Île Sainte-Marie
The pirate island of the East
c.1690 – 1720s
While Nassau and Tortuga anchored the pirate world of the Caribbean, its eastern counterpart lay half a world away: Île Sainte-Marie, a narrow island (today called Nosy Boraha) hugging the northeast coast of Madagascar. For a generation around the turn of the eighteenth century it was the most important pirate base in the Indian Ocean.
The Pirate Round
Sainte-Marie owed its rise to geography and greed. It sat astride the sea road between Europe, the Cape of Good Hope, and the fabulously rich trade of the Red Sea and the Mughal Empire. A pirate who made the long voyage out from the Americas or the Caribbean — the circuit known as the Pirate Round — could take a single Indiaman or Mughal treasure ship and retire on the proceeds. The island offered a deep, sheltered harbor, fresh water, timber, and a friendly shore well beyond the reach of any European navy.
Baldridge's trading post
Around 1691 an American adventurer named Adam Baldridge established himself on the island, building a fortified trading post that sold provisions, arms, and liquor to passing pirates and bought their plunder for resale to merchants in New York. For a decade the island functioned as a genuine market economy on the far side of the world — a place to refit, spend, and winter between cruises.
The captains of the East
The names associated with Sainte-Marie are the aristocracy of the Pirate Round: Thomas Tew, Henry Every — whose capture of the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai set off an international incident — William Kidd, Robert Culliford, Christopher Condent, and John Bowen. The island is also the reputed site of Libertalia, the free pirate republic described by Charles Johnson, though most historians regard that colony as a moralizing fiction.
Decline
The great Red Sea prizes could not last. Naval patrols increased, the Mughal and East India Company authorities cracked down, and the amnesties and hangings that broke the Caribbean pirates reached the Indian Ocean too. By the 1720s the traffic had dwindled. A small, weathered "pirate cemetery" on the island — its stones carved, by legend, with skulls and crossbones — is nearly all that remains of the anchorage that once rivaled Nassau itself.