Adam Baldridge was an English pirate merchant who, after fleeing Jamaica to escape a murder charge, established a fortified trading post on Île Sainte-Marie (St. Mary’s Island) off the coast of Madagascar in the late 1680s or early 1690s, sources differ on the exact year. From a hilltop stronghold overlooking the harbor, he supplied provisions, ammunition, and rum to pirates working the Indian Ocean’s “Pirate Round,” including Thomas Tew, in exchange for a share of their plunder, which he shipped to the New York merchant Frederick Philipse for resale. The settlement grew into a pirate haven housing several hundred men at its height. In 1697, local inhabitants rose up after discovering Baldridge had been selling captured islanders into slavery; they destroyed his fort and warehouses and forced him to flee. What became of him afterward is not clearly established in the surviving record.
Adam Baldridge
