Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People.
Did Cool Stuff your weekly reminder that there's sometimes two things that are, if not good, at least interesting. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is a guest who also researches deep, weird historical subjects, often the same ones that I do. Molly Krabapple, Hi.
Hey, please to be here.
How are you doing?
Slightly tired but very good. I was in the research minds again today.
Oh good. I love those minds. I left them about thirty minutes before recording started. Sophie gets my scripts shortly before I record and can tell how I'm doing based on how shortly before we record scripts come along. But Mollie, I was trying to figure out one sentence version of you, and I came up with a conflict journalist and artist and all around cool person who's researching a book about the Jewish Labor Bund, which has been on the show
multiple times. Not you, you haven't been on the show before, but the Jewish Labor Bund has. How's that for a description?
I like that description? And I can't even tell you how much my heart soared when I listened to all of your episodes about like my gangster King Bernard Goldstein and other Jewish labor and stuff. So I'm so happy to be here.
Yeah, I am excited to have you, and I'm excited to have you to talk about the Betsimisarik Confederation. You ever heard of the bet Semisarik Confederation?
Never? In my life?
I sure as hell hadn't either, Sophia, You ever heard of it?
Nope?
I'm pretty excited to talk about them because it talks about a whole bunch of stuff that we like talking about on this show. Yeay, okay, So that was a real thing that happened, right, that confederation. But I had heard of something called Libertalia, a thing that never happened. You ever heard about the pirate utopia Libertalia?
I feel like in my youthful days trolling anarchist bookstores, I saw like cultural signifiers pointing towards this.
Yeah. That's uh, That's where I came up with it too originally.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's like some well patched jackets involved with this, perhaps a crime think pamphlet.
Oh yeah no. And I'm going to talk about a friend of mineho war patch pants. He told me about it real soon, because Pirate Utopia's on Madagascar is what we're talking about this week, and we're talking about how most of what we know about it is lies really cool, but there's a bunch of true stuff that's even more interesting, which is like my favorite kind of cool people who did cool stuff story.
Oh my god, this is fucking amazing. Go On, go on.
This week, we're going to talk about pirates Madagascar, synthesis between indigenous and foreign criminal ideas of liberty and pirates, which I already said, but I'm going to say twice because it's it's fun. We talk a lot on the show about various experiments with like free horizontal societies that have been tried over the years. We've talked a lot about the republican and anarchist Spain. We've talked about the
horizontal peasants in Ukraine and Manchuria. We've talked about various maroon communities of you know, indigenous folks and runaway enslave people in the Americas, and we'll keep talking about all of those things. We also once did a couple episodes about societies that should have been free but weren't, like the Golden Age of pirates. The goal of those episodes that people can go back and listen to if they want to hear all about it is to explode kind
of a couple layers of myth making about pirates. I'm kind of curious, like coming into it, because there's all of these different versions of pirates. Where do you land on, like, you know, Jolly Roger, European and Caribbean pirates.
I think the pirates that I was always most interested in were the pirates that were like the guy that they based Jack Sparrow on, who were essentially poor Europeans whose ships were taken over by pirates from algiers and who were given the choice of whether like to convert to Islam and piracy or to become galley slaves, and they obviously chose to convert to Islam and piracy. So
I always thought the Muslim pirates were the shit. And in fact, the first free Muslim in New York City ever was the son of a pirate.
Oh shit, we're going to talk about New York City mostly in bad ways in this episode.
Actually we're very evil city, I mean, with who have done many bad things. Why we're so rich?
You know that New York City was the had the second largest concentration of enslaved people during the colonial period.
I did.
I didn't until I researched this. It makes sense that you did. You live in New York City. We always think of like the North as the place where there was no slavery, and to be fair, the North like fought a whole war and like died a lot to end slavery. I'm not trying to specifically come for the North here. But so there's all of these myths about pirates, right, and there's all these different layers to it, and there is a lot of truth behind a lot of it too.
There's these ideas that pirates were wonderful democrats and a truly a galitarian society. Then there was another set of myths that they were like, no, they were all petty tyrannies of this or that captain, and anyone who says they were democrats is a liar, and everything was violence and bad. And the truth, as best as I can sort out, is that it's messier than either of those. I've been arguing that Golden Age pirates, often way more than I actually expected, did live free in a galitarian
short lives. So they were a galitarian within themselves, but they also practiced conscription and slavery and physical and sexual violence, and their moral world only applied internally. Externally, anything goes. The really magical thing about pirates from this point of view isn't that they were like somehow precursors to good republican societies, although it turns out they actually did influence
the later literal republics. And I had no idea, But they lived these brief, beautiful, strange, terrible lives outside the logic of capitalism in the state, and they did a strange and romantic mixture of both good and evil with their short lives. They freed some slaves, they conscripted others, and then they sold others further along the way. You know. So the myth making around Golden Age pirates is nearly
as old as pirates themselves. There's one major book about pirates from the Golden Age of Piracy, from which, like almost everything that isn't you know, actual anthropology and stuff are like main source. And this Golden Age of piracy really only lasted from like seventeen fifteen to seventeen twenty six. Although if you feel like being like real generous, you can do sixteen fifties to seventeen thirties.
You know, it's like nine years. Nine years was all it lasted.
Yeah, Like, I mean there's versions of it, depends on where you want to draw the start in the close of it, but like, yeah, most of the like we're gonna talk about some pirates who were like the most famous pirate in history in the following reason and they like did piracy for two years or got shot in the belly and died on their second raid. You know, it wasn't a good way to live a very long time to declare war against the entire world. Who would have known?
Who would have known? They were here for a good time, not a long time.
Yeah, that is that is the true pirate motto. And I was like this idea that like because the Jolly Roger, as much as it was like a skull and crossbones, sometimes a lot of them used hourglasses, and I love that the part of the point of the hourglass wasn't like your time is up. It was kind of like our time is running out, so you should be afraid of us because we don't give a shit.
Wow.
Wow the other stuff too, right, when like old timey pirates will like curse and blaspheme and stuff like these days someone's saying, goddamn, it is like not a real big deal, right, It was a kind of a big deal because you're this is like pre Enlightenment or like just around the start of the Enlightenment. You know, they're all like saying, we are hell bound. They like meant it.
They didn't care. Yeah, they were like Milton Satan or something.
Yeah, no I And so it's it's funny because then also a lot of the myths that sprung up around them were like they literally worshiped Satan. They kind of might have my kids, like my God, some of them, right, or like but another pirate like maybe got killed by his own crew for worshiping Satan. It's like or that's all shit to sell books, and no one fucking knows, and it's so weird and cool and interesting. I'm completely offscript at this point. Oh fuck, Okay, sorry, no, no, no,
it's not your fault. I just I'm really interested in that stuff. Okay. So the one book that most shit is based on from seventeen twenty four, and it's called A General History of the Pirates by Captain Charles Johnson, there is no such name this man, it's a pseudonym. It is generally accepted that this book was written by Daniel Dafoe, although more recent he's the guy who wrote Robinson Crusoe, but more recent scholarship suggests it might have
been a publisher named a Nathaniel mist. Basically, it was just like, ah, we need to book about pirates to sell to people. Can you write about pirates? Yeah, I get write about pirates. You know. This book two volumes. It's a list of pirate captains and their adventures. Most of the stories are more or less true, or at least they describe people who actually existed, and there seems
to be some real scholarship. But then a second volume was released and it contains three pirates who probably didn't exist at all. One was William Lewis, who is openly in league with the devil and so this is like where you get like, you know, maybe it's a myth making right, And he's the one who got killed by his own crew. Then his quartermaster succeeded him. John Cornelius also probably didn't exist, because this whole devilship probably didn't.
But most important to our story was a pirate who loomed large in my early life as an anarchist trap A famous Captain James Mission, or just Captain Mission he's usually called, was a good last name, although might be a little on the nose if this was whole thing was made up to tell a moral tale. One of my best friends when I was a young wanderer was this tiny Irish American man named Dark Star, who proudly announced that he weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, he had
snake bite piercings. He scowled all of the time, and he was utterly and fully committed to a life of piracy in classic form. He did not live a very long time. He wrote freight trains. He lived in a van. He fucked dudes for money to get gas, or he would just steal money or gas as needed. He burned every American flag he could find. His so many stories about being like and then we stole all these American flags and I had to hide in a dumpster from the cops for six hours. And this kind of man.
He also wrote short stories about animals living in happy anarchist societies, and he wrote a zene call Irish for Punks, which was full of ideas about how to cuss in Irish. When I was twenty and he was twenty one, he died drinking and driving stolen photocopies of anarchizines splayed out across the freeway. Don't drink and dive or drink and die. Don't drink and drive or you will die. It's bad. Don't do it. Before he died, he told me a
lot about pirates. He was obsessed with pirates. He used to draw lox's over his eyes when he would write letters to me, And he told me about Captain Mission. As Darkstar had it, Captain Mission was like the original anarchist. He and his crew attacked slave ships, freeing the slaves and killing the slavers before establishing an anti racist colony on Madagascar called Libertalia, which was ruled by direct democracy, and they lived in a socialist economy nearly a century
before anyone was calling anything socialism. This story is too good to be true, and it's not true. Captain Mission was invented by the author of the Pirate Book. Almost certainly. I'd always assumed he'd been invented whole cloth, either to sell more books, because like, uh, throw this little interesting guy in there, right, or to get across some political ideas, a mission as it were, right, Captain Mission is clearly
an important part of the book. Captain Mission's chapter is more than fourteen thousand words long, which is real long for people who are listening and they don't think in terms of words like my weird writer brain is poisoned to do. That's twice as long as this week's script. So a bunch of words. It's also clearly important to the author. It is the first chapter of the second volume. And it turns out he did base it on fact. He just based it on the less interesting part of
the story. And this sounds like an ad transition, but it Isn't you know what else was both real and imagine somehow both at once.
The monetary system that we use.
Oh that's true. Also the libertarian socialist pirate communities on Madagascar, which inasmuch as they existed, were less colonies of like white and black pirates from elsewhere and more complicated societies built from indigenous Malagassi political traditions interacting with pirates.
So the pirates were showing up running away from the crown and all the people they stole from landing in this place where well, I've read my David Graber where there was a super developed form of democracy and like learning it from the Malagasy and that sounds like a very nice fairy tale too, So there must be something more complicated than that.
Okay, so interesting one. David Graber is the main source for this episode. Fuck yes, two No, Actually, oh, the ways in which it's different from that are so interesting because egalitarian traditions were coming from a lot of the Malagasy methods of how people were living there, but they were not any way democratic. The pirates actually brought the democracy. But oh, you're gonna like it. This is gonna be a good Okay.
I cannot wait. I cannot wait, I cannot wait.
So Madagascar, Madagascar is a big fucking island off the coast of Southeast Africa. It is almost as big as Texas. Even if you're bad at geography, especially African geography, like the average American, I think there's a good chance that people know where Madagascar.
Is, the giant island off of the coast.
Yeah. I feel like if you handed the average non Africa geography know where, they'd probably figure out. Egypt, South Africa and Madagascar.
Maybe I'm wrong, and yeah, I think you might be overestimating. I think probably only Madagascar fair enough.
There's a lot of things that know anyway, I'm not great at geography, but I know way more than that. I'm proud to say because I worked at it. This is not what anyone is here to hear about it. Geography Understanding Madagascar is fascinating for a thousand reasons. There's a ton of biodiversity there, especially endemic plants and animals, like stuff that doesn't appear anywhere else. There are a
fuck ton of endemic species of lemurs. I spent way too long in the time I had to write this script just looking at pictures of different kinds of lemurs.
Was there a lemur pirate intersection?
No, I just was reading about Madagascar and I got distracted by pictures of lemurs. This is the way my brain works. Also, there's an animal called a fossa, which is like a giant mongoose that looks like a puma and eats lemurs. They're pretty cool.
Right now, I'm in my head, I'm drawing pirate lemurs. I'm sorry. This is what happens when you get an artist on the show.
No, yeah, no, you know what, you can just to draw pirate lemurs and it'll be great. There's also huge bats there, and there's an animal called the satanic leaf tailed gecko.
What the fuck?
I want one.
They're so cute.
I want one.
They really are little satanic leaf tail gekos.
Is it big or little? Is it a tiny thing or a large?
Oh?
I don't know.
I didn't get a good picture for scale, but has a leaf tail and it's like dragon demon looking. They're so good.
This is of course, this became pirate Island, and look at the visuals that you have.
No, I know right, folks have lived on Madagascar for around two thousand years. It actually is one of the like more recently populated large land masses.
I'm sorry, I have to pause for a second so I can show you guys this gecko.
Because it's actually really terrifying. Look at this guy.
What the fuck man? That was what the Satan pirate was worshiping that the crew killed him for They It was definitely yeah yeah, because look at those eyes.
One of those was hanging out on his shoulder just talking to him.
And I don't change my statement. I want one. I want this guy with this crazy giant red eyeballs.
Yeah. Oh oh they're tiny.
They're tiny. Well they're geckos, their finger ge goos.
That one's like finger nail. That might be a baby.
That might be a baby. But yeah, anyways, I just thought everybody should know that. And if you're listening, please please google Satanic leaf tailed gecko. You will enjoy it. Yeah, oh my god, what a delightful creature.
I know. No, you're right, this is what the guy was worshiping. Like one of them was hanging out on his shoulder, and people were like, I just can't handle it. It's too much for me.
He had a pinky gecko and it was hanging out on his pinky. He was talking to it. He was asking whether or not they should do missions, and the crew tore him into pieces over it.
Thunder Yeah, that tracks, and I would read the your graphic novel about it. So folks have lived there for about two thousand years, coming from all over the place, coming from the east, the north, and the west, from Indonesia and Swanna and East Africa, including most likely many Jews. Were actually an important part of the sort of cultural
makeup of Madagascar for a long time. These groups actually just lived in different places, and then around the turn of the first millennia you start getting a synthesis culture that what's now the Malagassy culture. The island was under Arab influence and slavers from the Ottoman Empire lived on the west coast of it for a long ass time, doing a fair amount of integrating into the local population or at least making all alliances and such with them.
They stayed apart, but they weren't like, they weren't what the Europeans are about to do basically.
And so were they they enslaving Malagasy people or were they using it as a base to take slaves from other parts of the continent.
So they were buying, So slavery and in Madagascar was actually kind of interesting when we talk about it a little bit. Basically, whenever different groups would fight, they would take captives from each other, and then those would they would turn around and sell them to the Ottomans, who would then sell them off the island. So they weren't necessarily like raiding for slaves, but they were instead buying them from people there. And yeah, they absolutely were enslaving
people on the island and shipping them away. Portugal and France tried to set up settlements too, starting the fifteen hundreds, but they were messy assholes about it, and they all got run off by the locals and or like just killed.
Were what were they doing?
So basically Europeans were just seen as violent savages.
Like I mean, for good reason.
Absolutely they were accurately seen as what they were. And they would show up and basically just like take whatever they wanted and rob people and just like try to like crush entire villages and just be like whatever, it's ours now. And they would be like incredibly racist about stuff, and they would like it was just like the Ottoman Empire showed up as slavers and stead up like slave trade places, and they were by far the lesser evil.
That's how bad the Europeans were. Basically the tracks the tracks. Yeah, And so you know, these legal settlements would just go around, and I'm comparing that to the pirates who were gonna come later, who actually were much more polite. The legal settlements would run around and rob locals and capture slaves and shit, and were far too racist to consider that are integrating with the locals at all. Later European settlements
did start sticking around pirate settlements. Not everyone, not all the pirates were European, right, but they were kind of more in the European sphere of influence. Basically, the pirates ironically were a lot less likely to steal ship from their neighbors and or steal their neighbors themselves because.
They didn't have like a base that they could run to and you know, take all of their loot off to, because they actually had to make themselves not hated in order to use the island as a base.
I think. So, I mean, they kind of just like came in less cocky, right, and with a lot less assumptions, and also just kind of like I think that there was honestly different ethics. Like it's so hard because, for very understandable reasons, we look at slavery as like one of those things where like all slavery is bad, right, because it is, but not all slavery is the same.
And I think that understanding slavery outside of the United States requires understanding to some level that like different ways that slavery worked at different times in different places, you know, And so like I think the pirates were like, why would we steal from our poor neighbors? Honestly, I mean, well, we'll talk about what the pirates are doing in slavery.
It's actually really complicated and interesting. But one of the largest distinct ethno groups in modern Madagascar is in fact the Zono Malata, where the descendants of Malagasy and European pirate ancestors. And they're going to come up a bunch in this week's story because also the other thing that the pirates were doing was like marrying into the culture.
And there's kind of this like there's a lot of places like this in the world, and I'm assuming that because I can I know about it with Ireland and now Madagascar, and so therefore I'm making rude assumptions about the entire world where prior to like settler colonialism, people would show up places and either maybe stay a little bit different and have their port or kind of just like marry in and then sort of dissipate into the culture and like do some kind of synthetic thing, you know.
I mean, I mean, I feel like that's most of the history of India, you know.
I believe it.
I mean, that's that's what people do, right, Like they move, they go to places, they become other things when they're there. And it's really the Setler colonialism that takes like these super defined identities and defines you as like the indigenous people to be exploited or the elite British or French
or whatever to do the exploiting. Whereas like previously, even sometimes you have people show up and sometimes they'd even be bastards and criminals, but there are also could be bastards and criminals that integrated into your society somehow.
Yeah, totally and you know, joined Malagasy society. Like again not any perfect way, and we're going to talk about some of the imperfect parts of it. But do you know what doesn't integrate well into society and sticks.
Out Satanic leaf tails get goos.
That's right, they are. This podcast is brought to you by Satanic not the concept of Satanic leaf tailed get goes, but a specific one named Lucifer who has been talking to me and giving me information that is the sponsor of this show and also whoever else gave us money? Now iber Beck, So okay, the Libertalius story, the idea
of this like perfect little utopian pirate community. I don't know too many authors who could have convinced me there was anything to that story at all, because I had wanted to believe it's so bad when I was younger that I like mourned its falseness and moved on, didn't really want to look back. But there is an author that I trust, the author that brought me back there, whose name you've already mentioned.
David Graeber.
Yeah, here's my little aside about David Graeber. I think David Graber is going to be considered one of the greatest thinkers of the early twenty five century. He wrote books that were at once accessible to the public while also pushing anthropological and political science forward. His writing has been one of the primary things that shifted how I
view politics and economics. I honestly think he is as important of an economic thinker as Marx if we let him be, if people listen to what he has to say. He wrote a book called Debt, The First five thousand Years into History of Money that contains an awful lot of bombshells that destroy the way that people normally talk about money. For example, barter didn't precede money. Barter is what people who are used to money use when there
suddenly isn't any money anymore. He also, alongside another anthropologist named David Wengrow, wrote a book called The Dawn of Everything. This book pulls the rug out from underneath a wide swath of modern Western thought, including the idea that the Enlightenment came primarily from European minds or I mean the go ahead, No.
I mean that book. It basically is this complete subversion right of everything that we're taught. We're taught that the Enlightenment is just sort of this like neat progression of European history. Born in Europe, raised in Europe, gifted to America, you know, from the Europeans. And he's like, no, fuck, that the Enlightenment actually comes from indigenous intellectuals in North America and Europeans like taking seriously what they were.
Saying, yeah, and then turning around and using it to do absolutely awful things, because the Enlightenment mostly did bad stuff, but the concepts of it absolutely One of the things that I've run across by doing research on the show is I've been thinking even about how, like, you know, my own political ideology, anarchism comes from the people who are calling themselves that it first or like enlightenment political thinkers from Western Europe, right, or actually a lot of
them are from Russia. And yet what I've been learning by doing the show and learning more about out all of these different things is that anarchists were actually specifically drawing from indigenous communities all over the world very consciously, and indigenous anarchists in various places were informing people, whether it was like in Siberia, in Ukraine and Ireland and Mexico. Oh, and a lot of ideas coming from like Korea and
places like that. Right, those are the places I personally run across it in my research for this show, and so I'm just like more and more, I'm like, oh, all this shit comes from elsewhere, you know.
So basically what you're telling me is you had these Russian radicals that were getting exiled to Siberia and they were meeting indigenous folks and they were listening to them and learning from them.
Yeah, and they were like, oh, there's the rules. What if we all treat each other as equals? Doesn't that sound nice?
Yeah?
Yeah?
But also like, let's not credit these people when we write our pamphlets. About it.
Well, I actually think some of them did, and they did, I think so, And like, I think that it goes through this process of like the original of that gets dissolved. And part of it is because anarchists are so internationalist in the late like nineteenth early twentieth century, where they would refuse to credit anything as like coming from this or that place, right, because you'd have like indigenous Mexican anarchists who wouldn't necessarily identify as indigenous because they're like, oh,
we're internationalists. And also, of course, because Mexico's indigenous, the structure of whiteness and indigeneity is different in Mexico than it is like in the United States.
Right.
But I think about how like, oh, man, there's a tangent. But I think how like twentieth century anarchist history books don't talk about the women, right, right, But then if you actually read the people that those books are about, those people did write about the women because the women were just as involved as everyone turns out. And so it's this like process of like stripping away.
Yeah, exactly, No, No, I totally get it. I mean when I was writing about the boon do it was the same thing when you go through these like biographical dictionaries, it's like thirty percent women. And they're not just like making food and educating the kids. They're throwing bombs, they're running self defense groups. They're riling up, you know, when
the battleship Potempkin is there. But somehow, through this process of people writing histories and then people writing the histories in English instead of in Yiddish or whatever, the women just kind of get filtered out and made into a footnote. And I feel like so much of the work of what you're doing, it's this act of necromancy right where you're taking those people back from being lost in the dust of the archive.
Hell yeah, and I will take that as an honor, Okay. So Graeber is one of the authors who has done more to popularize this idea, this idea that the Enlightenment doesn't just come from the West, right, And this book also downe of Everything, destroys linear concepts of progress. It shows that societies have done just about everything, They've tried just about everything. So many things are possible, so many different things have been done, and most of what we
assume about the development of human society is wrong. And this isn't necessarily all of his or the other David's research, as much as like kind of catching up the rest of us on what anthropologists have been realizing for a while. I'll know. And Graver was also an anarchist. His other claim to fame was heavily influencing the occupy movement of twenty eleven. Framing things around the ninety nine percent against like the one percenter seems to have been his idea.
I met him once. We have an awful lot of friends in common, and we also had some frenemies in common, but I'm not Yeah.
I met him a few times also, and one of my sort of fond memories of him was him taking me around these like flea markets in London, and there was this book of Edmund Dulac fairy Tales, and I was looking at it lustfully, but I had no cash, and he just like he just bought it for me. He was like, I like to just I like to give gifts. And then he he showed me all of these these beautiful costumes that he had in his place because he loved to play dress up.
Also, Oh that's cool, I genuinely think. Okay, So he died suddenly in twenty twenty of Pancreatis. His wife lays the blame at COVID's feet, and that seems completely possible, and I think we he really lost something he was I believe fifty nine when he died.
I would have given anything to have him now talking about the shit with Israel and the genocide.
Oh no, yeah, Like I just honestly, like, I never really, like gave much credence to the idea of a public intellectual until kind of seeing the impact that he was able to have. And David Graeber did a lot of anthropological research on Madagascar specifically, and one of his last books, probably the last book of his to be published in English. This book was first published in French in twenty nineteen and then in English in twenty twenty three, three years
after his death. I phrased it that way because I don't know how to pronounce post hum humorously, honestly.
Posthumously humously, I think.
Yeah, nope, and maybe it's not. And if you're listening, don't tell me. I don't want to, because I could look it up if I really cared, but I don't.
And so it's also my one it's my lys favorite word to say.
I know right, it's no good. This book is called Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia, and more than anything else is it's my primary source for this particular episode, because frankly, I am not aware of other sources worth taking seriously on this topic, because all the rest are random myths and lies. But first, back to pirates, and by that I mean back to ads. The lead tailed gecko has told me to sell. You all should give
me things. Just leave things out under a linden tree and I will come and pick them up.
Right.
Also, here's other ads.
We're back.
I don't think I could recognize the indantry.
I feel like it's something from old songs. I don't think I could recognize it either.
Maybe they only have them in England. Again, if you are listening and you know the answer, don't tell me. I could look it up if I wanted to know. Why am I complaining about people? Anyway? Whatever pirates, Europe was doing some wild expansion throughout the seventeenth century. They're off conquering and colonizing willy nilly. By the end of the seventeenth century, he star again the Enlightenment and well, here's the part of the script that it does the
thing we already talked about. So now I have to figure out where to skip ahead to. But I'm going to actually skip to a David Graeber quote specifically on this idea. The European Enlightenment was, more than anything else,
an age of intellectual synthesis. Were previously intellectual backwaters like England and France that suddenly found themselves at the center of global empires and exposed for them startling new ideas were trying to integrate, for instance, ideas of individualism and liberty drawn from the Americas, a new conception of the bureaucratic nation state largely inspired by China, African contract theories, and economic and social theories originally developed in medieval Islam.
And what does that have to do with pirates? Well, all of these wild ideas you can't play around with them in an existing monarchy, very easily, right.
No, you can't play around with ideas and monarchies. The monarch tends to cut off your head for that. Yeah.
No, like classically not a popular thing to do around this, you know, in the middle of the seventeenth century and all the like, people who are like, what if there's no such thing as sin and we can do polyamory and they were like, We're going to drill holes through your tongue. Those are the ranters. We did an episode
about them. Nice Nice, So at the colonial fringes in the desolated lands of genocide and extermination, you could play around with these ideas, so, you know, go to murder all the people in North America who gave you these ideas, and then you can play around with them. What could go wrong? The pirates, viewed within this framework are among the people playing around with enlightenment ideas. They had direct democracies.
In case I don't think I like cover this too clearly, like the average pirate ship in the oldie Golden Age, pirates elected their captains and the only two official posts was captain and quartermaster. Most decisions were made at assemblies. The quartermaster was actually in charge of the assemblies. In a lot of ways, the captain resembles what would be called anthropologically a war chief, someone who's in charge only during times of war. Most decisions were democratically made except
during the middle of a fight. On pirate ships. That is the big reveal that I suspected a lot of people listening already.
Know, so they were actually doing the kind of assemblies that I feel like we were trying to do an Occupy Wall Street that people were trying to do in all of the Occupy the Squares type rebellions that happened in twenty eleven, but they were working.
Okay, but even wilder than that. Yeah, the Pirate ones were mostly I believe, majority vote, but the Malagasy ones that we're going to talk about in a little bit were consensus. Holy fuck, and Graber is one of the primary people who helped set up Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street owsen in in credible amount directly to the Malagasy like culture of consensus decision making at assembly.
This is amazing. I yeah, you blew my mind. Like I obviously I knew David helped set up Occupy, but I okay, my mind is blown. My mind is blown by this.
And there is there is a previous history of consensus decision making on the left in the United States, coming from the anti nuke movement, right, But like you know, I think that this is still a valid thread to be drawn because he had been doing a lot of this anthropological research before Occupy Wall Street. I think he did it when he was just getting when he was in school, actually, some of his earlier research on this.
And so these pirates they're setting up direct democracies and they have social contracts that are one hundred years ahead of their time, and it helped. I'm sure that any given ship was full of people from all over the world. There was escaped slaves and indigenous people and Arabic people and all kinds of white people from different countries. So of course they tried some shit together. And also pirates
like to spin their own legends. They had to write the fear of the black flag is a fundamental part of their economic and military strategy. They don't want to fight, they want people to surrender, and so they spread legends. And one of the legends, ironically, they both would spread their legend about like, oh, man, our guy black Beard, he's gonna fucking flay you, right, because you want everyone to think that, so you surrender when you see fucking black Beard.
And then you don't lose half your crew.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, Like getting into gunfights is always a bad idea, Like you.
Know, yeah, I know, it's much better to be so scary that the other person doesn't fuck with you in the first place.
Yeah, that has actually literally been my strategy. Is like when I was like a street kid, people don't know what to make of me. I'm not particularly large, but I'm strange looking, and it's kept me safe. Another legend that they would spread is kind of this the story of their democracy. So in a way that I didn't really realize, pirates themselves kind of influenced probably the creation of modern democratic states were both better and worse.
So they were spreading the story of the democracy so that when they got onto some ship that is filled with poor press ganged British guys who are like literally having their teeth fall out of scurvy, the poor press ganged British guys won't fight them because they think that they can join up with the pirates and have a better life.
Is that that the strategy, So that's my read on it. I'm not one hundred percent certain. I'm kind of conjecturing. I've read that they would spread this thing, the legend of their democracy, and I reached a kind of similar conclusion because actually one of the main ways that new pirates crews would form was direct mutiny. It wouldn't even be that a lot of crews would form, like you were talking about, where pirates would show up and be like, hey, you want to be pirates or you want to die,
It's easy choice, you know. And other times people would be like, hey, we fucking hate our captain, We're not even getting paid. Let's have a mutiny. And then once you have a mutiny, you're like, well, if we go to any civilized port, we're now dead, right right, you know, so I guess we're fucking pirates now, and so you can have this like cultural spread if people have these ideas. I could know more about this than I do. I'm a little bit conjecturing here.
And by civilized port you mean like ports of European christiandom.
I am also under the impression to include like places in South Asia, and I'm not. I couldn't tell you one one or the other about how the Ottomans were treating pirates at this time, because obviously, like pirate versus privateer is like such a funny distinction, right, privateer as an official charter to go around and do piracy and a pirate doesn't. And so a pirate is like an
the enemy of all nations. I don't know my inference, and I have one reason to draw this, which has to do with a later thing that involves some some folks in South Asia being real mad at the pirates. Is that enemy of all nations? Like meant everywhere that considered itself civilized, which I would assume would mean Swanna, Western Europe and South Asia and presumably East Asia, but I know way less about East Asian piracy. That's my best guess.
There was an amazing woman pirate from China. Yeah, yeah, who needs an episode like most successful pirate of all time?
No exactly. That's literally why I don't know as much about it yet is that I'm planning to do a whole episodes about her.
Fuck yes, fuck yes.
And then these pirates, they're trying out all these different ideas, according to both legend and anthropology alike, they would try out new social forms on various islands like Libertalia, the Legend of Libertalia. Honestly, it's kind of a bummer of a story. All of these pirates, none of them indigenous to Madagascar, show up and create this racially diverse democratic utopia based on private property and it's sort of like a proto USA, but less immediately racist than the USA.
But it's also kind of involve in the slave trade, so it's not really all that much better. And then all of a sudden they're killed by indigenous people for no reason. That's the story.
Reason never, no, no reason at all.
Yeah. David Graeber writes about this quote, it would appear likely that there was no captain mission or a settlement called Libertalia, but there most certainly were pirate settlements on the Malagasy coast, and what's more, they were the place for radical social experiments. Pirates did experiment with new forms
of governance and property arrangements. What's more, so did members of the surrounding Malagassy communities into which they married, many of whom had lived in their settlements, sailed in their ships and formed blood brotherhood pacts, and spent many hours in political conversation with them. Which is to say Libertalia isn't real. Instead, the thing that happened is so much more interesting. There was, however, a direct inspiration for the Libertalia story, so in a way, there kind of was
a Libertalia. There was this pirate utopian an island and it was destroyed by the locals. And it was destroyed by the locals for a good reason. What was that slavery?
Shockingly, when you break into people's houses and drag them off screaming to do the shit work on the other side of the ocean, they don't like you, and then they kick you out.
I know, who would have known?
Yeah, shocker, shocker.
An awful lot of early Golden Age pirates actually spent their time in the Indian Ocean, not the Caribbean. The Caribbean kind of comes a little bit later. It comes both before and later, but the main Golden Age we talked about is in the Caribbean, whereas like a couple decades earlier, it's in the Indian Ocean. Trade was richer over in the Indian Ocean at the time. Europe was really only just starting to not be a backwater and these pirates needed a home base, and Madagascar was perfect.
The East India Company didn't claim it, and neither did the British Royal African Company, which was running slavery. They especially settled on the northeast of the island, away from the Malagasy kingdoms elsewhere on the island, not that there weren't people there, but there was like some larger political institutions elsewhere. In particular, they settled on an island called Nosey Boraja from sixteen ninety one to sixteen ninety nine.
For eight years there was a pirate community there. The population of pirates and locals alike that would ebb and flow from like thirty to one thousand. It seemed like pirates would take some time away from the ocean there. Some would smuggle themselves back into the regular world on passing merchant ships. Some would live on the island permanently. Mostly they would like move to the mainland and get married.
But we'll get to that. And so these pirates, they're robbing the shit out of ships in the Indian Ocean, and they needed somewhere to fence their stolen goods. And that's where these pirate islands historically come in. This or that merchant will set themselves up on an island, they'll build a fortress, they will declare themselves the pirate king, and then they will fence stole and goods to and also corrupt but ostensibly above board merchant.
So are these merchants the only people declaring themselves pirate kings because the pirate ship captains were not declaring themselves pirate kings. Was pirate Kings only a marketing thing?
Okay, so I believe that it was only a marketing thing. However, I believe that mostly these merchants were calling themselves pirate kings. But occasionally other pirate captains would get called pirate kings or call themselves pirate kings or whatever. But it largely was a marketing thing. This idea of like the charismatic leader of all the pirates type thing was a marketing ploy like, don't fuck with us, y'all got kings, we got a king. Don't worry, you can't fuck with us.
We got a king, you know. And the above board merchants who would show up on Madagascar or to this island off Madagascar were slavers from New York City. That's the big above ground organization.
Oh New York City, Oh New York Yeah.
Who Yeah, I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole in a second. You might know more about them, but I'm a find out.
Okay, no, no, tell me, I bet you do, go down the rabbit hole.
So basically, these merchants from New York would send out ships with gunpowder and supplies. And this is like the fucking opposite side of the world, right when I picture places that are far from New York City, Mattagascar is one of the first places I would think of as
being far from Every hemisphere is different here. But on the other hand, people are coming around the so whatever anyway, So they would send out ships with gunpowder and supplies and all the like live off of this stuff, you know, stuff from New York City, and they would bring back treasure to sell and then kind of their their cover
story is this slavery. The people on the Pirate Island are like less excited about the slavery, but they're still okay with it, and whereas New York City is like they're okay with the fencing stolen goods, but they're like more into it for the slavery because.
The slavery is respectable in America and the fence and goods might get you in trouble with the Western power who those goods were stolen from.
I think so, and we'll talk about why in a little bit. But a decent chunk of New York City's slave population was Malagassy.
Holy fuck, I had no idea.
And you want to know how we learned how we know that there's a bunch of enslave Malagassy folks and old new and like colonial New York. How because of a side tangent called the Conspiracy of seventeen forty one. You ever heard of this?
Okay? So I had heard of. I don't know if this is the Conspiracy of seventeen forty one, but I had heard of a bunch of enslaved people in New York basically got together and planned like a big ass armed revolt that took a ton of firepower to put down. But I do not know if that was seventeen forty one or one of many other times that enslaved people decided to kick out their enslavers and get free.
Try and do some shit. Yeah, I think that might have been a different one, but I'm not sure. This one seems to be one of the more talked about one. But that's less because of like shit that actually went down, and more about the way that, like the trials and stuff worked. And I was reading that, like for like twenty years before this, there was like a new slaver vault in New York City every like two years or so.
Understandable.
Yeah, in seventeen forty one, black slaves, freed black people and Irish indentured servants conspired to burn down New York City, and the Irish indentured servants they were suspected of being Catholic spies. Like literally they got killed for being undercover priests. Because the fuck did you know that in the year seventeen hundred they passed laws where you got life in prison if you were a Catholic priest in New York What the fuck?
I had no idea.
No, I had no idea either, Holy fuck man. Yeah, And so a bunch of people realizing that they're all on the same like that their class interests actually align, even though some of them are free and some of them aren't, and some you know, they tried to have a big old revolt. Probably probably why. Probably so a bunch of stuff did burn. But the way that this conspiracy was like persecuted was Salem witch trial. Basically shit Jesus.
So these secret evil spies for the pope are going around doing their like crazy ass Catholic things and like making enslaved people not like being beaten and raped and like and now we're going to like put rocks on people's chests. Until they came in to say that like the devil made them think that it's bad to be a slave.
Not the furthest from that, and like stop giving the pope so much credit, you know, not you, but the authorities basically they started getting people to crack and then name names. And these names were like there's no real particular reason to believe that they're reliable, and so it's like hard to know if this conspiracy happened, but it was kind of this ass panic around this stuff happening,
and a lot of people were arrested. I didn't write down the numbers, and the low hundreds I think, and several dozen people were killed by the authorities, and specifically enslave people were either hanged or fucking burned at the stake.
The fuck fucking new.
Well Irish people were hanged.
They had to like racially stratify executions fucking people.
Oh yeah, yeah, come on, like which is always funny too, right, because it's like like overall the history of like Irish's whiteness in America is very complicated, and people make sweeping generalizations. The Irish have always had it better than black people in the United States, but were also criminalized. It just was a racial category below white and above black, you know, but it was above black, so they didn't get burned
at the steak. I guess there also were fewer of them, so it could be that they just like didn't get lucky. And when the I don't know whatever, I found a book about This'm probably gon do the episodes about it.
You have to do an episode about this. I would listen to the shit out of this episode.
Yeah, because I only know like the surface level stuff about this so far. But back to our pirate haven that is not so great On Wednesday, you're gonna have to wait to find out. Here's a hint. They're all gonna die and they're all gonna have deserved it. Oh you gotta wait ti Wednesday to find out what happened.
Oh no, So the man in the patch pants was wrong.
He was wrong. Unfortunately, often people who die at the age of twenty one haven't yet been able to develop more complex historical analyses. But you know, his heart was in the right place. Also, I think he'd like the real version so much more so if you're listening Dark Star, you'll like it. But do you have anything you want to plug?
Well, I am working on a book about the Jewish labor boond, but it's gonna come out so far in the future, probably next fall, that I'm just gonna ask you to cherish our open your hearts for it eventually being published, you know, believe in it like tinker Bell.
Uh.
And other than that, I'm illustrating a children's book about someone who is the exact opposite of a pirate. She is Queen nor Jahan of India, the first female sovereign of the Mughal Empire. Whoa, And she killed tigers and rode war elephants into battle and whoa. Yes, I know, like no kings, no gods, no masters, but like so interesting. Yeah you have to fucking you have to love a fucking Mughal empress.
Yeah fuck yeah. Well the Mughal Empire is going to be in part two of this.
Actually, oh my god, amazing.
I just don't know a ton about them, so I can't provide like broader context around them yet, you know, so, but you do. And people can check out Molly's existing stuff, including a ton of art that's like, Actually, what I mostly personally know you for is that your art was just like often everywhere in different like political spaces and stuff like that. It's really beautiful art. People should check it out.
Thank you. Yeah, you can go to mollikrabapple dot com and check out my work, or you can go to Instagram, where I feel like I'm hopping like Pavlov's dog to show like my process of painting. And I'm always drawing many, many, many many things because that's how I interface with the world because I can't do it normally fair enough.
I hide and research things. But I guess you also do that if you want to follow me. I'm also on Instagram. I'm on substack. I write about a lot of stuff on there. I usually kind of go in deeper or a little bit more like personal on topics I cover here on this show. Everything that's more political is free. Everything that's like super personal. You can subscribe and then you can read my tour diaries. Oh, I'm on tour right now, that's the thing I'm supposed to plug.
Oh fine, I am like currently on book tour, and by that I mean I came home two days ago and I leave tomorrow to continue on and I'll be gone for six weeks further on tour. So if you live across the north and middle of the United States, I will probably come vaguely near you. And then eventually I will plan the rest of the tour where I'll go down through California and out east and go everywhere with me and my dog and my truck. And it's supposed to be my van, but my van broke down.
I've already complained about this in other podcasts a bunch of times. My transmission died. I'm really frustrated by it. But I have a truck, so I'll travel in the truck. And yesterday, and this is completely totally of interest to everyone, I got a truck cap on my truck by myself, and it is the most physical feat thing I've ever done in my life. And it took so many ratchet straps.
What's a truck cap.
Oh, it's the thing on the back of a pickup truck that makes it like covered, you know.
Oh cool, that's awesome.
They're very heavy and I had taken it off because I needed my truck to like move mulch and stuff, and so just like under some trees in my yard was my old truck cap from when I try used to travel more in my truck, which I'm gonna do again. And this is a totally related Sophia. Anything you want to.
Plug, there's anything specific I want to plug from all of our stuff.
Zone Media, well, there's cooler.
Zone Media and the Android version is coming very soon. I actually have a meeting about that tomorrow that I think is me being like, yes, please fucking do it, and then I want to plug. Ed to Trund's Better Offline just got a nice little write up in Vulture and Ed Ed worked very hard on that show. So if you're interested in tech stuff, Ed.
I increasingly feel like I would be better Offline.
Oh yeah, I'm interested in the way that I am interested in looking at any mortal enemies, which I feel like Ed is really good at covering it like that.
Yes, exactly.
If you want to hear someone scream at people who are terrible, but like in a really comforting way, it's a good show for it, exactly, all right. Also, a good show is part two with this on Wednesday, I'll talk to you all.
That Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
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