Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People.
Speaker 2: Did Cool Stuff your weekly reminder that there's sometimes two
Speaker 2: things that are, if not good, at least interesting. I'm
Speaker 2: your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is a
Speaker 2: guest who also researches deep, weird historical subjects, often the
Speaker 2: same ones that I do. Molly Krabapple, Hi.
Speaker 3: Hey, please to be here.
Speaker 2: How are you doing?
Speaker 3: Slightly tired but very good. I was in the research
Speaker 3: minds again today.
Speaker 2: Oh good. I love those minds. I left them about
Speaker 2: thirty minutes before recording started. Sophie gets my scripts shortly
Speaker 2: before I record and can tell how I'm doing based
Speaker 2: on how shortly before we record scripts come along. But Mollie,
Speaker 2: I was trying to figure out one sentence version of you,
Speaker 2: and I came up with a conflict journalist and artist
Speaker 2: and all around cool person who's researching a book about
Speaker 2: the Jewish Labor Bund, which has been on the show
Speaker 2: multiple times. Not you, you haven't been on the show before,
Speaker 2: but the Jewish Labor Bund has. How's that for a description?
Speaker 3: I like that description? And I can't even tell you
Speaker 3: how much my heart soared when I listened to all
Speaker 3: of your episodes about like my gangster King Bernard Goldstein
Speaker 3: and other Jewish labor and stuff. So I'm so happy
Speaker 3: to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am excited to have you, and I'm excited
Speaker 2: to have you to talk about the Betsimisarik Confederation. You
Speaker 2: ever heard of the bet Semisarik Confederation?
Speaker 3: Never? In my life?
Speaker 2: I sure as hell hadn't either, Sophia, You ever heard
Speaker 2: of it?
Speaker 3: Nope?
Speaker 2: I'm pretty excited to talk about them because it talks
Speaker 2: about a whole bunch of stuff that we like talking
Speaker 2: about on this show. Yeay, okay, So that was a
Speaker 2: real thing that happened, right, that confederation. But I had
Speaker 2: heard of something called Libertalia, a thing that never happened.
Speaker 2: You ever heard about the pirate utopia Libertalia?
Speaker 3: I feel like in my youthful days trolling anarchist bookstores,
Speaker 3: I saw like cultural signifiers pointing towards this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's uh, That's where I came up with it
Speaker 2: too originally.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's like some well patched jackets involved
Speaker 3: with this, perhaps a crime think pamphlet.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah no. And I'm going to talk about a
Speaker 2: friend of mineho war patch pants. He told me about
Speaker 2: it real soon, because Pirate Utopia's on Madagascar is what
Speaker 2: we're talking about this week, and we're talking about how
Speaker 2: most of what we know about it is lies really cool,
Speaker 2: but there's a bunch of true stuff that's even more interesting,
Speaker 2: which is like my favorite kind of cool people who
Speaker 2: did cool stuff story.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, this is fucking amazing. Go On, go on.
Speaker 2: This week, we're going to talk about pirates Madagascar, synthesis
Speaker 2: between indigenous and foreign criminal ideas of liberty and pirates,
Speaker 2: which I already said, but I'm going to say twice
Speaker 2: because it's it's fun. We talk a lot on the
Speaker 2: show about various experiments with like free horizontal societies that
Speaker 2: have been tried over the years. We've talked a lot
Speaker 2: about the republican and anarchist Spain. We've talked about the
Speaker 2: horizontal peasants in Ukraine and Manchuria. We've talked about various
Speaker 2: maroon communities of you know, indigenous folks and runaway enslave
Speaker 2: people in the Americas, and we'll keep talking about all
Speaker 2: of those things. We also once did a couple episodes
Speaker 2: about societies that should have been free but weren't, like
Speaker 2: the Golden Age of pirates. The goal of those episodes
Speaker 2: that people can go back and listen to if they
Speaker 2: want to hear all about it is to explode kind
Speaker 2: of a couple layers of myth making about pirates. I'm
Speaker 2: kind of curious, like coming into it, because there's all
Speaker 2: of these different versions of pirates. Where do you land on, like,
Speaker 2: you know, Jolly Roger, European and Caribbean pirates.
Speaker 3: I think the pirates that I was always most interested
Speaker 3: in were the pirates that were like the guy that
Speaker 3: they based Jack Sparrow on, who were essentially poor Europeans
Speaker 3: whose ships were taken over by pirates from algiers and
Speaker 3: who were given the choice of whether like to convert
Speaker 3: to Islam and piracy or to become galley slaves, and
Speaker 3: they obviously chose to convert to Islam and piracy. So
Speaker 3: I always thought the Muslim pirates were the shit. And
Speaker 3: in fact, the first free Muslim in New York City
Speaker 3: ever was the son of a pirate.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, we're going to talk about New York City
Speaker 2: mostly in bad ways in this episode.
Speaker 3: Actually we're very evil city, I mean, with who have
Speaker 3: done many bad things. Why we're so rich?
Speaker 2: You know that New York City was the had the
Speaker 2: second largest concentration of enslaved people during the colonial period.
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 2: I didn't until I researched this. It makes sense that
Speaker 2: you did. You live in New York City. We always
Speaker 2: think of like the North as the place where there
Speaker 2: was no slavery, and to be fair, the North like
Speaker 2: fought a whole war and like died a lot to
Speaker 2: end slavery. I'm not trying to specifically come for the
Speaker 2: North here. But so there's all of these myths about pirates, right,
Speaker 2: and there's all these different layers to it, and there
Speaker 2: is a lot of truth behind a lot of it too.
Speaker 2: There's these ideas that pirates were wonderful democrats and a
Speaker 2: truly a galitarian society. Then there was another set of
Speaker 2: myths that they were like, no, they were all petty
Speaker 2: tyrannies of this or that captain, and anyone who says
Speaker 2: they were democrats is a liar, and everything was violence
Speaker 2: and bad. And the truth, as best as I can
Speaker 2: sort out, is that it's messier than either of those.
Speaker 2: I've been arguing that Golden Age pirates, often way more
Speaker 2: than I actually expected, did live free in a galitarian
Speaker 2: short lives. So they were a galitarian within themselves, but
Speaker 2: they also practiced conscription and slavery and physical and sexual violence,
Speaker 2: and their moral world only applied internally. Externally, anything goes.
Speaker 2: The really magical thing about pirates from this point of
Speaker 2: view isn't that they were like somehow precursors to good
Speaker 2: republican societies, although it turns out they actually did influence
Speaker 2: the later literal republics. And I had no idea, But
Speaker 2: they lived these brief, beautiful, strange, terrible lives outside the
Speaker 2: logic of capitalism in the state, and they did a
Speaker 2: strange and romantic mixture of both good and evil with
Speaker 2: their short lives. They freed some slaves, they conscripted others,
Speaker 2: and then they sold others further along the way. You know.
Speaker 2: So the myth making around Golden Age pirates is nearly
Speaker 2: as old as pirates themselves. There's one major book about
Speaker 2: pirates from the Golden Age of Piracy, from which, like
Speaker 2: almost everything that isn't you know, actual anthropology and stuff
Speaker 2: are like main source. And this Golden Age of piracy
Speaker 2: really only lasted from like seventeen fifteen to seventeen twenty six.
Speaker 2: Although if you feel like being like real generous, you
Speaker 2: can do sixteen fifties to seventeen thirties.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like nine years. Nine years was all
Speaker 3: it lasted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, I mean there's versions of it, depends on
Speaker 2: where you want to draw the start in the close
Speaker 2: of it, but like, yeah, most of the like we're
Speaker 2: gonna talk about some pirates who were like the most
Speaker 2: famous pirate in history in the following reason and they
Speaker 2: like did piracy for two years or got shot in
Speaker 2: the belly and died on their second raid. You know,
Speaker 2: it wasn't a good way to live a very long
Speaker 2: time to declare war against the entire world. Who would
Speaker 2: have known?
Speaker 3: Who would have known? They were here for a good time,
Speaker 3: not a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is that is the true pirate motto. And
Speaker 2: I was like this idea that like because the Jolly Roger,
Speaker 2: as much as it was like a skull and crossbones,
Speaker 2: sometimes a lot of them used hourglasses, and I love
Speaker 2: that the part of the point of the hourglass wasn't
Speaker 2: like your time is up. It was kind of like
Speaker 2: our time is running out, so you should be afraid
Speaker 2: of us because we don't give a shit.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Wow the other stuff too, right, when like old timey
Speaker 2: pirates will like curse and blaspheme and stuff like these
Speaker 2: days someone's saying, goddamn, it is like not a real
Speaker 2: big deal, right, It was a kind of a big
Speaker 2: deal because you're this is like pre Enlightenment or like
Speaker 2: just around the start of the Enlightenment. You know, they're
Speaker 2: all like saying, we are hell bound. They like meant it.
Speaker 3: They didn't care. Yeah, they were like Milton Satan or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no I And so it's it's funny because then
Speaker 2: also a lot of the myths that sprung up around
Speaker 2: them were like they literally worshiped Satan. They kind of
Speaker 2: might have my kids, like my God, some of them, right,
Speaker 2: or like but another pirate like maybe got killed by
Speaker 2: his own crew for worshiping Satan. It's like or that's
Speaker 2: all shit to sell books, and no one fucking knows,
Speaker 2: and it's so weird and cool and interesting. I'm completely
Speaker 2: offscript at this point. Oh fuck, Okay, sorry, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: it's not your fault. I just I'm really interested in
Speaker 2: that stuff. Okay. So the one book that most shit
Speaker 2: is based on from seventeen twenty four, and it's called
Speaker 2: A General History of the Pirates by Captain Charles Johnson,
Speaker 2: there is no such name this man, it's a pseudonym.
Speaker 2: It is generally accepted that this book was written by
Speaker 2: Daniel Dafoe, although more recent he's the guy who wrote
Speaker 2: Robinson Crusoe, but more recent scholarship suggests it might have
Speaker 2: been a publisher named a Nathaniel mist. Basically, it was
Speaker 2: just like, ah, we need to book about pirates to
Speaker 2: sell to people. Can you write about pirates? Yeah, I
Speaker 2: get write about pirates. You know. This book two volumes.
Speaker 2: It's a list of pirate captains and their adventures. Most
Speaker 2: of the stories are more or less true, or at
Speaker 2: least they describe people who actually existed, and there seems
Speaker 2: to be some real scholarship. But then a second volume
Speaker 2: was released and it contains three pirates who probably didn't
Speaker 2: exist at all. One was William Lewis, who is openly
Speaker 2: in league with the devil and so this is like
Speaker 2: where you get like, you know, maybe it's a myth
Speaker 2: making right, And he's the one who got killed by
Speaker 2: his own crew. Then his quartermaster succeeded him. John Cornelius
Speaker 2: also probably didn't exist, because this whole devilship probably didn't.
Speaker 2: But most important to our story was a pirate who
Speaker 2: loomed large in my early life as an anarchist trap
Speaker 2: A famous Captain James Mission, or just Captain Mission he's
Speaker 2: usually called, was a good last name, although might be
Speaker 2: a little on the nose if this was whole thing
Speaker 2: was made up to tell a moral tale. One of
Speaker 2: my best friends when I was a young wanderer was
Speaker 2: this tiny Irish American man named Dark Star, who proudly
Speaker 2: announced that he weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, he had
Speaker 2: snake bite piercings. He scowled all of the time, and
Speaker 2: he was utterly and fully committed to a life of
Speaker 2: piracy in classic form. He did not live a very
Speaker 2: long time. He wrote freight trains. He lived in a van.
Speaker 2: He fucked dudes for money to get gas, or he
Speaker 2: would just steal money or gas as needed. He burned
Speaker 2: every American flag he could find. His so many stories
Speaker 2: about being like and then we stole all these American
Speaker 2: flags and I had to hide in a dumpster from
Speaker 2: the cops for six hours. And this kind of man.
Speaker 2: He also wrote short stories about animals living in happy
Speaker 2: anarchist societies, and he wrote a zene call Irish for Punks,
Speaker 2: which was full of ideas about how to cuss in Irish.
Speaker 2: When I was twenty and he was twenty one, he
Speaker 2: died drinking and driving stolen photocopies of anarchizines splayed out
Speaker 2: across the freeway. Don't drink and dive or drink and die.
Speaker 2: Don't drink and drive or you will die. It's bad.
Speaker 2: Don't do it. Before he died, he told me a
Speaker 2: lot about pirates. He was obsessed with pirates. He used
Speaker 2: to draw lox's over his eyes when he would write
Speaker 2: letters to me, And he told me about Captain Mission.
Speaker 2: As Darkstar had it, Captain Mission was like the original anarchist.
Speaker 2: He and his crew attacked slave ships, freeing the slaves
Speaker 2: and killing the slavers before establishing an anti racist colony
Speaker 2: on Madagascar called Libertalia, which was ruled by direct democracy,
Speaker 2: and they lived in a socialist economy nearly a century
Speaker 2: before anyone was calling anything socialism. This story is too
Speaker 2: good to be true, and it's not true. Captain Mission
Speaker 2: was invented by the author of the Pirate Book. Almost certainly.
Speaker 2: I'd always assumed he'd been invented whole cloth, either to
Speaker 2: sell more books, because like, uh, throw this little interesting
Speaker 2: guy in there, right, or to get across some political ideas,
Speaker 2: a mission as it were, right, Captain Mission is clearly
Speaker 2: an important part of the book. Captain Mission's chapter is
Speaker 2: more than fourteen thousand words long, which is real long
Speaker 2: for people who are listening and they don't think in
Speaker 2: terms of words like my weird writer brain is poisoned
Speaker 2: to do. That's twice as long as this week's script.
Speaker 2: So a bunch of words. It's also clearly important to
Speaker 2: the author. It is the first chapter of the second volume.
Speaker 2: And it turns out he did base it on fact.
Speaker 2: He just based it on the less interesting part of
Speaker 2: the story. And this sounds like an ad transition, but
Speaker 2: it Isn't you know what else was both real and
Speaker 2: imagine somehow both at once.
Speaker 3: The monetary system that we use.
Speaker 2: Oh that's true. Also the libertarian socialist pirate communities on Madagascar,
Speaker 2: which inasmuch as they existed, were less colonies of like
Speaker 2: white and black pirates from elsewhere and more complicated societies
Speaker 2: built from indigenous Malagassi political traditions interacting with pirates.
Speaker 3: So the pirates were showing up running away from the
Speaker 3: crown and all the people they stole from landing in
Speaker 3: this place where well, I've read my David Graber where
Speaker 3: there was a super developed form of democracy and like
Speaker 3: learning it from the Malagasy and that sounds like a
Speaker 3: very nice fairy tale too, So there must be something
Speaker 3: more complicated than that.
Speaker 2: Okay, so interesting one. David Graber is the main source
Speaker 2: for this episode. Fuck yes, two No, Actually, oh, the
Speaker 2: ways in which it's different from that are so interesting
Speaker 2: because egalitarian traditions were coming from a lot of the
Speaker 2: Malagasy methods of how people were living there, but they
Speaker 2: were not any way democratic. The pirates actually brought the democracy.
Speaker 2: But oh, you're gonna like it. This is gonna be
Speaker 2: a good Okay.
Speaker 3: I cannot wait. I cannot wait, I cannot wait.
Speaker 2: So Madagascar, Madagascar is a big fucking island off the
Speaker 2: coast of Southeast Africa. It is almost as big as Texas.
Speaker 2: Even if you're bad at geography, especially African geography, like
Speaker 2: the average American, I think there's a good chance that
Speaker 2: people know where Madagascar.
Speaker 3: Is, the giant island off of the coast.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like if you handed the average non
Speaker 2: Africa geography know where, they'd probably figure out. Egypt, South
Speaker 2: Africa and Madagascar.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm wrong, and yeah, I think you might be overestimating.
Speaker 3: I think probably only Madagascar fair enough.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of things that know anyway, I'm not
Speaker 2: great at geography, but I know way more than that.
Speaker 2: I'm proud to say because I worked at it. This
Speaker 2: is not what anyone is here to hear about it.
Speaker 2: Geography Understanding Madagascar is fascinating for a thousand reasons. There's
Speaker 2: a ton of biodiversity there, especially endemic plants and animals,
Speaker 2: like stuff that doesn't appear anywhere else. There are a
Speaker 2: fuck ton of endemic species of lemurs. I spent way
Speaker 2: too long in the time I had to write this
Speaker 2: script just looking at pictures of different kinds of lemurs.
Speaker 3: Was there a lemur pirate intersection?
Speaker 2: No, I just was reading about Madagascar and I got
Speaker 2: distracted by pictures of lemurs. This is the way my
Speaker 2: brain works. Also, there's an animal called a fossa, which
Speaker 2: is like a giant mongoose that looks like a puma
Speaker 2: and eats lemurs. They're pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Right now, I'm in my head, I'm drawing pirate lemurs.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. This is what happens when you get an
Speaker 3: artist on the show.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, no, you know what, you can just to
Speaker 2: draw pirate lemurs and it'll be great. There's also huge
Speaker 2: bats there, and there's an animal called the satanic leaf
Speaker 2: tailed gecko.
Speaker 3: What the fuck?
Speaker 1: I want one.
Speaker 2: They're so cute.
Speaker 4: I want one.
Speaker 2: They really are little satanic leaf tail gekos.
Speaker 3: Is it big or little? Is it a tiny thing
Speaker 3: or a large?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I didn't get a good picture for scale, but has
Speaker 2: a leaf tail and it's like dragon demon looking. They're
Speaker 2: so good.
Speaker 3: This is of course, this became pirate Island, and look
Speaker 3: at the visuals that you have.
Speaker 2: No, I know right, folks have lived on Madagascar for
Speaker 2: around two thousand years. It actually is one of the
Speaker 2: like more recently populated large land masses.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I have to pause for a second so
Speaker 4: I can show you guys this gecko.
Speaker 1: Because it's actually really terrifying. Look at this guy.
Speaker 3: What the fuck man? That was what the Satan pirate
Speaker 3: was worshiping that the crew killed him for They It
Speaker 3: was definitely yeah yeah, because look at those eyes.
Speaker 2: One of those was hanging out on his shoulder just
Speaker 2: talking to him.
Speaker 1: And I don't change my statement. I want one. I
Speaker 1: want this guy with this crazy giant red eyeballs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh oh they're tiny.
Speaker 1: They're tiny. Well they're geckos, their finger ge goos.
Speaker 2: That one's like finger nail. That might be a baby.
Speaker 1: That might be a baby. But yeah, anyways, I just
Speaker 1: thought everybody should know that. And if you're listening, please
Speaker 1: please google Satanic leaf tailed gecko. You will enjoy it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh my god, what a delightful creature.
Speaker 2: I know. No, you're right, this is what the guy
Speaker 2: was worshiping. Like one of them was hanging out on
Speaker 2: his shoulder, and people were like, I just can't handle it.
Speaker 2: It's too much for me.
Speaker 3: He had a pinky gecko and it was hanging out
Speaker 3: on his pinky. He was talking to it. He was
Speaker 3: asking whether or not they should do missions, and the
Speaker 3: crew tore him into pieces over it.
Speaker 2: Thunder Yeah, that tracks, and I would read the your
Speaker 2: graphic novel about it. So folks have lived there for
Speaker 2: about two thousand years, coming from all over the place,
Speaker 2: coming from the east, the north, and the west, from
Speaker 2: Indonesia and Swanna and East Africa, including most likely many Jews.
Speaker 2: Were actually an important part of the sort of cultural
Speaker 2: makeup of Madagascar for a long time. These groups actually
Speaker 2: just lived in different places, and then around the turn
Speaker 2: of the first millennia you start getting a synthesis culture
Speaker 2: that what's now the Malagassy culture. The island was under
Speaker 2: Arab influence and slavers from the Ottoman Empire lived on
Speaker 2: the west coast of it for a long ass time,
Speaker 2: doing a fair amount of integrating into the local population
Speaker 2: or at least making all alliances and such with them.
Speaker 2: They stayed apart, but they weren't like, they weren't what
Speaker 2: the Europeans are about to do basically.
Speaker 3: And so were they they enslaving Malagasy people or were
Speaker 3: they using it as a base to take slaves from
Speaker 3: other parts of the continent.
Speaker 2: So they were buying, So slavery and in Madagascar was
Speaker 2: actually kind of interesting when we talk about it a
Speaker 2: little bit. Basically, whenever different groups would fight, they would
Speaker 2: take captives from each other, and then those would they
Speaker 2: would turn around and sell them to the Ottomans, who
Speaker 2: would then sell them off the island. So they weren't
Speaker 2: necessarily like raiding for slaves, but they were instead buying
Speaker 2: them from people there. And yeah, they absolutely were enslaving
Speaker 2: people on the island and shipping them away. Portugal and
Speaker 2: France tried to set up settlements too, starting the fifteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: but they were messy assholes about it, and they all
Speaker 2: got run off by the locals and or like just killed.
Speaker 3: Were what were they doing?
Speaker 2: So basically Europeans were just seen as violent savages.
Speaker 3: Like I mean, for good reason.
Speaker 2: Absolutely they were accurately seen as what they were. And
Speaker 2: they would show up and basically just like take whatever
Speaker 2: they wanted and rob people and just like try to
Speaker 2: like crush entire villages and just be like whatever, it's
Speaker 2: ours now. And they would be like incredibly racist about stuff,
Speaker 2: and they would like it was just like the Ottoman
Speaker 2: Empire showed up as slavers and stead up like slave
Speaker 2: trade places, and they were by far the lesser evil.
Speaker 2: That's how bad the Europeans were. Basically the tracks the tracks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so you know, these legal settlements would just go around,
Speaker 2: and I'm comparing that to the pirates who were gonna
Speaker 2: come later, who actually were much more polite. The legal
Speaker 2: settlements would run around and rob locals and capture slaves
Speaker 2: and shit, and were far too racist to consider that
Speaker 2: are integrating with the locals at all. Later European settlements
Speaker 2: did start sticking around pirate settlements. Not everyone, not all
Speaker 2: the pirates were European, right, but they were kind of
Speaker 2: more in the European sphere of influence. Basically, the pirates
Speaker 2: ironically were a lot less likely to steal ship from
Speaker 2: their neighbors and or steal their neighbors themselves because.
Speaker 3: They didn't have like a base that they could run
Speaker 3: to and you know, take all of their loot off to,
Speaker 3: because they actually had to make themselves not hated in
Speaker 3: order to use the island as a base.
Speaker 2: I think. So, I mean, they kind of just like
Speaker 2: came in less cocky, right, and with a lot less assumptions,
Speaker 2: and also just kind of like I think that there
Speaker 2: was honestly different ethics. Like it's so hard because, for
Speaker 2: very understandable reasons, we look at slavery as like one
Speaker 2: of those things where like all slavery is bad, right,
Speaker 2: because it is, but not all slavery is the same.
Speaker 2: And I think that understanding slavery outside of the United
Speaker 2: States requires understanding to some level that like different ways
Speaker 2: that slavery worked at different times in different places, you know,
Speaker 2: And so like I think the pirates were like, why
Speaker 2: would we steal from our poor neighbors? Honestly, I mean, well,
Speaker 2: we'll talk about what the pirates are doing in slavery.
Speaker 2: It's actually really complicated and interesting. But one of the
Speaker 2: largest distinct ethno groups in modern Madagascar is in fact
Speaker 2: the Zono Malata, where the descendants of Malagasy and European
Speaker 2: pirate ancestors. And they're going to come up a bunch
Speaker 2: in this week's story because also the other thing that
Speaker 2: the pirates were doing was like marrying into the culture.
Speaker 2: And there's kind of this like there's a lot of
Speaker 2: places like this in the world, and I'm assuming that
Speaker 2: because I can I know about it with Ireland and
Speaker 2: now Madagascar, and so therefore I'm making rude assumptions about
Speaker 2: the entire world where prior to like settler colonialism, people
Speaker 2: would show up places and either maybe stay a little
Speaker 2: bit different and have their port or kind of just
Speaker 2: like marry in and then sort of dissipate into the
Speaker 2: culture and like do some kind of synthetic thing, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I mean, I feel like that's most of
Speaker 3: the history of India, you know.
Speaker 2: I believe it.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's that's what people do, right, Like they move,
Speaker 3: they go to places, they become other things when they're there.
Speaker 3: And it's really the Setler colonialism that takes like these
Speaker 3: super defined identities and defines you as like the indigenous
Speaker 3: people to be exploited or the elite British or French
Speaker 3: or whatever to do the exploiting. Whereas like previously, even
Speaker 3: sometimes you have people show up and sometimes they'd even
Speaker 3: be bastards and criminals, but there are also could be
Speaker 3: bastards and criminals that integrated into your society somehow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally and you know, joined Malagasy society. Like again
Speaker 2: not any perfect way, and we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: some of the imperfect parts of it. But do you
Speaker 2: know what doesn't integrate well into society and sticks.
Speaker 3: Out Satanic leaf tails get goos.
Speaker 2: That's right, they are. This podcast is brought to you
Speaker 2: by Satanic not the concept of Satanic leaf tailed get goes,
Speaker 2: but a specific one named Lucifer who has been talking
Speaker 2: to me and giving me information that is the sponsor
Speaker 2: of this show and also whoever else gave us money?
Speaker 2: Now iber Beck, So okay, the Libertalius story, the idea
Speaker 2: of this like perfect little utopian pirate community. I don't
Speaker 2: know too many authors who could have convinced me there
Speaker 2: was anything to that story at all, because I had
Speaker 2: wanted to believe it's so bad when I was younger
Speaker 2: that I like mourned its falseness and moved on, didn't
Speaker 2: really want to look back. But there is an author
Speaker 2: that I trust, the author that brought me back there,
Speaker 2: whose name you've already mentioned.
Speaker 3: David Graeber.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's my little aside about David Graeber. I think
Speaker 2: David Graber is going to be considered one of the
Speaker 2: greatest thinkers of the early twenty five century. He wrote
Speaker 2: books that were at once accessible to the public while
Speaker 2: also pushing anthropological and political science forward. His writing has
Speaker 2: been one of the primary things that shifted how I
Speaker 2: view politics and economics. I honestly think he is as
Speaker 2: important of an economic thinker as Marx if we let
Speaker 2: him be, if people listen to what he has to say.
Speaker 2: He wrote a book called Debt, The First five thousand
Speaker 2: Years into History of Money that contains an awful lot
Speaker 2: of bombshells that destroy the way that people normally talk
Speaker 2: about money. For example, barter didn't precede money. Barter is
Speaker 2: what people who are used to money use when there
Speaker 2: suddenly isn't any money anymore. He also, alongside another anthropologist
Speaker 2: named David Wengrow, wrote a book called The Dawn of Everything.
Speaker 2: This book pulls the rug out from underneath a wide
Speaker 2: swath of modern Western thought, including the idea that the
Speaker 2: Enlightenment came primarily from European minds or I mean the
Speaker 2: go ahead, No.
Speaker 3: I mean that book. It basically is this complete subversion
Speaker 3: right of everything that we're taught. We're taught that the
Speaker 3: Enlightenment is just sort of this like neat progression of
Speaker 3: European history. Born in Europe, raised in Europe, gifted to America,
Speaker 3: you know, from the Europeans. And he's like, no, fuck,
Speaker 3: that the Enlightenment actually comes from indigenous intellectuals in North
Speaker 3: America and Europeans like taking seriously what they were.
Speaker 2: Saying, yeah, and then turning around and using it to
Speaker 2: do absolutely awful things, because the Enlightenment mostly did bad stuff,
Speaker 2: but the concepts of it absolutely One of the things
Speaker 2: that I've run across by doing research on the show
Speaker 2: is I've been thinking even about how, like, you know,
Speaker 2: my own political ideology, anarchism comes from the people who
Speaker 2: are calling themselves that it first or like enlightenment political
Speaker 2: thinkers from Western Europe, right, or actually a lot of
Speaker 2: them are from Russia. And yet what I've been learning
Speaker 2: by doing the show and learning more about out all
Speaker 2: of these different things is that anarchists were actually specifically
Speaker 2: drawing from indigenous communities all over the world very consciously,
Speaker 2: and indigenous anarchists in various places were informing people, whether
Speaker 2: it was like in Siberia, in Ukraine and Ireland and Mexico. Oh,
Speaker 2: and a lot of ideas coming from like Korea and
Speaker 2: places like that. Right, those are the places I personally
Speaker 2: run across it in my research for this show, and
Speaker 2: so I'm just like more and more, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: all this shit comes from elsewhere, you know.
Speaker 3: So basically what you're telling me is you had these
Speaker 3: Russian radicals that were getting exiled to Siberia and they
Speaker 3: were meeting indigenous folks and they were listening to them
Speaker 3: and learning from them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they were like, oh, there's the rules. What
Speaker 2: if we all treat each other as equals? Doesn't that
Speaker 2: sound nice?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: But also like, let's not credit these people when we
Speaker 3: write our pamphlets. About it.
Speaker 2: Well, I actually think some of them did, and they did,
Speaker 2: I think so, And like, I think that it goes
Speaker 2: through this process of like the original of that gets dissolved.
Speaker 2: And part of it is because anarchists are so internationalist
Speaker 2: in the late like nineteenth early twentieth century, where they
Speaker 2: would refuse to credit anything as like coming from this
Speaker 2: or that place, right, because you'd have like indigenous Mexican
Speaker 2: anarchists who wouldn't necessarily identify as indigenous because they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: we're internationalists. And also, of course, because Mexico's indigenous, the
Speaker 2: structure of whiteness and indigeneity is different in Mexico than
Speaker 2: it is like in the United States.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: But I think about how like, oh, man, there's a tangent.
Speaker 2: But I think how like twentieth century anarchist history books
Speaker 2: don't talk about the women, right, right, But then if
Speaker 2: you actually read the people that those books are about,
Speaker 2: those people did write about the women because the women
Speaker 2: were just as involved as everyone turns out. And so
Speaker 2: it's this like process of like stripping away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, No, No, I totally get it. I mean
Speaker 3: when I was writing about the boon do it was
Speaker 3: the same thing when you go through these like biographical dictionaries,
Speaker 3: it's like thirty percent women. And they're not just like
Speaker 3: making food and educating the kids. They're throwing bombs, they're
Speaker 3: running self defense groups. They're riling up, you know, when
Speaker 3: the battleship Potempkin is there. But somehow, through this process
Speaker 3: of people writing histories and then people writing the histories
Speaker 3: in English instead of in Yiddish or whatever, the women
Speaker 3: just kind of get filtered out and made into a footnote.
Speaker 3: And I feel like so much of the work of
Speaker 3: what you're doing, it's this act of necromancy right where
Speaker 3: you're taking those people back from being lost in the
Speaker 3: dust of the archive.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, and I will take that as an honor, Okay.
Speaker 2: So Graeber is one of the authors who has done
Speaker 2: more to popularize this idea, this idea that the Enlightenment
Speaker 2: doesn't just come from the West, right, And this book
Speaker 2: also downe of Everything, destroys linear concepts of progress. It
Speaker 2: shows that societies have done just about everything, They've tried
Speaker 2: just about everything. So many things are possible, so many
Speaker 2: different things have been done, and most of what we
Speaker 2: assume about the development of human society is wrong. And
Speaker 2: this isn't necessarily all of his or the other David's research,
Speaker 2: as much as like kind of catching up the rest
Speaker 2: of us on what anthropologists have been realizing for a while.
Speaker 2: I'll know. And Graver was also an anarchist. His other
Speaker 2: claim to fame was heavily influencing the occupy movement of
Speaker 2: twenty eleven. Framing things around the ninety nine percent against
Speaker 2: like the one percenter seems to have been his idea.
Speaker 2: I met him once. We have an awful lot of
Speaker 2: friends in common, and we also had some frenemies in common,
Speaker 2: but I'm not Yeah.
Speaker 3: I met him a few times also, and one of
Speaker 3: my sort of fond memories of him was him taking
Speaker 3: me around these like flea markets in London, and there
Speaker 3: was this book of Edmund Dulac fairy Tales, and I
Speaker 3: was looking at it lustfully, but I had no cash,
Speaker 3: and he just like he just bought it for me.
Speaker 3: He was like, I like to just I like to
Speaker 3: give gifts. And then he he showed me all of
Speaker 3: these these beautiful costumes that he had in his place
Speaker 3: because he loved to play dress up.
Speaker 2: Also, Oh that's cool, I genuinely think. Okay, So he
Speaker 2: died suddenly in twenty twenty of Pancreatis. His wife lays
Speaker 2: the blame at COVID's feet, and that seems completely possible,
Speaker 2: and I think we he really lost something he was
Speaker 2: I believe fifty nine when he died.
Speaker 3: I would have given anything to have him now talking
Speaker 3: about the shit with Israel and the genocide.
Speaker 2: Oh no, yeah, Like I just honestly, like, I never really,
Speaker 2: like gave much credence to the idea of a public
Speaker 2: intellectual until kind of seeing the impact that he was
Speaker 2: able to have. And David Graeber did a lot of
Speaker 2: anthropological research on Madagascar specifically, and one of his last books,
Speaker 2: probably the last book of his to be published in English.
Speaker 2: This book was first published in French in twenty nineteen
Speaker 2: and then in English in twenty twenty three, three years
Speaker 2: after his death. I phrased it that way because I
Speaker 2: don't know how to pronounce post hum humorously, honestly.
Speaker 3: Posthumously humously, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nope, and maybe it's not. And if you're listening,
Speaker 2: don't tell me. I don't want to, because I could
Speaker 2: look it up if I really cared, but I don't.
Speaker 1: And so it's also my one it's my lys favorite
Speaker 1: word to say.
Speaker 2: I know right, it's no good. This book is called
Speaker 2: Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia, and more than anything
Speaker 2: else is it's my primary source for this particular episode,
Speaker 2: because frankly, I am not aware of other sources worth
Speaker 2: taking seriously on this topic, because all the rest are
Speaker 2: random myths and lies. But first, back to pirates, and
Speaker 2: by that I mean back to ads. The lead tailed
Speaker 2: gecko has told me to sell. You all should give
Speaker 2: me things. Just leave things out under a linden tree
Speaker 2: and I will come and pick them up.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Also, here's other ads.
Speaker 4: We're back.
Speaker 2: I don't think I could recognize the indantry.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's something from old songs. I don't
Speaker 3: think I could recognize it either.
Speaker 2: Maybe they only have them in England. Again, if you
Speaker 2: are listening and you know the answer, don't tell me.
Speaker 2: I could look it up if I wanted to know.
Speaker 2: Why am I complaining about people? Anyway? Whatever pirates, Europe
Speaker 2: was doing some wild expansion throughout the seventeenth century. They're
Speaker 2: off conquering and colonizing willy nilly. By the end of
Speaker 2: the seventeenth century, he star again the Enlightenment and well,
Speaker 2: here's the part of the script that it does the
Speaker 2: thing we already talked about. So now I have to
Speaker 2: figure out where to skip ahead to. But I'm going
Speaker 2: to actually skip to a David Graeber quote specifically on
Speaker 2: this idea. The European Enlightenment was, more than anything else,
Speaker 2: an age of intellectual synthesis. Were previously intellectual backwaters like
Speaker 2: England and France that suddenly found themselves at the center
Speaker 2: of global empires and exposed for them startling new ideas
Speaker 2: were trying to integrate, for instance, ideas of individualism and
Speaker 2: liberty drawn from the Americas, a new conception of the
Speaker 2: bureaucratic nation state largely inspired by China, African contract theories,
Speaker 2: and economic and social theories originally developed in medieval Islam.
Speaker 2: And what does that have to do with pirates? Well,
Speaker 2: all of these wild ideas you can't play around with
Speaker 2: them in an existing monarchy, very easily, right.
Speaker 3: No, you can't play around with ideas and monarchies. The
Speaker 3: monarch tends to cut off your head for that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, like classically not a popular thing to do around this,
Speaker 2: you know, in the middle of the seventeenth century and
Speaker 2: all the like, people who are like, what if there's
Speaker 2: no such thing as sin and we can do polyamory
Speaker 2: and they were like, We're going to drill holes through
Speaker 2: your tongue. Those are the ranters. We did an episode
Speaker 2: about them. Nice Nice, So at the colonial fringes in
Speaker 2: the desolated lands of genocide and extermination, you could play
Speaker 2: around with these ideas, so, you know, go to murder
Speaker 2: all the people in North America who gave you these ideas,
Speaker 2: and then you can play around with them. What could
Speaker 2: go wrong? The pirates, viewed within this framework are among
Speaker 2: the people playing around with enlightenment ideas. They had direct democracies.
Speaker 2: In case I don't think I like cover this too clearly,
Speaker 2: like the average pirate ship in the oldie Golden Age,
Speaker 2: pirates elected their captains and the only two official posts
Speaker 2: was captain and quartermaster. Most decisions were made at assemblies.
Speaker 2: The quartermaster was actually in charge of the assemblies. In
Speaker 2: a lot of ways, the captain resembles what would be
Speaker 2: called anthropologically a war chief, someone who's in charge only
Speaker 2: during times of war. Most decisions were democratically made except
Speaker 2: during the middle of a fight. On pirate ships. That
Speaker 2: is the big reveal that I suspected a lot of
Speaker 2: people listening already.
Speaker 3: Know, so they were actually doing the kind of assemblies
Speaker 3: that I feel like we were trying to do an
Speaker 3: Occupy Wall Street that people were trying to do in
Speaker 3: all of the Occupy the Squares type rebellions that happened
Speaker 3: in twenty eleven, but they were working.
Speaker 2: Okay, but even wilder than that. Yeah, the Pirate ones
Speaker 2: were mostly I believe, majority vote, but the Malagasy ones
Speaker 2: that we're going to talk about in a little bit
Speaker 2: were consensus. Holy fuck, and Graber is one of the
Speaker 2: primary people who helped set up Occupy Wall Street. Occupy
Speaker 2: Wall Street owsen in in credible amount directly to the
Speaker 2: Malagasy like culture of consensus decision making at assembly.
Speaker 3: This is amazing. I yeah, you blew my mind. Like
Speaker 3: I obviously I knew David helped set up Occupy, but
Speaker 3: I okay, my mind is blown. My mind is blown
Speaker 3: by this.
Speaker 2: And there is there is a previous history of consensus
Speaker 2: decision making on the left in the United States, coming
Speaker 2: from the anti nuke movement, right, But like you know,
Speaker 2: I think that this is still a valid thread to
Speaker 2: be drawn because he had been doing a lot of
Speaker 2: this anthropological research before Occupy Wall Street. I think he
Speaker 2: did it when he was just getting when he was
Speaker 2: in school, actually, some of his earlier research on this.
Speaker 2: And so these pirates they're setting up direct democracies and
Speaker 2: they have social contracts that are one hundred years ahead
Speaker 2: of their time, and it helped. I'm sure that any
Speaker 2: given ship was full of people from all over the world.
Speaker 2: There was escaped slaves and indigenous people and Arabic people
Speaker 2: and all kinds of white people from different countries. So
Speaker 2: of course they tried some shit together. And also pirates
Speaker 2: like to spin their own legends. They had to write
Speaker 2: the fear of the black flag is a fundamental part
Speaker 2: of their economic and military strategy. They don't want to fight,
Speaker 2: they want people to surrender, and so they spread legends.
Speaker 2: And one of the legends, ironically, they both would spread
Speaker 2: their legend about like, oh, man, our guy black Beard,
Speaker 2: he's gonna fucking flay you, right, because you want everyone
Speaker 2: to think that, so you surrender when you see fucking
Speaker 2: black Beard.
Speaker 3: And then you don't lose half your crew.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Like getting into gunfights is always a
Speaker 2: bad idea, Like you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, I know, it's much better to be so
Speaker 3: scary that the other person doesn't fuck with you in
Speaker 3: the first place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that has actually literally been my strategy. Is like
Speaker 2: when I was like a street kid, people don't know
Speaker 2: what to make of me. I'm not particularly large, but
Speaker 2: I'm strange looking, and it's kept me safe. Another legend
Speaker 2: that they would spread is kind of this the story
Speaker 2: of their democracy. So in a way that I didn't
Speaker 2: really realize, pirates themselves kind of influenced probably the creation
Speaker 2: of modern democratic states were both better and worse.
Speaker 3: So they were spreading the story of the democracy so
Speaker 3: that when they got onto some ship that is filled
Speaker 3: with poor press ganged British guys who are like literally
Speaker 3: having their teeth fall out of scurvy, the poor press
Speaker 3: ganged British guys won't fight them because they think that
Speaker 3: they can join up with the pirates and have a
Speaker 3: better life.
Speaker 2: Is that that the strategy, So that's my read on it.
Speaker 2: I'm not one hundred percent certain. I'm kind of conjecturing.
Speaker 2: I've read that they would spread this thing, the legend
Speaker 2: of their democracy, and I reached a kind of similar
Speaker 2: conclusion because actually one of the main ways that new
Speaker 2: pirates crews would form was direct mutiny. It wouldn't even
Speaker 2: be that a lot of crews would form, like you
Speaker 2: were talking about, where pirates would show up and be like, hey,
Speaker 2: you want to be pirates or you want to die,
Speaker 2: It's easy choice, you know. And other times people would
Speaker 2: be like, hey, we fucking hate our captain, We're not
Speaker 2: even getting paid. Let's have a mutiny. And then once
Speaker 2: you have a mutiny, you're like, well, if we go
Speaker 2: to any civilized port, we're now dead, right right, you know,
Speaker 2: so I guess we're fucking pirates now, and so you
Speaker 2: can have this like cultural spread if people have these ideas.
Speaker 2: I could know more about this than I do. I'm
Speaker 2: a little bit conjecturing here.
Speaker 3: And by civilized port you mean like ports of European christiandom.
Speaker 2: I am also under the impression to include like places
Speaker 2: in South Asia, and I'm not. I couldn't tell you
Speaker 2: one one or the other about how the Ottomans were
Speaker 2: treating pirates at this time, because obviously, like pirate versus
Speaker 2: privateer is like such a funny distinction, right, privateer as
Speaker 2: an official charter to go around and do piracy and
Speaker 2: a pirate doesn't. And so a pirate is like an
Speaker 2: the enemy of all nations. I don't know my inference,
Speaker 2: and I have one reason to draw this, which has
Speaker 2: to do with a later thing that involves some some
Speaker 2: folks in South Asia being real mad at the pirates.
Speaker 2: Is that enemy of all nations? Like meant everywhere that
Speaker 2: considered itself civilized, which I would assume would mean Swanna,
Speaker 2: Western Europe and South Asia and presumably East Asia, but
Speaker 2: I know way less about East Asian piracy. That's my
Speaker 2: best guess.
Speaker 3: There was an amazing woman pirate from China. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: who needs an episode like most successful pirate of all time?
Speaker 2: No exactly. That's literally why I don't know as much
Speaker 2: about it yet is that I'm planning to do a
Speaker 2: whole episodes about her.
Speaker 3: Fuck yes, fuck yes.
Speaker 2: And then these pirates, they're trying out all these different ideas,
Speaker 2: according to both legend and anthropology alike, they would try
Speaker 2: out new social forms on various islands like Libertalia, the
Speaker 2: Legend of Libertalia. Honestly, it's kind of a bummer of
Speaker 2: a story. All of these pirates, none of them indigenous
Speaker 2: to Madagascar, show up and create this racially diverse democratic
Speaker 2: utopia based on private property and it's sort of like
Speaker 2: a proto USA, but less immediately racist than the USA.
Speaker 2: But it's also kind of involve in the slave trade,
Speaker 2: so it's not really all that much better. And then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden they're killed by indigenous people for
Speaker 2: no reason. That's the story.
Speaker 3: Reason never, no, no reason at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah. David Graeber writes about this quote, it would appear
Speaker 2: likely that there was no captain mission or a settlement
Speaker 2: called Libertalia, but there most certainly were pirate settlements on
Speaker 2: the Malagasy coast, and what's more, they were the place
Speaker 2: for radical social experiments. Pirates did experiment with new forms
Speaker 2: of governance and property arrangements. What's more, so did members
Speaker 2: of the surrounding Malagassy communities into which they married, many
Speaker 2: of whom had lived in their settlements, sailed in their
Speaker 2: ships and formed blood brotherhood pacts, and spent many hours
Speaker 2: in political conversation with them. Which is to say Libertalia
Speaker 2: isn't real. Instead, the thing that happened is so much
Speaker 2: more interesting. There was, however, a direct inspiration for the
Speaker 2: Libertalia story, so in a way, there kind of was
Speaker 2: a Libertalia. There was this pirate utopian an island and
Speaker 2: it was destroyed by the locals. And it was destroyed
Speaker 2: by the locals for a good reason. What was that slavery?
Speaker 3: Shockingly, when you break into people's houses and drag them
Speaker 3: off screaming to do the shit work on the other
Speaker 3: side of the ocean, they don't like you, and then
Speaker 3: they kick you out.
Speaker 2: I know, who would have known?
Speaker 3: Yeah, shocker, shocker.
Speaker 2: An awful lot of early Golden Age pirates actually spent
Speaker 2: their time in the Indian Ocean, not the Caribbean. The
Speaker 2: Caribbean kind of comes a little bit later. It comes
Speaker 2: both before and later, but the main Golden Age we
Speaker 2: talked about is in the Caribbean, whereas like a couple
Speaker 2: decades earlier, it's in the Indian Ocean. Trade was richer
Speaker 2: over in the Indian Ocean at the time. Europe was
Speaker 2: really only just starting to not be a backwater and
Speaker 2: these pirates needed a home base, and Madagascar was perfect.
Speaker 2: The East India Company didn't claim it, and neither did
Speaker 2: the British Royal African Company, which was running slavery. They
Speaker 2: especially settled on the northeast of the island, away from
Speaker 2: the Malagasy kingdoms elsewhere on the island, not that there
Speaker 2: weren't people there, but there was like some larger political
Speaker 2: institutions elsewhere. In particular, they settled on an island called
Speaker 2: Nosey Boraja from sixteen ninety one to sixteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: For eight years there was a pirate community there. The
Speaker 2: population of pirates and locals alike that would ebb and
Speaker 2: flow from like thirty to one thousand. It seemed like
Speaker 2: pirates would take some time away from the ocean there.
Speaker 2: Some would smuggle themselves back into the regular world on
Speaker 2: passing merchant ships. Some would live on the island permanently.
Speaker 2: Mostly they would like move to the mainland and get married.
Speaker 2: But we'll get to that. And so these pirates, they're
Speaker 2: robbing the shit out of ships in the Indian Ocean,
Speaker 2: and they needed somewhere to fence their stolen goods. And
Speaker 2: that's where these pirate islands historically come in. This or
Speaker 2: that merchant will set themselves up on an island, they'll
Speaker 2: build a fortress, they will declare themselves the pirate king,
Speaker 2: and then they will fence stole and goods to and
Speaker 2: also corrupt but ostensibly above board merchant.
Speaker 3: So are these merchants the only people declaring themselves pirate
Speaker 3: kings because the pirate ship captains were not declaring themselves
Speaker 3: pirate kings. Was pirate Kings only a marketing thing?
Speaker 2: Okay, so I believe that it was only a marketing thing. However,
Speaker 2: I believe that mostly these merchants were calling themselves pirate kings.
Speaker 2: But occasionally other pirate captains would get called pirate kings
Speaker 2: or call themselves pirate kings or whatever. But it largely
Speaker 2: was a marketing thing. This idea of like the charismatic
Speaker 2: leader of all the pirates type thing was a marketing
Speaker 2: ploy like, don't fuck with us, y'all got kings, we
Speaker 2: got a king. Don't worry, you can't fuck with us.
Speaker 2: We got a king, you know. And the above board
Speaker 2: merchants who would show up on Madagascar or to this
Speaker 2: island off Madagascar were slavers from New York City. That's
Speaker 2: the big above ground organization.
Speaker 3: Oh New York City, Oh New York Yeah.
Speaker 2: Who Yeah, I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole in
Speaker 2: a second. You might know more about them, but I'm
Speaker 2: a find out.
Speaker 3: Okay, no, no, tell me, I bet you do, go
Speaker 3: down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 2: So basically, these merchants from New York would send out
Speaker 2: ships with gunpowder and supplies. And this is like the
Speaker 2: fucking opposite side of the world, right when I picture
Speaker 2: places that are far from New York City, Mattagascar is
Speaker 2: one of the first places I would think of as
Speaker 2: being far from Every hemisphere is different here. But on
Speaker 2: the other hand, people are coming around the so whatever anyway,
Speaker 2: So they would send out ships with gunpowder and supplies
Speaker 2: and all the like live off of this stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: stuff from New York City, and they would bring back
Speaker 2: treasure to sell and then kind of their their cover
Speaker 2: story is this slavery. The people on the Pirate Island
Speaker 2: are like less excited about the slavery, but they're still
Speaker 2: okay with it, and whereas New York City is like
Speaker 2: they're okay with the fencing stolen goods, but they're like
Speaker 2: more into it for the slavery because.
Speaker 3: The slavery is respectable in America and the fence and
Speaker 3: goods might get you in trouble with the Western power
Speaker 3: who those goods were stolen from.
Speaker 2: I think so, and we'll talk about why in a
Speaker 2: little bit. But a decent chunk of New York City's
Speaker 2: slave population was Malagassy.
Speaker 3: Holy fuck, I had no idea.
Speaker 2: And you want to know how we learned how we
Speaker 2: know that there's a bunch of enslave Malagassy folks and
Speaker 2: old new and like colonial New York. How because of
Speaker 2: a side tangent called the Conspiracy of seventeen forty one.
Speaker 2: You ever heard of this?
Speaker 3: Okay? So I had heard of. I don't know if
Speaker 3: this is the Conspiracy of seventeen forty one, but I
Speaker 3: had heard of a bunch of enslaved people in New
Speaker 3: York basically got together and planned like a big ass
Speaker 3: armed revolt that took a ton of firepower to put down.
Speaker 3: But I do not know if that was seventeen forty
Speaker 3: one or one of many other times that enslaved people
Speaker 3: decided to kick out their enslavers and get free.
Speaker 2: Try and do some shit. Yeah, I think that might
Speaker 2: have been a different one, but I'm not sure. This
Speaker 2: one seems to be one of the more talked about one.
Speaker 2: But that's less because of like shit that actually went down,
Speaker 2: and more about the way that, like the trials and
Speaker 2: stuff worked. And I was reading that, like for like
Speaker 2: twenty years before this, there was like a new slaver
Speaker 2: vault in New York City every like two years or so.
Speaker 3: Understandable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in seventeen forty one, black slaves, freed black people
Speaker 2: and Irish indentured servants conspired to burn down New York City,
Speaker 2: and the Irish indentured servants they were suspected of being
Speaker 2: Catholic spies. Like literally they got killed for being undercover priests.
Speaker 2: Because the fuck did you know that in the year
Speaker 2: seventeen hundred they passed laws where you got life in
Speaker 2: prison if you were a Catholic priest in New York
Speaker 2: What the fuck?
Speaker 3: I had no idea.
Speaker 2: No, I had no idea either, Holy fuck man. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so a bunch of people realizing that they're all
Speaker 2: on the same like that their class interests actually align,
Speaker 2: even though some of them are free and some of
Speaker 2: them aren't, and some you know, they tried to have
Speaker 2: a big old revolt. Probably probably why. Probably so a
Speaker 2: bunch of stuff did burn. But the way that this
Speaker 2: conspiracy was like persecuted was Salem witch trial. Basically shit Jesus.
Speaker 3: So these secret evil spies for the pope are going
Speaker 3: around doing their like crazy ass Catholic things and like
Speaker 3: making enslaved people not like being beaten and raped and
Speaker 3: like and now we're going to like put rocks on
Speaker 3: people's chests. Until they came in to say that like
Speaker 3: the devil made them think that it's bad to be
Speaker 3: a slave.
Speaker 2: Not the furthest from that, and like stop giving the
Speaker 2: pope so much credit, you know, not you, but the
Speaker 2: authorities basically they started getting people to crack and then
Speaker 2: name names. And these names were like there's no real
Speaker 2: particular reason to believe that they're reliable, and so it's
Speaker 2: like hard to know if this conspiracy happened, but it
Speaker 2: was kind of this ass panic around this stuff happening,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people were arrested. I didn't write
Speaker 2: down the numbers, and the low hundreds I think, and
Speaker 2: several dozen people were killed by the authorities, and specifically
Speaker 2: enslave people were either hanged or fucking burned at the stake.
Speaker 3: The fuck fucking new.
Speaker 2: Well Irish people were hanged.
Speaker 3: They had to like racially stratify executions fucking people.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, come on, like which is always funny too, right,
Speaker 2: because it's like like overall the history of like Irish's
Speaker 2: whiteness in America is very complicated, and people make sweeping generalizations.
Speaker 2: The Irish have always had it better than black people
Speaker 2: in the United States, but were also criminalized. It just
Speaker 2: was a racial category below white and above black, you know,
Speaker 2: but it was above black, so they didn't get burned
Speaker 2: at the steak. I guess there also were fewer of them,
Speaker 2: so it could be that they just like didn't get lucky.
Speaker 2: And when the I don't know whatever, I found a
Speaker 2: book about This'm probably gon do the episodes about it.
Speaker 3: You have to do an episode about this. I would
Speaker 3: listen to the shit out of this episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I only know like the surface level stuff
Speaker 2: about this so far. But back to our pirate haven
Speaker 2: that is not so great On Wednesday, you're gonna have
Speaker 2: to wait to find out. Here's a hint. They're all
Speaker 2: gonna die and they're all gonna have deserved it. Oh
Speaker 2: you gotta wait ti Wednesday to find out what happened.
Speaker 3: Oh no, So the man in the patch pants was wrong.
Speaker 2: He was wrong. Unfortunately, often people who die at the
Speaker 2: age of twenty one haven't yet been able to develop
Speaker 2: more complex historical analyses. But you know, his heart was
Speaker 2: in the right place. Also, I think he'd like the
Speaker 2: real version so much more so if you're listening Dark Star,
Speaker 2: you'll like it. But do you have anything you want
Speaker 2: to plug?
Speaker 3: Well, I am working on a book about the Jewish
Speaker 3: labor boond, but it's gonna come out so far in
Speaker 3: the future, probably next fall, that I'm just gonna ask
Speaker 3: you to cherish our open your hearts for it eventually
Speaker 3: being published, you know, believe in it like tinker Bell.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 3: And other than that, I'm illustrating a children's book about
Speaker 3: someone who is the exact opposite of a pirate. She
Speaker 3: is Queen nor Jahan of India, the first female sovereign
Speaker 3: of the Mughal Empire. Whoa, And she killed tigers and
Speaker 3: rode war elephants into battle and whoa. Yes, I know,
Speaker 3: like no kings, no gods, no masters, but like so interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah you have to fucking you have to love a
Speaker 3: fucking Mughal empress.
Speaker 2: Yeah fuck yeah. Well the Mughal Empire is going to
Speaker 2: be in part two of this.
Speaker 3: Actually, oh my god, amazing.
Speaker 2: I just don't know a ton about them, so I
Speaker 2: can't provide like broader context around them yet, you know, so,
Speaker 2: but you do. And people can check out Molly's existing stuff,
Speaker 2: including a ton of art that's like, Actually, what I
Speaker 2: mostly personally know you for is that your art was
Speaker 2: just like often everywhere in different like political spaces and
Speaker 2: stuff like that. It's really beautiful art. People should check
Speaker 2: it out.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Yeah, you can go to mollikrabapple dot com
Speaker 3: and check out my work, or you can go to Instagram,
Speaker 3: where I feel like I'm hopping like Pavlov's dog to
Speaker 3: show like my process of painting. And I'm always drawing many, many,
Speaker 3: many many things because that's how I interface with the
Speaker 3: world because I can't do it normally fair enough.
Speaker 2: I hide and research things. But I guess you also
Speaker 2: do that if you want to follow me. I'm also
Speaker 2: on Instagram. I'm on substack. I write about a lot
Speaker 2: of stuff on there. I usually kind of go in
Speaker 2: deeper or a little bit more like personal on topics
Speaker 2: I cover here on this show. Everything that's more political
Speaker 2: is free. Everything that's like super personal. You can subscribe
Speaker 2: and then you can read my tour diaries. Oh, I'm
Speaker 2: on tour right now, that's the thing I'm supposed to plug.
Speaker 2: Oh fine, I am like currently on book tour, and
Speaker 2: by that I mean I came home two days ago
Speaker 2: and I leave tomorrow to continue on and I'll be
Speaker 2: gone for six weeks further on tour. So if you
Speaker 2: live across the north and middle of the United States,
Speaker 2: I will probably come vaguely near you. And then eventually
Speaker 2: I will plan the rest of the tour where I'll
Speaker 2: go down through California and out east and go everywhere
Speaker 2: with me and my dog and my truck. And it's
Speaker 2: supposed to be my van, but my van broke down.
Speaker 2: I've already complained about this in other podcasts a bunch
Speaker 2: of times. My transmission died. I'm really frustrated by it.
Speaker 2: But I have a truck, so I'll travel in the truck.
Speaker 2: And yesterday, and this is completely totally of interest to everyone,
Speaker 2: I got a truck cap on my truck by myself,
Speaker 2: and it is the most physical feat thing I've ever
Speaker 2: done in my life. And it took so many ratchet straps.
Speaker 3: What's a truck cap.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's the thing on the back of a pickup
Speaker 2: truck that makes it like covered, you know.
Speaker 3: Oh cool, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: They're very heavy and I had taken it off because
Speaker 2: I needed my truck to like move mulch and stuff,
Speaker 2: and so just like under some trees in my yard
Speaker 2: was my old truck cap from when I try used
Speaker 2: to travel more in my truck, which I'm gonna do again.
Speaker 2: And this is a totally related Sophia. Anything you want to.
Speaker 4: Plug, there's anything specific I want to plug from all
Speaker 4: of our stuff.
Speaker 2: Zone Media, well, there's cooler.
Speaker 4: Zone Media and the Android version is coming very soon.
Speaker 4: I actually have a meeting about that tomorrow that I
Speaker 4: think is me being like, yes, please fucking do it,
Speaker 4: and then I want to plug. Ed to Trund's Better
Speaker 4: Offline just got a nice little write up in Vulture
Speaker 4: and Ed Ed worked very hard on that show. So
Speaker 4: if you're interested in tech stuff, Ed.
Speaker 2: I increasingly feel like I would be better Offline.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'm interested in the way that I am
Speaker 3: interested in looking at any mortal enemies, which I feel
Speaker 3: like Ed is really good at covering it like that.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: If you want to hear someone scream at people who
Speaker 2: are terrible, but like in a really comforting way, it's
Speaker 2: a good show for it, exactly, all right. Also, a
Speaker 2: good show is part two with this on Wednesday, I'll
Speaker 2: talk to you all.
Speaker 5: That Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
Speaker 5: of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media,
Speaker 5: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
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Speaker 1: You get your podcasts. H