The Harbors Where Pirates Were Safe, and Why Every One Fell | Tortuga, Royal, Nassau, Madagascar

For a couple of hundred years there were harbors on the far edges of the sea where pirates could be safe, and almost none of them lasted. This is a slow, calm tour of the great pirate havens, told one at a time for sleep. Tortuga, Port Royal, Ile Sainte-Marie off Madagascar, Barataria in Louisiana, and a brief stop at Nassau, each one's rise and how it fell. Overview: We begin on Tortuga, the turtle-shaped island off Hispaniola, where the cattle-hunting boucaniers who smoked their meat over a boucan gave the buccaneers their name, and where the governor Bertrand d'Ogeron slowly turned a raiders' island into a colony. We cross to Port Royal in Jamaica, the town so rich on Spanish plunder that people called it the richest and wickedest city on earth, home to Henry Morgan, the privateer who sacked Panama, was arrested, and came back knighted as lieutenant governor, until the great earthquake of the 7th of June 1692 dropped two-thirds of the town into the sea. We sail halfway around the world to Ile Sainte-Marie off Madagascar and the pirate round, with Henry Every and the taking of the Ganj-i-Sawai, the doomed William Kidd, and the almost certainly fictional legend of Libertalia. We move forward a century to the marshes of Barataria Bay and Jean Lafitte, whose Baratarians helped Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. And we close with a short look at Nassau, which has a night of its own. Each place, why it worked, and how it ended, in a calm voice with no music cues, no interruptions, and no reason to stay awake. If you drift off partway through, that is exactly the idea. Sources: World History Encyclopedia, Wikipedia (1692 Jamaica earthquake, Henry Every, Bertrand d'Ogeron, Republic of Pirates), National Geographic, Britannica, the Golden Age of Piracy project, Find a Grave (Lewis Galdy), and standard histories of the buccaneers and the golden age of piracy. Libertalia is drawn from A General History of the Pyrates (1724) and is presented as legend, not fact. This channel makes long, quiet, factual history you can sleep to. New stories are added regularly.