James Misson was born in Provence, France, the son of a respectable family, and entered the French Royal Navy as a young man aboard the warship Victoire. While on shore leave in Rome, he encountered a Dominican friar named Caraccioli — described by Johnson as a “lewd Priest” whose faith had been demolished by his encounters with the corruption of the Papal Court and who had spent years developing a philosophy of natural liberty radically at odds with both the Church and the European monarchies. Over the course of long Atlantic voyages, Caraccioli converted Misson and a significant portion of the Victoire‘s crew to his way of thinking.

When the Victoire‘s captain was killed in an engagement with an English man-of-war, Misson took command. He called the crew together, delivered an address announcing they were no longer in the service of any king, and proposed they sail for their own account under the principle of universal liberty. The vote was unanimous. The white flag was raised. The pirates of the Victoire renounced their national identities and called themselves the Liberi — “the Free.”

Raiding across the Atlantic and down the African coast, Misson’s crew freed enslaved Africans from the ships they captured and invited them to join the company as equals. When they captured a Dutch slaver off the West African coast and found 240 men, women, and children chained below decks — among them the relatives of several of their own crew — Misson reportedly declared: “the Trading for those of our own Species, could never be agreeable to the Eyes of divine Justice: That no Man had Power of the Liberty of another.” The Africans were freed and integrated into the crew.

Sailing to Madagascar, Misson found a bay on the northern coast that Johnson describes as perfect for their purposes: protected, fertile, well-watered, with friendly inhabitants and an abundance of fish. Here they built Libertatia — constructing houses, laying out a town, erecting two forts armed with forty guns each taken from Portuguese prizes, and establishing the institutions of their republic: a council in which all members held equal votes regardless of origin, a three-year term for the Lord Conservator (elected, not hereditary — Misson was the first), and a common treasury into which all prizes were paid and from which all needs were met. Caraccioli was named Secretary of State. Thomas Tew — the real English privateer whose career is independently documented from court records, newspaper accounts, and Royal Navy correspondence — arrived from New York, was received with celebration, and became Admiral of the Libertatia fleet.

Johnson’s account of Libertatia’s legal and social structure is remarkably specific, and it is this specificity that has most interested historians. The colony abolished slavery absolutely — not merely declining to practise it but declaring it contrary to natural law. It held land in common: “no Hedge bounded any particular Man’s Property.” It maintained a common treasury into which all takings were deposited and from which all members drew equally. It practiced direct democracy for major decisions. It specifically excluded hereditary power, limiting the Lord Conservator’s term to three years after which the position had to be reconfirmed by vote. The council included men of all nationalities and races with equal standing.

Additionally — and this detail is among the most curious in the account — the colonists devised a new language. Johnson writes that they “resolved to seek out for themselves a Language, by which they could speak to all Nations, understanding none, and none understanding them.” The language, combining elements of all the tongues spoken among the colonists, was intended as both a practical communication tool and a symbol of their rejection of national identity. No record of this language has ever been found.

The colony was destroyed not by a European naval expedition — which Misson had always feared — but in a surprise night attack by the indigenous Malagasy population. Johnson describes the colony’s inhabitants, lulled into security by years of peaceful relations, being overwhelmed in the dark without warning. Caraccioli died in the defence. Misson escaped to the sea with forty-five survivors, a quantity of rough diamonds and gold bars, and the knowledge that everything they had built was gone. He and Thomas Tew, meeting at sea afterward, planned to sail for America. Their vessels were separated by a storm. Misson’s ship, Johnson reports, was never seen again.

The treasure — the accumulated wealth of twenty-five years of raiding in some of the richest sea lanes in the world, supplemented by rough diamonds and gold bars that Misson carried off the beach — went with Misson into the storm. Johnson provides no further account of what happened to either the man or the money.

Historians investigating A General History of the Pyrates have noted a structural anomaly in the source’s reliability that is directly relevant to Libertatia. Across the book’s many biographical entries — Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, Henry Avery, Thomas Tew, William Kidd, Calico Jack, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and dozens of others — the accounts have proven, in the overwhelming majority of verifiable details, to be accurate. Court records, newspaper accounts, colonial dispatches, Admiralty reports, and merchant correspondence from the period confirm name, date, location, and event details that Johnson had no obvious public source for.

This accuracy makes the Libertatia anomaly more difficult to dismiss, not less. If the author of this book had access to genuine inside information about real pirates — information confirmed by independent archival sources — their invention of two entirely fictional central figures in an otherwise accurate historical narrative requires explanation. The asymmetry is precise: almost every pirate Johnson mentions can be found somewhere else in the historical record. James Misson and Caraccioli cannot be found anywhere else. This has led some historians to conclude that the Libertatia chapters are the author’s own fiction inserted into a factual work — and others to suggest that the absence of documentation for Misson and Caraccioli reflects the nature of the colony they founded, which was specifically designed to be invisible to European institutions.

Of the three men Johnson names as the principal founders of Libertatia — Misson, Caraccioli, and Thomas Tew — only Tew is independently documented. His existence is confirmed by English court records, Colonial Office correspondence from Rhode Island and New York governors, newspaper reports, Admiralty records, and multiple eyewitness accounts. He was a privateer operating from Newport, Rhode Island who in 1693 obtained a commission to attack French trading posts in West Africa, diverted instead to the Red Sea, captured a Mughal treasure ship yielding a staggering haul, and returned to Newport having made every member of his crew wealthy. He made a second voyage in 1694–1695, joined a consortium of privateers that included Henry Avery, and was killed by a cannonball during an attack on another Mughal vessel.

Johnson’s account, however, places Tew’s death in a different context — at Libertatia, proposing that Misson and the survivors sail for America, before the storm separates them. The dating is inconsistent: Tew’s independently documented death in 1695 would appear to place Misson’s arrival at Libertatia and his death at roughly the same time as Tew was verifiably dying in the Red Sea. This chronological problem is documented in the academic literature and is cited both as evidence that the Libertatia account is fiction (Johnson misplaced a real person in a fictional narrative) and as evidence that Johnson may have had access to a manuscript about Misson that contained errors about Tew’s involvement — errors that crept in because whoever wrote the manuscript did not have accurate information about Tew’s actual fate.

Fig. C1 — Placeholder: Newport, Rhode Island harbour c.1700. Thomas Tew’s home port and the commercial hub of the “Pirate Round.” (Insert period illustration or map)

Separately from the Libertatia account, the period produced a persistent rumour — reported in English newspapers, pamphlets, and official correspondence — that Henry Avery, the most celebrated English pirate of the era, had established a kingdom in Madagascar after his raid on the Mughal fleet in 1695. Avery’s attack on the Ganj-i-Sawai — the most valuable prize ever taken by a pirate — produced a diplomatic crisis between England and the Mughal Empire and a Royal Navy manhunt. Avery disappeared afterward with a haul estimated at hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, and was never caught.

The “King of Madagascar” rumours circulated for years. Daniel Defoe himself addressed them directly in two works — first in a 1709 pamphlet crediting the rumour, then in a 1719 novel attempting to correct it. In Johnson/Defoe’s General History, Avery is recast as a reduced figure who dies in penury — a deliberate narrative correction of the Madagascar kingdom story. Several historians have suggested that Defoe’s repeated engagement with the Avery/Madagascar material led him to transpose the utopian experiment story from Avery to the fictional Misson, producing the Libertatia chapters. If this is correct, there may be a real kernel of truth underneath the fictional overlay: a genuine experiment in alternative governance somewhere on the Malagasy coast, attributed to the wrong man.

If Libertatia existed, the most probable candidate location — based on Johnson’s description and the confirmed geography of pirate activity in the region — is the area around Île Sainte-Marie (also known as Nosy Boraha), a small island off the northeast coast of Madagascar that was the principal base for Indian Ocean pirates during the Golden Age. The island lies along the principal shipping routes between Europe, the Red Sea, and the East Indies, offers a sheltered harbour, fresh water, and fertile land. Multiple confirmed historical pirates — Thomas Tew, Henry Avery, William Kidd, Edward England, Christopher Condent, Olivier Levasseur — all used Île Sainte-Marie as a base at various points in their careers. If anyone built a permanent pirate settlement in the region, this is where it would have been.

The island today contains what is marketed as the only pirate cemetery in the world — a walled burial ground containing approximately thirty visible graves, some marked with headstones bearing skull-and-crossbones and crossed-swords motifs. The cemetery’s authenticity as a genuine pirate burial site is accepted by the majority of historians, though the specific individuals buried there are largely unidentifiable. The cemetery is a tourist attraction and the island’s principal cultural feature. Surrounding the island in the waters of the bay lie the wrecks of several large vessels that have never been fully identified or salvaged.

Fig. D1 — Placeholder: The Pirate Cemetery, Île Sainte-Marie. Contemporary photograph of skull-and-crossbones headstones in the walled burial ground. Insert photograph.

Journalist Kevin Rushby documented his search for the physical remains of Libertatia in his 2001 book Hunting Pirate Heaven. His journey took him through Mozambique, the Quirimbas Islands, the Comoros, and Madagascar. He met individuals on Madagascar who claimed descent from the pirate settlers — some of them belonging to the Betsimisaraka people, a confederation with a documented tradition of claiming mixed European-Malagasy pirate ancestry. He found a grave claimed to be that of a pirate, an old cauldron of disputed provenance, and a house identified by local tradition as the meeting place between Captain Misson and a local queen named Halina.

He found nothing that could be positively identified as the physical remains of a fortified settlement of the type Johnson describes — no masonry foundations of the scale required for two forty-gun forts, no archaeological stratum consistent with twenty-five years of European-style settlement in the late 17th century, no artefacts unambiguously attributable to the colony. His summary: “others have tried and failed many times.” Rushby’s conclusion was not that the search was over, but that whatever Libertatia was — if it was anything — the jungle and the sea had consumed the physical evidence.

The Betsimisaraka are the second-largest ethnic group in Madagascar and the dominant population of the northeast coast — precisely the region where Libertatia was supposedly located. Their oral history and documented genealogical traditions include extensive claims of descent from European pirates who settled on the Malagasy coast in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The sub-group known as the zana-malata — “children of the mulatto” — specifically traces its lineage to intermarriage between European pirate settlers and Betsimisaraka women. Ratsimilaho, the founder of the Betsimisaraka confederation in the early 18th century, was the son of an English pirate — a fact documented in period sources as well as oral tradition.

Anthropologist David Graeber, whose posthumously published 2023 book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia drew on decades of fieldwork on the island, argues that the Betsimisaraka confederation itself represents the living legacy of the pirate experiment — a political and cultural structure directly shaped by the contact between European pirate egalitarianism and Malagasy social organisation. In Graeber’s reading, Libertatia was real in the sense that matters: not as a single settlement with that name and those founders, but as a genuine political experiment conducted by pirates and their Malagasy partners across the northeast coast, which Johnson then romanticised and consolidated into the Misson narrative. The treasure, in this reading, is not gold hidden in the ground. It is the Betsimisaraka confederation itself.

Fig. D2 — Placeholder: Map showing Betsimisaraka territory on the northeast coast of Madagascar with Île Sainte-Marie marked. Insert map.

If Libertatia existed for approximately twenty-five years as a functioning pirate base operating in the Indian Ocean — the richest sea lane in the world during the Golden Age of Piracy, where Mughal treasure fleets, East India Company vessels, and the pilgrim fleets of the Hajj all passed within reach of a well-positioned pirate harbour — the accumulated wealth of its common treasury would represent one of the largest concentrations of stolen wealth in the 17th-century world. Thomas Tew’s single voyage in 1693 reportedly yielded a share worth £3,000 per man — more than a working seaman would earn in a lifetime. Henry Avery’s single raid in 1695 produced a haul estimated at £600,000 sterling at minimum. A colony running that operation continuously for twenty-five years, pooling all takings into a common treasury, would have accumulated wealth of a scale that has no precise modern equivalent but is plausibly in the hundreds of millions of contemporary pounds.

Johnson’s account describes Misson escaping with “a considerable Quantity of rough Diamonds and Bar Gold” loaded onto two sloops before the colony was overrun. This is the treasure that is specifically unaccounted for: not the twenty-five years of accumulated wealth in the common treasury (presumably burned or taken by the Malagasy attackers), but the portion that Misson personally rescued. What happened to it is not stated. Misson’s ship was lost in a storm. The diamonds and gold were on that ship.

• The Cryptogram of Olivier Levasseur (“La Buse”) One of the most celebrated Indian Ocean treasure legends is directly adjacent to the Libertatia region and timeline. Olivier Levasseur, known as “La Buse” (“The Buzzard”), was a French pirate who operated from Île Sainte-Marie and was hanged on Réunion Island on July 7, 1730. Before being executed, he reportedly threw a cryptogram into the crowd and shouted: “My treasures for who will understand!” The cryptogram — a combination of symbols, letters, and what may be a substitution cipher — has never been solved. La Buse’s treasure, which by some estimates included the loot from the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, one of the richest ships ever taken by a pirate, has never been found. La Buse operated in the same waters, at roughly the same time, as the final period of Libertatia’s existence.
• Captain Kidd’s Adventure Galley — Located but Unsalvaged William Kidd, the Scottish privateer hanged for piracy in London in 1701, used Île Sainte-Marie as a base and is documented to have sunk his ship, the Adventure Galley, in the harbour. The wreck was located in 2001 and a 110-pound bar of metal found near it in 2015 was initially identified as silver — potentially part of Kidd’s legendary cache — before UNESCO analysis determined it was 95% lead. The wreck remains in the water, only partially examined.
• Henry Avery’s Disappeared Fortune Henry Avery’s raid on the Mughal fleet produced the greatest single haul in pirate history. Avery dispersed his crew across multiple ships before disappearing — almost certainly to avoid both capture and the need to share his personal portion. He was never caught. His treasure was never found. He reportedly died in poverty in Devon, England, having been cheated out of his share by Bristol merchants — but this account is itself based on a single disputed source. His approximately £30,000–£60,000 personal share (at conservative estimates) was never accounted for.
• The Libertatia Common Treasury — The Specific Missing Wealth Separate from Misson’s rescued diamonds and gold, and separate from the individual treasures of pirates who passed through the region, the Libertatia common treasury itself — into which twenty-five years of prize takings were deposited — was supposedly destroyed or looted by the Malagasy attackers. But the attackers were not a colonial power with the ability to remove and monetise large quantities of gold, silver, jewels, and foreign currency. Community researchers have pointed out that a treasury of that scale, buried or hidden before the colony was overrun, would still be in the ground somewhere on or near Île Sainte-Marie. No targeted archaeological excavation of the specific region Johnson describes has ever been conducted under scientific conditions.

Fig. E1 — Placeholder: Île aux Forbans (“Pirates’ Island”) adjacent to Île Sainte-Marie, site of the pirate cemetery and the bay containing unexamined shipwrecks. Insert photograph.

David Graeber — anthropologist, anarchist theorist, and one of the principal architects of the Occupy movement — died unexpectedly in 2020. His final completed book, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, was published posthumously in 2023 and represents the most sustained scholarly engagement with the Libertatia question from an anthropological rather than a purely historical standpoint. Graeber’s first academic fieldwork, in the late 1980s, had been conducted on Madagascar, studying the island’s political and social structures. That early research gave him a perspective on the Libertatia question that historians working only from European sources could not have.

His argument is structured around a reframing of the question. The standard inquiry — “Did a settlement named Libertatia, founded by a man named Misson, exist on the coast of Madagascar?” — Graeber describes as “a rather trivial question.” It appears likely, he argues, that there was no Misson or Caraccioli with precisely those names, and no settlement with precisely that name. But this is the wrong question. The right question is: “Was the northeast coast of Madagascar in the late 17th and early 18th centuries the site of genuine political experiments in egalitarian governance, involving both European pirates and Malagasy communities?” To this question, Graeber argues, the answer is almost certainly yes.

His argument rests on the documented social history of the Betsimisaraka confederation. The political structures of the Betsimisaraka — the way their communities were organised, the roles of their leaders, the specific forms of political alliance and consensus-making they practiced — show, in Graeber’s reading, clear evidence of hybridisation with the egalitarian social norms that pirates brought from their ships. This is not a vague cultural influence but a specific, traceable structural correspondence. The Betsimisaraka, he argues, are the real Libertatia: a Malagasy-European political experiment that Johnson then translated into the romanticised and Europeanised story of Captain Misson.