the area of the River Plate in detail because it lay "within the limits of the South Sea Company", whose schemes had not yet burst into financial scandal. Rogers' book was carried by such South Pacific navigators as Admiral George Anson and privateering captains John Clipperton and George Shelvocke. Governor and later life Financial difficulties and the Bahamas proposal Rogers encountered financial problems on his return. Sir William Whetstone had died, and Rogers, having failed to recoup his business losses through privateering, was forced to sell his Bristol home to support his family. He was successfully sued by a group of over 200 of his crew, who stated that they had not received their fair share of the expedition profits. The profits from his book were not enough to overcome these setbacks, and he was forced into bankruptcy. His wife gave birth to their fourth child a year after his return—a boy who died in infancy—and Woodes and Sarah Rogers soon permanently separated. Rogers decided the way out of his financial difficulty was to lead another expedition, this time against pirates. In 1713, Rogers led what was ostensibly an expedition to purchase slaves in Madagascar and take them to the Dutch East Indies, this time with the permission of the British East India Company. Rogers' secondary purpose was to gather details on the pirates of Madagascar, hoping to destroy or reform them, and colonise Madagascar on a future trip. Rogers collected information regarding pirates and their vessels near the island. Finding that a large number of the pirates had gone native, he persuaded many of them to sign a petition to Queen Anne asking her for clemency. While Rogers' expedition was profitable, when it returned to London in 1715, the British East India Company vetoed the idea of a colonial expedition to Madagascar, believing a colony was a greater threat to its monopoly than a few pirates. Accordingly, Rogers turned his sights from Madagascar to the West Indies. His connections included several of the advisers to the new king, George I, who had succeeded Queen Anne in 1714, and Rogers was able to forge an agreement for a company to manage the Bahamas, which were infested with pirates, in exchange for a share of the colony's profits. At the time, according to the Governor of Bermuda, the Bahamas were "without any face or form of Government" and the colony was