He called himself the King of Ranter Bay, and for a few violent years in the 1720s, on a stretch of Madagascar's northeast coast, the title was no joke. James Plantain was an English pirate, born in Jamaica, who came to the island the way most of his trade did - with a hold full of stolen gold and nowhere left to spend it. Where other pirates buried their loot and drifted back to sea, Plantain stayed. He poured his fortune into guns and alliances, raised a settlement near what is now the village of Rantabe, and set out to rule the people around him. It is one of the strangest careers of piracy's golden age: a robber who tried to become a monarch.
Plantain's fortune was made in a single famous robbery. In 1720 he was sailing under the pirate captain Edward England, part of a flotilla that ran down the East India Company ship Cassandra and her captain, James Macrae, in a bloody fight off the African coast. The pirates looted the vessel of a fortune and then dispersed across the Indian Ocean, scattering to Madagascar to divide the spoils and go their separate ways. England himself came out of it ruined. His crew deposed him for showing mercy to Macrae - letting the captured captain live - and set him ashore. Plantain took his share of the plunder and went looking for a kingdom to buy with it.
He found it on the coast at Ranter Bay. With a couple of fellow pirates, Plantain built a fortified base and made himself a warlord. He supplied local allies with firearms and used that advantage to tip battle after battle against neighboring communities. His wealth he replenished by trading with passing ships - bartering food, water, and supplies for guns, powder, shot, and cloth. He also sold people. Among the goods he offered were enslaved captives taken in his wars, men and women seized from neighboring villages and bartered away like cargo. It was the same brutal commerce that drew so many pirates to these waters, and the human cost of his crown was paid by the people he raided and sold.
His undoing began, by some accounts, with a marriage demand. Plantain insisted that a neighboring king hand over his granddaughter to be his wife. The king refused. What followed was a spiral of wars and counter-raids that consumed the coast, and from which Plantain - better armed than anyone around him - eventually emerged the victor. There is a vivid scene from these years: when a Royal Navy squadron called at Madagascar in 1722 hunting pirates, Plantain coolly assured the officers their quarry was long gone and invited them to visit his settlement. Edward England was reportedly there too by then, haggard and dying, the merciful captain reduced to a broken guest in his old crewmate's court.
In the end, Plantain made too many enemies even for a man with the most guns on the coast. In 1728 he gathered up his favored wife and abandoned the kingdom he had built, sailing for India. There he reinvented himself yet again, taking service in the Maratha Navy under the formidable admiral Kanhoji Angre, and he is thought to have died sometime before 1737, still in Maratha service. Behind him he left only rumor - tales of treasure he was said to have buried and dug up between his wars, gold that, if it was ever real, has never been found. The King of Ranter Bay vanished as abruptly as he had crowned himself.
Plantain's Ranter Bay is the modern Rantabe, on the northeast coast of Madagascar near 15.75°S, 49.84°E, on the western shore of the great Antongil Bay. From the air the setting is a deeply indented green coast where forested ridges meet the Indian Ocean, with the broad sweep of Antongil Bay to the east and the town of Maroantsetra at the bay's head. The nearest airport is Maroantsetra Airport (ICAO FMNR, IATA WMN). Recommended viewing altitude 2,000 to 4,000 ft AGL to trace the coastline and river mouths; this is one of the wettest regions of Madagascar, so expect cloud, haze, and frequent rain over the Masoala highlands.