Other Madagascan kingdoms of the era have left a discernible footprint, but archaeologists have found no physical evidence for any kind of centralised state in the area: no public works or palaces, no evidence of any system of administration or taxation, no trace of an army or a bureaucracy, indeed nothing that indicates any interruption to existing ways of life on the coast. So there is no doubt that something politically unusual happened in north-east Madagascar at the start of the 18th century, and that it had something to do with pirates and their descendants. The word means ‘the many unsundered’ and, according to Graeber, who undertook anthropological fieldwork in Madagascar in the late 1980s, they are ‘one of Madagascar’s most stubbornly egalitarian peoples’. The subject of his work was undoubtedly a real person, and the Betsimisaraka Confederation certainly existed – the people of the area call themselves Betsimisaraka to this day. Mayeur was no hack: he had lived and worked on the island for 25 years and had gathered his information from some of Ratsimilaho’s generals and confidants, who were by then elderly. It is by no means the only tale of pirate kings and kingdoms in Madagascar, but it is one of the few that is much more than a colourful yarn. Mayeur’s account, ‘Histoire de Ratsimilaho, Roi de Foule-pointe et des Betsimisaraka’, is held in manuscript at the British Library. When he died in 1750, it began to disintegrate by the early 1800s it was gone. But it seems that his confederation was sustained mostly by personal charisma. In the conventional accounts he is presented as an enlightened visionary who sought to bring contemporary science and letters to a new nation modelled on the states of Europe. As a child he had visited England, most likely with his father (‘Captain Tom’), receiving at least a partial education. It is considered to have been mostly the creation of the evidently remarkable Ratsimilaho himself, who was probably in his late teens when he rose to power. Centred on the town of Ambonavola, or Foulpointe (now Mahalevona), and stretching for more than four hundred miles, the confederation had unified existing local polities through a combination of war and diplomacy. Mayeur, a retired slave trader turned historian, was recounting the rituals at the coronation of a young man called Ratsimilaho, the son of an English pirate captain and a Malagasy princess, who was installed in 1720 as ruler of a new political entity on the coast of north-eastern Madagascar, the Betsimisaraka Confederation. The formula, recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. And for that ritual a gunpowder drink was essential.

Then again, he was an alchemist, not a Madagascan pirate king swearing a magical oath of brotherhood. Whatever it was, black lead juice apparently made you very ill, but even Zheng didn’t seem to think anyone would make a gunpowder drink – he merely cautioned people not to burn their whiskers messing about with it. Zheng’s list of procedures to be avoided also included the imbibing of elixirs made of lead, silver, mercury and cinnabar (outcome – death) taking cinnabar derived from mercury and sulphur (causes boils and sores) and drinking ‘black lead juice’, an unappetising brew that the biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham thought was possibly a ‘hot suspension of graphite’, which sounds like a hot toddy made of pencil shavings. He warns against the mixing of sulphur, realgar, honey and saltpetre, a dangerously deflagrable combination: alchemists experimenting with the ingredients had burned down buildings and singed their beards. A very early reference appears in the Zhenyuan Miaodao Yaolue ( Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things), a text attributed in part to the third-century alchemist Zheng Yin. The classic cocktail of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal was known from at least the ninth century CE, though Taoist alchemists, searching for both gold and immortality, had by then been aware of similar preparations for hundreds of years. L ike many other important scientific inventions, the first true recipes for gunpowder were devised in China.

Pirate utopia book