The legendary capital of Caribbean piracy was a 69 square mile rock off the northwest coast of Haiti that Columbus named for its turtle-shell shape in 1492. This episode strips away the Hollywood tavern fantasy to look at how Tortuga became a pirate base almost by accident. French and English colonists from St. Kitts aimed for Hispaniola in 1625 and landed there by chance, and the overextended Spanish repeatedly expelled them, built a fort, left, and watched the squatters move right back in until the French and Dutch held the island for good by 1640.

We map the island's southern coast, where the port of Cayona, the tobacco-growing Middle Plantation and other zones formed a symbiotic micro-economy, and trace the 1641 formation of the Brethren of the Coast. We also examine the short-lived attempt at plantation slavery that collapsed amid the  ...