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  ...