Pirate Round

The course led from the western Atlantic, parallel to the Cape Route around the southern tip of Africa, stopping at Madagascar, then on to targets such as the coast of Yemen and India.

This was the ideal position for intercepting and robbing Mughal shipping, especially the lucrative traffic between Surat and Mecca, carrying Muslim voyagers on the Hajj pilgrimage.

It is described as follows by David Cordingly: "Some pirates made the additional journey around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean and attacked ships loaded with the exotic products of India.

"[1] Jenifer G. Marx writes that "Ambitious sea outlaws began to leave for the East on what became known as the Pirate Round: a route that, for some thirty years beginning in 1690, linked ports in the Caribbean and the North American colonies with Madagascar.

Key to the initial success of the Pirate Round was the trade route between Adam Baldridge on Île Sainte-Marie and merchant Frederick Philipse in New York City.

The causes included the aforementioned loss of Baldridge's base on Madagascar, increased convoying and protection of Indian and Arab shipping in cooperation with heavily armed British East Indiamen, and the War of the Spanish Succession, which from 1701 to 1713 provided English seamen with legally sanctioned, less arduous opportunities for plunder in the naval and privateer services.

However, in 1718 Woodes Rogers pacified Nassau, while colonial Virginia and South Carolina prosecuted aggressive anti-pirate campaigns, destroying Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet and Richard Worley.

Among the last pirates to frequent Madagascar waters from 1719 to 1721 were Edward England, John Taylor, Oliver La Buse and Christopher Condent.

Taylor and La Buse reaped the greatest prize in the history of the Pirate Round, the plunder of the Portuguese East Indiaman Nossa Senhora Do Cabo at Réunion in 1721, netting diamonds and other treasures worth a total of about £800,000.