Speaker 1: Whoso Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to cool people who talk about pirates sometimes.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I'm talking to a
Speaker 2: cool person about pirates sometimes whose name is Molly.
Speaker 3: Hi, Molly, Hey, Margaret.
Speaker 2: I suppose you have a last name, Molly Crabapple, Molly Krabapple.
Speaker 2: If you've listened to part one, you know who Molly
Speaker 2: Crabapple is. If you're listening only to part two, you
Speaker 2: might still know who Molly Crabapple is because her stuff's
Speaker 2: a lot of places, and if you don't, you should
Speaker 2: look it up. But Molly Crabapple is a like a
Speaker 2: conflict journalist with art and it's cool. Thank you, our
Speaker 2: producer of Sophie Hi, Sophie Hi, our editor who I
Speaker 2: forgot to shout out last time. I'm so sorry. Rory
Speaker 2: is Rory Hi, Rory Hi, Riy you have to say
Speaker 2: hi to Rory too. All those we can't continue, Hey, Rory,
Speaker 2: my brain doesn't work right? And are they? Musical was
Speaker 2: written for us by unwoman. So this is part two
Speaker 2: about the real Libertalia, rather the cool shit that indigenous
Speaker 2: rebels were doing in Madagascar and how it relates to
Speaker 2: the sometimes cool and complicated shit and sometimes terrible shit
Speaker 2: that pirates from the rest of the world were doing
Speaker 2: in Madagascar, and how cultures come together and do weird
Speaker 2: and interesting things and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not.
Speaker 2: And there's no clear moral line to easily draw in
Speaker 2: this week's episodes, but it sure ain't boring. So there's
Speaker 2: this pirate haven in Madagascar, except instead of a cool
Speaker 2: anarchist utopia, it's a slave trade port, and in order
Speaker 2: to fence their stolen goods. I guess it's one of
Speaker 2: those things where it's like when you're just like kind
Speaker 2: of in the crime world, you're just like fucking around
Speaker 2: with people who are bad also, you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, yeah, pretty much like the.
Speaker 2: Jain Collective was totally working with the mafia. And it's
Speaker 2: like very narrowly hidden subtext. You know, it's just cool
Speaker 2: people do crime and bad people do crime. Crime is
Speaker 2: not a useful metric by which to judge morality. This
Speaker 2: slave trade port, sorry, this pirate haven in Madagascar wasn't
Speaker 2: really operating under the European model of settlement in slavery,
Speaker 2: but more like the Arab and indigenous model, which doesn't
Speaker 2: make it Again. Whatever I've said, my piece about that
Speaker 2: they were actually coordinating with locals to purchase war captives
Speaker 2: and sell those into slavery. And everyone is intermarrying, and
Speaker 2: it wasn't wildly distinct from local culture in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways at the time. This doesn't make it good,
Speaker 2: but it certainly better than the legal settlements. Rather than
Speaker 2: like leading slave raids, various conflicts between various groups would
Speaker 2: lead to small scale warfare which produce captives who could
Speaker 2: be sold into slavery. And so at this point it's
Speaker 2: worth talking about the Malagasy culture of northeast Madagascar itself.
Speaker 2: Madagascar overall was not actually particularly egalitarian, but definitely not
Speaker 2: a modern state structure or anything like that. And honestly,
Speaker 2: it's funny because this, like not a galitarian society, is
Speaker 2: so much more a galitarian than the societies that probably
Speaker 2: anyone who's listening to this lives in. Currently, there was
Speaker 2: an established class of priests, and there was a growing
Speaker 2: class of warriors who are above everyone else too. Those
Speaker 2: are the things that like keep it from being moregalitarian.
Speaker 3: And what's the what religion are the priests doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's really interesting. It depends on what part
Speaker 2: of the island you're on. They're doing different indigenous practices.
Speaker 2: But even though there's no qur'an in sight, most of
Speaker 2: the rest of the island is doing what they would
Speaker 2: call Islam, but it does not map to other people's
Speaker 2: understanding of Islam particularly And then in the northeast part,
Speaker 2: it's Jewish in that same way where it's also not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's like a folk memory of what
Speaker 3: being Jewish might have been this. Yeah, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: like this faint trace of something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And David Graeber, who was Jewish, was kind of
Speaker 2: also been like and I think that they, you know,
Speaker 2: I think some Jewish cultural traits carried on. They like
Speaker 2: spent a lot of time actively discussing philosophy with each
Speaker 2: other and not.
Speaker 3: Agreeing on things and nitpicking, nitpicking the culture of graduate students,
Speaker 3: that's our culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and again I won't say that, but grab
Speaker 2: did and you can.
Speaker 3: And as a Jewish woman, I will say that it's
Speaker 3: no surprise that the culture of rabbis produced Marxists.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, it makes sense. So Northeast Madagascar was a
Speaker 2: clan structure. That whole region had about fifty clans of
Speaker 2: several hundreds more than one thousand people in each clan,
Speaker 2: and these were split up into these large families, and
Speaker 2: you have villages and stuff. Most people are growing rice.
Speaker 2: To quote Graber about the economics in any given village,
Speaker 2: there was a great hall where everyone ate their midday
Speaker 2: meal together, and collective granaries where each family kept their
Speaker 2: own stock, but also a collective store any family coul
Speaker 2: in case of shortfall. This was by no means in
Speaker 2: a galitarian society. Well, everyone had access to the means
Speaker 2: to sustain life, not everyone had equal access to the
Speaker 2: means to create it. Just as the heads of villages
Speaker 2: had multiple wives, so each clan had a dominant lineage
Speaker 2: that managed to keep a large proportion of its daughters
Speaker 2: to itself. It's funny that this is the like nonagalitarians.
Speaker 2: It's so much more a galitarian than how we live now.
Speaker 3: I mean, it seems like the losers of the nonagalitarian
Speaker 3: society are all of the guys that get no wives
Speaker 3: because one guy is getting a lot of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah kind of. And then like and actually a new
Speaker 2: clan split off all the time, started by women who
Speaker 2: were unhappy with what was going on. And overall it's
Speaker 2: a patriarchal and patrilineal culture, but it's like not completely
Speaker 2: and that's also not universal across Madagascar, where there's more
Speaker 2: of like they would, oh there's a word for it,
Speaker 2: I don't remember, but instead of matrilineal or patrilineal, there's
Speaker 2: a like botham version, you know, where people keep track
Speaker 2: of both they're both their parents families. And that's like
Speaker 2: what was happening in Madagascar overall. But northeast Madagascar was
Speaker 2: like ostensibly led by men, but in really complicated ways
Speaker 2: that we're going to talk about, where women actually exerted
Speaker 2: a lot of power. These large families in the clans
Speaker 2: themselves had sort of formal leaders who Europeans immediately called kings,
Speaker 2: but these kings never centralized power and specifically they had
Speaker 2: like basically no executive power. Sometimes these clans would fight.
Speaker 2: I'll talk about decisions or whatever, spoil it already spoiled it.
Speaker 2: They make decisions by consensus and assemblies that anyone who's
Speaker 2: affected by a decision can come participate in.
Speaker 3: And what makes you a king then, besides that you
Speaker 3: have a lot of wives kind of that that's it.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 2: I think it's like, and you also kind of like
Speaker 2: are doing the like I have so many daughters, and
Speaker 2: I control what's happening to my daughter. Like, honestly, there's
Speaker 2: some like patriarchy involved in it too, right, and you're
Speaker 2: like wealthier more likely. Yeah. I think it's so interesting
Speaker 2: because this happens all over the world where we just
Speaker 2: like show up, like Europeans will show up and be
Speaker 2: like that there's a kingdom, and people are like, what, okay,
Speaker 2: if we say we're king, will you leave us alone?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, well you decide that we're quote unquote civilized
Speaker 3: enough not to invade us.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And sometimes these clans would go to war with
Speaker 2: each other, and I think, actually, I think that these
Speaker 2: kings were like war chiefs a lot of times also,
Speaker 2: which put them on equal footing with pirates in a
Speaker 2: lot of ways. Right, Sometimes the kings would just sort
Speaker 2: of fight duels with each other, and then during any
Speaker 2: given war, captives were often taken. And then these captives
Speaker 2: were generally ransom back to the original families or they
Speaker 2: were married into the families that captured them. This is
Speaker 2: like a way you like go get men to make
Speaker 2: everyone not in bread this ye go, it's not whatever.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to put a moral judgment one way
Speaker 2: or the other.
Speaker 3: It's obvious. So they're kidnapping. They're not doing the usual
Speaker 3: thing where they're like kidnapping women and forcing them to marry.
Speaker 3: They're kidnapping dudes and forcing them to marry in.
Speaker 2: Actually, you know what, now that I'm thinking this through,
Speaker 2: a lot of the people are being old as slaves,
Speaker 2: are also women and children, So I think they're just
Speaker 2: capturing people during these raids. But that's my conjecture based
Speaker 2: on what I read. And this does not create chattel slavery,
Speaker 2: but of course foreigners, including Arab traders and European traders,
Speaker 2: turned it into like funneled people into chattel slavery and
Speaker 2: the sort of modern what we think of the North
Speaker 2: Atlantic slave trade and stuff like that. And this whole
Speaker 2: system of conflict kept any given clan or family from
Speaker 2: taking too much power. They were often rich and they
Speaker 2: were surrounded by pirate treasure and shit, but they didn't
Speaker 2: have a lot of control over other people. The political decisions,
Speaker 2: including criminal trials, basically were made it consensus based assemblies
Speaker 2: called cabarety, and these would involve whoever had an interest
Speaker 2: in whatever decision was being made. Most were on a
Speaker 2: household or clan level. Sometimes they were regional, like probably
Speaker 2: the one that is about to kill all the pirates
Speaker 2: was probably a regional cabaret, but we don't know. Also,
Speaker 2: there was like women only ones for like like if
Speaker 2: the shit involved women, then only other women were involved,
Speaker 2: which is better gender politics than a lot of Now,
Speaker 2: there are two ways of looking at the way women
Speaker 2: were treated in the society. One, the primary way that
Speaker 2: is written down by European anthropologists and by European visitors
Speaker 2: is that women were more or less property. They were
Speaker 2: regularly kidnapped and given away. Teenage daughters of important men
Speaker 2: in particular were given away, especially to foreigners like pirates
Speaker 2: like Yasically you show up and they're like, ah, nice
Speaker 2: to meet you, foreigner. Here is my sixteen year old daughter.
Speaker 2: Fuck yeah, no, it's not the best. Men often had
Speaker 2: multiple wives. These are all true statements, but they don't
Speaker 2: address the reality of what was happening. According to the
Speaker 2: Malagasy view of what was happening, and when pirates married
Speaker 2: Malagasy women, interestingly, it brought men into the sphere of
Speaker 2: these important families, so it was like I'm a little
Speaker 2: bit confused I could read this both ways. There's a
Speaker 2: real implica that a lot of the pirate men just
Speaker 2: basically like, like the son in law now just goes
Speaker 2: and like lives with father in law, you know. But
Speaker 2: I believe also women were going and living in these
Speaker 2: coastal towns. And we'll talk about the coastal towns in
Speaker 2: a minute. The way that Malagasy women wrote about what
Speaker 2: was happening is wildly different than the way that European
Speaker 2: men were talking about what was happening, even though they're
Speaker 2: describing the same thing.
Speaker 3: So how did they describe, for instance, like your dad
Speaker 3: given you to the newly arrived pirate dude, so I.
Speaker 2: We arrived pirate dude.
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 2: So they were describing what they were doing as putting
Speaker 2: on love charms and going down to the ocean to
Speaker 2: attract men.
Speaker 3: So they were just like they're having fun.
Speaker 2: They've done witchcraft to get them to show up. They're like, fuck, yeah,
Speaker 2: I got a guy. I went fishing at the ocean
Speaker 2: for a guy.
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow.
Speaker 3: So that's very different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they would marry these men and not be
Speaker 2: subordinate to them.
Speaker 1: So wait, they're like, oh, there's plenty of fish in
Speaker 1: the sea, but there's like.
Speaker 2: Literal men in the sea.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, I'm gonna put a cute outfit on
Speaker 1: and perfume and go to the sea to find a man,
Speaker 1: just like me going to a bookstore being like.
Speaker 2: Do you read? Are you?
Speaker 1: Are?
Speaker 2: You look at me? I'm so alluring? Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: that is the implication of what's happening. And they were like, hell, yeah,
Speaker 2: my powerful witchcraft pulled a man out of the sea,
Speaker 2: you know, honey.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, you know, good for you. And then they're like,
Speaker 3: and my dad will be a good choice for my
Speaker 3: my sea hookup.
Speaker 2: So I again, I don't know how it relates to
Speaker 2: the I don't know how often they're like, dad, why
Speaker 2: do you give me to this guy? Right? I don't
Speaker 2: know as much about that, but by and large, I
Speaker 2: think that the way that they are viewing marriage is
Speaker 2: as an economic relation and not as a romantic relation.
Speaker 2: And specifically it's an economic relation between equals in a
Speaker 2: way that it wasn't in Europe at this time, right,
Speaker 2: And so that's like part of why Europeans could easily
Speaker 2: be like, oh fuck in her property and being given
Speaker 2: around because it's like, well, women were property in England
Speaker 2: in Europe at the time.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, they couldn't even own property.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I don't know about the property rights of women.
Speaker 2: I do know about how women ran all the finances.
Speaker 2: So actually that has some implications. But any man who
Speaker 2: mistreated his wife would be killed, cursed and killed, probably poisoned.
Speaker 2: But it was like not presented as like I'm going
Speaker 2: to poison you. Instead it was like, oh, I don't
Speaker 2: mess with these women though, And then there's all of
Speaker 2: these stories about like and then this man died randomly
Speaker 2: of illness, you know, after he was shitty to his wife.
Speaker 3: So you're just living. You're living with your wife, and
Speaker 3: you just know that at any moment, if you beat
Speaker 3: her up or get out of line, that she might
Speaker 3: just put poison in your food.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Basically that seems like it would make them be respectful.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, And overall that seems to be what happened. And
Speaker 2: men were necessary basically as the bread winners of get
Speaker 2: the fuck out of here. I don't even want to
Speaker 2: see you. Why aren't you on the ocean robbing people
Speaker 2: and giving me stuff? Shit?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 2: And so men couldn't be trusted with finances, and so
Speaker 2: women were in charge of the money. Most of the
Speaker 2: merchants at all of these port cities of pirates, whether
Speaker 2: they were married or not, were women, and so women
Speaker 2: are kind of running the economic sphere.
Speaker 3: Except for the pirate kings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the only specific pirate king. Okay, so
Speaker 2: when I'm talking about these coastal cities, I'm actually talking
Speaker 2: about post that pirate king getting run out of town,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to talk about him getting run of
Speaker 2: town after I finished the like a side about the
Speaker 2: Malagassy folks, and I don't know, I suspect there were
Speaker 2: also probably European traders as well, but the people who
Speaker 2: were kind of like interfacing stuff coming in and out
Speaker 2: of the islands were often women. Observers wrote with scandal
Speaker 2: about how all of the Malagasy women who were married
Speaker 2: could fuck whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted. If a
Speaker 2: pirateman had multiple wives, each must be provided with her
Speaker 2: own home, and then like if he's not home, they're
Speaker 2: allowed to do whatever they want. Basically, it reached the
Speaker 2: point where the coastal pirate towns were called cities of
Speaker 2: women because women ran them and it was mostly women
Speaker 2: living in them. Because all the husbands are at sea.
Speaker 2: Isn't that weird how both those stories are true.
Speaker 3: That's amazing, because, yeah, the Europeans, they had no frame
Speaker 3: to interpret a world where like, first of all, where
Speaker 3: a woman who was married could sleep around, right, where
Speaker 3: a woman would control all of the commerce, where a
Speaker 3: woman would poison her husband if he gave her a
Speaker 3: black eye. They had no way to imagine or I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm sure they had a way, but they hadn't. They
Speaker 3: refused to imagine women as equal humans. And so if
Speaker 3: you can't see women as equal humans, you cannot understand
Speaker 3: at all what's going on.
Speaker 2: Right, And then you're still talking about like a fundamentally right,
Speaker 2: you're still talking about a slave society, right, And so
Speaker 2: on some level, the giving away daughters, it's like, well,
Speaker 2: people are capable of becoming property temporarily in the society
Speaker 2: or even permanently in the society. But then like when
Speaker 2: men are captured, they're often married into the family or whatever. Right,
Speaker 2: so it's just different. Like I feel like this is
Speaker 2: one of the best examples of cultural relativism I've ever seen,
Speaker 2: where I can tell the story that does not look good,
Speaker 2: and then I can tell the story that sounds cool
Speaker 2: as shit, and they're both true in that it's kind
Speaker 2: of not good and it's kind of cool as shit,
Speaker 2: you know, at the same time. And yeah, that is
Speaker 2: the Malagasy people on the northeast coast at the time.
Speaker 2: This is the culture that these pirates are showing up
Speaker 2: and intermarrying with and hanging out with. And so you've
Speaker 2: got this first pirate settlement off on the island, and
Speaker 2: they're sending a few slaves here and there. It's basically
Speaker 2: in their best interest to make sure the various clans
Speaker 2: keep fighting each other because that produces captives which they
Speaker 2: can turn around and sell. And so there's an economic
Speaker 2: incentive for them to go around and stir up shit.
Speaker 2: So that's not good.
Speaker 3: And they are stirring up shit. Do they know how
Speaker 3: they stir up shit?
Speaker 2: I don't know how they're stirring up shit. What I
Speaker 2: do know is specifically late they're going to be the
Speaker 2: fucking mediators, my god, and so I know the shift,
Speaker 2: but I don't know what they were doing beforehand.
Speaker 3: Being gospy bitches. They were being like, oh this one, sure, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: this one says that your communal cafeteria has shitty food
Speaker 3: and the meat is dry, you just do something about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, they just cointel prode that shit, and
Speaker 2: their primary interest is fencing stolen goods. But then the
Speaker 2: New York City businessmen were like, you send far too
Speaker 2: few slaves. And so the pirate king he's kind of
Speaker 2: like he thinks forced but whatever, fuck him. He starts
Speaker 2: stepping it up. And what he does in he didn't
Speaker 2: write in the script sixteen ninety seven. Mm. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: tricks a bunch of people into coming into his fort
Speaker 2: and then he scoops them up and sells them. And
Speaker 2: this is entirely outside the social contract of like the
Speaker 2: way slavery is supposed to work around here, right, So
Speaker 2: the locals burn his fucking fortress down and slit the
Speaker 2: throat of every pirate they.
Speaker 3: Saw, I mean understandably.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, except a bunch of the pirates had been
Speaker 2: given a heads up by their wives who they were
Speaker 2: actually nice to and had nothing to do with any
Speaker 2: of it, and weren't there that day.
Speaker 3: And they never they never retaliated against those pirates. Did
Speaker 3: those pirates have to go away forever? Did they just
Speaker 3: like leave until.
Speaker 2: Oh they wipe out the fucking town, Like it is.
Speaker 3: The ones who're the ones who have not been there
Speaker 3: that day.
Speaker 2: No, I know what I'm saying is there's no one
Speaker 2: to retaliate against them. They show up and they slit
Speaker 2: everyone's throats. That time, that period of slavery on this
Speaker 2: island is over. In one attack, they wipe out a
Speaker 2: slave trade port.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that particular pirate king, he escaped the knife because
Speaker 2: he was out at sea. I don't think he was
Speaker 2: tipped off. And he just never goes back. He's like,
Speaker 2: I'm fucking out of here.
Speaker 3: He knows it's fucking over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And basically all the pirates realized their allegiance is
Speaker 2: not to fucking Europe or to sl They are at
Speaker 2: war with the whole civilized world. After all. They stop
Speaker 2: slave trading, and they cut out the trying to stir
Speaker 2: up conflict between groups, and they more go native. I
Speaker 2: don't know the proper way to use. I know it's
Speaker 2: a shitty phrase. I just don't know.
Speaker 3: They become Malagasy, they integrate.
Speaker 2: More so, they do more of that. They're still distinct
Speaker 2: and their children are going to become this kind of
Speaker 2: separate clasp and we'll talk about that later. And they
Speaker 2: moved to the mainland, and then slavers avoid northeast Madagascar
Speaker 2: for decades because well, the pirates will still attack slave ships.
Speaker 3: Because it turns out that that was highly effective.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and they're probably not doing it because they're
Speaker 2: like we individually. But honestly, I'm will into bed. The
Speaker 2: average pirate who believes in this all galitarian shit might
Speaker 2: be like kind of anti slavery. I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 2: obviously some of them weren't, you know, I could see it.
Speaker 2: So the place that inspired Libertalia fell destroyed righteously, and
Speaker 2: what rose and stay were these cities of women and
Speaker 2: then a whole crazy rebellious confederation that is really fucking interesting.
Speaker 2: But before we talk about it, I want to talk
Speaker 2: about medieval weapons. Have you purchased medieval weapons lately? If
Speaker 2: you haven't purchased a new medieval weapon, your soul has
Speaker 2: a sword shaped hole in it.
Speaker 3: Sword shaped holes is also what happens when you don't
Speaker 3: purchase medieval weapons and someone else around you has.
Speaker 2: I know, those without swords can still die upon them.
Speaker 2: That's our slogan. Anyway, here's other ads ed, Rebecca, So
Speaker 2: I'm going to tell you about another pirate. This is
Speaker 2: going to lead to the weird legend stuff that people
Speaker 2: are going to build. There's a guy named Henry Avery,
Speaker 2: and he's like in the like list of like he's
Speaker 2: not Blackbeard, but he's like up there right. He's one
Speaker 2: of the the guys people talk about. He was active
Speaker 2: for all of two years and he pulled off the
Speaker 2: greatest haul in pirate history probably and he was never caught.
Speaker 2: He's one of the only motherfuckers that didn't get caught him.
Speaker 3: And the Chinese pirate queen.
Speaker 2: Oh does she get away in the end? That rules?
Speaker 3: She did. At the end, she was so powerful that
Speaker 3: the government like cut a deal with her and she
Speaker 3: got to like retire with all her money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Most of Avery's folks, who we
Speaker 2: know where they ended up. They just like showed up
Speaker 2: to the Americas and were like, Hey, if we give
Speaker 2: you like a shit ton of stolen stuff, can you
Speaker 2: just not kill us? And America was like, yeah, that
Speaker 2: sounds up our alley, you know. But most Golden Age
Speaker 2: pirates got their start in a similar way as our
Speaker 2: guy Avery, unpaid wages. The Charles two was a ship
Speaker 2: that wasn't paying its sailors and there was a big
Speaker 2: old warship, and so the sailors were like, well, we
Speaker 2: want to get paid though, and they were like, well,
Speaker 2: we're not going to pay you right now. And they
Speaker 2: were like, there's a lot of us, and so they mutinied.
Speaker 3: Good for them, Good for them as a freelancer who
Speaker 3: has often gotten paid later or not gotten paid at all. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I salute you, pirates.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, mutineers. You'll get the death penalty if you
Speaker 2: go back to port. So they're like, all right, we're
Speaker 2: pirates now, all because your boss has tried to get
Speaker 2: you to work for free, almost like that was a
Speaker 2: big hole thing during the seventeen and eighteenth century.
Speaker 3: They didn't pay you for that children's book you illustrated.
Speaker 2: Nope, nope. So it's time to just go to war
Speaker 2: against the world exactly. And I feel like there's a
Speaker 2: lesson in here somewhere about how, for example, unpaid wages
Speaker 2: are the largest category theft in the US today. The
Speaker 2: Economic Policy Institute calculates that workers in this country now
Speaker 2: not talking about the old seventeen hundreds, are robbed of
Speaker 2: fifty billion dollars a year, which is one hundred times
Speaker 2: more than the combined sum of all robbery. So all
Speaker 2: these motherfuckers run out there and buy guns to protect
Speaker 2: themselves from robbery, are pointing the guns in the wrong direction,
Speaker 2: is all I'm saying. Anyway, before criminally actionable things get said,
Speaker 2: back to ye oldie times, that's obviously what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: We're only talking about ye oldie times, which.
Speaker 3: Is safely in the past and has no relevance to
Speaker 3: the present whatsoever.
Speaker 2: No, I can't even imagine any comparisons that could be made,
Speaker 2: like the one I just made. So Avery and his
Speaker 2: friend's mutiny and they elect Avery captain, and so they
Speaker 2: renamed their ship the Fancy, which is a cool fucking
Speaker 2: name for a pirate ship.
Speaker 3: The Fancy. Yeah, yeah, does that like Swarowski crystals are
Speaker 3: their pasties?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, it's pretty soon gonna have the most treasure a
Speaker 2: ship has ever stolen on it.
Speaker 3: So I hope they're doing some like glam shit with
Speaker 3: that Fancy.
Speaker 2: That's one of the things that's so fucking weird about
Speaker 2: pirates is so interesting. They're stuck doing glam shit because
Speaker 2: they can't always fence that shit, and so they're just
Speaker 2: like walking around like covered in jewels, because you can't
Speaker 2: sell this like rare jewel that everyone knows that if
Speaker 2: you sell it, you'll get murdered by the state, you know.
Speaker 3: So you always you always have to dress fancy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so they sailed to the Indian Ocean. I
Speaker 2: think they start off off the coast of Spain and
Speaker 2: been more certain about things. And they go to the
Speaker 2: Indian Ocean and they join a fleet and they attack
Speaker 2: some fuck off rich ships from the Mughal Empire. I
Speaker 2: promise you, the Mughal Empire. This is where they come up.
Speaker 2: The amount that they stole is calculated now to be
Speaker 2: somewhere between two hundred to four hundred million dollars in
Speaker 2: today's money.
Speaker 3: And the Mughal Empire then, like the level of fanciness
Speaker 3: that the Mughal Empire is, there is no fanciness like
Speaker 3: that in Europe. Europe is a backwater. Then. I mean,
Speaker 3: these are the people who are building the taj Mahal.
Speaker 3: These are the people that if you went to like
Speaker 3: a party in England then it would smell like shit
Speaker 3: and I don't know, stale beer. If you went to
Speaker 3: a party in the Mughal Empire, it would smell like
Speaker 3: one thousand two roses that were arranged in a lot
Speaker 3: ornate persian ate patterns in giant golden flagons of water.
Speaker 3: It is the most it is the most lavish place
Speaker 3: on earth. So whatever they eluded from the Mughal Empire
Speaker 3: is shit though. Make a European's eyes pop.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is like, this is more than even
Speaker 2: the pirate King of Madagascar because this happens before they
Speaker 2: all get their throat split a couple of years earlier,
Speaker 2: I think sixteen ninety five whatever. But even the pirate
Speaker 2: King of Madagascar could not realistically fence all this shit.
Speaker 2: This theft was an international incident. It almost got England
Speaker 2: kicked out of India, like, it almost ruined international trade
Speaker 2: because India or the Mubile Empire was like, this is
Speaker 2: y'all's fault, and England was like, we're really sorry. We
Speaker 2: swear they hadn't. They had not yet conquered India obviously,
Speaker 2: so this.
Speaker 3: Could have been like a cautionary thing that kept the
Speaker 3: Brits out from take colonizing India.
Speaker 2: I know, Avery almost saved the day, but instead England
Speaker 2: declared avery the enemy of all humanity and the world's
Speaker 2: first international manhunt was.
Speaker 3: On most wanted man in the Ship, the Fancy.
Speaker 2: Yeah mm hmm, and his crew, who disappeared to the Americas,
Speaker 2: where they bought their way in. I think a lot
Speaker 2: of them went to Ireland. I read two sources that
Speaker 2: seemed to disagree about that, and twenty four of his
Speaker 2: crew were arrested and six of them were hanged. Avery
Speaker 2: himself was never caught. There are a thousand stories about
Speaker 2: what he did next. There's a he went and retired rich.
Speaker 2: There's a he got screwed over by diamond merchants. Oh
Speaker 2: my god, that's probably an anti Semitic conspiracy theory. There's
Speaker 2: a he got screwed over by diamond merchants and died poor.
Speaker 2: And there's a like he became a spy for blah
Speaker 2: blah blah, and just no one fucking knows.
Speaker 3: What do you think happened to him?
Speaker 2: Honestly, maybe because of what I just read. I think
Speaker 2: he married his way into a Malagassy family and was like,
Speaker 2: I'm good.
Speaker 3: And he was just enjoying, like the beautiful weather and
Speaker 3: the yeah, cool society, gossiping at the communal table.
Speaker 2: That's like my best guess. But I don't have a
Speaker 2: good sense of him as a person. He kind of
Speaker 2: has that thing where the reputation around him is that
Speaker 2: he was like a little bit more of like a
Speaker 2: proper gentleman and like a family man, and he ust less.
Speaker 2: Because actually a lot of those people would be the
Speaker 2: people who get elected captain, because people were like, oh,
Speaker 2: we like that guy is like a little bit calmer
Speaker 2: and shit, you know, and are more likely to be literate.
Speaker 2: Often it was like the literate people who were elected captain.
Speaker 2: But I don't know. I don't know what happened to him,
Speaker 2: But I do know what happened to his reputation, which
Speaker 2: is that the pirates on Matta Gascar did this wild
Speaker 2: scam against the entire world with his legacy. By the
Speaker 2: early seventeen hundreds, about ten years later or so, they
Speaker 2: announced that Avery was there with ten thousand men, and
Speaker 2: that they had set up an entire country, a utopian
Speaker 2: democratic society, and they sent out emissaries all over the
Speaker 2: fucking world, or scam artists independently just decided this would
Speaker 2: be fun to do. Basically, people claiming to be emissaries
Speaker 2: showed up to all over Europe, and the Ottoman Empire
Speaker 2: to try and convince them to make treaties with this
Speaker 2: fucking pirate kingdom.
Speaker 3: What did they call the pirate kingdom?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm like annoyed by this. I'm annoyed
Speaker 2: that I don't know the answer to that. England and
Speaker 2: France and the Netherlens told them to kick rocks when
Speaker 2: the emissaries showed up. But they made allies in Sweden,
Speaker 2: Russia and the Ottoman Empire and Sweden actually signed some
Speaker 2: treaties before they figured out they were being lied to.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: And Daniel Dafoe, the Robinson Crusoe guy, was a really
Speaker 2: important writer and wrote about Salien and shit all the time,
Speaker 2: and pirates and shit. He like wrote this whole thing
Speaker 2: about how interesting all this was, and then ten years
Speaker 2: later when he found out it was like a lie,
Speaker 2: he wrote this like long, like it's a lie. He's
Speaker 2: like also the guy who like myth busted it.
Speaker 3: He actually like did a correction of himself in a
Speaker 3: way that is exceedingly rare.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true, I know, right. Props to you, Daniel Dafoe.
Speaker 2: I don't know anything about you as a person. And
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that this is so interesting is
Speaker 2: this is the grand scale version of what pirates did anyway,
Speaker 2: which was create wild myths about who we are so
Speaker 2: people don't fuck with us. And it's going to kind
Speaker 2: of lead to what people are then going to do
Speaker 2: with what Graber presents is a myth that still is pervasive,
Speaker 2: basically like this concept of like mock kings and mock kingdoms.
Speaker 2: With the fall of that small island community, pirates were
Speaker 2: moving to the mainland and they set up a bunch
Speaker 2: of port towns all over the northeast of the island.
Speaker 2: And we know a little bit about how they function.
Speaker 2: We have educated guesses. We know, for example, that a
Speaker 2: pirate we believe the sources are iffy or the sources
Speaker 2: say this happened, but you know whatever. We know that
Speaker 2: a pirate crew moved on to mainland Madagascar at the
Speaker 2: end of seventeen oh three and elected a guy named
Speaker 2: Nathaniel North as their captain. And this is the first
Speaker 2: time we see the sort of evidence of people saying, hey,
Speaker 2: this system worked on a ship, why not try it
Speaker 2: on land. What if we like elect the guy who's
Speaker 2: in charge and then make most of our decisions by
Speaker 2: direct democracy. This place was called Ambo Navalla, and we
Speaker 2: don't actually know where it was. There's some guesses and
Speaker 2: these pirates once they moved on to land. According to
Speaker 2: that not really trustworthy, but the only actual source book
Speaker 2: about pirates, they became conflict resolution specialists with the locals.
Speaker 3: Because they had this cultural memory of having started so
Speaker 3: much shit, they knew how to de escalate it.
Speaker 2: So instead of promoting conflict because it led to more
Speaker 2: captives and therefore more slaves, they were running around listening
Speaker 2: to both sides of issues and helping people find peaceful resolution.
Speaker 2: And the book goes on at length discussing their strategies,
Speaker 2: but not necessarily their motives behind it. There's self interest
Speaker 2: here first. The one I can tell you what their
Speaker 2: self interest was is that internally they developed a lot
Speaker 2: of conflict resolution methods because they absolutely needed to provide
Speaker 2: show a united front to the outside, because if they
Speaker 2: were seen as divided, people would probably come raid them
Speaker 2: and you know, fuck them up right.
Speaker 3: And there would also be a lot of extreme conflict
Speaker 3: if you're strapped on a ship with each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, totally, Well now they're on an island, but yeah,
Speaker 2: it was stly in so many of you. You know,
Speaker 2: and I think that doing it for other people, it's
Speaker 2: either getting presented as this like quirky moral good they're
Speaker 2: like motive isn't really that I was able to figure
Speaker 2: out explain, but it certainly makes them useful to the
Speaker 2: locals and makes people like you if you're the person
Speaker 2: who always like makes everything work okay, you know. These
Speaker 2: pirates and many many others married locals and got involved
Speaker 2: in local politics, basically becoming part of the large clan
Speaker 2: families in some cases and in other cases, they would
Speaker 2: set up these like cities of women on the coast,
Speaker 2: and then a local group of five clans elected themselves
Speaker 2: or picked it. I don't know how they picked it
Speaker 2: ended up with a high king and they formed the
Speaker 2: Sokoa Confederation. These folks, they're slightly further to the south,
Speaker 2: and they were landlocked or they didn't specifically control a port,
Speaker 2: and they didn't want to be landlocked, so they conquered
Speaker 2: the ports, and they were dicks about it. According to
Speaker 2: some sources, they were just absolute tyrants. Their leader was
Speaker 2: a guy named raman Gano, which is more of a
Speaker 2: title than a name, and it means he who does
Speaker 2: exactly as he pleases.
Speaker 3: Oh god.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So so Elon Musk comes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's our main villain here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a war that's gonna there's gonna be a
Speaker 2: rebellion in a war. It's kind of one of the
Speaker 2: main things that we're gonna talk about the rest of
Speaker 2: this episode. And there's only one fucking source on it again,
Speaker 2: and this is a different source. This source is that
Speaker 2: a French spy, years later, working for a European con man,
Speaker 2: went around and interviewed the rebels about what they had
Speaker 2: done forty years earlier.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, I'm gonna go to Tangent. You're gonna forgive me.
Speaker 3: So why does a fucking con man have a spy
Speaker 3: And does the spy know that the guy is a
Speaker 3: con man or does he think that he's like a
Speaker 3: lost Romanov monarch? What the fuck tell me? You gotta
Speaker 3: tell me?
Speaker 2: Oh my god. It was so complicated that I was
Speaker 2: like I started writing into the script and then I
Speaker 2: was like, this is so complicated. It he was trying
Speaker 2: to prove some shit about the way that Matta Gascar
Speaker 2: was so he could like sell some shit to some Europeans.
Speaker 2: Like he was like he like wanted to basically, I think,
Speaker 2: like sell settlements or something.
Speaker 3: So he's like selling fucking time shares to the Europeans,
Speaker 3: and he has a spy to like get Intel to
Speaker 3: sell to sell like fake time shares.
Speaker 2: I don't think you're wrong, but I also don't know
Speaker 2: if you're right. I basically like this part of it.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh my god, this is so complicated.
Speaker 2: The thing that it is was so complicated that I
Speaker 2: was like, I'm going to simplify this. But if I
Speaker 2: had thought this through and realized that you were my guests,
Speaker 2: I realized I should have done the European con men
Speaker 2: more justice that.
Speaker 3: I was going to just like tear you down that
Speaker 3: rabbit hole, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is where our history comes from, right,
Speaker 2: So this is not a reliable source. But this man
Speaker 2: does seem to be genuinely really and he fell doun
Speaker 2: a fucking rabbit hole. He was like, I want to
Speaker 2: know about this fucking confederation of rebels that's going to form.
Speaker 2: But he's talking to people and he builds his hagiography, right,
Speaker 2: like the making of a saint about this man who
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about soon. The sort of the
Speaker 2: person who's presented as the grand leader of this confederation,
Speaker 2: and it absolutely emphasizes this great man of history narrative
Speaker 2: of what's to come. But that narrative is not held
Speaker 2: up by anthropological evidence. So Graber's claim is that this
Speaker 2: is another mock king. This is a war chief who
Speaker 2: has now been They're like, oh, yeah, we totally have
Speaker 2: a high king. Don't fuck with us.
Speaker 3: Oh wow wow. So this guy does not actually have
Speaker 3: any of the power of a king. He's a guy
Speaker 3: that was good in battle, and then when the battle
Speaker 3: is over, he's no longer in power. But they make
Speaker 3: him like almost like a mascot, like a mythological figure.
Speaker 2: Yes, and no, he still has some of the same
Speaker 2: power as like kind of the like heads of clans
Speaker 2: and stuff we were talking about earlier, where he can
Speaker 2: like summon up some warriors and he sort of gets
Speaker 2: as many wives as he wants and stuff. But he
Speaker 2: all the decisions are still being made by consensus decision
Speaker 2: making councils that take days.
Speaker 3: Oh god, oh god, and have the most truculent person
Speaker 3: ever keep everyone from taking care of their kids.
Speaker 2: That night, Yeah, they had the people's mic. It was great.
Speaker 3: Oh fuck man.
Speaker 2: And so this is the best narrative we have about
Speaker 2: this war, the unreliable narrator. He said that the conquering
Speaker 2: of port towns by this Soca confederation meant quote, their
Speaker 2: young daughters were taken away and sold on board to
Speaker 2: European ships who frequented the coasts. The slightest murmur was
Speaker 2: punished by slavery and death. And basically they were doing
Speaker 2: the stuff that like European settlers had been doing. They
Speaker 2: were like state making. They were stealing everything that they wanted.
Speaker 2: They were desecrating the tombs of ancestors. It's not a
Speaker 2: specifically state making thing, but it's a shitty thing to do.
Speaker 2: And whole towns were wiped out. And it's probable that
Speaker 2: his power wasn't so completely absolute because there wasn't really
Speaker 2: a state apparatus to like seas and wield. But they
Speaker 2: took control of everything they could. They taxed everything, they
Speaker 2: desecrated tombs, and they started doing slave raids instead of
Speaker 2: the way that you're supposed to do slavery at this time,
Speaker 2: which is the captives. That thing that had gotten so
Speaker 2: many pirates killed a few years back. Now this Malagasy
Speaker 2: chief is doing. People were unhappy, and so they did
Speaker 2: something about it which actually involved, in addition to modern weapons,
Speaker 2: which is not a sponsor of our show, it involved
Speaker 2: medieval weapons or hand to hand weapons, because it's not
Speaker 2: specifically part of the medieval period. But Spears, you ever
Speaker 2: held a spear? It's nice this show brought to you
Speaker 2: by Spears. Get the new Spears catalog and whatever other
Speaker 2: ads come next, and we're back. The person who is
Speaker 2: presented as the big man of history of this story
Speaker 2: is a man named Ratsimalajo, and he is an interesting fellow.
Speaker 2: He seems genuinely coal. It's just, you know, he wasn't
Speaker 2: the king of everything. Probably Ratsimalajo wasn't himself a pirate,
Speaker 2: or if he was, he didn't do it for very long.
Speaker 2: His father was a pirate. His father was an English
Speaker 2: pirate named either Tom or Tomo. Maybe Fomo. It's probably Tomo,
Speaker 2: it's Thamo, some weird English name, and everyone's like, oh,
Speaker 2: he was the son of Tom too, or like other
Speaker 2: famous Tom pirates. He almost certainly was not. He was
Speaker 2: almost certainly the son of some pirate named Tom. There
Speaker 2: were a lot of pirates named Tom, because there's a
Speaker 2: lot of people named Tom, and a lot of people
Speaker 2: are pirates. His dad was just some guy. But the
Speaker 2: thing is, when your dad's just some guy and a pirate,
Speaker 2: it means his dad was rich as shit, because if
Speaker 2: you're a pirate, there's two things. You are rich and doomed.
Speaker 3: The most romantic figure on earth.
Speaker 2: I know. I don't understand how people are so in
Speaker 2: love with it. I can't imagine. Yeah, so he's rich
Speaker 2: as shit. His mother was named Rahenna and was the
Speaker 2: daughter of one of the leaders of one of the clans,
Speaker 2: one of the people who would sort of get called
Speaker 2: a king. We're pretty sure about that. We're pretty sure
Speaker 2: that his parents' names. Everything else, we're not so sure about.
Speaker 2: The most common story, which may as well be true,
Speaker 2: So I'll tell it like it is, is that when
Speaker 2: he was a teenager, his dad sent him off to
Speaker 2: England for an education, and he was like, I don't
Speaker 2: like Englin. Fuck this. He came home and so his
Speaker 2: dad was like, all right, well, here's a ton of
Speaker 2: guns and money, go and earn your way in life.
Speaker 2: And what he did was lead a revolution, or join
Speaker 2: one as an equal among other war chiefs. Helping lead
Speaker 2: a revolution. In seventeen twelve, he's eighteen years old. He
Speaker 2: and some of his friends are like, all right, let's
Speaker 2: go fuck this tyranny. Shut up. They sent someone down
Speaker 2: to go talk to that high king and be like, hey, look,
Speaker 2: you really wanted a port. You keep one of the
Speaker 2: ports and give all the rest back. How's that sound
Speaker 2: And they were like, no, we're in charge. Fuck you.
Speaker 2: So the rebels set up a rebel camp. Local folks
Speaker 2: are like, oh, I want to not have tyranny. That
Speaker 2: sounds nice. And so they get together a cabrey An
Speaker 2: assembly and they figure this is going to take days,
Speaker 2: So they build little shacks and shit to sleep in
Speaker 2: while they talk.
Speaker 3: We should have thought of that. Why didn't we think
Speaker 3: of that?
Speaker 2: I know, I mean tense, but you know, not quite.
Speaker 3: The same on hard concrete, nah, I know.
Speaker 2: And also just like admitting that you're like, no, the
Speaker 2: meeting is going to take days, like that is what.
Speaker 2: That is the weird downside of horizontal life. But you
Speaker 2: know what, if you do it right, it's fun. And
Speaker 2: then here's a part that I'm curious about. The main
Speaker 2: source is that this particular Cabarey, very much as an
Speaker 2: exception to the norm, excluded women. No women allowed at
Speaker 2: our war talk party.
Speaker 1: Why not?
Speaker 2: Why not?
Speaker 3: Why not?
Speaker 2: So oh the way it's sort of presented, Okay, So
Speaker 2: one of the reasons it might have been written that
Speaker 2: way is that the source like he actually had a
Speaker 2: version where he was like, no cabarets allowed women, and
Speaker 2: then he had to like cross that out because it
Speaker 2: was like so blatantly untrue. But so like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: get him. I get the impression this guy like wasn't
Speaker 2: a big woman lover or appreciator, respect her, and I
Speaker 2: think all of those things misogynist will call themselves. But
Speaker 2: the other argument that seems to have some credit is
Speaker 2: that this was like oddly at statement around returning rule
Speaker 2: back to the sort of linear clan structure instead of
Speaker 2: this new economic force of women in the cities, even
Speaker 2: though the women in the cities were not part of
Speaker 2: this new evil empire thing that was taking over, right,
Speaker 2: And so it was kind of like almost like a
Speaker 2: weird classes the wrong construction. But it was like a
Speaker 2: weird thing. But I also I wonder whether it's even
Speaker 2: true because of something I'm going to say about their oath. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so they get together for days and they talk about
Speaker 2: whether or not to go to war, and they hear
Speaker 2: everyone out, and in the end they reach consensus they
Speaker 2: will form a new confederation and go to war. This
Speaker 2: new confederation is called the Betsimisaraka. Or actually it's funny
Speaker 2: because I've seen it spelled a bunch of different ways.
Speaker 2: The Internet wants to spell it differently than Graver wants
Speaker 2: to spell in this book. They might not have an
Speaker 2: a at the end of it. I don't know. It's
Speaker 2: different sources complain with each other. This name means those
Speaker 2: who will not be sundered, Like the confederation isn't going
Speaker 2: to break up. We are a fucking unbreakable. It's a
Speaker 2: good name. And they do a bunch of rituals before
Speaker 2: they decide to go to war. Right, These meetings kind
Speaker 2: of sound fucking interesting, right. You go for several days,
Speaker 2: you camp out, you argue ship for a long ass time,
Speaker 2: and at the end they do both a pirate ritual,
Speaker 2: which was that they drank seawater mixed with gunpowder.
Speaker 3: What the fuck? And how are they like living after
Speaker 3: this lovely pirate ritual?
Speaker 2: Well, what's funny is that usually it was just seawater
Speaker 2: and gunpowder, but this one they also seem to have
Speaker 2: put like musket balls and stuff in it. So, which
Speaker 2: is that scene from The fucking Crow right where they
Speaker 2: like drink bullets with their fucking whiskey.
Speaker 3: What the fuck? I must have blocked that one out
Speaker 3: in my goth upbringing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the very beginning of the Crow, the like arsonist
Speaker 2: crew that's like running around being the batties. They're like
Speaker 2: fired up, and then they like take a shot and
Speaker 2: drink a bullet or I guess a cartridge because it
Speaker 2: has all the stuff, and so that's like weirdly accurate
Speaker 2: pirate thing.
Speaker 3: I'm starting to believe that there aren't any women at
Speaker 3: this assemblies, that they're doing this fair enough.
Speaker 2: There's only one line that makes me think otherwise, okay,
Speaker 2: and probably there weren't women. Now Ratsimalajo is the only
Speaker 2: partly white person in attendance. Probably there's a lot of
Speaker 2: like the way that this whole rebellion has talked about it.
Speaker 2: It's talked about as if all of the sons of
Speaker 2: the white pirates and the non white Indigenous women are
Speaker 2: the people who rose up. But like there's a lot
Speaker 2: of anthropological reasons that that is not to believe that
Speaker 2: is not the case, mostly in that most of those
Speaker 2: people were children at the time, but pirate culture is
Speaker 2: rubbing off on folks. The other ritual they do is
Speaker 2: a malagassy ritual. They each cut their own stomachs the
Speaker 2: tiniest bit to draw blood the way that we might
Speaker 2: like prick a finger or like cut a palm in
Speaker 2: like other literature, you know, they're not like gutting themselves.
Speaker 2: And then they soak a piece of ginger root in
Speaker 2: everyone's blood, and then they swear an oath to one another,
Speaker 2: and then they eat the ginger. Here's the quote. They
Speaker 2: swore a solemn oath to take back their land, to
Speaker 2: stop letting their wives and daughters be sold off overseas,
Speaker 2: and to stop letting their husbands die. Oh and that's
Speaker 2: the line where I'm like, wait, you said no women allowed,
Speaker 2: but their oath is like, let's stop letting husbands die.
Speaker 2: And I'm not. I mean, I don't know. Maybe they're queer,
Speaker 2: but like I feel like that would have come up.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: And this was a war basically to prevent the creation
Speaker 2: of a state, to preserve the lineage clan structure. Along
Speaker 2: the way. They put a lot of work, but not
Speaker 2: like infinite work into making sure the war captives would
Speaker 2: be returned to their families. They were like very into like, no, no,
Speaker 2: we ran some people back instead of selling them away overseas.
Speaker 2: This did not turn into a like let's free all
Speaker 2: the slaves thing. And they went to war and they
Speaker 2: won first. At first they win, they trapped the high
Speaker 2: king in his mountain fortress, and the piece from what
Speaker 2: they originally offered. They're like, hey, you can have one port,
Speaker 2: but just stop fucking taking everything over. And they agreed
Speaker 2: to those terms. But then they break the truce and
Speaker 2: the war goes on for years. It lasts from seventeen
Speaker 2: twelve to seventeen twenty. Eventually the new confederation, the Betsimisaraka,
Speaker 2: they win. During this war, the pirates in the coastal towns,
Speaker 2: some of them maybe went and fought and stuff, but
Speaker 2: like overall they're kind of staying out of it, except
Speaker 2: they're helping the rebellion behind the scenes. The pirates pretended
Speaker 2: to play both sides, but they supported the rebellion. They
Speaker 2: sold over priced muskets to the enemy in order to
Speaker 2: get prisoners free, and then supplied the rebels more honestly,
Speaker 2: and this is like, this would be such a fucking
Speaker 2: good setting. I would watch the shit out of a
Speaker 2: long ass series set in this war. Hell's yes, Hell's yes,
Speaker 2: you're talking about like some guns, because there's some guns available,
Speaker 2: but that mostly really shitty guns because the colonial center
Speaker 2: doesn't like sending it's good guns out overseas. But Ratsimlajo
Speaker 2: he actually has some really good guns, and so like
Speaker 2: that's one of the main reasons that they win. And
Speaker 2: then there's this whole thing about how like it's still
Speaker 2: the like heroic warfare where there's a lot of like
Speaker 2: one on one fights and duels in the middle of
Speaker 2: battles and shit, while mixed with modern warfare where the
Speaker 2: like overall grand strategy was around disruption of supply lines.
Speaker 2: And it's just like it's like it's like a strategy dream.
Speaker 3: Like, so it's the exact moment where everything is changing,
Speaker 3: but where you still could possibly have this notion in
Speaker 3: your head that warfare was romantic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's not near the colonial center and no
Speaker 2: neither side is armed by the colonial center, so you
Speaker 2: have yeah, and uh. Along the way, Ratsimalajo during the
Speaker 2: first Truce, he's made the high king of the whole confederation.
Speaker 2: That's what everyone says but there's no evidence to back
Speaker 2: that up that he actually took any there's a lot
Speaker 2: of there's no state formation that ever forms, there's no
Speaker 2: sense that he centralized any control, and other contemporary sources
Speaker 2: are very clear that he was just one war chief
Speaker 2: among others, or even there's multiple things that are like,
Speaker 2: oh no, here's this other guy's second in command. Oh shit,
Speaker 2: he might not even been a war chief at all. Right,
Speaker 2: there's like two different guys that he's like, Ah, is
Speaker 2: that guy's second in command? Like he is the guy
Speaker 2: that they're like, Oh, you're the guy. That's fine, we
Speaker 2: needed the.
Speaker 3: Guy, Like you're the charismatic figurehead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, only I think that to present to the outside world.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Although after the war, it does seem like he kind
Speaker 2: of becomes one of these sort of you know, like
Speaker 2: quote unquote and I don't mean to when I say
Speaker 2: quote unquote kings, I'm not trying to put it down.
Speaker 2: I'm rather saying, like, fuck the European assumption that everyone's
Speaker 2: a king, you know, and the rumors in Europe are
Speaker 2: that there's this great high king and this powerful kingdom
Speaker 2: because they're doing the pirate thing, They're like, got powerful
Speaker 2: ruler leave us the fuck alone, and they win, and
Speaker 2: for thirty years there's peace in this confederation. Ratsimalajo is
Speaker 2: the king in his way. He has a rich court,
Speaker 2: but lots of people have rich courts. Again, the greatest
Speaker 2: treasure hall in history has come here and couldn't be sold,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: So everyone is hanging around with rubies and diamonds, and
Speaker 3: there are liberated women wearing their love charms to the ocean,
Speaker 3: and it is the best party ever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or none of that's true, you know, It's like
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, it's like seems like that is that
Speaker 2: is a very likely way of reading it, And I
Speaker 2: suspect it's like one of those things where it's like
Speaker 2: I suspect a lot of people experience the society that way,
Speaker 2: and other people experience the society very differently, you know.
Speaker 2: And with his power as one of the kings, he
Speaker 2: can summon soldiers, but like only some of them, he
Speaker 2: has no particular executive power. Malagasy culture in this confederation
Speaker 2: becomes explicitly more egalitarian than Malagasy culture elsewhere. The priest
Speaker 2: caste and the warrior cast are more or less gone.
Speaker 2: Clans are no longer ranked against one another. There is
Speaker 2: an exception. The Zana Malata is the sort of new
Speaker 2: class formed by the mixed race descendants of pirates, and
Speaker 2: they form a sort of nobility, and that's why there's
Speaker 2: kind of this like rumor. That's why the legend is
Speaker 2: that these are the people who like fought to build
Speaker 2: the confederation, whereas like, they almost certainly weren't. But what's
Speaker 2: interesting is that the raising of them to power was
Speaker 2: actually the raising of their mothers to power, right, because
Speaker 2: they're children at this time, and so it's all of
Speaker 2: the women of the cities who are like, all right,
Speaker 2: we're going to build this like weird new merchant nobility.
Speaker 2: And yeah, they created a mock kingdom which was already
Speaker 2: more a galitarian than what we fucking live in now.
Speaker 2: Decisions continue to be made in consensus based assemblies. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: pirates were cleared out of the area by Western European
Speaker 2: powers around seventeen twenty four, and so the slave trade
Speaker 2: comes back. So even during this like a galitarian, beautiful confederation,
Speaker 2: slave trades back. And then the Great Confederation fell apart
Speaker 2: after Ratsimalaju died, and the argument that the most likely
Speaker 2: reason why it fell apart when he died. Is that
Speaker 2: the Zanomalada the new sort of powerful nobility or whatever.
Speaker 2: A lot of them don't want their kids to even
Speaker 2: marry other Zanamlada. They want their kids to marry foreigners.
Speaker 2: They want their kids to marry hey, because there's this
Speaker 2: whole concept there of the sort of like the foreigners
Speaker 2: this interesting and powerful person worth bringing in. They bring
Speaker 2: in the riches and do all of this stuff, right,
Speaker 2: and so there's this like, if you marry a foreigner,
Speaker 2: we will become more powerful. Unfortunately, what instead happened is
Speaker 2: that enough people who had enough power married enough foreigners
Speaker 2: that they fell under foreign influence and basically betrayed the island.
Speaker 2: So that's how it ended. But along the way they
Speaker 2: did this like crazy experiment that was like kind of
Speaker 2: weird and kind of misogynistic at its core, but also
Speaker 2: fascinating and egalitarian. And it's so messy and it's so interesting.
Speaker 2: That's how I feel about it.
Speaker 3: And it's so interesting on two levels, right, Like there's
Speaker 3: the the level of the actual fact, like all those
Speaker 3: fucking alliances, like a spy for a con man, that
Speaker 3: people dripping rubies, like all of the stuff that's unknown.
Speaker 3: But then there's also the cultural residence right of the legend.
Speaker 3: I mean, I just remember like being this weirdo, you know,
Speaker 3: kid hanging on the anarchist bookstore because I lived literally
Speaker 3: in one room with two roommates that we divided up,
Speaker 3: curtains that had no window, and a fucking suck, so
Speaker 3: I need to be in the anarchist bookstore and you know,
Speaker 3: reading sort of I'm not going to call them history books,
Speaker 3: but basically like these sort of cultural the like flickerings,
Speaker 3: the cultural flickerings produced by this and being inspired as
Speaker 3: on a different way to live. And I think that
Speaker 3: something I've thought a lot about when I'm trying to
Speaker 3: write history. It's like there's the real truth, which is
Speaker 3: always more messy and sordid and treacherous and fucked up
Speaker 3: that you can possibly imagine, and has no clear moral lesson.
Speaker 3: But then there's also the poetic afterlife, which often does
Speaker 3: have a clear moral lesson because it's imposed on that
Speaker 3: that influences so many other things in the future and
Speaker 3: is fascinating in its own way. And I always think
Speaker 3: the interaction between how do I put it, the beautiful
Speaker 3: and inspirational bullshit that that drives the presence versus the twisted,
Speaker 3: treacherous but fascinating and human story of the past. That
Speaker 3: interaction obsesses me and I feel it's so much here.
Speaker 2: No, that makes so much sense, because that is absolutely
Speaker 2: what's happening. And the thing that I love honestly about
Speaker 2: Graver's work, and then also just one of things I
Speaker 2: love about fiction is just saying, like, look, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to paint a better society, I'm just gonna paint
Speaker 2: a different one. Or maybe it's better, but it's not perfect,
Speaker 2: because one, there is no perfect with society. And two,
Speaker 2: just like things don't have to be the way they
Speaker 2: are because they can be different. They have been different before,
Speaker 2: they will be different again. It's something we need to
Speaker 2: know because, to constantly quote our Solo Gwin, we live
Speaker 2: under capitalism. Its power seems inescapable, so do the divine
Speaker 2: right of kings. We struggle to imagine that things could
Speaker 2: be different. And one thing I love about Graver's anthropology
Speaker 2: is an anthropology in general and specifically like anthropology that
Speaker 2: stops looking at things from such a white European point
Speaker 2: of view, even though Graver's you know, a white man,
Speaker 2: but like is trying to undo a lot of that
Speaker 2: work is just saying things can be fucking different, And
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: It's so essential because the way the things are is
Speaker 3: collapsing around us. I mean, you were just you were
Speaker 3: just delivering mutual aid in this like unforeseen climate disaster.
Speaker 3: We're literally places that are so high above sea level
Speaker 3: or seeing the houses being wiped away. So it's like
Speaker 3: the physical, practical reality of the world is telling us
Speaker 3: that things are going to change, and so we have
Speaker 3: to realize that there are other ways of ourselves living.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and one of those ways is we could have
Speaker 2: fucking granaries where if you don't have enough food, you
Speaker 2: can just go get food at it.
Speaker 3: That would be the yeah, yeah we can.
Speaker 2: You don't even have to declaric communism or whatever. You
Speaker 2: can have a weird non egalitarian society where people just
Speaker 2: don't fucking starve to death and no one is means
Speaker 2: testing people getting food.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we could have that. We could have that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, what people can also have is information about
Speaker 2: how to follow you and your work.
Speaker 3: So you can go see my art at mollikrabapple dot com,
Speaker 3: or you can follow Instagram, which where I post all
Speaker 3: of my obsessive, obsessive drawings and I'm supposed to plug
Speaker 3: my two projects. So I have a book about the
Speaker 3: Jewish Labor Boond, a Jewish anti Zionist revolutionary party that
Speaker 3: I've been working on for five years. It's not coming
Speaker 3: out for another year.
Speaker 2: Books are like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I just believe in it. Believe in it.
Speaker 3: It's going to come out. It's called here, where we
Speaker 3: live is Our Country.
Speaker 2: And that's such a good title.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you. It was the Boons slogan, and
Speaker 3: it was such a defiant thing, right because they're living
Speaker 3: in these countries that are so racist, that want nothing
Speaker 3: more than to expel them, and they're like, no, here
Speaker 3: is our fucking land. And if you don't like it,
Speaker 3: we have brass knuckles.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: And then my other book that I'm doing with Indian
Speaker 3: historian Ruby Lal is a children's book about nor Jahan
Speaker 3: that Ruby is writing and I'm illustrating. It's called Tiger
Speaker 3: Slayer because nor Jehan hunted tigers with a musket from
Speaker 3: the back of elephants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, what do you say?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm on tour. If you want to see me talk,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be reading fairy tales set in the
Speaker 2: same world as my book, because I decided it would
Speaker 2: be boring to go around and just read a part
Speaker 2: of my own book that you might have already read
Speaker 2: by now. It's a book called The Sapling Cage about
Speaker 2: a young trendswitch who has to disguise herself as a
Speaker 2: girl to go off and join the witches, and then
Speaker 2: has to defend the world from what's a thinly veiled
Speaker 2: metaphor for climate change and the destruction of the environment.
Speaker 2: And I will be reading fairy tales from that at
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of different places around the US. And
Speaker 2: if I'm not coming to your city specifically, it is
Speaker 2: because I dislike you personally, and that's the way it is.
Speaker 2: But you can check out my tour dates by going
Speaker 2: to my substack or my Instagram. My website's down so
Speaker 2: you can't go there. So if you guys, thing you
Speaker 2: want to plug, Yeah, I'll plug.
Speaker 1: A sixteenth Minute of Fame host by Jimmy Loftus. We've
Speaker 1: got a fun one coming out in this next month
Speaker 1: or so, all about viral hippo moo dang and why
Speaker 1: me be Zoo's not a great idea?
Speaker 2: Maybe? Hell yeah, I love how Jamie takes the like, hahaha,
Speaker 2: here's the funny, quirky thing. Now let's learn how the
Speaker 2: fucking world works.
Speaker 1: It's literally that. That is literally the episode. But yeah, all.
Speaker 2: Right, talk to you all next week.
Speaker 3: Bye, you see you later.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. Or more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
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