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The ocean is a lonely and dangerous place. This is especially true when you’re aboard a leak-prone wooden ship, loaded with a rich shipment of sugar, silks, and opium, like the investors sailing on the Quedagh Merchant around the southern tip of India in 1698. They must have panicked when they saw a huge shipment of war. with thirty-four fixed guns heading towards them, or he would have done so if he had not waved the French colors. The merchant Quedagh had a document, written in sublime handwriting, which ensured passage from France. French shipments posed no threat; They could even be providing protection, information, or materials.
The Quedagh Merchant sent a ship with a French gunner with the pass. When she boarded the warship, she raised a new flag: the English flag. The shooter temporarily discovered that it was a trap. She is not a French ship; she is Captain William Kidd’s adventure galley. And she is not a parliament; it’s a theft.
For Captain Kidd, it’s a life-changing purpose that he says will “cause quite a stir in England. ” Kidd has become “the topic of all conversations,” wrote one contemporary, and his life is “sung in ballads. ” One of them is still sung today: “My calling is Captain Kidd, / And I forbade God’s legislation, / And I did it with utmost wickedness, / While he sailed. “
It’s as if Kidd and his fellow marauders never impede sailing. Nowadays, pirates are everywhere. The five “Pirates of the Caribbean” films have collectively grossed billions. And then there are the shows, the games, the memes, the bars, the parties and the bottles of rum. Three major sports groups are named after him: the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: the first two come from cities with no connection to piracy.
The pirates we think of are specific: the English-speaking sea robbers who sailed from the mid-seventeenth century to the first decades of the eighteenth. And what makes those violators of the maritime laws of yesteryear so desirable that, three centuries later, we still find them?Dressed like them? The undeniable answer is that they were rebels. We rejoice in their vigorous and wild life because we too need to live freely. Pirates are desirable primarily because they sailed at the dawn of our era, just as the British Empire was. Seen from a certain perspective, pirates – the scourge of admirals and merchants – were the last strongholds in a world ruled by states and corporations.
But were pirates implacable enemies of the fashionable order?Power and piracy have not been distinctly different, at least not in the early days of English capitalism. It is worth asking whether the global opposition against which the pirates mutinied was not also, in part, a global one that they themselves created.
A sign of our sympathy for pirates is that their heyday is known as the Golden Age of Piracy, roughly between 1650 and 1730. The pirates who lived then can be divided into generations. The first, the buccaneers, plundered Spanish possessions around the Caribbean in the mid-17th century. The latter, including Kidd, were largely introduced from the North American continent and received their greatest rewards in the Indian Ocean in the 1690s. This is the third generation, sailing from 1716 to 1726, to fly black flags. and attacked everyone at most.
Only the last generation, which included infamous captains like Blackbeard and Bartholomew (Black Bart) Roberts, fully corresponds to our canonical symbol of the pirate. It is interesting to note that there were not many. Prominent piracy historian Marcus Rediker estimates that only 4,000 pirates sailed in the Black Flag era. If he’s right, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies worked more people than the real Pirates of the Caribbean.
While black flag pirates were not particularly numerous, they have become iconic for a reason. The pirates of the 18th century were the most radical, Rediker observes, following a lifestyle “as far removed from classical authority as any man can be. ” It will be at the beginning of the 18th century. “As he writes in” Villains of all nations “(2004):” They dared to believe in another life and they dared to go out and live it. »
While earlier raiders, such as Kidd, had sailed under the banners of primal empires, eighteenth-century pirates hoisted the Jolly Roger: black (or rarely red) flags adorned with skulls, bones, skeletons, or hourglasses that pronounced the immediate technique of death. These were not different ancient symbols (they can be discovered on tombstones from the time), however, the skulls on pirate flags lacked the same ancient wings that symbolized the ascension of the dead to heaven. Removing those wings was a dark and irritable touch of the Goths of the best seas.
Like teenage goths, 18th-century marauders not only stood out from mainstream society; They frowned furiously. “Condemnation to the governor and confusion to the colony,” said a typical pirate toast presented at the gallows. Stede Bonnet called his shipment The Revenge, Blackbeard called his Queen Anne’s Revenge, William Fly opted for Fames’ Revenge and John Cole came up with a double ice cream: New York Revenge’s Revenge.
It was all a bit theatrical and no doubt intentional: raids were carried out more easily when the victims were terrified. However, the pirates had real reasons to need revenge. The first fashion world was hostile to ordinary people, and the situations on merchant and naval ships, where many pirates had begun their careers, were dire. The symbol of a captain’s absolute authority was the cat o’ nine tails, although the punishment rarely went beyond whipping: damaged arms, gouged out eyes and knocked out teeth, not to mention death. One sailor reported being hit “on the head with dried elephant pizle,” which is never good.
Such “heavy use” was rarer aboard a pirate ship. Mutilated and well-armed men did not submit easily to whipping, nor were they content to receive orders just because an officer had given them to them. According to the regulations of Kidd’s ship, the captain needed the consent of the majority to punish the men, and vital decisions were put to a vote. Historians give much importance to “items” signed through pirate crews, adding Kidd’s. By the 18th century, the constitutions of those ships had become strangely democratic. During their terms, captains were generally elected, the wounded earned a bounty, and pay was inventory rather than salary, and captains rarely received more than double what sailors earned. today it exceeds two cents to one. )
Examples of pirate items are found in “A General History of Pirates,” a 1724 book that is the source for much of pirate history. (For decades it was attributed to Daniel Defoe. ) A second volume explored in more detail the unorthodox politics of pirates. He describes a short-lived colony in Madagascar, called Libertalia, in which pirates abandoned their national loyalties to Liberi, the other people of freedom. They formed a democracy, pooled their treasures, freed the slaves they found, and avoided cash as “useless when everything was in common. “
Libertalia, as we now know, a fiction. However, the American anarchist Hakim Bey stuck to it a few decades ago, insisting that he embodied the pirate spirit. For Bey, “pirate utopias” were “temporary autonomous zones” that provided safe haven from an inhospitable world. His ideas encouraged recent supporters of Gaza. student camps, some of which were little Libertalias on quads.
Did the utopias of the pirates influence the politics of the time?Anthropologist David Graeber suggests the same in “Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia” (2023). The Libertalia of “A General History” never existed, Graeber admits, but pirates landed in Madagascar and their sons, with Malagasy women, founded politically attractive societies there. In addition, reports of the pirates’ radical social experiments “had a profound effect on the European imagination,” Graeber writes. It is perhaps no coincidence that eighteenth-century philosophers were publishing experimental ideas about how laid-back Americans could hypothetically engage in social contracts at the very moment that pirates were doing (visibly, not hypothetically) exactly that. that.
In “A General History,” the leader of Libertalia is said to have “abhorred even the call of slavery. “This is an enlightened vision, given that Thomas More’s original European utopia, dating from 1516, had promised two slaves compatible with the home. True pirates were opposed to slavery, although it was more confusing. Certainly, they trafficked and possessed people. According to Kidd’s articles, any team member who lost a member would get cash or “six capable slaves” as compensation. Still, some pirates were black, especially in the 18th century, when pirate shipping became the site of what Rediker calls a “multicultural, multiracial, multinational social order. “In general, slaves probably faced greater difficulties among pirates than anywhere else in the white-ruled world.
Have women also discovered freedom at sea?” A General Hitale” tells the story of one of them, Anne Bonny, who left her husband to join Jack Rackham’s “Calico” team, dressing as a man and fighting as pirate On board, Bonny had a “special affection” for a “handsome young man” and revealed her secret to him. Her handsome teammate responded, awkwardly, that he, too, was a woman in disguise; his name was Mary Read. Her cute story in “A General Hitale” is hard to swallow, however, there are many records of Bonny and Read wearing panties and sailing with Calico Jack. And, although we only know of a handful of Women who abandoned domestic duties to pursue the pirate life, historian Jo Stanley speculates that “many more” were lost on Hitale.
The most tempting hypothesis considers the sexuality of pirates. Although pirates have long been portrayed as overly heterosexual Errol Flynn types, historian B. R. Burg made national news in the 1970s by proposing that homosexuality was prevalent among pirates. Could we expect turbulent men who had Selected to live in a transgressive, exclusively male environment to renounce sex? Surely not, Burg argued. They created a “functional and resilient society of sodomistic pirates,” he wrote: a floating network where men can simply love freely.
Popular culture has coalesced around Burg’s thesis. In the 1991 film “Hook,” Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins quietly portrayed Captain Hook and Smee as what Hoffman called “a pair of old queens. “Johnny Depp said he played Jack Sparrow as gay in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films (2003-17). This trend peaked with the rainbow-splattered HBO Max screen “Our Flag Means Death” (2022-23), in which Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet are boyfriend and girlfriend.
The trope of the homosexual pirate sums up the broader understanding of pirate shipping as a nautical autarchy, disconnected from the earth, not even sexual. The myth of the buried treasure completes this picture. The concept is that, instead of spending their loot, the pirates hid it in secret places that they only shared with each other, through whispered confidences and enigmatic maps. We believe that pirates inhabit closed worlds, with shipments as homes, their equipment as families, and remote islands as banks. Anything else can be hung.
But had the pirates separated from the land? It is difficult to discover that they had sexual relations at sea. The evidence is “so rare as to be almost non-existent,” admitted one scholar who followed in Burg’s footsteps. There is also no evidence that pirates accumulated their treasures in buried chests. The evidence that exists, to a large extent, is that pirates spend their loot on women on land. Pirate ships may have been oases of freedom, but they were also tight ships, with low rations and high tensions. Once on land, the men fired like cannonballs toward the taverns and brothels. Coins were flying in all directions. A buccaneer gave a woman five hundred eights – a tempting sum – to see her naked.
This is one aspect of pirates: not nautical rebels, but enthusiastic participants in port economies. This role is highlighted in two vital books from 2015, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740” through Mark G. Hanna and “Pirates”. , Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves” through Kevin P. These two monographs are educational monographs that are not very patient to boast. Instead, they see hackers as being strongly connected to the societies around them.
To appreciate the position of pirates in high life, it is useful to take a step back from the fierce “Black Flag” era of 1716-1726 and the broader context. Spain and Portugal had seized valuable colonies in the West, while India and China had amassed wonderful riches in the East. England, however, was largely excluded. She didn’t rule the waves or command a vast empire, at least not yet. Thus, London welcomed all who could discover the treasures of the east and the west. And he didn’t flinch when the men who came forward were pirates.
After all, piracy is a subjective matter. Was it a crime to go to sea and plunder ships, attack cities, torture people and seize a fortune in silver from the Spanish-American colonies?For the Spaniards it surely was, and they called the villain El Draque (the Dragon) guilty. But when the El Draque shipment returned to Plymouth and deposited five tons of stolen silver in the Tower of London (more than the Crown had earned from all other resources combined that year), Queen Elizabeth was in a position to forgive the sin, to board the shipment. and be named caballero. su captain. The English know El Draque as Sir Francis Drake and not as a pirate but as a daring explorer.
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At first, they saw Captain Kidd the same way. Kidd was a respectable member of New York society, owning a space at 56 Wall Street and a bank near Trinity Church. The explanation for why he owned such a giant warship was that he had the money of some of the toughest men in England. When the Adventure Galley left Manhattan, it did so to the sound of trumpets.
Captains like Kidd were not naval officers acting under direct orders, but they had broad authority to rob England’s rivals. Ideally, this license took the form of authorization cards, called letters of marque or reprisal, which allowed them to attack certain foreign ships for a percentage of the loot. Technically, ownership of such letters made them “privateers” rather than pirates. This is how Kidd looked when he was carrying a royal commission to capture French ships (and some others to attack pirates). Certainly, you had to squint to see that his main product – Quedagh Merchant, an English-run Indian company – was French. But it was a wonderful age to squint. Privateers relied on letters that were invalid, expired, or issued after the fact, when they had letters.
Overall, this did not bother the authorities. As long as the pirates were pointing in the right direction, their task was smart for business. Not only did they harass England’s rivals; they also enriched their colonies. McDonald points out its importance in the development of new slave colonies, which were first difficult for English colonists to acquire as part of the general trade. Africans sold into slavery in Virginia in 1619 (the occasion that sparked the New York Times 1619 Project, four centuries later) had been confiscated from a Portuguese slave sent via an English privateer bearing a Dutch trademark patent.
The hackers also provided cash. America produced prodigious quantities of silver and gold, but the mines were in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Meanwhile, the English colonies suffered from chronic shortages of the steel they needed to pay England’s taxes and buy their products. An early 18th-century observer estimated that an average coin lasted only six months in the United States before leaving for England. Since imperial regulations and rivalries prevented English colonists from trading directly with their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts, pirates and smugglers (two overlapping categories) were indispensable. They exploited the veins of minerals that flowed from America to the Iberian Peninsula, irrigating the English empire with hard currency.
“Eight coins” and “doubloons” sound like colorful pirate speeches, but they were the English names for the Spanish coins that pirates stole on their raids, earned from their trade, and spent on their follies. Gold coins from the plundering of the Indian Ocean flooded into colonial societies. The well-known dollar sign, in fact, was originally the American symbol for the peso, the mythical “eight coin. ” the main currency, so it has become the token currency.
The sexuality of pirates is applicable here, as sex was a very important channel through which foreign currencies entered the colonies. The ports favored by pirates were hotbeds of prostitution. It was illegal, and at the pirates’ hideout in Port Royal, Jamaica, “Ordinary harlots” were imprisoned in a “cage near the turtle market,” one guest wrote. But instead of locking those women in the kennel, Jamaica deserves statues to have been erected to them to solve the colonial liquidity crisis. The biggest statue deserves to be that of the anonymous woman who convinced a pirate to give her five hundred pieces out of 8 just to see her strip naked. Forget Blackbeard; This is the outlaw they deserve to make TV shows about.
The ports were also full of goldsmiths. We believe that goldsmithing is an ancient and ancient profession; Paul Revere was a goldsmith, and they generally outnumbered lawyers in colonial America. But why were they, given that the country had few silver mines?The answer, Mark Hanna explains, is that goldsmiths worked like fences, transmuting “pirate metal” into respectable wealth. The first currency in the Thirteen Colonies was created in 1652 by John Hull, who made Massachusetts pine shillings from Spanish bullion. Hull was a goldsmith; his brother Edward was a pirate.
John Hull accused of supporting his brother’s pirate ship, but acquitted. Although piracy is a crime, it can also be a blessing, and the sympathy of locals made prosecution difficult. Hanna provides the example of one Moses Butterworth, who had sailed with Kidd. When Butterworth attempted to commit piracy in what is now New Jersey, an armed defense force stormed the courthouse. The judge drew his sword, but it was not suitable for more than a hundred men armed with pistols and clubs. They released Butterworth and captured the governor and sheriff, taking them prisoner. They then detained the governor for 4 days, after which Butterworth disappeared. (He arrived three years later in Newport, Rhode Island, in command of his own ship. )
Richard Blakemore’s new book, “Enemies of All,” addresses this topic. In Pennsylvania, Blakemore notes, a prominent pirate married the governor’s daughter and was elected to the legislature. An even more vital pirate, Henry Morgan, known to lovers of spiced rum as Captain Morgan, was arrested and transported to London. Then, after being released without punishment, he was knighted and returned to Jamaica, where he held various positions as acting governor. When Morgan died in 1688, he was offered a state funeral at Port Royal, with twenty-two gun salutes. The pirates would have benefited from an amnesty to sign up for the mourners.
Like Morgan, Kidd faces jail. But, even with an arrest warrant issued, he disembarked to discuss his case with the Massachusetts Council. It helped that Lord Bellomont, then governor of New York, Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, was one of Kidd’s leading supporters. He sent Lady Bellomont an enamelled box containing 4 gold-set diamonds. He explained to the board that his actions, while technically illegal, were justifiable. Kidd can be forgiven for hoping for mercy. And we would forgive him for his astonishment when Lord Bellomont, his former investor, had him arrested.
William Kidd grew up in a time when pirates were the imperialist Robin Hoods, stealing from foreigners and giving to the English. This made them affable outlaws, more evil than evil. Disorders arose at the end of the century, when pirate depredations disrupted the development of London. Maritime domain. It is a disgrace for Kidd to navigate a “turning point in the history of empire,” writes his biographer Robert C. Ritchie: He had passed into a permissive era and he has returned to a punitive era.
It’s helpful to think of hacking as a phase of trendy venture capital. This is the compelling argument put forward by economic historian Nuala Zahedieh, who studies the British Caribbean. The sugar planters were looking for gigantic profits, but they had to make serious investments. buy slaves, clear land, build roads and ports, before they could make them. Donors in London were understandably suspicious. The most “promising” economic base for Jamaica, thought one of its governors, was, therefore, raids. It was an “ideal start-up job,” Zahedieh acknowledges, since it only required a small initial outlay, all the more modest as hackers. Piracy was dangerous, but it temporarily generated the cash needed to free the plantations. The theft of the seas thus helped identify a more reliable plundering bureaucracy: of indigenous lands and African labor.
But as the plantations took root, piracy lost ground. The two expenditures were “absolutely incompatible,” wrote a less sympathetic Jamaican governor, since one demanded order and the other sowed chaos. Slave planters sought socialization on land and safe passage across the seas. and the pirates were dangerous. If in the 17th century pirates had been tools of English colonization, in the 18th century they were obstacles.
London also discovered that the pirates were interfering with the East India Company, the chartered trading corporation that would serve as a bridge to the British conquest of India. This was Kidd’s marvelous crime. The theft of him from the merchant of Quedagh, who was carrying items belonging to a high Mughal official, caused a furore in the subcontinent. The Mughal emperor insisted that if the English wanted to continue operating there, justice must be done. Kidd’s arrest through Lord Bellomont in 1699 was a sacrifice made on the altar of English commerce. .
By this time, the Crown had become hostile to piracy. Their hunt for pirates was interrupted by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which forced everyone to board English ships to fight. But after the end of this war, the final confrontation began. The demobilization retired more than 40 thousand men from naval service, and the privateers’ careers also dried up. Unsurprisingly, some unemployed turned to piracy, but in doing so, they faced tighter naval control, developed valid trade, and a punitive twist on the colonies. He jumped ashore and married the governor’s daughter, now he was at risk of being arrested, convicted and executed.
Henry Morgan, until the end of the 17th century, had retired from piracy and invested in slavery and plantations. Pirates of the 18th century did not have such easy escape routes. They were surrounded by the sea and the ports in front of them were blocked. That’s when they raised the black flag and fought against the global total. But one way to say it is that everyone fought against them.
According to Marcus Rediker, this gave rise to pirate radicalism. As merchants withdrew from piracy, it became more proletarian. Their leveling and libertarian tendencies became clearer after 1716, when sailors took over their workplaces (ships) and founded their own companies. Its global “upside down,” Rediker writes, a contented brotherhood in which no one would hit anyone with an elephant’s dry Pizle. No wonder the powers that be refuse to rest until each and every pirate is released, imprisoned, hanged, or drowned. .
However, not all historians consider the black flag pirates to be political visionaries. Take their wealth sharing projects as an example. Are they evidence of socialism? Zahedieh points out that payment through shares can also be understood as a way of reducing the costs of hard work, necessarily replacing salaries with lottery tickets. If the pirates were lucky, they would prosper, but if not, they would prosper. die of hunger: “No prey, no salary”, as they said. Kidd’s generation of hackers had also worked for stocks, but they clearly had their prey on the brain, hence Kidd’s wealthy investors. Later hackers lacked “a transparent goal,” Blakemore writes, and were “more directionless. “
Kidd’s seizure of the Quedagh Merchant was among the last legendary hauls. With huge scores now rare and the gallows looming, eighteenth-century pirate ships grew less desirable as places to work, and they relied more on coercion to replenish their ranks. One reason for their multiracialism was that they struggled to recruit white men. The motley crews that today look so admirable may have been products less of democracy than of desperation.
From Madagascar, the place of the fictional Libertalia, we have a story of profit sharing in an authentic pirate colony. Fourteen men in difficult conditions agreed to mix their meager fortunes, divide into groups and fight to the death for the boat. The two survivors shared the profits. It was a bold social experiment, but not carried out by free men who believed that some other global level was possible. It was a task of last resort: the desperate radicalism of the miserable.
The Crown’s crackdown meant that William Kidd had to face a jury in London, not a New England jury, which coddles pirates. “I’m the most innocent user of all,” Kidd protested. He placed a lot of importance on the French pass that the merchant Quedagh had taken, which in his opinion made it fair game. This defense may have worked a generation ago. But now? Kidd’s moves were “the most mischievous and disruptive to commerce that can happen,” the ruling told jury. Kidd was found guilty and sent to the dock in Wapping.
Kidd and everyone. Rediker estimates that between 1719 and 1725 the number of pirates fell from about two thousand to less than two hundred. Hundreds of pirates were swinging on piles of ropes and their feet were dancing wildly in the air. The corpses of infamous pirates were later put on display in macabre exhibitions. Kidd is suspended in chains for years over the River Thames.
The end of British piracy was, interestingly, the beginning of the British obsession with pirates. In 1713 a successful play, “The Successful Pirate”, was produced. In 1719, Daniel Defoe published “Robinson Crusoe,” based on the plight of a prominent marooned buccaneer. (Defoe wrote an authentic pirate novel in 1720. ) In 1724, the widely read “General History” set the terms in which he still We talk about piracy. The very moment the pirates disappeared, they became immortal.
It may simply feel like nostalgia, as pirates are a bygone era. But did he miss out on his way of life? The decline of the pirates was the dawn of the slave trade, the American plantations, and Britain’s global empire. The looting was not so much abandoned as redirected and made routine. Perhaps seeing the global as pirates did, with theft as an adventure. and the goods stolen as booty, helped to calm British consciences. In life, the pirate had been seen as an obstacle. At his death, he served – with the machete in the air and the eye patch on – as a mischievous pet for a predatory age. ♦
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