According to a legend first printed in 1724, a French sailor named Captain James Misson led a mutiny, flew a white flag instead of the Jolly Roger, and founded Libertalia on Madagascar: a settlement with shared wealth, direct democracy, freed slaves as equal citizens, an invented language, and twin forts armed with 40 captured Portuguese cannons each. This episode explores that story and the problem at its heart.

We trace Misson’s disillusionment in Rome, the rogue priest Caraccioli’s below-deck philosophy lessons aboard the warship Victoire, and the rules the crew adopted after electing Misson captain. Then we turn to the historiography: the tale comes from a single source, Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pirates, and modern historians widely consider it utopian fiction, while real pirate outposts on Madagascar supplied the raw material.

• How the segregated decks of a 17th-century warship let Caraccioli preach early Enlightenment ideas out of the officers’ earshot
• Why the crew traded larger shares for officers for equal splits, votes on where to sail, mutual defense, and injury compensation
• The Liberi identity, a pidgin blending French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Malagasy, and the deliberate erasure of national loyalties
• The documented pirate settlements at Fort Dauphin, Ile Sainte-Marie, and Ranter Bay, and Betsimisaraka claims of pirate ancestry
• Libertalia’s afterlife in William S. Burroughs, David Graeber, Uncharted 4, Fallout 4, Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, and a museum in Antananarivo