Adam Baldridge also catered to pirates. Once a pirate himself, he arrived at Île Sainte Marie in 1691 with a shipload of goods from New York merchants. He built a trading post in this pirate enclave ten miles off the coast of Madagascar where he exchanged silver, silks, and slaves for food, drink, and women. His fort, which overlooked the harbor, boasted forty guns. On top of a hill visible from ships, he erected a mansion. He amassed a fortune by trading European goods to natives in exchange for food, which he traded to the pirates in exchange for their plunder, which he then sold to merchants in colonial cities like New York and Boston. Six years later, he sold his lucrative enterprise to Edward Welsh.
Trading with pirates, particularly in North America, proved highly profitable for all parties, especially merchants, because of the many trade restrictions Britain imposed on its colonies. Colonists had to buy goods manufactured in England. They were forbidden from manufacturing them because that would have meant competition for the English providers of those goods. These Navigation Acts in essence forced reputable merchants to deal with Madagascar pirates, whom they referred to as the "Red Sea Men," in order to supply the colonists with the goods and luxuries denied them by the government. The public seemed to support the pirates, even though they broke the law, because the pirates robbed "heathens." Others, both merchants and colonists alike, publicly decried piracy, claiming it to be a "cancer on the body politic," but in secret they either fenced or bought the pirates' ill-gotten gains. When the first cargo arrived in New York, the plunder quickly disappeared and merchants made a considerable profit compared to their original cost for the goods. In 1684, the governor of New Hampshire complained that one ship docked in Boston Harbor held so much booty that each pirate netted seven hundred pounds as his share.
