The pirate anchorage of Ile Sainte-Marie

For a few decades around 1700 this island off Madagascar was the best pirate base in the world: a sheltered bay on the route home from the Indian Ocean, out of reach of any navy. Kidd, Every and Tew used these waters, and the ships that took the Mughal treasure fleets came here to divide the take. A hillside cemetery above the anchorage still holds the graves, and wrecks lie in the bay, one long argued to be Kidd’s Adventure Galley. The utopian pirate republic of Libertalia is almost certainly a literary invention; the anchorage, the graves and the wrecks are not.