I'VE BEEN READING reviews of the late David Graeber's posthumously-published final book, Pirate Enlightenment, and it sounds fascinating. Somehow, though, I feel I should read his Debt first, and I promised myself I would finish Piketty's Capital before I started Debt....so I may never get around to it. But I can at least read the chapters in the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates (often assumed to be by Daniel Defoe) that touch on the founding of Libertalia.
Captain Misson was a French naval officer in the late 17th century who (if the story is true) had his assumptions about God, society, and the world rocked by a disillusioned Italian priest and decided to devote his ship and crew to piracy...but of a new kind. Misson abolished class distinctions, insisted that all important matters be decided democratically by the crew, divided whatever wealth they captured equally, and set a policy of giving sailors taken prisoner, who were typically executed, the option of joining the crew or being set down safely at the nearest port.
Eventually Misson and his crew set up a colony in Madagascar, established on the same democratic and egalitarian principles, after coming to an agreement with the neighboring indigenous peoples. An Englishman, Captain Tew, and his crew eventually join them.
Is any of this true? There is not much in the way of corroborating evidence, unfortunately, although apparently there actually were a few such experimental communities, as described and analyzed in Graeber's book.
True or not, the accounts of Captains Misson and Tew speak to the circulation of democratic and egalitarian ideas several generations before the American or French Revolutions, even if only in fantasy.
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