211–33; Virginia Bever Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Oct. 1969): 548–77; Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1930–1935); and Van Cortland MSS (New-York Historical Society, New York).

appendix 2

Ships at Madagascar, 1689–1730

pirate ships at madagascar Cygnet (1689–1690) Batchelor’s Delight (1690–1691) Jacob (1690–1693) Unity (1691–1692) Amity (1693–1694, 1695–) Pearl (1693, 1695–1696) Dolphin (1695–) Susanna (1695–1696) Portsmouth Adventure (1695) Fancy (1695–1696) John and Rebecca (1695–1697) Resolution/Soldado (1695–1698) Charming Mary (1695–1697) Mocha (1696–1698) Adventure Galley (1696–1699) Pelican (1698–) Speaker (1699–1701) Speedy Return (1702–1704) Prosperous (1702–1704) Defiance (1704–) Thomas White’s prize/slaver (1705–1706) Charles (1705–1708) Neptune (1708) Flying Dragon (1718–1722)

141

142

.

appendix 2

Fancy (1719–1721) Cassandra (1720–1722) Victory (1719–20) Rising Sun (1719) La Buse vessel (1719–1720) Howell Davis’s vessel (1719) Nostra Senhora de Cabo (1721–1723)

merchant/slave ships at madagascar Charles (1693–) Catherine (1695) Charming Mary (1694–) Margaret (1695–1697, 1697–1698) Amity (1696–1697) Fortune (1696–1698) New York Merchant (1696–1698) Swift (1698–) Nassau (1698–1699) Prophet Daniel (1699) Fidelia (1700) Sarah Gally (1717) Elizabeth (1717–1719) Hamilton Galley (1717) Courrier de Bourbon (1718) Arabella (1718–1721) Mercury (1717–1718) Henry (1717–1718) Drake (1719) Swallow (1719) Turnbridge Galley (1719) Duckinfield (1719) Robert and Rebecca (1719) Elizabeth (1719) Prince Eugene (1719) Mercury (1719–1720) Coker Snow (1720) Henrietta (1720–21) Crown Gally (1720–1721) Gascoigne Galley (1721) Prince Eugene (1720–1721) Rebecca Snow (1720–1721)

ships at madagascar

Henrietta (1721) Saint Michael (1726–1727) Sea Horse (1726–1728) Rudge (1729–1731) Saint Michael (1729–1730)

.

143

NOTES

introduction 1. This account is drawn from various sources, including Tew’s Commission, November 2, 1694, in Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (hereafter cited as NYCD), 4:221–23; Letter from Peter de La Noy relative to Governor Fletcher’s Conduct, June 13, 1695, in NYCD, 223; Bellomont to Lords of Trade, May 8, 1698, in NYCD, 306–9; and Col. Fletcher’s Answers to the Complaints against Him, Dec. 24, 1698, in NYCD, 447. See also McDonald, “ ‘A Man of Courage and Activity.’ ” 2. In his highly influential essay, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” David Armitage defines circum-Atlantic as “the history of the people who crossed the Atlantic, who lived on its shores and who participated in the communities it made possible” (16). I extend this definition to include peoples and communities of the western Indian Ocean, especially Madagascar and its surrounding islands. 3. The plantation complex itself had origins in the Mediterranean. See Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex . 4. The classic and magisterial two-volume treatment of the Mediterranean as a coherent historical region is Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. On the importance of spices, see Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination; and Keay, The Spice Route. 5. For an excellent study on these ancient trade routes, see Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony. The classic treatment of the Indian Ocean before the arrival of Europeans is Hourani, Arab Seafaring. More recent is Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean. 6. Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean, 313; see also Eaton, “Multiple Lenses: Differing Perceptions of Fifteenth Century Calicut.” 7. A number of excellent works treating the Indian Ocean as a single coherent world system cover the periods before and after the arrival of Europeans, but none considers

145

146

.

notes to introduction

it as an interoceanic or “Indo-Atlantic” region. These include Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe; McPherson, The Indian Ocean; and Pearson, The Indian Ocean. A recent study focusing on the modern era is Bose, A Hundred Horizons. Ashin das Gupta’s essays have been collected in The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant. 8. This in turn has followed the rigidity of the academic discipline, which has been heavily biased toward territorial frameworks. Maritime historians, of course, have been generally exempt from this arrangement, but their work has often been relegated (sometimes rightly) as antiquarian. For recent comparative collections of essays that move beyond this direction, see Mukherjee, ed., Oceans Connect; Bentley et al., eds., Seascapes; and Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis.” The strongest metageographical critique of continental history remains Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents; see also Klein and Mackenthun, Sea Changes; Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean; and Buschmann, “Oceans of World History.” 9. The classic texts are Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire; and Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600–1800. Recent scholarly treatments of the English East India Company include Stern, The Company State; and Bowen, The Business of Empire. 10. The most important exception is Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates. My work expands and complicates Ritchie’s analysis by positing an IndoAtlantic world framework for piracy, and most crucially, by focusing on the significance of the slave trade and individual slaves in the functioning of the trade network. See also Koot, Empire at the Periphery. A broader overview is Karras, Smuggling. 11. A recent exception is Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. A top-down approach can be found in Bowen et al., Britain’s Oceanic Empire 12. Carson, The Sea around Us , 141; for a similar and more recent anthropological approach, see Mack, The Sea. 13. See Bradley, The Lure of Peru; Dampier describes the circumnavigation in A New Voyage Round the World, first printed in 1697, reprinted in Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages. 14. See Igler, The Great Ocean; and Matsuda, Pacific Worlds. 15. The trend arguably began with Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies; Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 1; Butel, The Atlantic. For recent overviews of the field, see Greene and Morgan, eds., Atlantic History; and Bailyn, Atlantic History. 16. In particular, the cis-, trans-, or circum-Atlantic framework outlined in Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History.” 17. See McDonald, “ ‘A Parcell of Pirates in These Parts’ ”; and Benton, “The British Atlantic in Global Context.” Peter Coclanis and others have more recently extended the challenge to “stretch the field” of Atlantic history. See Coclanis, “Beyond Atlantic History”; and Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?” See also Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 460. For a recent but more traditional top-down approach, see Bowen et al., Britain’s Oceanic Empire. 18. For a comparable perspective that highlights the liminal nature of this period, see Greg Dening’s introduction and thoughtful essay chapters in Hoffman, Sobel, and Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly. Dening’s impressive oeuvre on cross-cultural

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interactions in the Pacific and his emphasis on the historical significance of the beach have been influential in this present study; see also Helms, Ulysses’ Sail, esp. 25–28. 19. Here again I highlight Ritchie’s Captain Kidd, which provides the best account of Kidd’s voyage and the political dimensions of his prosecution and trial. I have reviewed nearly all the same sources, and my account here differs especially in that Ritchie does not examine slaves or the slave trade in any detail. In chapter 4, I also challenge Ritchie’s assertion that the pirate settlements in Madagascar were “only an offshoot of the buccaneer raids in the Indian Ocean” (85). For another detailed but somewhat meandering account, see Rogozinksi, Honor among Thieves. 20. For recent works on the rise of consumer culture, see Fichter, So Great a Proffit; Martin, Buying into the World of Goods; Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution; Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America. For a contrary view that claims there was “little market” for East India goods in New York in the late seventeenth century, see Piwonka, “Margrieta van Varick in the West,” 113. 21. See, for example, Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement; and Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns. 22. On this idea, see esp. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty; Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier, 5; and Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 1:1. 23. This viewpoint is supported in Senior, A Nation of Pirates, 39. For the contrary view of pirates as outcasts and antiauthoritarian rebels, see Rediker, Villains of All Nations; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 254–87; and especially his pioneering article, “ ‘Under the Banner of King Death.’ ” 24. Another author, an economist, has recently and reasonably asserted that pirates were rational economic actors, but I believe they were much more complex and multifaceted historical figures. Moreover, his “economic” perspective focuses solely on cost /benefit analysis and lacks any discussion or consideration of markets, market behavior, or the role of merchants and illicit trade. See Leeson, The Invisible Hook. 25. Letter from Sarah Horne to Jacob Horne, June 11, 1698, HCA 1/98, fols. 118–19, PRO. 26. Quote from Charles Wooley (1701), cited in Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm, 139. 27. Cowries were harvested predominantly in the Maldives in the central Indian Ocean. See, for example, Thomas, The Slave Trade, 324; and Yang, “The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells.” 28. See Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic.” 29. At the height of Indo-Atlantic piracy, in 1698, loyal sailors of the HMS Speedwell revealed a surreptitious plan to mutiny while in Barbados. The mutineers were preparing to kill the senior officers and then sail to Madagascar, “a place fit for pleasant living for such as were pirates.” The mutiny was averted. Depositions of John Graham and Richard Brookes, Aug. 24, 1698, Admiralty Records (ADM) 1/1588/8, Public Records Office, London (PRO).

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30. See esp. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Alan Taylor briefly mentions the Malagasy in his introduction, but does so alongside the Ibo, Fulani, and Ashanti in a list of “West African peoples.” Alan Taylor, American Colonies, xii.

1. the spectrum of piracy 1. These introductory paragraphs were derived in part from the author’s review of Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews (Dec. 2005), www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11035. See also Rubin, The Law of Piracy. 2. This is recognized by Kris E. Lane in Pillaging the Empire. Other works on Caribbean piracy include Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean; Earle, The Sack of Panama; Gerhard, Pirates on the West Coast of New Spain, 1575–1742; Marx, Pirate Port; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica; S. A. G. Taylor, The Western Design. 3. Zehedieh, “The Wickedest City in the World”; Zehedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1689”; and Zehedieh, “Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655–89.” See also Sheridan, “The Wealth of Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century.” 4. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, 11–12. 5. “Beyond the line” refers to the Atlantic longitudinal boundary drawn up by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1493. Meant to protect the Spanish Americas from encroachment by rival European powers, it was unenforceable from the outset and by the sixteenth century had truly become a relic. On the seasonal nature of the admiralty court, see Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals. 6. See, for example, Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, ch. 3. 7. A major exception is Greg Dening’s valuable work on cross-cultural exchanges in the Pacific: Islands and Beaches; Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language; and Beach Crossings. 8. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 112. 9. Journal of Christopher Columbus, 74–75. The quote is from Ferdinand Columbus, the admiral’s son, and is cited in Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 3. See also Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind, 126, 128, 145, 230. 10. On the other hand, recent scholarship highlights the persistence, sophistication, and “breathtaking scale of Asian piracy” to argue that piracy was deeply ingrained in social worlds, commercial exchanges, and political contestations across the Asian littoral. See Antony and Prange, “Piracy in Asian Waters, Part 1”; and “Piracy in Asian Waters,” two special issues of the Journal of Early Modern History 16, no. 6 (2012), and 17, no. 1 (2013); and Prange, “A Trade of No Dishonor.” 11. The classic text is Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825; see also Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808; Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 69, 73–74, 78, 81; Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 121, 133. 12. Armitage, “Introduction,” in Grotius, The Free Sea, xi, xxi. 13. Sir Robert Southwell to Daniel Frich, Second Earl of Nottingham, BL 418, London, March 23, 1688/9, Blathwayt MS, Box 3, Huntington Library (HL). See also

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Senior, A Nation of Pirates. Even defenders of empire accept this notion of early English colonialism as piracy; see Ferguson, Empire, xxiv. 14. An excellent overview of the English is Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement; see also Kupperman, Providence Island; Kupperman, Roanoke; Preble, The Darien Disaster; McGrath, The French in Early Florida. 15. The taxes were paid by Spanish merchants on both sides of the Atlantic and were used to finance the fitting out of the fleet. See Lane, Pillaging the Empire; Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain. 16. See, for example, The Post Man, Feb. 23–25, 1699, Burney Papers, 117A, British Library (BL). 17. An excellent Atlanticist overview of Bermuda is Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade. 18. Cited in Thornton and Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 26. 19. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 171–75; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast 1580–1680, 31–37; Craven, “The Earl of Warwick, a Speculator in Piracy.” 20. Thornton and Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 27–28. 21. See Harlow, The Voyages of Captain William Jackson (1642–45). 22. Harlow, The Voyages of Captain William Jackson (1642–45), 28–37; Kupperman, Providence Island, 172, 191, 197, 278, 283. The WIC’S official name was Geoctryoyeerde Westindische Compagnie. 23. Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving, 42, 48, 52–53, 68–69, 75, 100, 113. 24. Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America, 164, 170, 172, 181, 215. 25. Van Laer, New York Historical Manuscripts, 1:212; Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (NYCD), 1:91 26. Don Estevan de Gamarra y Contreras to the States General, December 11, 1655, NYCD 1:576–77. 27. See Pestana, “English Character and the Fiasco of the Western Design.” A book-length account can be found in Taylor, The Western Design. 28. “Account of Jamaica” (1662), Add. Mss., 11410, BL. 29. Zehedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1689”; Zehedieh, “Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655–89”; and Zehedieh, “The Wickedest City in the World”; McDonald, “Antigua.” Antigua was sacked in 1666 and again in 1712. 30. See Southwell MSS, naval ships lists, 1698–1700 (Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England). It was not until 1700, after the millennial wave of piracy had reached its peak, that the English government began to provide the necessary naval firepower to protect its North American colonies. 31. “The Case of Nicholas Trott the Elder, Esq.,” Sloane MSS, 2902, fol. 269, BL. 32. See Hanna, “The Pirates’ Nest: The Impact of Piracy on Newport, Rhode Island, and Charles Town, South Carolina, 1670–1740”; Burgess, “A Crisis of Charter and Right”; Hawes, Off Soundings, ch. 1.

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33. Lord Bridgewater’s notes, Dec. 4, 1699, Ellesmere MSS Box 232, 9629, HL. Bridgewater named Trott, Markham, Robert Treat (CT), Andrew Hambleton (NJ), and Jon Archer (NC), a Quaker; Narrative of Lt. William Ockman, HMS Prince of Orange, Oct. 1, 1697, CO 391/10, fols. 143–44, 268, 286–87, 332–33, PRO. 34. May 2–4, May 6–8, 1701, The Post Man, BL. 35. Firsthand accounts of the logwood settlements can be found in Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages, vol. 2, part 2; Uring, A History of the Voyages and Travels of Captain Nathaniel Uring; Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, 227–28; Cook, Remarks on a Passage from the River Balise, in the Bay of Honduras, to Merida. 36. Schneider, “Peacocks and Penguins”; Fairlie, “Dyestuffs in the Eighteenth Century.” 37. Perspective by Muriel Haas, in Cook, Remarks on a Passage from the River Balise, in the Bay of Honduras, to Merida, 7. 38. Sir Herbert W. Richmond, ed., “The Land Forces of France—June 1738,” Publications of the Navy Records Society 43 (London, 1928), 65–68, quoted in Wilson, “The Logwood Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 11. 39. Donohoe, A History of British Honduras, 27, 82. The very name Belize is supposedly derived from a Spanish corruption of a Scots pirate, Peter Wallace (i.e., Vallis or Ballis). This theory has recently been debunked as an origin myth in BulmerThomas and Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Belize. 40. Deposition of Richard Harris, Dec. 27, 1714, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, Aug. 1714–Dec. 1715, quoted in Wilson, “The Logwood Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 2. 41. Craig, “Logwood as a Factor in the Settlement of British Honduras”; Offen, “British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia”; Frank Griffith Dawson, “William Pitt’s Settlement at Black River on the Mosquito Shore”; Frank Griffith Dawson, “The Evacuation of the Mosquito Shore and the English Who Stayed Behind, 1786–1800”; McBride, “Contraband Traders, Lawless Vagabonds, and the British Settlement and Occupation of Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras”; Finamore, “A Mariner’s Utopia”; Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism; Davidson, Historical Geography of the Bay Islands, Honduras.” 42. Anderson, “Better Judges of the Situation,” 57; Bolland, “The Social Structure and Social Relations of the Bay of Honduras in the Eighteenth Century.” 43. Wilson, “The Logwood Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 7–8, 13–14. 44. See Anderson, Mahogany. 45. Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, 227–28. 46. On the enslavement of “several hundreds of English” invaders in New Spain, see, for example, Blathwayt to Bridgewater, Oct. 11, 1697, Ellesmere MSS, 9740, HL. 47. Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, 227–28. 48. Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies. 49. For contrary views that argue for a “transgressive homosexual piratical society,” see Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash; and “almost universal homosexual involvement among pirates,” in Burg, “The Buccaneer Community,” 237.

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50. Parry, Trade and Dominion, 109. Though Jenkins had a career in the illicit Madagascar slave trade, Parry describes him as “neither a rascal nor a ruffian, but a capable and conscientious seaman” (154). 51. Wilson, “The Logwood Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 5–6; at least four South Sea Company slavers transported over a thousand Malagasy slaves to Buenos Aires between 1726 and 1731. See entries 76158, 76203, 77047, and 78951 in Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 52. Schneider, “Peacocks and Penguins”; Fairlie, “Dyestuffs in the Eighteenth Century.” 53. John Mullaney, “Freight List of the Brigantin Roberdt,“ Dec. 3, 1694, New York Historical Society, GLC03107.00266. For examples of New York ships carrying logwood to London, see Hopewell, Post Man, Nov. 5–8, 1698; Eleonor, Post Man, Nov. 12–15, 1698; Helen Galley, Post Man, Feb. 7–9, 1699; Allen Galley, Flying Post, Feb. 7–9, 1699. 54. Karraker, Piracy Was a Business, 46. 55. Board of Trade, Properties, cited in Karraker, Piracy Was a Business, 67. 56. Abstract of Mr. Santen’s Memo and of Dongan’s Answer; King James II to Gov. Dongan, Oct. 22, 1687, NYCD, 3:491–93. 57. Deposition of Theophilus Turner, June 8, 1698, Blathwayt MSS, Box 4, HL. 58. See Dawson, “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World”; and Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean.” 59. Kris Lane, in Pillaging the Empire, shows piratical events closer to the Iberian peninsula in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, then shifting to the Caribbean. 60. Gov. Treat to Gov. Dongan, Aug. 5, 1686, NYCD, 3:387. 61. Information based on author’s archival research. The newspapers reviewed were The Flying Post (1698–1701), The Post Man (1698–1701), and The Post Boy, courtesy of the British Library. 62. Post Man, June 29, 1700, BL; Post Boy, June 29, 1700, and July 13, 1700, BL; Flying Post, June 29, 1700, BL. 63. Flying Post, Jan. 17–19, 1699, BL; Post Man, Jan. 17–19, 1699, BL. 64. See especially Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; Rediker, Villains of All Nations. 65. According to Peter Earle, only twenty-six pirate captains were hanged by English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish authorities combined during the 1720s (Pirate Wars, 206). See also Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 150. 66. Testimony of Dampier and Wafer re: Darien, July 2, 1697, CO 391/10, fols. 139–42, PRO. 67. For recent overviews of Dampier, see Neill, “Buccaneer Ethnography“; McCarthy, “HM Ship Roebuck (1690–1701)”; Williams, The Great South Sea, ch. 6; Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences, ch. 7; Preston and Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind. 68. Nov. 14, 1699, Post Boy, Burney Papers, BL. Italics added for emphasis. 69. This account of the Cygnet is drawn from Dampier, New Voyage (London: James Knapton, 1697), BL; the ship’s demise in Madagascar is found on 510–11. See also EAP 524/1/3/5: St Helena Records [1696–1699], BL.

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70. A pink was a small, square-rigged vessel with a narrow and overhanging stern. A bark was a small vessel with three masts, square-rigged on the fore and main and fore-and-aft rigged on the mizzen. Definitions found in Kemp, ed., The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, 61–62, 648. 71. The Board of Trade, fearing the creation of a pirate state, reported 1,500 men, 40–50 guns, and 17 ships at the settlement on Saint Mary’s alone. See Representation of the Board of Trade, January 17, 1698, CO 324/6, fols. 222–25, PRO. 72. See Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 360. The Margaret’s registry papers are found in High Court of Admiralty Records (HCA) 1/98, PRO. 73. Royle, The Company’s Island. 74. Captain Kidd’s voyage in the Adventure Galley, for example, left New York on Sept. 6, 1696, and arrived at Saint Augustine, Madagascar, on January 27, 1697. See Ritchie, Captain Kidd, ch. 3. Contemporary accounts of the equatorial crossing, and the maritime cultural traditions that accompanied it, can be found in Lubbock, trans., Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships. 75. See, for example, Frederick Philipse’s Private Orders to Samuel Burgess, June 1698, HCA 1/98, fols. 145–50, PRO; and Stephen Delancey’s Orders to Capt. Giles Shelley, June 28, 1698, HCA 1/98, fol. 167, PRO. 76. HCA, 1/98, Part I, fols. 98–101, Account of Seamen’s Wages, Margaret, New York, 1698, PRO. 77. Seafaring slaves aboard the Margaret are explored in chapter 5. 78. The entire collection has been preserved by the Public Records Office and now resides in the British National Archives at Kew in West London: HCA, 1/98, 2 vols. The affidavit from Lowth is from Dec. 19, 1699, HCA 1/98, vol. 2, fol. 257, PRO. 79. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1:355–93, for his extended discussion of “l’espace, ennemi numéro 1 [distance, the first enemy].” See also McCusker, “The Demise of Distance.” The letters are collected in two volumes and found in HCA 1/98, PRO. 80. Mail service began in 1672 but was intermittent. Scharf, History of Westchester County, 1:170–71. The completion of the Long Island postal route was reported in The Flying Post, Oct. 15–17, 1700, BL. 81. This is the subject of chapter 5. 82. HCA 1/98, fol. 142, PRO. 83. Will of Cornelius Dorrington, HCA 1/98, fol. 87, PRO; see also Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 363–64. 84. Receipt of Willliam Witcomb’s Goods, HCA 1/98, fol. 113, PRO; Power of Attorney Letter from Judith Lofsinger, HCA 1/98, fols. 103–5, PRO. Elias Rose to Burgess, May 23, 1698 (Newport, RI), with note for “Brother John Dodd” to deliver 400 pieces of eight belonging to “the widow Beeho.” 85. Certificate of John Carterell’s marriage to Ann Carterell, formerly married to John Read, mariner, deceased at Madagascar, HCA 1/98, fol. 90, PRO; Ann Carterell to Baldridge, Mar. 25, 1698; Ltr. of Attorney to John Powell, fols. 92–97, HCA 1/98, PRO.

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2. new york merchants and the indo-atlantic trade 1. For example, Menard, “Transport Costs and Long-Range Trade, 1300–1800,” 252. 2. Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland; Jacobs, New Netherland; Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow; and Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America. On the role of disease and virgin-soil epidemics, see Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. 3. Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680, 99; for an excellent study, see Koot, Empire at the Periphery. 4. Pritchard, In Search of Empire. This book provides an excellent overview of the French imperial design in North America. 5. Much of the historiography on colonial New York amounts to a near hagiography of Lord Bellomont at the expense of Colonel Fletcher. My own research indicates that there was a deep personal animosity between the two individuals, stemming from class conflict rather than any major policy differences with regard to the sponsoring of Madagascar settlements. Bellomont’s opinions of Fletcher have been repeated nearly verbatim, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, New York (New York: Longmans, Green, 1891). Most historians have merely repeated the same claims. See Kammen, Colonial New York. Robert Ritchie provides the most nuanced account in Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates. 6. John Evans to Lt. Gov. Nanfan, Nov. 3, 1698, CO 5/1042. Evans, captain of the Richmond and supporter of Fletcher, was in London at the time of the incident. 7. Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 28. I discuss the piracy/slavery nexus in more detail in chapter 1. 8. Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 11294. 9. See Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade”; Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 357. 10. Frederick Philipse to Samuel Burgess, Feb. 25, 1699, HCA 1/98 fols. 57–58, 200–201, PRO; Philipse to Burgess (“Private Orders”), June 1698, HCA 1/98, fols. 145–50, PRO; Solomon, “Foreign Specie Coins in the American Colonies.” 11. Parry, Trade and Dominion, 65–67; Flynn and Giraldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’ ”; “Cycles of Silver”; Nettles, The Money Supply of the American Colonies before 1720. 12. See, for example, “Soliciting Contributions to Redeem Christians of New York City from Slavery in Morocco,” June 8, 1693 (Gov. Fletcher) (New York: William Bradford), Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (NYCD), IV. For a broad perspective, see Colley, Captives. 13. Coddington Narrative, Nov. 27, 1699, CO 5/1259, fols. 205–6, PRO. 14. “Proposals to Suppress Illegal Trade,” undated (1690s), Ellesmere MSS, 9880, HL; Memorial to His Majesty on the Condition of the Navy, Nov. 30, 1699, Ellesmere MSS, 9177, HL. 15. Log of the Richmond, ADM 51/4310, PRO; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 69; NYCD, IV; Boyd, Atlantic Highlands, 54.

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16. Governor Fletcher to Committee of Trade, Oct. 10, 1693, NYCD, 4:68; see also Extract of Letter from Benjamin Bullivant to John Usher, Jul. 10, 1690, Blathwayt MSS, Box 3, HL; see also Augustyn and Cohen, eds., Manhattan in Maps, 1527–1995, 50–51. 17. Extract of Letter from Nanfan to Bellomont, June 24, 1700, Blathwayt MSS, Box 5, HL. 18. Dongan’s Report on the State of the Province, Feb. 22, 1687, in NYCD, 3:390–91. 19. Andrews, “A Glance at New York in 1697”; Bromley, The Manning Problem of the Royal Navy. 20. Bellomont to Lords of Trade, May 25, 1698, in NYCD, 4:313–17. 21. Zehedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1689”; Zehedieh, “Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655–89”; and Zehedieh, “The Wickedest City in the World”; McDonald, “Antigua.” Antigua was sacked in 1666 and again in 1712. 22. Sirmans, “Politics in South Carolina,” 44. 23. NYCD, 4:392. 24. Fletcher to Blathwayt, Nov. 19, 1694, Blathwayt MSS, Box 1, HL. 25. See Leamon, “Governor Fletcher’s Recall.” 26. Berlin and Harris, eds., Slavery in New York, 51. 27. See McManus, A History of Negro Slavery, 6; and Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 12, 14, 18–19. See also Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815. 28. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery, 23, 34–35; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 26–27. The earliest freedmen boweries were near present-day Washington Square Park in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan. 29. NYCD, 3:369–75, 543–49, 685–91, 818–24. 30. Hodges, Root and Branch, 38–40. 31. See “An account of His Majesty’s Island of Barbadoes and the Government thereof,” Feb. 3/13, 1676, in Kupperman, Appleby, and Banton, eds., Calendar of State Papers (CSP), Item 812, Vol. 9 (1675–1676), 348–49; and CO, 29/2, 1–14, PRO. 32. Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” 542. 33. See Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade”; Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade”; Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 279–81, 386; and Hodges, Root and Branch, 38–40. On cross-cultural brokerage, see Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 92; and Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. 34. Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 354. The source for the claim of an English mother is Van Rensselear, City of New York, 2:172–73, 383. It has never been verified. See Murrin, “English Rights as Ethnic Aggression,” 64. 35. Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 354–55; Narrett, “Dutch Customs of Inheritance, Women, and the Law in Colonial New York City,” 28, 33; Main, “Probate Records as Source for Early American History,” 88–99; Wyntjes, “Survivors and Status,” 396–405; Vetare, Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills, 19–21; Zimmerman, The Women of the House, 50, 66, 70–71, 85, 87.

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36. Bonomi, A Factious People, 60–62; Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade.” 37. Report of the Governor of Bahamas, May 27, 1684, CO 1/54, fol. 315, PRO; Craven to Lords of Trade, May 27, 1684, CSP, vol. 11, no. 1707; Ritchie, “Samuel Burgess, Pirate,” 119. 38. NYHS Collections, 1892, Abstracts of Wills, vol. 1 (1665–1707), 88. 39. Deposition of Richard Harris, Dec. 27, 1714, CSP, Aug. 1714–Dec. 1715, quoted in Wilson, “The Logwood Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 2. 40. See Wilson, “The Logwood Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”; Offen, “British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia”; Donohoe, A History of Br. Honduras; and Cook, Remarks on a Passage from the River Balise, in the Bay of Honduras, to Merida.” A detailed firsthand account of the logwood cutters and their settlements is found in Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages. 41. Zimmerman, The Women of the House, 144–49. 42. Frederick Philipse to Burgess, Jul. 29, 1697, HCA 1/98, Part I, fol. 84, PRO; Philipse to Burgess, HCA 1/98, Part II, fols. 152–53, PRO. See also Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 366–67. 43. Bankoff and Winter, “The Archaeology of Slavery at the Van Cortlandt Plantation in the Bronx, New York.” 44. Aug. 10 and 11, 1695, Livingston’s Journal Manuscript, New York Historical Society; see also Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 49–50. 45. Valentine’s Manual (1864), 581–82. 46. Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 282n36. 47. Matson, Merchants and Empires, 63–64, 354n63, 373n28. 48. Register of the Peter, HCA 1/98, Part I, fol. 106, PRO. Anna Lynch appears as a partial owner, along with Peter Schuyler, Brandt Schuyler, and Jacobus Verplanck of Albany, and Patrick Meade of Barbados. The ship was listed as a square stern brigantine, sixty tons, built in Albany, 1696, and was sent to trade for East India goods and slaves with Edward Welch. The slaves bought on Madagascar were to be sold on the Mascarene islands. See also McManus, A History of Negro Slavery, 27. 49. Valentine’s Manual (1864), 618; Ltr. from Owners of Peter to John Renslare (merchant/supercargo), June 27, 1698, HCA, Part II, fols. 162–63, PRO. Matson, Merchants and Empires, 61, 134. Van Dam’s slaves, Quack and Quash, were hanged for their roles in the 1712 slave revolt; a third slave, Tom, was sentenced but reprieved by Governor Hunter. See Berlin and Harris, eds., Slavery in New York, 80. 50. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 59; Lord Bellomont to Lord Bridgewater, June 27, 1698, Ellesmere MSS, fol. 9747, HL. 51. May 29, 1699, CO 5/1258, Part II, PRO; “List of Freight Four Ships Bound from New York to Madagascar,” Capt. Courtland to Board of Trade, July 1, 1698, CO 5/1042, PRO; Shelley to DeLancey, May 27, 1699, CO 5/1258, Part II, PRO. DeLancey and the captain of the Nassau, Giles Shelley, will be discussed in more detail below. 52. Cruger to Bueno and Co., April 6, 1699, HCA 1/98, Part II, fols. 169–70, PRO.

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53. See Javier, In Old New York, 32; and David T. Valentine, History of the City of New-York (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1863). I am indebted to Susan Waide of the New York Public Library for helping me locate these two sources (which are incorrectly cited in Matson), both of which are available on the Making of America website, www. hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/. Most of the fifty slaves, who were acquired earlier at Mattanatta, were left behind by the pirates, though some were kept on board (likely as laborers). The slaves had been intended for auction at New York but were taken aboard a London slaver, also anchored at Fort Dauphin, and eventually sold in Barbados. 54. Will of John Leggett, NYHS Collections, 1892, Abstracts of Wills, vol. 1 (1665– 1707), 67. Leggett, who was married, also bequeathed an unnamed slave to his son. 55. The pirates sailed to Saint Thomas in the West Indies, where the vessel and remaining slaves were seized—but not before the pirates made their escape. William Caesar, Bello, York, Jonachee, and Rosousa were sold in the West Indies to local merchants. Dep. of Capt. Thomas Warren, Dec. 20, 1699, HCA 1/98, Part I, fols. 28–30, PRO; and Letter of Capt. Billingsley, May 13, 1700, ADM 1, 1462/fol. 15, PRO. 56. Bellomont to the Lords of Trade and Plantation, July 8, 1699, Kidd Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), 40–44. 57. See Scharf, History of Westchester County 1:863–64. On French migration to New York, see Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 46–51. 58. Scharf, History of Westchester County, 1:582; Karraker, Piracy Was a Business, 78; Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 368. 59. Matson, Merchants and Empire, 373n29. 60. Van Cortlandt’s involvement in the slave trade can be tracked in the Van Cortlandt MSS, New York Historical Society (NYHS). A summary can be found in the NYHS Quarterly Bulletin (Oct. 1936); Stahr, John Jay. 61. Ritchie offers a brief paragraph summary in “Samuel Burgess, Pirate,” 122. 62. Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 145. On these mostly unsubstantiated viewpoints, see Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. 63. See, for example, Deps. of Father Rosaro, Dom Gonsalvis, John Soaza, Pedro Soaza, and Bart Silva, Oct. 10, 1697, E/3/53 fol. 6444: India Office Records, Original Correspondence, BL. 64. Bolster, Black Jacks, 15. The best account is Ritchie, Captain Kidd. 65. Fletcher’s Pass re: Burgess (Jacob), April 15, 1693 Part I, HCA 1/98, fol. 55, PRO (also signed by Daniel Honan, New York’s customs collector); and Gov. Beeston’s Pass re: Burgess (Amity), Nov. 1, 1693, Part I, HCA 1/98, fol. 53, PRO (the Johnston power of attorney letter can be found in fol. 158); and Karraker, Piracy Was a Business, 75, 109. 66. NYHS Collections, 1894, Abstracts of Wills, vol. 3 (1730–1744), 91. 67. NYHS Collections, 1893, Abstracts of Wills, vol. 2 (1708–1728), 22–23. 68. Valentine’s Manual (1862), 577. 69. NYHS Collections, 1894, Abstracts of Wills, vol. 3 (1730–1744), 142–43. 70. HCA 1/15, fol. 60; 29/265, fol. 284; 24/127, no. 84, PRO, cited in Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 295n3.

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71. NYHS Collections, 1893, Abstracts of Wills, vol. 2 (1708–1728), 60–62. 72. HCA, 1/98, Part I, fol. 51, June 27, 1689, PRO. 73. NYHS Collections, 1893, Abstracts of Wills, vol. 2 (1708–1728), 60–62. 74. The Nassau’s cargo: 17 bales of muslins (“fine and coarse”), 24 bales of white calicoes, 1 tun of “elephants teeth” (ivory), “2 or 3 hundred weight of opium,” 1 bale of painted calicoes, 12,000 pieces of eight, 3,000 lyon dollars, and 23 slaves. Shelley to Delancey, May 27, 1699, CO 5/1258, Part II, PRO. 75. Council Minutes II, 140; Staats to Depeyster, June 12, 1699, DePeyster MSS, NYHS; William Sharpas to DePeyster, June 26, 1699, cited in Ritchie, Captain Kidd. 76. Adolphus Philipse to Robert Heysham, May 5, 1698, HCA 15/17 (PRO), cited in Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 367. 77. Bellomont to Secretary Popple, June 27, 1698, in NYCD, 4:327. 78. Report of the Bd. of Trade on the Affairs of the Province of NY, Oct. 19, 1698, in NYCD, 4:385–96; and CO 5/1040, fols. 242–49, PRO, cited in Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 171, 282n40. 79. Bellomont to Lords of Trade & Plantations, Oct. 20, 1699, Kidd Papers, MHS. 80. Boyd, Atlantic Highlands, 60; McConville, These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace, 11–12, 26; Pomfret, The Province of East New Jersey, 1609–1702, 346–47. 81. Account of Gov. Quarry, Sept. 22, 1697, CO 391/10, 270–273/136–137, PRO. 82. Oct. 1, 1697, CO 391/10, 286–287/143–144, PRO. 83. Letters from EIC (1697), E/3/53, IOR, BL. 84. Hancock, Citizens of the World.

3. utopian dreamers and colonial disasters Portions of this chapter have been previously published by the author and are reprinted here by permission of the publisher from “English Disasters and Pirate Utopias of the Early Modern Indo-Atlantic World,” in New Worlds Reflected, ed. Chloë Houston (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 95–114. Copyright © 2010. 1. The most famous New World accounts, for contemporaries and modern scholars alike, are those of Captain John Smith. See Smith’s True Relation (1608) and General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (first printed in 1624). 2. See Chloë Houston and other essays in Houston, ed., New Worlds Reflected. 3. For example, Richard Boothby, A Breife Discovery or Description of the Most Famous Island of Madagascar or St. Laurence in Asia neare unto East-India (London, 1646). Some modern scholars have likewise had a difficult time locating Madagascar. A recent book by Alan Taylor, for example, briefly mentions the Malagasy in its introduction, but does so alongside the Ibo, Fulani, and Ashanti in a list of “West African peoples.” Taylor, American Colonies, xii. Important exceptions include the work of Pier Larson, Gwyn Campbell, and Michael Pearson. For an excellent study of comparative English colonizing efforts in Saint Augustine and Asada, Madagascar (1640s), see Games, The Web of Empire, ch. 6.

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4. The General History of the Pyrates (1724) was supposedly written by Defoe under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson. The second part of the General History, first published in 1728, is a blend of fact and fiction that focuses on pirate activities in and around Madagascar. For a challenge to the Defoe theory of authorship, see Furbank and Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe; and more recently, Bialuschewski, “Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the General History of the Pyrates.” 5. Davis, “Re-examining the Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” 254–55. 6. More, Utopia, 29–30, 54, 69–70, 95, 99–100, 158n223. In Utopia, slaves had part of their ears cut off. 7. See Thornton and Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of the Americas, 26–28; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 171–75; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 31–37; Craven, “The Earl of Warwick, a Speculator in Piracy,” 461–62; Harlow, The Voyages of Captain William Jackson, 28–37. 8. These vessels can be tracked in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 3:2–3. 9. Rawlinson, “The Embassy of William Harborne to Constantinople, 1583–8”; Skilliter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582; Rabb, “Investment in English Overseas Enterprise, 1575–1630”; Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. 10. British Library, India Office Records, List of Marine Records (1896), iii–iv. 11. Madagascar specialists, particularly in the fields of anthropology and linguistics, have often been consumed by a search for origins. More recently, an argument has emerged regarding the African versus Malay versus Islamic impact on the wider Malagasy society and culture. The most detailed general history on Madagascar remains Grandidier, ed., Collection des ouvrages anciens concernant Madagascar. For general histories in English, see Brown, A History of Madagascar; and Kent, Early Kingdoms in Madagascar, 1500–1700. The origins/impact debates can be tracked in Ricks, “Persian Gulf Seafaring and East Africa: Ninth-Twelfth Centuries”; Ottino, “Myth and History”; Spear, “Early Swahili History Reconsidered”; Walsh, “When Origins Matter”; and Bloch, “The Ethnohistory of Madagascar.” 12. It is no coincidence that the narrator in More’s Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, is Portuguese, as the Iberians were the preeminent early modern global explorers and dominated the East Indies trade to and from Europe during the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth centuries. 13. Kent, Early Kingdoms in Madagascar, 533–35; Ottino, “Myth and History,” 222. 14. Flacourt, Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar, 32–33; Pearson, “Close Encounters of the Worst Kind,” 395–96. 15. Houtman quote is from Churchill and Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1:xxvii–xxviii. 16. Pearson, “Close Encounters of the Worst Kind,” 396. 17. Churchill and Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1:xxx. The EastIndiaman Union had been separated from its consort, Ascension, when this fracas occurred.

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18. On the origins of a Madagascar maritime culture and vessels described as Indonesian “proto-Oceanic spritsail,” see Bowen, “Eastern Sail Affinities, Part I.” 19. John Fryer, New Account of East India (1698), 46, cited in Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645–46,” 239. 20. The arguments of these critics can be followed in Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645–46,” 239–50; and Games, “Oceans, Migrants, and the Character of Empires”; Games further develops this in The Web of Empire, ch. 6. 21. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 79. The Dutch were the preponderant partners in the company (the company books were kept at Middelburg). See also Edmundson, “The Dutch in Western Guiana.” 22. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 49–50. 23. Weddell lost the EIC flagship, Charles, to a fire in Swally Roads and soon thereafter resigned his EIC commission. See Wright, “The Noble Savage in Madagascar,” 113; Griffiths, A Licence To Trade; Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800, 69; and Chaudhuri, The English East India Company, 73. 24. See Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 170, 299. Kent Island was founded in August 1631 by William Claiborne and was used as a trading post with Native Americans. It was considered a part of Virginia until Lord Baltimore (who claimed ownership of Kent Island through a land grant) fought with Claiborne over ownership. After initially fleeing the island, Claiborne returned in 1644 and recaptured it, holding on to Kent Island for another two and a half years. Claiborne was defeated and finally gave up all claims to the island in 1657, making Kent Island part of Maryland. Robert Hunt, promoter of the Assada colonizing project near Madagascar in 1649–50, had been involved in the Old Providence Island colony near Nicaragua. A book-length study can be found in Kupperman, Providence Island; Games, The Web of Empire, 152. 25. See William Foster’s introduction to Sainsbury’s A Calendar of the Court Minutes, etc., of the EIC, 1635–1639, xv–xvi. 26. Quotations from Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645–46,” 241. Rupert soon left for the continent to join the Prince of Orange’s army and was eventually captured during the invasion of Westphalia. He was imprisoned in Austria until 1641. A book-length study can be found in Edinger, Rupert of the Rhine. Thomas Roe’s journal (1615) can be found in Churchill and Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. 1. 27. See Wright, “The Noble Savage of Madagascar,” 113; and Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645–46,” 242. 28. Gilman, “Madagascar on My Mind.” 29. See Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise. Madagascar has been at times referred to as the “Red Island” because of the distinctive colour of its laterite soil. 30. Arthus, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane languages, 72. 31. Davenant, Madagascar with other poems, ll. 425–27. 32. Blaine, “Epic, Romance, and History in Davenant’s ‘Madagascar.’ ” 33. Hamond, A Paradox, Prooving, That the Inhabitants of the Isle called Madagascar, or St. Lawrence, (in Temporall things) are the happiest People in the World.

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34. See Wright, “The Noble Savage of Madagascar,” 113. 35. Hawkesworth’s Voyages, based on the journals of Cook and Banks, was published in 1783, and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in 1833. On the literary aspects of Hamond’s pamphlet, see Wright, “The Noble Savage of Madagascar in 1640.” Montaigne’s and More’s work precede Hamond. 36. Until midcentury in the North American colony of Virginia, “seasoning” killed between one-half and three-quarters of the population, and Virginia did not see a natural increase until 1644. Edmund S. Morgan states emphatically that “Virginia and Maryland, like the sugar islands of the West Indies, would have expired without a steady flow of new workers” (American Slavery, American Freedom, 180). 37. Boothby, A Briefe Discovery, 5–6, 10. 38. The following account, unless otherwise noted, is derived from the surviving records of the Courteen settlement, British Library (BL), Additional Manuscripts 14,037, “A Booke of Consultations belonging to the Plantation of Madagascar, als the island of St. Lawrence.” Quote is from a copy of a general letter sent from Soldana Bay to England, January 1644, Add. Mss. 14,037. 39. In June 2007, the author spent two long days awaiting weather clearance to safely travel across Antongil Bay to the Masoala Peninsula via motorboat. Visibility was extremely limited. 40. Copy of a letter to England, August 18, 1645 BL, Add. Mss. 14,037, fols. 13–14. 41. See footnote 24 on sources for Madagascar history. 42. Smart to Kynnaston, Dec. 15, 1645, BL, Add. Ms. 14,037, fol. 17. 43. Ibid. 44. May 18, 1646, BL, Add. Ms. 14,037, fol. 26; and Aug. 20, 1646, BL, I/3/20, fol. 42. 45. See McDonald, “Pirates, Merchants, Settlers and Slaves”; McDonald, “ ‘A Man of Courage and Activity’ ”; and Deschamps, Les pirates à Madagascar aux XVII et XVIII siècles; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, chs. 4–5; Rogozinski, Honor among Thieves. 46. Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, 403–4. See note 4 for the authorship debates. 47. At least 130,000 Malagasy were sold into slavery between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. See Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 58. 48. John Darell, Strange News from th’Indies: or, East-India Passages further discovered (London, 1652), 4, quoted in Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645–46,” 240. 49. A very good recent study of imperial networks is Ward, Networks of Empire. Ward conceptualizes a vibrant “southeast Atlantic–southwest Indian Ocean zone,” with a focus on “sovereign networks,” positing the VOC as an “empire within a state” (rather than informal linkages); see esp. 14, 57, 134, and 173.

4. pirate-settlers of madagascar 1. The quote is from Sloane MSS 3674, “Journal of our Voyage . . . to the E. Indies in HMS Scarboro,” BL. The spine is mislabeled “Journal of a Voyage to the W. Indies,

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1703–1705.” The seas off the Cape are especially turbulent because of the confluence of three different major ocean currents: the warm Agulhas, which is the Western Boundary current of the Indian Ocean, collides with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the South Atlantic Gyre. There is “leakage” among the three currents, so all the world’s oceans do blend into one. 2. These concepts are developed in chapter 1; see also EAP 524/1/3/5: St Helena Records (1696–1699), BL. 3. See appendix for names and dates of vessels. Details of the Cygnet and Delight are found in previous chapters. 4. Robert Ritchie, for example, acknowledges that the pirates helped create a unique era in Madagascar history, but he elides the colonial complexity of these settlements and the fundamental role of the Malagasy in stating, “They were only an offshoot of the buccaneer raids in the Indian Ocean” (Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, 85). A fuller treatment is given in Bialuschewski, “Pirates, Slavers, and the Indigenous Population in Madagascar, c. 1690–1715.” 5. On the Cape especially, see Ward, Networks of Empire, ch. 4. 6. At least one contemporary eyewitness remarked that ships could not enter the harbor without “warping,” i.e., hauling the vessel on a line fastened to a pile, dock, or anchor. See Deposition of Francisco Domingo, Dec. 20, 1699, HCA, 1/98, fols. 24–25, 265, PRO. The author completed field research on the island in June–July 2007, and this description of Saint Mary’s (Île Sainte-Marie) is based on personal observations as well as contemporary sources. A causeway has been built cutting off access between the lagoon and the open ocean. 7. Deposition of Samuel Perkins, Southwell MSS, fol. 57, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. 8. Unless otherwise noted, the following account is based on the Dep. of Baldridge, May 5, 1699, Colonial Office Records (CO) 5/1042, PRO. 9. Deposition of Samuel Burgess, HCA 1/98, fol. 43, PRO. For the career of Burgess, see Ritchie, “Samuel Burgess, Pirate.” 10. Bellomont to Lords of Trade and Plantation, Aug. 24, 1699, Kidd Papers, MHS. Lest we single out New York for drunkenness, the House of Burgesses in Virginia declared, “A Duty . . . raised upon liquors imported into the . . . colony would be the most easie means that can be found out for the better support of that government” (Journal of the House of Burgesses, April 29, 1699, CO 5/1411, PRO). 11. See list of pirate and merchant ships in appendix. 12. The Board of Trade, fearing the creation of a pirate state, reported 1,500 men, 40–50 guns, and 17 ships at the settlement on Saint Mary’s alone. See Representation of the Board of Trade, January 17, 1698, CO 324/6, fols. 222–25, PRO. 13. Deposition of Adam Baldridge, May 5, 1699, 2201–5, CO 5/1042, PRO; Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” 550–51; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 37–38; Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 363. 14. For the death match, see Deposition of Samuel Perkins, in Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, 177; and Kupperman, Appleby, and Banton,

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eds., Calendar of State Papers (CSP), Aug 25, 1698, Item 771, Vol. 16 (1697–1698), 403–4, CO 323/2, No. 131, PRO. 15. May 5–7, 1698, Flying Post, Burney Papers, BL. The author has found numerous examples of alcohol-related violence in contemporaneous London newspapers. The following example is representative: “Two gentlemen quarreled at an alehouse in Leather Lane near Holborn, where one was killed, and the other was taken and is committed to Newgate,” Oct. 5, 1700, Post Boy, Burney Papers, BL. See Rabin, “Drunkenness and Responsibility for Crime in the Eighteenth Century”; a broader study is Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800. 16. Minutes of the Trade and Plantation Board (Whitehall), Feb. 17, 1697/8, CO 391/10, fol. 432, PRO. Finlinson was a seaman aboard Frederick Philipse’s vessel, the Charles, when he visited Saint Mary’s in 1693. 17. Deposition of Adam Baldridge, May 1699, CO 5/1042, PRO; Deposition of Samuel Perkins, Aug. 25, 1698, Southwell MSS, fol. 57; Extract of Blacon Deposition, Minutes of the Board of Trade & Plantations, Aug. 9, 1698, Southwell MSS, fol. 53; Extract of William Kidd, Aug. 24, 1699, Kidd Papers, Vol. 2, MHS. 18. Kidd Papers, Vol. 2, fol. 187, MHS. Bourbon is now known as Réunion Island, and Maurice is Mauritius (also known as Île de France in the eighteenth century). They are still collectively known as the Mascarene islands. 19. Frederick Philipse to Samuel Burgess, June 9, 1698, HCA 1/98, fols. 135–41, 218–24, PRO. 20. Dep. of Baldridge, May 5, 1699, CO 5/1042, fols. 2201–5, PRO. 21. Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (NYCD), 4:447. 22. Hodges, Root and Branch, 40. Michael Gomez argues that some Malagasy slaves were Muslim (Black Crescent, 140). 23. Van Tyle was a New York merchant of Dutch origins who sailed to Madagascar with the pirate Captain Hoar. See CSP, Item 740 xii, Vol. 17 (1699), 407; and Johnson, “Of Captain Howard,” in A General History of the Pyrates, 492; Hodges, Root and Branch, 40; Johnson, “Of Captain Cornelius,” in A General History of the Pyrates, 605. 24. On the origins of this symbol, see Rediker, “ ‘Under the Banner of King Death,’ ” 222–23. 25. Based on author’s field research in Île Sainte-Marie, including oral interviews with local villagers in June–July 2007. 26. Deposition of Joseph Wheeler (cooper), Dec. 11, 1699, HCA 1/98, fol. 3, 263, PRO. 27. Mariner’s Share Agreement, Jan. 11, 1696, HCA 1/98, fol. 73, PRO. 28. Details of the Pelican found in Wheeler’s deposition, and Deposition of Michael Hicks, Dec. 19, 1699, HCA 1/98, fol. 256, PRO. 29. Last Will and Testament of Joseph Jones, May 9, 1698, HCA 1/98, fols. 108–9, PRO. The handwriting on Hicks’s deposition appears to match that of Joseph Jones’s will, so Hicks, as the executor of Jones’s will, was also its recorder.

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30. Letter from Thomas Bale to Josiah Burchett, July 1, 1702, ADM 1/3666, fol. 139, 352, PRO. Culliford mutinied aboard the East Indiaman Mocha, killing the captain, taking over the ship, and converting her to a pirate. He was later arrested but received a pardon when he testified against Kidd and Burgess. 31. Quote from Narrett, “Dutch Customs of Inheritance, Women, and the Law in Colonial New York City,” 32. 32. Kelly was taken into custody by Governor Bellomont, who ordered multiple eyewitness affidavits to verify that Kelly had been circumcised “not after the manner of the Jews.” Kelly eventually escaped from prison in New York in 1699 with the help of local merchants. See Bellomont to Board of Trade, October 20, 1699, in Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, 4:591–95; and Bellomont to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Nov. 29, 1699, incl. affidavits, CSP, Item 1011, i–iii, Vol. 17 (1699), 551–59. 33. Johnson, “Of Captain Avery,” in A General History of the Pyrates, 59; “Narrative of Mr. Henry Watson, who was taken prisoner by the pirates, 15 August, 1696,” Feb. 14, 1698, CSP, Item 224, Vol. 16 (1697–1698), 106–8. 34. Examination of Samuel Perkins, Aug, 25, 1698, Southwell MSS, fol. 57. 35. See Cole, Forget Colonialism?, 37–38; and Sylla, “Les Malata,” 19–32. 36. See Brown, A History of Madagascar, 75–83; Cole, Forget Colonialism?, 37–38; Berg, “The Sacred Musket,” 265–67; Ellis, “Tom and Toakafo.” Though the foundation disintegrated, the second-largest “ethnic” group in Madagascar today calls itself the Betsimisaraka. 37. Brown, A History of Madagascar, 80. See also Ellis, “Tom and Toakafo.” Capt. Johnson’s chapters in the General History on Tew and the fictional French pirate Misson include an elaborate telling of mixed European pirate and Malagasy communities spread throughout Madagascar. Most scholars, myself included, agree that Johnson’s depiction of Tew at Madagascar is fictional. Tew’s death was corroborated by other accounts, including the depositions of Adam Baldridge and Samuel Perkins. 38. Piracy Destroy’d, 2. A book-length account can be found in Ritchie, Captain Kidd; Khan, “Capture of a Royal Ship”; see also Eacott, “Making an Imperial Compromise,” 735, 740–41. 39. Depositions of John Graham and Richard Brookes, August 24, 1698, ADM 1/1588/8, PRO. 40. Quote found in “Remarks on Madagascar in order to make an advantage of Settlement” (1716), C 108/416, PRO; other examples include Memorial of Marquis of Carmarthen, June 2, 1709, PC 1/2/169, PRO; Bowrey MSS M3041/3(iii), (1711), Guildhall Library, London; Capt. Jonathan Breholt Memorial for Lord Bridgewater, Ellesmere MSS 9179 (undated), HL; see also Bialuschewski, “Thomas Bowrey’s Madagascar Manuscript of 1708.” 41. CO 324/6, CO 323/2, CO 391/10–11, ADM 1/36666, fol. 100, HCA 1/98, fol. 28, PRO. 42. Logs of the Hastings, ADM 51/3859, of the Angelsea, ADM 51/4114, and of the Lizard, ADM 51/3886, PRO.

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43. Log of the Scarborough (1703–04), Sloane MSS, 3674, fol. 22, BL. 44. Downing, A Compendious History of the Indian Wars, 81, 92–93 (emphasis added). 45. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 92; see also Curtin, CrossCultural Trade in World History.

5. seafaring slaves and freedom in the indo-atlantic world 1. This account is drawn from Frederick Philipse to Cornelius Jacobs and Samuel Burgess, January 11, 1697, High Court of Admiralty Records (HCA), 1/98, Part I, fols. 75–76, Public Records Office, London (PRO). Philipse stated he was unsure whether three or four years had elapsed since the escape, and that Jack was fluent in both Dutch and English. In subsequent orders to Burgess written in 1699, he repeated his desire for Jack to be found—and stated that Jack had escaped five years earlier. See Philipse’s Private Orders to Capt. Burgess (Margaret), HCA 1/98, Part II, fol. 147, PRO. 2. It must be noted that the documentary evidence on the slaves is far more fragmentary than that on merchants or even pirates. Some documents, like the ship’s ledger, merely list the slaves among the crew. This information may appear inadequate, but the very existence of a record that lists slaves among the crew, especially their names and occupations, is a veritable bonanza to historians working in this field. Other documents, particularly the letters and instructions composed by Frederick Philipse and other merchants to their captains and factors, provide much greater detail about the central role played by maritime slaves in this network. Historians like Jeffrey Bolster and, more recently, Emma Christopher and Stephanie E. Smallwood, have documented the role of black sailors, slave-ship crews, and the experience of the Middle Passage; their work stands as a comparative framework for this chapter. See Bolster, Black Jacks; Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807; Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic”; Rediker, The Slave Ship. 3. The following account is based on Philipse to Burgess, Jul. 29, 1697, HCA I/98, fol. 84, PRO; and Philipse to Burgess, June 10, 1698, HCA I/98, fols. 156–57, PRO. 4. For one such harrowing firsthand account, see Walling, “The Wonderful Providence of God Exemplified in the Preservation of William Walling.” 5. Rip Van Dam, Brandt Schuyler, Thomas Wenham (owners) to Capt. Revelly, June 4, 1698, HCA 1/98, fols. 166–67, PRO; Owners to John Renslare, June 28, 1698, HCA 1/98, fol. 168, PRO. 6. Philipse to Burgess, Jul. 29, 1697, HCA I/98, fol. 84, PRO. 7. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 60; Bolster, Black Jacks, 33. 8. A parenthetical notation beside Marramitta’s name in the ledger, written in Philipse’s hand, states “my negore.” Acct. of Seamen’s Wages (Margaret), HCA I/98, fols. 98–101, PRO; Vaughn, Creating the Creole Island, 105, 111–12; Campbell, “Labour and Transport Problems in Imperial Madagascar.”

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9. Bolster, Black Jacks, 30. “Retired pirate passengers” refers to the pirate-settlers of Madagascar who grew tired of the island and wished to return to New York or other Atlantic colonies or seaports. 10. Philipse to Burgess, Feb. 25, 1695, HCA 1/98, fols. 57–58, 135–41, PRO; Dep. of Adam Baldridge, May 5, 1699, and Exam. of Moses Dawson, Dec. 1699, HCA 1/98, fols. 15–17, 264. 11. Average wages found in Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 123; see also Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 364; and Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 138–39. 12. Seventeenth-century blacks were not unknown on privateers. For a black privateer in Boston in 1694, see Bolster, Black Jacks, 12. Tony, a New York slave and “a very good sailor,” stowed away aboard a Royal Navy ship in 1710 and was safely transferred to England. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 124. 13. For the Cygnet’s cruise touching both South America and the Philippines, see Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), reprinted in Dampier’s Voyages. 14. Lepore, New York Burning, 161; Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741, 116. Historians continue to debate the events surrounding the fires set in New York in 1741 . 15. Philipse to Burgess, Feb. 25, 1695, HCA 1/98, Part I, fols. 57–58, PRO. The average sale price of a healthy male slave in New York in 1687 was 16 and rose to 40 in 1700, but did not reach 60 until 1720—twenty-five years after this letter was composed. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 27. 16. Philipse to Burgess, Feb. 25, 1695, HCA 1/98, Part I, fols. 57–58, PRO. In an interesting inversion, Philipse signed the letter, “your friend and servant.” 17. Letter of Freedom, Dec. 30, 1696, HCA 1/98, Part I, fol. 72, PRO. 18. Private Orders to Burgess (Margaret), HCA 1/98, Part II, fols. 145–50, PRO. The Margaret left New York in June 1698. 19. Acct. of Seamen’s wages, Margaret (1698), HCA I/98, fols. 98–101, PRO; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 122–23. 20. Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland, 55. 21. This section is based on the Deposition of Francisco Domingo, Dec. 20, 1699, HCA 1/98, fols. 24–25, 265, PRO. 22. Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of America; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 162; Rogozinksi, Honor among Thieves, 9; Flying Post, July 4, 1700, Burney Papers, BL. 23. “Dep. of Franciscoe Domingoe,” Dec. 20, 1699, HCA 1/98, fols. 24–25, PRO. 24. See note 1 above on Philipse’s orders to his captains. 25. See Vetare, Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills, 21. The loss of one-third of the human cargo aboard the Charles was well above the 10–15 percent median average for slave mortality rates during the Middle Passage. 26. Some important works on the transference of African cultures to the Americas include Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture; Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World; and Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks.

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27. On slave-naming patterns, see Thornton, “Central African Names and African American Naming Patterns”; Handler and Jacoby, “Slave Names and Naming in Barbados, 1650–1830.” For slave names in New York, see Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 36; and Lepore, New York Burning, 24, 37, 43–44. 28. Over 70 percent of deep-sea sailors were between these ages, the median age being twenty-five. See Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 12–13, 299. 29. John Steedham was one such trader, and he penned the following poem: “Upon beholding her / He could but ill restrain / Himself from crying out, / O! Blossom of my choice, what woman gave you birth / In this barbaric land? . . . / Had God united us / In matrimonial bonds, / How happy we could be / We have discovered: Alas, it cannot / (For reasons) come to pass” (cited in Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 50). On the development of creole culture in Angola, see Miller, Way of Death, chs. 8–9; on creolization in general, see Berlin, “From Creole to African.” 30. See Matson, Merchants and Empire, 77; Scharf, History of Westchester County, 2:12. For Barbados slave figures, see author’s slave table chart. 31. The figures on the textile trade are found in Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 23; and Klein, “Economic Aspects of the EighteenthCentury Atlantic Slave Trade,” 292. A proposed amendment by a free trader to a 1698 bill regulating the African trade noted that “painted calicoes [were] the most proper goods to purchase negroes.” Ellesmere MSS (undated, 1698), fol. 9610, HL. 32. The voyages are in Eltis, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 21382, 24313. The vessel’s owner is not named. See also Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 360. 33. The pirate Robert Culliford’s admission of the bribe was made while imprisoned at Newgate and can be found in ADM 1/3666, fol. 100, 255, Oct. 2, 1701, PRO. For a denial of the bribery charges, see Deposition of John Evans, Jan. 1698, CO 5/1042, fol. 297/2, PRO. Evans claimed that Edward Taylor denied ever speaking to Fletcher “in his whole lifetime” and any testimony indicating otherwise was made under duress. Fletcher’s detailed answer to these allegations can be found in his Letter to the Lords of Trade, June 22, 1697, in Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (NYCD), 4:274. See also Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 356. 34. Philipse to Burgess, Feb. 25, 1695, HCA 1/98, fols. 43, 57–58, PRO. 35. See chapter 3 regarding the origin of the first Madagascar inhabitants and the later European settlements. 36. See McDonald, “ ‘A Man of Courage and Activity,’ ” 17–19, 23; Brown, A History of Madagascar, 75–83; Cole, Forget Colonialism?, 37–38; Berg, “The Sacred Musket,” 265–67; Campbell, “The Structure of Trade in Madagascar, 1750–1810,” 121, 123; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 118. 37. Letter from Peter Delanoy relative to Governor Fletcher’s Conduct, June 13, 1695, NYCD, 4:223. 38. Coddington Narrative, Nov. 27, 1699, CO 5/1259, fols. 205–6, PRO (emphasis added). Coddington added that the word among the colonials was that “the people there [the Red Sea region] were infidels and it was no sin to kill them.”

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39. Inventory of Roger Baker (1704), Historical Documents Collection, Queen College, New York City, cited in Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 117–18. 40. Post Man, Sept. 27–30, 1701, Burney Papers, BL. 41. Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland, 55. 42. Morris, “Philipse of Philipsburgh,” 26. 43. Quotes are from Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, xxi, 340. 44. This useful admonition is given in Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland, 203. 45. Bolster, Black Jacks, 26. 46. Sparks, Two Princes of Calabar, 87. 47. See Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade.” Curtin argues convincingly that the horrific death rates among Europeans on the West African coast necessitated the use of local laborers. 48. See Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, 226–31 (quote on 226); Sparks, Two Princes of Calabar, 10, 33, 70, 84, 86–88; Bolster, Black Jacks, 51–55. 49. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 116. It does not appear that the slaves described here are included in Goodfriend’s estimate. 50. Bolster, Black Jacks, 51. 51. An apothecary, Mr. Willis, requested 9, 8s., 10p. for treating the lascars. Ltrs. from Mr. Major to Navy Bd., Oct. 31, 1750, Nov. 20, 1750, and Dec. 8, 1750; Ltr. from Joseph Peyton to Major, Dec. 4, 1750; Ltrs. from Dan Devers to Navy Bd., Dec. 6, 1750, and Dec. 24, 1750, ADM B/143, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. 52. Larson, “Enslaved Malagasy and ‘Le Travail De La Parole’ in the Pre-Revolutionary Mascarenes”; see also Allen, “The Constant Demand of the French.” 53. Cited in Tobin, Captain Bligh’s Second Chance, 40. 54. Worden, “Revolt in Cape Colony Slave Society,” 11. 55. Andrew Alexander, “Shipboard Slave Uprisings on the Malagasy Coast.” 56. Platt, “The East India Company,” 555–56. 57. Winterbottom, “Introduction to Seventeenth Century Records in the St. Helena Archives,” 6–8. 58. Logan, “The British East India Company and African Slavery in Benkulen, Sumatra, 1687–1792,” 339–42, 347. 59. Riddell, “Before the Conquest,” 263. 60. Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 25151; Bradstreet to T&P, May 8, 1680, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections., 3rd Ser., VIII, 337; Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 3:14–15; Desrochers, “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781,” 645. 61. NYCD, 4:304, 319, 325, 388–89; Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 3:438. This ship must have traded at Madagascar, because her master gave affidavits that he had not been in RAC territory and further gave security for any claims the company might make against him. 62. Archives of NJ, 1st ser., XIII, 82, 84; CSP, 1685–1686, 220, both cited in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America. On slavery in New Jersey, see Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North.

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63. See Gomez, Black Crescent, 140. 64. Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 25683. 65. This is surely among the more horrific details of the slave trade. On mortality rates overall, see Klein et al., “ Transoceanic Mortality.” 66. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas, 65–66; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 40–41. See also Salley, “The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina”; and esp. Heyward, Seed from Madagascar; Wood, Black Majority, 57. For a work that discounts the Malagasy transfer, see Carney, Black Rice, esp. ch. 5. 67. Stede and Gascoigne to the RAC, Mar. 22, 1678/9, Stede and Gascoigne to the RAC, Barbados, Apr. 9, 1681 (from T70, PRO), quoted in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 1:93, 101. 68. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas, 65–66. The best study of Barbados in this period remains Dunn, Sugar and Slaves. 69. See Handler and Pohlmann, “Slave Manumissions and Freedmen in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” 401. 70. Probate Inventory of Nicholas Cransbrough, Jan. 1690/91, Vol. 3. fol. 384, Port Royal Probate Inventories, available at Donny L. Hamilton, The Port Royal Project, http://nautarch.tamu.edu/portroyal/archives/. Nicholas was the brother of Oliver Cransborough, who captained at least two Indo-Atlantic slave voyages to Madagascar in the 1680s aboard the Margarett of New York. See Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 21382 and 24313. 71. Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 28043, indicates a Massachusetts slaver that purchased 149 Malagasy slaves, selling 126 in Jamaica in 1679 (cited in Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” 558). There are various reports of Jamaican vessels loaded with Madagascar slaves in the London newspapers; see, for example, The Amity, Post Man, June 16–18, 1698, Burney Papers, BL. 72. The “Madagascan” leader was killed by Cudjoe and his band incorporated. Kopytoff, “The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies,” 293; Kopytoff, “The Development of Jamaican Maroon Ethnicity,” 38; Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 299; Hardyman, “The Madagascar Slave-Trade to the Americas,” 517; Mitchell, “The Maroons of Accompong”; Gardner, History of Jamaica, 97. 73. Eltis, ed., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 77050, 77052, 76203, 76158, 77047, 78951; “Minutes from the Court of the South Sea Co. Directors,” May 16, 1716, in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 2:207–8, 263, 322. 74. Palmer, Human Cargoes. 75. Allen, “Satisfying the ‘Want for Labouring People’”; Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic”; Kusimba, “Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa”; Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’”; Alpers, “A Complex Relationship”; J. Alexander, “Islam, Archaeology and Slavery in Africa”; Alpers, “Recollecting Africa”; Manning, “The Slave Trade”; ClarenceSmith, ed., The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century. 76. See Campbell, “The Structure of Trade in Madagascar, 1750–1810,” 121, 123.

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conclusion 1. Information from author’s field research in Mauritius (June 2007). Le Morne is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The maroon communities and the fear they instilled in the European settler populations can be tracked in Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island, 4–19. 2. Pearson, Pilgrimage to Mecca; McPherson, The Indian Ocean, 124–25, 129, 146; Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 6, 128–31. 3. Letter from Peter de La Noy relative to Governor Fletcher’s Conduct, June 13, 1695, in Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (NYCD), 4:223; and Col. Fletcher’s Answers to the Complaints Against Him, Dec. 24, 1698, NYCD, 4:447. See Kupperman, Appleby, and Banton, eds., Calendar of State Papers, Gilbert Nelson to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Nov. 4, 1700, Item 903, Vol. 18 (1700), 632–33, CO 37/3, No. 45 and CO 38/5, 132–35; Remonstrance of William Outerbridge and others to Lt. Gov. Bennett, Item 1014 xxxix, Vol. 21 (1702–1703), 622–23, Item 1014 xl, Vol. 21 (1702–1703), 623; Deposition of Gilbert Nelson, Item 1014 xliv, Vol. 21 (1702–1703), 624; Deposition of Capt. Samuel Stone, Item 1014 xlviii, Vol. 21 (1702–1703), 624; and Mr. Larkin to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Jan. 26, 1703, Item 237, Vol. 21 (1702–1703), 154–56; McDonald, “A Man of Courage and Activity,” 18. 4. Bellomont to Lords of Trade, May 8, 1698, NYCD, 4:320. See McDonald, “A Man of Courage and Activity,” 19; and Johnson, “Of Captain Tew,” in A General History of the Pyrates, 439. 5. Fletcher to the Lords of Trade, June 22, 1697, NYCD, 4:275. The quote was a perceptive insight into the debacle that befell Captain Kidd. 6. See, for example, Anne Perotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor: Power and Law on the Seas, 1450–1850,” in Pennell, Bandits at Sea, 27. 7. See Platt, “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade,” 552–53. 8. Sir William Foster, ed., The Red Sea and Adjacent Countries at the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Hakluyt Society, 1949), xix, 69–70. 9. Flying Post, June 10, 1699, Burney Papers, BL. 10. Frederick Philipse, Private Orders to Samuel Burgess, June 1698, HCA 1/98, fols. 145–50, PRO; Deposition of Theophilus Turner, June 8, 1699, CO 5/714, 369–73, PRO. Kidd would later allege that the “mutineers” aboard the Adventure Galley stole his chest, including the ship’s journal, from Welch’s fortified house at Saint Mary’s. Kidd’s Narrative, July 3, 1699, Kidd Papers, 153–64, MHS. 11. Quotes from NYCD, 4:304; Weaver to Boards of Trade, Sept. 27, 1698, NYCD, 4:384; Bellomont to Lords of Trade, May 8, 1698, NYCD, 4:303. 12. Leamon, “Governor Fletcher’s Recall,” 542. 13. Bellomont to Lords of Trade, May 8, 1698, and July 1, 1698, NYCD, 4:309, 359. 14. Lords of Trade to Bellomont, Mar. 21, 1698, NYCD, 4:299. On the legal changes during this time frame, see Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, ch. 4; Ritchie, Captain

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Kidd, 127–59; Rubin, The Law of Piracy, 66–104; and Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade,” 32–34. 15. This section is based on Judd, “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade,” 371–74; and Ritchie, “Samuel Burgess, Pirate,” 125–28. For Lowth’s malfeasance, see Report from the Admiralty, Feb. 4, 1703, ADM 1/3666, fol. 430, PRO. 16. The account of Burgess’s death can be found in Johnson, The General History of the Pyrates, 510. 17. Report of the Board of Trade on the Affairs of the Province of New York, Oct. 19, 1698, NYCD, 4:390. 18. Flying Post, Nov. 5, 1700. 19. Quote is found in Earle, The Pirate Wars, 208. Marcus Rediker estimates that between 400 and 600 pirates were executed between 1716 and 1726. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 283. 20. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 50. 21. See Frost, The Global Reach of Empire. 22. The archaeological remnants of a Philipse well remain preserved on Pearl Street in the Financial District in downtown Manhattan. On the role of the wells during the conspiracies, see Lepore, New York Burning, ch. 5. James DeLancey, eldest son of Stephen DeLancey, presided over the 1741 trials. 23. For smuggling and contraband trading during the Seven Years’ War, see Truxes, Defying Empire. On the transformational growth of American capital, see Fichter, So Great a Proffit (the discussion of American prisoners is found on p. 84; for EIC complaints followed by cooperation and investment, see pp. 95, 142).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

manuscripts United Kingdom Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford, England Rawlinson MSS British Library, London (BL) Additional Manuscripts (Add. Mss.) Burney Papers India Office Records Marine Records Original Correspondence Saint Helena Records (Endangered Archives Program, EAP) Sloane MSS Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England Admiralty Records (ADM) Southwell MSS Guildhall Library, London Bowrey MSS Public Records Office, London (PRO) Admiralty Records (ADM) Chancery Records (C) Colonial Office Records (CO) High Court of Admiralty Records (HCA) Probate Records Treasury Records (T)

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United States James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Journal of Charles Wylde Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (HL) Blathwayt MSS Ellesmere MSS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (MHS) Kidd Papers Massachusetts Historical Society Collections New-York Historical Society, New York (NYHS) Gilder Lehrman Collection (GLC) Johannes De Peyster MSS Robert Livingston’s Journal MSS Van Cortlandt MSS

newspapers (burney collection) The Flying Post, London, 1698–1701, British Library The Post Boy, London, 1698–1701, British Library The Post Man, London, 1698–1701, British Library

published primary sources For background reading on early English expansion, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1590), which includes many episodes of state-sponsored and privately sponsored piracy, is indispensable. The exploits of Henry Morgan and the Caribbean buccaneers are detailed firsthand in John Exquemelin, History of the Bucaniers of America (1684–1685). Basil Ringrose’s journal account is appended to the second English edition of Exquemelin’s History, and segments of the buccaneers’ expeditions against the Spanish can also be found in William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), and Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of America (1699). Woodes Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712) is an excellent contemporary account and a probable source for the Johnson General History. John Atkins’s A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies (1735) is explicitly cited in subsequent editions of A General History, which was amended and edited as updated information filtered back to the author. A firsthand account of early eighteenth-century Madagascar is Madagascar, or, Robert Drury’s journal, during fifteen years’ captivity on that island; and a further description of Madagascar by the Abbé Alexis Rochon. Arthus, Gotthard. Dialogues in the English and Malaiane languages: or, Certaine common formes of speech, first written in Latin, Malaian, and Madagascar tongues, by the diligence and painfull endeuour of Master Gotardus Arthusius, a Dantisker, and now faithfully translated into the English tongue by Augustine Spalding Merchant, for

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their sakes, who happily shall hereafter vndertake a voyage to the East-Indies. London, 1614. Atkins, John. A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies in His Majesty’s Ships, The “Swallow” and “Weymouth” . . . London: Caesar Ward and Richard Chandler, 1735. Barlow, Edward. Barlow’s Journal: Of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East and West Indiamen and Other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703. Transcribed by Basil Lubbock. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1934. Boothby, Richard. A Breife Discovery or Description of the Most Famous Island of Madagascar or St. Laurence in Asia neare unto East-India. London, 1646. Brodhead, John Romeyn. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York. Vols. 3–4. Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1853–1857. Cauche, François. Relation du voyage que François Cauche de Rouen a fait à Madagascar, isles adjacentes, & coste d’Afrique. Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1651. Churchill, Awnsham, and John Churchill. A Collection of Voyages and Travels . . . 6 vols. London: J. Walthoe, 1732. Columbus, Christopher. Journal of Christopher Columbus (during his First Voyage, 1492–93). Edited by Clements Markham. London: Hakluyt Society, 1892. Cook, James. Remarks on a Passage from the River Balise, in the Bay of Honduras, to Merida . . . (London, 1769); facsimile of original w/perspective by Muriel Haas. New Orleans: Midamere Press, 1935. Dampier, William. Dampier’s Voyages: Consisting of a New Voyage Round the World, a Supplement to the Voyage Round the World, two Voyages to Campeachy, a Discourse of Winds, a Voyage to New Holland, and a Vindication, in An Answer to the Chimerical William Funnell. Edited by John Masefield. 2 vols. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906. Danckaerts, Jasper. Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680. Edited by Bartlett Burleigh James and J. Franklin Jameson. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2001. Davenant, William. Madagascar with other poems. London, 1638. Dellon, Gabriel. A Voyage to the East Indies . . . w/abstract of Mons. de Rennefort’s History if the East Indies w/propositions for the improvement of the EIC. London: D. Browne, 1698. Donnan, Elizabeth, ed. Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America. 4 vols. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1930–1935. Downing, Clement. A compendious history of the Indian Wars; with an account of the rise, progress, strength, and forces of Angria the Pyrate. London, 1737. Drury, Robert. Madagascar, or, Robert Drury’s Journal. London: M. Sheepey, J. Wren, and T. Lownds, 1750. Eltis, David, ed. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Exquemelin, Alexander O. The Buccaneers of America. Trans. Alexis Brown. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1969. Flacourt, Étienne de. Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar. Edited by Claude Allibert. Paris: INALCO Karthala, 1995 [1661].

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Essays and Articles Alexander, Andrew. “Shipboard Slave Uprisings on the Malagasy Coast: The ‘Meermin’ (1766) and ‘De Zon’ (1775).” Kronos: Journal of Cape History, no. 33 (2007): 84–111. Alexander, J. “Islam, Archaeology and Slavery in Africa.” World Archaeology 33, no. 1 (June 2001): 44–60.

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Greene, Jack and Philip Morgan, eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Handler, Jerome, and J. Jacoby. “Slave Names and Naming in Barbados, 1650–1830.” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (July 1996): 685–728. Handler, Jerome S., and John T. Pohlmann. “Slave Manumissions and Freedmen in Seventeenth-Century Barbados.” William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 3 (July 1984): 390–408. Hanna, Mark G. “The Pirates’ Nest: The Impact of Piracy on Newport, Rhode Island, and Charles Town, South Carolina, 1670–1740.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006. Hardyman, J. T. “The Madagascar Slave-Trade to the Americas (1632–1830).” Studia 11 (Jan. 1963): 501–21. . “Outline of the Maritime History of St. Augustine’s Bay.” Studia 11 (Jan. 1963): 315–41. Hoffman, Ronald, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Judd, Jacob. “Frederick Philipse and the Madagascar Trade.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1971): 354–74. Kent, R. K. “Madagascar and Africa: II. The Sakalava, Maroserana, Dady and Tromba before 1700.” Journal of African History 9, no. 4 (1968): 517–46. Khan, Khafi. “Capture of a Royal Ship: The English at Bombay.” in India in the Seventeenth Century: As Depicted by European Travellers, edited by J. N. Das Gupta, 233–38. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1916. Klein, Herbert. “Economic Aspects of the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade.” In The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, edited by J. D. Tracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Klein, Herbert S., Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz. “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective.” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Jan. 2001): 93–118. Kopytoff, Barbara Klamon. “The Development of Jamaican Maroon Ethnicity.” Caribbean Quarterly 22, nos. 2/3 (June–September 1976). . “The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies.” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (Apr. 1978): 287–307. Kusimba, Chapurukha M. “Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa.” African Archaeological Review 21, no. 2 (June 2004): 59–88. Larson, Pier M. “Enslaved Malagasy and ‘Le Travail De La Parole’ in the Pre-Revolutionary Mascarenes.” Journal of African History 48, no. 3 (2007): 457–79. Leamon, James S. “Governor Fletcher’s Recall.” William and Mary Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Oct. 1963): 527–42. Levitt, James H. “From Whence or Where Bound—the Role of the Customs and Naval Officers at Colonial New Jersey’s Ports.” American Neptune 37, no. 4 (Oct. 1977): 262–75.

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Logan, Frenise A. “The British East India Company and African Slavery in Benkulen, Sumatra, 1687–1792.” Journal of Negro History 41, no. 4 (1956): 339–48. Lovejoy, Paul. “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis.” In Slave Trades, 1500–1800: Globalization of Forced Labour, edited by Patrick Manning. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996. Lydon, James G. “New York and the Slave Trade, 1700 to 1774.” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (Apr. 1978): 375–94. Main, Gloria. “Probate Records as Source for Early American History.” William and Mary Quarterly 32 (1975): 88–99. Manning, Patrick. “The Slave Trade: The Formal Demography of a Global System.” Social Science History 14, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 255–79. Mapp, Paul W. “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives.” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Oct. 2006): 713–24. Markell, Ann B. “Building on the Past: The Architecture and Archaeology of Vergelegen.” Goodwin Series, vol. 7, Historical Archaeology in the Western Cape ( June 1993): 71–83. Mathew, David. “The Cornish and Welsh Pirates in the Reign of Elizabeth.” English Historical Review 39, no. 155 (July 1924): 337–48. McBride, J. David. “Contraband Traders, Lawless Vagabonds, and the British Settlement and Occupation of Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras.” X Marks the Spot: New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology, edited by Russell K. Skowronek and Charles R. Ewen. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. McCarthy, Michael. “HM Ship Roebuck (1690–1701): Global Maritime Heritage?” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 33, no. 1, (2004): 54–66. McCusker, John J. “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 295–321. McDonald, Kevin P. “Antigua.” In Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, edited by James Ciment, 1:106–8. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006. . “ ‘The Dream of Madagascar’: English Disasters and Pirate Utopias of the Early Modern Indo-Atlantic World.” In New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period, edited by Chloë Houston, 95–114. London: Ashgate, 2010. . “ ‘A Man of Courage and Activity’: Thomas Tew and Pirate Settlements of the Indo-Atlantic Trade World, 1645–1730.” Berkeley: University of California World History Workshop (2005), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tm078mp. . “ ‘A Parcell of Pirates in These Parts’: Reimagining Colonial New York, the Lost Settlement of St. Mary’s, Madagascar and the Triangle Trade (1645–1721).” Master’s thesis, Rutgers University, 2004. . “Pirates, Merchants, Settlers and Slaves: Making an Indo-Atlantic Trade World, 1645–1730.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2008.

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INDEX

Abeel, John, 52, 60 Acts of Trade, 46 Admiralty, English/British, 101, 128, 163n37 Adventure Galley (pirate ship), 152n74, 169n10 Africa, 31, 32, 54, 74, 105; Akan speakers, 109–10; Barbary pirates of North Africa, 42; East African coast slave raids, 122; European exploration around Atlantic coast of, 2; Indo-Atlantic trade network and, 4, 14; kingdom of Kongo, 109; populating of Madagascar and, 65; Portuguese colonial foothold in East Africa, 66; West African slave trade, 8, 10, 29, 41, 47, 50, 87, 108, 111, 115, 116 African Americans, 46, 83, 100 Akan speakers, 109–10 Albany, city of, 38, 43 Albemarle, Duke of, 25 alcohol, 84, 87, 88, 107, 161n10, 162n15 Algonquian peoples, 37–38 Amity (slave ship), 123–24, 168n71 Amurath III, Ottoman sultan, 64 Anglo-Dutch wars, 38, 45 antaloatra (“people from across the sea”), 65, 76 Antatsimo clans, 93 Antavarata, 93 Antigua, 20, 45, 149n29 Antill, Edward, 57 antiquity, pirates in, 17 Antongil Bay (Madagascar), xv map, 75, 86, 88, 89, 96, 160n39

Arab traders, 65 Arnold, Sion, 25, 35 Arthusius, Gotard, 71 asiento, 121 Assada colonizing project, 76, 159n24 Association Island (Tortuga), 18, 20 Atkins, John, 24 Atlantic Ocean, xiv map, 5, 69, 123 Atlantic studies, 4 Aurangzeb, Mughal emperor, 6, 95, 123 Australia, 29 avería tax, 17 Bahamas, 20, 25, 49 Baker, Roger, 113 Baldridge, Adam, 31, 35, 55, 106, 126, 163n37; attack on Baldridge’s fort, 89, 92, 93, 126; married to Malagasy woman, 92; on Saint Mary’s island, 85–86, 88–89 Barbados, 10, 18, 147n29; Carolina connection with, 119–120; first European settlement at, 68; slaves transported to, 30, 50, 109, 111, 120; Spring Head (Philipses’ property), 50, 111, 114 Barberie, John, 52, 56 Batchelor’s Delight (pirate ship), 28, 29, 31, 83, 108 Bayard, Nicholas, 52 Baymen, 23 Bay of Campeche, 22, 49 Beckford, William, 121 Beekman, William, 25, 49

197

198

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index

Beeston, governor of Jamaica, 55 Belize (British Honduras), 23, 123, 150n39 Bellomont, Lord (Richard Coote), 22, 31–32, 53, 56, 87, 127, 163n32; class animosity with Fletcher, 39–40, 153n5; Kidd sponsored by, 40, 51, 55; on Long Island as pirate haven, 58–59; mission to stamp out IndoAtlantic trade, 126; turn against Kidd, 51 Bencoolen (Sumatra), xv map, 10, 78, 130 Bermuda, 17–18, 44, 64, 81 Betinimena (“Covered with Red Mud”), 94 Betsimisaraka, 9, 92–94, 96–97, 122 Betty (“Indian slave”), 57 Bevis, John, 91 “beyond the line,” 14, 148n5 Black Bark (privateer), 112 Blathwayt, William, 128 Bond, John, 70 Boothby, Richard, 74, 79 Boston, city of, 10, 26, 78, 118 Boston Post Road, 46 Bourbon (Réunion), island of, 89, 116, 162n18 Boxer, Charles, 129 Bradstreet, 118 Braudel, Fernand, 33–34 Brazil, 75 Briefe Discovery or Description of Madagascar, A (Boothby), 74 Brindah, Dian, 75, 76, 77 Bruynvisch (slave ship), 18–19 buccaneers, 19, 20, 22, 24; brief flourishing of, 97; in Jamaica, 44; logwood cutting and, 49 Buckmaster, Edward, 58 Bueno, Joseph, 51, 52 Buenos Aires, city of, xiv map, 121, 151n51 Bullivant, Dr. Benjamin, 43 Burgess, Capt. Samuel, 31, 34, 55–56, 102; arrested by Lowth, 32–33, 113; commissions of, 55; contracts among pirates and, 35; death of, 128; on failure of Saint Augustine colony, 86–87; as former “pirate king,” 108; Philipse family network and, 50; Philipse’s orders to, 106, 109; privateering commission given to, 21, 22; trial of, 127, 163n30 Butterworth, Moses, 59 Calico Jack (“seafaring slave”), 9, 99–100, 105–6, 109–14, 116, 130 Calicut, city of, 2

Campen, Jan van, 19 Canary Islands, 32, 74 Cape Colony (South Africa), 93 Cape of Good Hope, 2–3, 32, 61, 91; British capture from the Dutch (1806), 129; as “Cape of Storms,” 2, 81, 161n1. See also South Africa Cape Town, 84 Cape Verde Islands, 32, 115 Caribbean region, 10, 13, 81, 82; buccaneer culture transferred to Madagascar, 83; privateers of, 45; Spanish colonies in, 17; as tropical extension of Atlantic, 62; wreck salvage in, 25 Carlisle, Earl of, 69 Carlyle, Thomas, 72, 160n35 Carolina, 20, 26, 119–120 Cartagena, Nicholas, 105–6, 111, 115, 116 cartaz system, 16 Carterell, John, 35 cattle raising and raiding, 67, 77, 87; by boucaniers of Hispaniola, 97; Saint Mary’s Massacre and, 89; wars over, 55, 85; as widespread practice in Madagascar, 75–76, 83 Cavendish, Thomas, 16 Charles (slave ship), 31, 50, 109, 162n16; mortality rate among human cargo, 165n25; Philipse as owner of, 112, 135 Charles, HMS, 112 Charles I, 70 Charles II, 25 Charleston (Charles Town), Carolina, 14, 45, 46, 120 Chesapeake colony, 70, 74. See also Virginia colony Claiborne, William, 69, 159n24 Clarendon, Earl of, 25 Clarke, Elizabeth, 57 Cloise, Peter, 108–9 Coates, Capt. Henry, 21–22, 111 Codringham, Thomas, 109 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 39 Coley, Capt. Robert, 91 Colleton, James, 45 colonization ventures, 5, 13, 15; Dutch, 18–19; English, 17–18, 44; failed colonizing attempts, 16; slave-trading piracy and, 17–19; as state-sponsored piracy, 7; utopian ideals and schemes, 61–62, 64, 71–74, 73 Columbus, Christopher, 2, 15, 29 commodity markets, 2

index Comoros Islands, 77, 122 Connecticut, 20, 26 Constantinople, 64 consumer desire, 5 contraband trading, 6, 8, 13, 15, 118, 130 contracts, 34 Cook, Capt. James, 29 Coote, Richard. See Bellomont, Lord (Richard Coote) Cornbury, Lord, 56 Cornelisen, Capt. John, 49 Coromantees, 110, 121 correspondences (letters), of pirates, 33–34, 56 Courteen, Sir William, 18, 68–69, 74, 75 Courteen, William, Jr., 69 Courteen’s Association, 68, 72, 79 cowrie shells, 8, 147n27 Cransborough, Capt. Oliver, 168n70 creoles, 110 Cromwell, Oliver, 19 cross-cultural interactions, 5, 14, 25, 81; aboard slave and pirate ships, 115; “custom of the country” in Madagascar, 96; marriages of Euro-American pirates and Malagasy women, 112; slave trade and, 85; zana malata children, 78 Cruger, John, 52, 53 Cuba, 19 Cudjoe, 121, 168n72 Culliford, Robert, 21, 91, 127, 163n30, 166n33 Cullins, Thomas, 53 Curaçao, 111 Cygnet (pirate ship), 28, 29, 30–31, 83, 106 Dampier, William, 25, 28–29, 30 Daniel, William, 125–26 Darien peninsula, 16 Davenant, Sir William, 72 Davis, Capt. Edward, 108 Dawson, Moses, 34, 35 Defoe, Daniel, 62, 78, 158n4. See also “Johnson, Capt. Charles” DeLancey, James, 54, 170n22 DeLancey, Stephen, 52, 53–54, 56, 170n22 DeLancey family, 7 Delaware Merchant (ship), 49 De Moor, Jan, 18 De Moor-Courteen (Anglo-Dutch company), 68–69, 159n21 DePeyster, Abraham, 56 Dervall, John, 50

.

199

Dialogues (Arthusius), 71–72 disease, 38, 76, 79, 88, 90, 97 Dongan, Governor, 25, 26, 43, 45–46 Dorrington, Cornelius, 34 Downing, Clement, 96 Dragon (ship), 69, 104 Drake, Sir Francis, 16, 29, 30 drugs, 2, 4 ducatoons (Dutch silver coins), 41 Dumbarton, HMS, 108 Dutch empire: Caribbean colonies, 111; encounters with Madagascar, 66, 67, 68; settlement of New York, 38; Spain as trading partner of, 26 Eagle (slave ship), 120 East India Act (1698), 125, 127 East India Company (EIC), 3, 16, 31, 87, 127; charter of, 41, 100; extralegal commissions to ships of, 33; Madagascar schemes and, 67–69, 70, 71, 72, 74; monopoly of, 42, 60, 72, 79, 125, 130; Mughal empire and, 6, 59, 69, 94, 98, 125; new (after 1698), 125, 126, 129; piracy committed by, 28; Saint Helena as outpost of, 84, 117; slaves provided for Caribbean sugar plantations, 120; slave trade and, 83, 100; trade routes, xiii map East India Company, Dutch. See Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) East India Company, French, 3, 54 East Indies, 15–16, 111 East Jersey colony, 45–46, 48, 126 Easton, “Honest” John, governor of Rhode Island, 124 Elfirth, Daniel, 18 Elizabeth I, Queen, 64 Elizabeth Stuart (the Winter Queen), 70, 72 Eltis, David, 115 English/British empire, 6, 59, 70, 79; asiento gained by, 121; colonies as predatory ventures, 81–82; Dutch mercantile wars with, 38, 45; imperial alliance with Spain, 13, 17; New York in possession of, 38–39; pirates hanged by authorities, 28, 151n65; protection of North American colonies, 42–43, 149n30; reliance on piracy against the Spanish, 44; shift in power from king to parliament, 129 English Channel, piracy in, 26, 27 Estado da India, 68, 82 ethnogenesis, 9, 92–98

200

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index

Europe, Western, 14, 65 Evans, Capt. John, 42–44, 153n6, 166n33 Evans, Jonathan, 58 Every, Henry, 20, 21, 25, 59, 112

gromettos, 115, 116 Grotius, Hugo, 16 Guianas, 61, 68 Gulf of Honduras, 49

Fancy (pirate ship), 20, 112 Fane, Capt. George, 56 Finlinson, John, 89, 162n16 Flacourt, Étienne de, 67 Fletcher, Benjamin, governor of New York, 32, 46, 51, 55, 58, 113; class animosity with Bellomont, 39–40, 153n5; Jacob (privateer ship) and, 112, 166n33; land grants to Captain Evans, 42; lawful protection given to pirates, 126; recalled as governor, 126; Tew and, 1, 11, 21–22, 90, 124; Trinity Church and, 52 Flypsen, Frederyck. See Philipse, Frederick Fort Caroline (La Florida), 16 Fort Dauphin (Madagascar), xv map, 53, 85, 156n53 Fortune (slave ship), 85 forum-shopping, 14, 39, 124 “Franck” (Francisco Domingo), 33, 107, 109, 115, 116 Frederick (ship), 54 Frederick V, Elector, 72 French, Philip, 51, 52, 56, 58 French empire, 16, 17; contest with England for imperial hegemony in North America, 39, 43; early encounters with Madagascar, 66, 67; Madagascar settlements and interest in, 75, 118; Madagascar slave trade and, 90; military value of pirates and, 22 Friendship (slave ship), 76 Frost (enslaved Malagasy woman), 120

Hakluyt, Richard, 16, 71 Halsey, Edward, 55 Hamilton, Governor, 59 Hamond, Walter, 72, 74 Hancock, David, 59, 60 Harburn, William, 64 Hardenbroek, Margaret, 31 Harley, Edward (Lord Treasurer), 25 Harris, Leslie, 46 Harrison (seaman aboard Margaret), 33 Hasket, Governor, 25 Hawkesworth, John, 72, 160n35 Hawkins, Sir John, 16, 17, 29 Heathcote, Caleb, 51, 52, 60 Henrietta (slave ship), 119 Hicks, Michael, 91–92, 162n29 Hicks, Thom, 101–3 Hispaniola, 19, 49, 97 Hoar, Captain, 21–22 Hoar, Nicholas, 33, 34, 35 homosexuality, 150n49 Honduras, 23, 123 Horne, Jacob, 7–8 Horne, Sarah, 7–8 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel, 70–71, 71 Hudson, Henry, 37 Huguenots, 53, 54 Hunt, Robert, 53, 69, 159n24

Galapagos Islands, 29 Gallardo Ferrara, Juan, 19 Gama, Vasco da, 2, 3, 76 Gascoigne, Stephen, 120 Gascoigne Galley (slave ship), 119 General History of the Pyrates, The (“Captain Johnson”), 78, 158n4, 163n37 gold, 4, 88 Gold Coast (Ghana), 109, 115 Goose Creek (Carolina), 45 Graham, James, 127 Green, Maj. Green, 112–13 Griffin, Admiral, 116 Griggs, Robert, 56

Iberian peninsula, 15, 151n59 Iberville, chevalier d,’ 43 indentured servitude, 70 India, 2, 14, 67 Indian Ocean, xv map, 14, 21, 69; Atlanticborn pirates in, 1; in Atlantic world history, 62; “new piracy” in, 28; as preferred hunting ground for pirates, 39; as world’s richest trading ground, 82 indigenous peoples, 15, 23, 37; Algonquian, 37–38; enslavement of, 64; Iroquois, 43; as noble savages, 62; rulers, 16; sailors, 5; utopian colonizing schemes and, 62; women in pirate settlements, 24–25 Indo-Atlantic trade network, 2, 3, 40–47, 84, 97; closure of, 116, 125; coastal littorals of, 14; as global network, 4; Madagascar

index pirates as linchpins of, 78; xiii map; Mughal India and, 59; New York merchants and, 51; Philipse as ringleader of, 108; Philipse family network and, 48; Portuguese monopoly of, 66; seafaring slaves in, 115; slaves as vital components in functioning of, 100, 114; slave trade and, 75 Iroquois peoples, 43 Islam, 2, 66, 92 ivory, 4, 157n74 Jackson, William, 18 Jacob (privateer), 86–87, 111–12 Jacobs, Capt. Cornelius, 106, 109 Jamaica, 23, 28, 53, 55, 85, 91, 104; act against pirates passed in, 127; as center of piracy and smuggling, 17; composition of population, 19–20; economic function of pirates in, 128; French-spread rumor about destruction of, 22; Jamaica–New York buccaneer/privateer nexus, 83; logwoodcutting settlements and, 49; merchants and buccaneers of Port Royal, 13, 20, 44–45; slaves transported to, 111, 120–21 James II, 25, 43 Jamestown colony, 44, 81 Jay, Augustus, 54 Jay, John, 54 Jenkins, Capt. Robert, 25, 151n50 Jenny (“Indian slave”), 57 jewels, 2, 4, 88 “Johnson, Capt. Charles,” 62, 78, 90, 92, 158n4. See also Defoe, Daniel Johnston, Lawrence, 92 Jones, Capt. Evan, 53 Jones, Joseph, 91, 162n29 Jope, John, 18 Joseph (cook aboard the Dragon), 104 Kelly, James (Gillam), 92, 163n32 Kendall, Miles, 18 Kent Island, Maryland, 159n24 Kidd, Capt. William, 21, 22, 28, 56, 59, 169n5; Bellomont’s sponsorship of, 32, 40, 51; execution of, 94, 96, 125; on Malagasy uprising against Baldridge, 89; on “mutineers” of the Adventure Galley, 169n10; as slave trader, 55; trial of, 108, 163n30; voyage to Madagascar, 152n74 King, John, 85 King George’s War, 128

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201

King William’s War (War of the League of Augsburg), 20, 21, 128 Kirby, Captain, 18 Kongo, kingdom of, 109 lançados (Afro-Portuguese traders), 115 Lancaster, James, 65 Lane, Anthony, 57 Lane, John, 57 Lansing, Robert, 52 Larinbey, Weybrand, 33, 34 Larmessin, Nicolas de, 95 lascars, 55, 116, 122 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 15 Lawrence (seaman aboard Margaret), 33 Lawrence, Richard, 55 legal documents, 7 legal theory, European, 16 Leggett, John, 53 Leisler, Gov. Jacob, 21, 50, 111 letters of marque, 13, 14 letters of reprisal, 13–14 Levant Company, 65 Lewis, Thomas, 52 Libertalia, 78 Lion (slave ship), 120 Little Ice Age, 42 Livingston, Philip, 52, 56 Livingston, Robert, 51 Lodwick, Charles, 51 logwood cutting, 15, 22–24, 25, 128, 129; Dampier and, 28, 29; Philipse family network and, 49 London, city of, 1, 34, 35, 43, 104, 119, 121; Bellomont and peerage of, 40; Board of Trade, 83, 118, 125, 128, 161n12; Courteen Association backers in, 79; East India trade and, 8, 41; Indo-Atlantic trade network and merchants of, 59–60; Kidd executed in, 55; literati of, 29; Marshalsea prison, 116, 127; newspapers in, 26–28, 114; New York merchants and, 51, 52, 53, 56; pirates tried in, 91, 113; political and economic power brokers of, 6; regulation of taverns in, 88, 162n15 Long Island, 34, 42, 50, 58–59 Long Island Sound, 43, 99 Lowstaff, HMS, 56 Lowth, Capt. Matthew, 32, 33, 35, 42; Margaret seized by, 91, 108, 109, 113; Philipse’s legal case against, 127–28

202

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index

Loyal Merchant (ship), 109, 113, 127 Ludlow, Gabriel, 52 Lurting, Robert, 51, 57 luxury goods, 2, 50, 66 Lynch, Anna, 52, 155n48 “lyon dollars,” 41, 42 Madagascar, 1, 8–10, 22, 24, 28, 57–60, 80; as base for Atlantic pirates, 12, 69; Bay settlements and, 25; Bellomont’s sponsorship of Kidd and, 40; in colonial imagination, 5, 9; communications with Atlantic world, 7, 33–36; difficulties in locating, 62, 157n3; disastrous English colonization attempt, 74–77; European colonizing schemes for, 8, 61–62, 69–71, 71, 96; first pirates to reach, 3; indigenous peoples and states, 65, 66, 67, 74, 76, 82; in Indo-Atlantic trade network, 4, 14, 42, 51; logwood settlements of America and, 24; map of, 86; monsoon cycle and, 30; New York connection to, 30–32, 47, 54, 56; origin of first inhabitants, 65, 68, 158n11; as the “Red Island,” 71, 112, 159n29; reputation as pirate haven, 9, 126; slave trade and, 41, 52–53, 66; Tew’s crew in, 19, 124; utopian colonizing literature about, 61–62, 64, 71–74, 73 “Madagascar” (Davenant), 72 Madagascar, pirate-settlers of, 8–9, 12, 81–84, 97–98, 161n4; Christian belief and practices among, 90–92; ideal location of Madagascar for activities of, 82; Malagasy women and, 83, 92, 97, 112; retired, 165n9. See also Saint Mary’s island Madagascar, the Richest and Most Fruitful Island in the World (Hamond), 73, 74 “Madagascar Jack.” See Calico Jack “Madagascar Portrait” (Van Dyck), 70–71, 71 Malabar, 3 Malagasy language, 65, 72, 117 Malagasy people/culture, 112; Antatsimo clans, 93; Antavarata, 93; Antongil Bay clans, 88; Betinimena, 94; Betsimisaraka, 9, 92–94, 96–97, 122; cattle raiding tradition of, 83; Christian conversion of, 90; pirate-settlers massacred by, 89; swapping of slaves and cattle, 85–86; Tsikoa ancestries, 93, 94; Zafiraminia, 66, 67; zana malata, 78, 93, 122. See also Betsimisaraka; slaves, Malagasy

Manhattan, island of, 38, 38, 43, 44, 46 Maramitta, 33 Mare Liberum (Grotius), 16 Margaret (pirate-slave ship), 7, 31–36, 53; as floating cross-cultural space, 115; “Franck” as cooper aboard, 107; Hicks (Thom) and, 102; Marramitta as cook aboard, 103–5; seized by Capt. Lowth, 91, 108, 109, 113, 115, 127–28 Margarett (slave ship), 31, 111, 168n70 Mariner’s Adventure (slave ship), 118, 167n61 maritime empires, early modern, 12 Markham, Gov. William, 21, 150n33 maroons, 19, 123 Marramitta, 103–5, 107, 115, 164n8 Marshalsea prison (London), 116, 127 Marston, Thomas, 52 Martha’s Vineyard, 26 Martinique, 22 Maryland colony, 159n24, 160n36 Mascarene islands, 89, 116, 155n48, 162n18; Malagasy language in, 117; plantations in, 123; slaving expeditions in, 93 Mase, Capt. William, 112–13 Mason, William, 21 matelotage custom, 83 Matson, Cathy, 51–52 Matthews, Commodore, 96 Mauritius (Maurice, Île de France), island of, 70, 89, 103, 116, 162n18; Malagasy slaves’ escape attempts in, 123; as refuge of “Red Sea Men,” 129 Meade, Patrick, 155n48 Medway, William, 116, 122 Meermin (slave ship), 117 merchants, 4, 80, 100; in Carolina colony, 45; English, 64–65, 67, 71; in London, 60; of Port Royal (Jamaica), 45; Venetian, 2, 64; wars at sea and, 129 merchants, New York, 5, 6, 7; English and Dutch, 46, 51; of French descent, 46, 51, 53–54; Indo-Atlantic trade network and, 40–41; Jewish, 52; logwood cutting and, 25; Madagascar pirates provisioned by, 82–83, 90, 126; metropolitan monopolies and, 10; slave trade and, 41, 47, 82, 89; sponsorship of Indo-Atlantic pirates, 39 Mercury (slave ship), 119 Middle Passage, 30, 55, 65n25, 104, 119, 164n2. See also slave trade Misson, Captain (fictional pirate), 78, 163n37

index Modyford, Governor, 22 money (silver coins), 41–42 monopolies, 10, 42, 60, 72, 79, 125, 130 monsoon cycle, 30, 76 More, Thomas, 8, 63, 64, 78, 158n12 Morgan, Henry, 13, 17, 28 Morris, Lewis, 59 Morton, Gov. Joseph, 45 Mosquito Indians, 23 Mostyn, Capt. Thomas, 55, 89, 106 Mozambique, 66 Mughal India, 6, 18, 81, 94, 97, 123–24; East India Company and, 59, 69; English ambassador to, 70; Mughal/hajj trade, xiii map; pirates executed to mollify, 96, 125 Muslims. See Islam and Muslims Nanfan, John, 43, 58 Nassau (slave ship), 52, 56, 58, 157n74 Navigation Acts (1696), 42, 46, 127 Neale, Thomas (Master of the Mint), 25 New Amsterdam, city of, 18–19, 45, 46, 114. See also New York, city of New England, 61, 64, 97, 118 Newfoundland, 61 New France, 39 New Netherlands, 39, 48 New Orleans, city of, 46 Newport, Rhode Island, 14, 91, 99 New Providence (Nassau), 20 New Voyage round the World, A (Dampier), 28 “New World,” 61, 64, 79 New York, city of, 1, 5, 11, 14, 170n22; communications with Madagascar, 33–34, 84; early colonial settlement of, 38–39, 38; freedmen’s boweries, 46, 154n28; French designs on, 43; as pirate haven, 39–40; slave population of, 46; slave revolts in, 106, 130; slaves transported to, 30, 40, 111; street plan of Manhattan (1660), 44; transition from Dutch to English rule, 114; Trinity Church, 52, 55; written communication network of, 34, 152n80. See also New Amsterdam, city of New York Council, 47, 50, 60 New York Harbor, 25, 43, 45, 58, 101 map, 118 New York Merchant (slave ship), 106 Nicholl, William, 52 Nicholson, Sir Francis, 25 North America, 10, 127; reliance on pirates for

.

203

military defense, 20, 21; transport of slaves to, 125 Nosy Boraha. See Saint Mary’s island (Madagascar) Ockman, Colonel, 59 Old Providence Island, 16, 159n24 Ottoman empire, 64 Pacific Ocean, 3 Palmer, Colin, 121 Panama, 28 Paradox (Hamond), 72–74 Parliament, English, 29, 125; debate over slave trade in, 83; EIC and, 59, 69, 94; Mughal emperor’s influence with, 97 Pelican (pirate ship), 91 Penn, William, 21, 25 Pennsylvania, 21 pepper, 96 Perkins, Samuel, 163n37 Persian Gulf, 2 Perth Amboy, port of, 118–19 Peter (slave ship), 102 Peters, Charles, 57 Peters, Mary, 57 Philip (slave ship), 31 Philippines, 29 Philipse, Adolph, 49, 56, 103, 109, 113, 127; on Bellomont, 58; loophole in EIC monopoly and, 60; smuggling operations and, 50 Philipse, Annetje, 50, 51 Philipse, Eva, 48, 49–50, 51 Philipse, Frederick, 25, 31, 52, 89, 109, 164n2; Calico Jack and, 99, 110–14, 164n1; Cartagena (Nicholas) and, 106; children of, 49–50, 111; death of, 129–130; Dutch West India Company and, 8; family network of, 40, 48–55, 56; “Franck” (Francisco Domingo) and, 107; Hicks (Thom) and, 100–101; as King of the Pirates, 51, 53, 58, 60, 129; Margaret owned by, 33, 103, 108, 135, 136; Marramitta as personal cook of, 164n8; New York Council and, 47; Saint Mary’s pirate-settlers and, 87, 126, 162n16; seizure of the Margaret and, 127–28; as slaveowner, 114; use of seafaring slaves and, 104–7 Philipse, Margaret de Vries, 48, 49 Philipse, Mary, 60 Philipse, Philip, 49–50, 111

204

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index

Philipse family, 7 “pieces of eight” (Spanish and Mexican piastres), 41 Pinhorne, William, 52 piracy, 5, 16; European armed trading model as, 3; in European waters, 26–27; geographical locations of, 26; Mughal shipping as target of, 59, 69; state-sponsored, 7, 15 piracy, spectrum of, 6–7, 12–17; Margaret (pirate-slave ship) and, 31–36; slave trade and, 17–31 Piracy Act (modified 1700), 127 “pirateers,” 29 pirates, 3, 4, 80; Barbary pirates of North Africa, 42; buried treasure in mythology of, 55; change in legal status of, 126–29; depicted as anarchic rebels and liberators, 54–55; English-speaking pirates in Indian Ocean, 6; executed by imperial powers, 28, 55, 129, 151n65, 170n19; familial connections with colonial society, 6, 7; as hostes humani generis (“enemies of all mankind”), 11, 12, 13, 28; literacy among, 34; logwood cutting by, 22–23; Malagasy allies of, 8; personal documents of, 33–34; Portuguese explorers described as, 3; protodemocratic practices of, 24; as rational actors, 27–28; as slave traders, 40–41, 64, 97; wives of, 6, 7–8, 54, 56–58, 92. See also privateers/privateering Plantain, James, 25 plantation complex, 78–79, 123 porcelain, 2, 33 Porter, Endymion, 70 Port Royal (Jamaica), city of, 13, 17, 20, 44–45 Portuguese empire, 2–3, 15–16, 129; cartaz system, 16; first contacts with Madagascar, 65–66; trade routes established by, 65 Powell, Capt. Henry, 68 Powell, Capt. John, 18, 35, 68 powers of attorney, 33, 34, 35–36, 55 Prince Eugene (slave ship), 119 privateers/privateering, 15, 62, 91, 97, 106, 112, 128; colonial officials’ welcoming attitude toward, 44–46; early modern colonialism and, 5; English colonies defended by, 20, 21–22, 112; Indo-Atlantic trade network and, 6, 39–40; letters of reprisal and, 13–14; “Moors” as victims of, 82; privateers “turned pirate,” 82; slave trade and, 17,

18–19, 64; Spanish empire attacked by, 20, 24, 44; as supplements to royal navies, 13. See also pirates Prophet Daniel (slave ship), 52, 53 Providence Island, 18, 20, 44, 61, 82 Quary, Governor, 45 Quebec, 39, 118 Queen Anne’s War (War of the Spanish Succession), 22, 128 Raeff, Capt. Sebastian, 19 Rainsford, Thomas, 34 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 16 Ramanano, 93–94 Ratsimilaho (Ramaromanompo), 93–94 Raymond, George, 65 Rayner, Josiah, 52 Read, Ann, 35–36 Read, Captain, 30, 31 Read, John, 35 Reaux, John, 43 Rebecca (slave ship), 76 Rebecca Snow (slave ship), 119 Red Sea, 2, 30, 69; Bab el Mandeb (Gate of Tears) at mouth of, 94, 123, 124; “Red Sea Men,” 82, 83, 84, 87, 90, 125, 129 Reed, Francis, 91 Revolution, American (revolutionary era), 7, 51, 60, 130 Rhode Island, 1, 20, 26, 59, 91, 99, 112, 124 Rich, Robert, 17–18 Richmond, HMS, 42, 43–44 Rivera, Antonio de, 19 Roanoke colony, 44, 81 Roberts, Capt. Bartholomew, 116 Roe, Sir Thomas, 70 Rome, ancient, 12 Royal (ship), 53 Royal African Company (RAC), 41, 46–47, 83, 100, 111; Gold Coast guardians on slave ships of, 115; slaves provided for Caribbean sugar plantations, 120 Royal Navy, English, 42, 70, 112, 116 Royal Society, 28 Rupert, Prince, 25, 69–70, 72, 159n26 Rynderston, Barent, 52 sailors, 4, 9, 147n29 “sailors of the woods,” 25 Saint Augustine (Florida), 49

index Saint Augustine Bay colony (Madagascar), 30, 31, 67, 78–79, 84, 86–87; abandoned by merchant backers, 79; colonization and disaster at, 74–77 Saint Christopher’s, 18 Saint Helena, island of, xiii map, 32, 35, 84, 104, 117, 129 Saint Lawrence (São Lourenço), 65 Saint Mary’s island (Madagascar), 9, 31, 55, 94, 107, 108; Euro-American population of, 87–88; history of pirate settlement at, 84–90; as inspiration for Defoe (“Captain Johnson”), 77–78; “Pirates’ Cemetery,” 90–91, 124; ships and armaments of pirates at, 83, 96, 152n71; as utopian settlement, 62 Saint Mary’s Massacre (attack on Baldridge’s fort), 89, 92, 93, 126 Saint Michael (slave ship), 121 Samuel, Abraham (“Tolinor Rex”), 52–53 Sandy Hook (East Jersey), 43, 46, 50, 58–59, 101–2 São João Bautista (slave ship), 18 Sara (enslaved Malagasy woman), 120 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 160n35 Scarborough, HMS, 96 Schuyler, Brandt, 155n48 Schuyler, Peter, 155n48 sea-lanes, 5, 16 Senegambia, 115 settlers, 4, 22, 80, 126 Seven Years’ War, 130 Shelley, Capt. Giles, 51, 55–58 Shelley, Hilligout, 56, 57–58 shipwrecks, 25–26, 49, 66–67, 81, 85, 101, 121. See also wreck salvage Sierra Leone, 115 Silk Road, 2 silks, 4, 41, 82 silver, 4, 41, 62, 82 situado tax, 17 Slave Coast, 115 slavery, 3, 5, 9–10, 63, 64, 114 slaves, 4, 80; from Angola, 18, 19; as commodities and laborers, 1–2, 6; female, 29; Filipino, 106; first slaves in English colonies, 17; Indo-Atlantic trade network and, 9, 40–41; manumission of, 9, 105, 109, 120; of pirate traders, 55, 57; prices paid for, 106, 165n15; punishment of, 64; revolts of, 52, 106, 117, 121; runaway, 9, 24, 99–100,

.

205

109–14, 119, 123; self-manumission of, 100; Spanish, 106; testimony against pirates, 107–9 slaves, Malagasy, 10, 25, 30, 41, 47; in Barbados, 111; in Boston, 118; in Carolina colony, 119–120; Christianized, 90; Indo-Atlantic diaspora of, 78, 93, 116–22; in Jamaica, 120–21; Middle Passage and, 104–5; in New York, 52, 112, 118; number of, 160n47; traded for sugar, 75; in Virginia, 119 slaves, seafaring, 33, 99–100, 114–16; Calico Jack, 109–14; in crew of slaving privateers, 105–6, 165n12; Hicks (Thom), 100–103; Marramitta, 103–5 slave trade, 4, 11, 46, 119; Arab slave traders, 66; European slave traders with African mistresses, 110, 166n29; in Madagascar before arrival of pirates, 86, 88, 93; Malagasy, 8, 10, 116–17; piracy and, 7, 17–31; slaving wars in Madagascar, 82; West African, 8, 10, 29, 41, 47, 50, 87, 108, 111, 115, 116. See also Middle Passage Smart, Capt. John, 74–75, 76, 77, 79 smuggling, 13, 15, 17, 42, 130 Snead, Major, 59 South Africa, 32, 93, 116, 117. See also Cape of Good Hope South America, 17, 18, 61 Southampton, Lord, 70 South Sea Company, 25, 121 Southwell, Sir Robert, 16 Spalding, Augustine, 71 Spanish empire, 16, 17; alliance with England, 13, 17; Anglo-Dutch privateering against, 17–18; English and Dutch as trading partners, 26; guarda-costas (coast guards), 23–24, 25, 49; logwood settlements and, 22–24; treasure fleet trip to Manila, 28 Spanish Main, 16, 19, 26 Sparkes, Maria, 50 Speedwell, HMS, 147n29 spices, 2, 4, 33, 82 Spring Head (Philipses’ Barbados property), 50, 111, 114 Stede, Edwyn, 120 Steedham, John, 166n29 Straits of Malacca, 16 sugar, 107, 126; decline in tolerance for pirates and, 17; sugar plantations, 3, 13, 78–79, 89, 120 Sumatra, 67, 76, 117–18

206

.

index

Surinam, 111 Swan, Charles, 28, 29–30 Swan, Paul, 58 Symon (“Indian slave”), 57 Taino Indians, 15 Taylor, Edward, 112, 166n33 Tew, Capt. Thomas, 5, 19, 99, 113, 125; death of, 124; Fletcher and, 1, 11, 21–22, 90, 124; in Madagascar, 19, 94, 124, 163n37; Mughal ships pillaged by, 6, 94, 123–24 textiles, 2, 4, 8, 33; calicoes, 111, 166n31; logwood as dying agent for, 25; “piece goods,” 41 Thirty Years’ War, 72 “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” (Armitage), 145n2 tobacco, 18, 48, 107, 126 toke (honey liquor), 84, 128 Tordesillas, Treaty of (1493), 148n5 trade networks, xiii map, 2, 3, 16 Treat, Governor, 26 Triangle trade, xiii map Triton (ship), 116 Trott, Nicholas, 20 Tsikoa, 93, 94 Tudor, John, Jr., 57 Unity (EIC ship), 31 Ushant Island, 27 utopian ideals and schemes: Madagascar colonizing literature, 61–62, 64, 71–74, 73; Misson’s Libertalia, 78; More’s Utopia, 8, 63, 64, 80, 158n12 Utrecht, Treaty of, 121 Van Cortlandt, Anne, 53–54 Van Cortlandt, Catherine, 50 Van Cortlandt, Jacobus, 50–51, 54, 107, 109, 156n60 Van Cortlandt, Oloff, 50 Van Cortlandt, Stephanus, 50, 52, 54 Van Cortlandt family, 7 Van Dam, Rip, 51, 52, 60 Van Dyck, Anthony, 70–71 Van Horne, Abraham, 52 Van Houtman, Captain, 67 Van Sweeten, Ounziel, 51, 52, 58

Van Toyle, Otto, 58 Van Tyle, Ort, 90 Venetian merchants, 2, 64 Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), 16, 37, 68, 84; as “empire within a state,” 160n49; slave revolt aboard the Meermin, 117 Verplanck, Jacobus, 155n48 Vincent, Captain, 116 Virginia colony, 59, 61, 73, 74, 119, 159n24; alcohol consumption in, 161n10; mortality among settlers, 160n36; slaves brought to, 17, 18, 40–41, 64; tobacco cultivated in, 48 Voyages (Hawkesworth), 160n35 Vries, Margaret Hardenbroeck de. See Philipse, Margaret de Vries Vries, Marie de, 48 Vries, Peter de, 48 Wafer, Lionel, 108 Wallace, Peter, 150n39 Wapen van Amsterdam (slave ship), 41 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 25, 121 Warren, Capt. Thomas, 96, 109 Washington, George, 60 Watson, John, 91 Watts, Robert, 57 Weddell, Capt. John, 69, 72 Welch, Edward, 25, 126, 155n48, 169n10 Wenham, Thomas, 51 Western Design, 19, 20 West India Company (WIC), Dutch, 8, 18, 19, 48; slave trade and, 46, 114; town and fort in lower Manhattan, 38 West Indies, 16, 47, 91 Wheeler, Joseph, 34, 91–92 William of Orange, 39 wills and testaments, 33, 34, 56, 91, 162n29 Wit, Frederik de, 86 wreck salvage, 15, 25–26, 35, 49. See also shipwrecks York, Duke of, 46–47 Yucatan peninsula, 22, 23 Zafiraminia, 66, 67 zamorin, 2 zana malata (“pirate princes”), 78, 93, 122