On Madagascar’s pirate island, the bones of ships fill the shallow shores, and the bones of the seafaring bandits fill the earth. The legacy of the pirating glory days is not only gold bullions or rubies or exotic textiles, but the graves of the pirates themselves.
Île Sainte-Marie, a long, thin island off the eastern African coast, was once the notorious home of an estimated 1,000 pirates. Today, it contains what may be the world’s only pirate graveyard.
The island, located four miles from Madagascar, was the ideal dock for sea-weary bandits who wanted to build a home base and still dabble in the shipping trade in the 1600 and 1700s.