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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 warship with thirty-four fixed guns heading towards them, or they would have done so if it had not waved the French colors. The merchant Quedagh possessed a document, written in a sublime handwriting, which ensured passage from France. French shipments posed no threat; They might even be offering protection, information, or supplies.
The Quedagh Merchant sent a ship with a French gunner carrying the pass. Upon boarding the warship, she raised a new flag: the English one. 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 subject of every conversation,” 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 the legislation of God, / And I did it with the utmost wickedness, / While sailing. “
It’s as if Kidd and his fellow marauders never impede navigation. Nowadays, hackers are everywhere. The five videos for “Pirates of the Caribbean” have grossed billions together. And then there are the shows, games, memes, bars, festivals and bottles of rum. Three major sports groups are named after him: the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Las Vegas Pirates Raiders and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: the first two come from towns unrelated 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, between 1650 and 1730 approximately. The pirates who lived then can be divided into generations. The first, the buccaneers, plundered Spanish possessions throughout the Caribbean in the mid-17th century. The latter, Kidd adds, were introduced mainly from the North American continent and achieved their greatest benefits in the Indian Ocean in the 1690s. It was the third generation, which sailed between 1716 and 1726, that flew black flags and attacked the whole world at most.
Only the last generation, which included infamous captains like Blackbeard and Bartholomew (Black Bart) Roberts, fits perfectly into our canonical symbol of the pirate. Curiously, there were not many. Prominent piracy historian Marcus Rediker estimates that only 4,000 pirates sailed the Black Flag Era. If you’re right, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” videos were staffed by more people than genuine 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. »
Where ancient 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 heralded the rapid technique of death. They 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 their wings was a dark and irritable touch on the part of the goths. of the best seas.
Like Gothic teenagers, 18th-century marauders not only withdrew from mainstream society; They frowned angrily. “Condemnation for the governor and confusion for the colony,” said the typical pirate toast presented at the gallows. Stede Bonnet called his send The Revenge, Blackbeard called his Queen Anne The Revenge, William Fly opted for The Revenge of the Famas. and John Cole proposed a double ice cream: the New York Revenge’s Revenge.
It was all a bit theatrical and undoubtedly intentional: raids were carried out more smoothly when victims were terrified. However, the pirates had real reasons to need revenge. The first world of fashion was hostile to ordinary people, and the situations on merchant and naval ships, where many pirates had begun their careers, were especially frightening. The symbol of a captain’s absolute authority was the nine-tailed cat, though rarely did the punishment go beyond whipping: damaged arms, gouged out eyes, and teeth pulled out, not to mention death. One sailor reported that he was hit “on the head with dry elephant shear,” which is never a good thing.
That “heavy use” was rarer aboard a pirate ship. Mutineers and well-armed men did not easily submit to whipping, nor were they content to receive orders just because an officer gave them them. Under Kidd’s ship regulations, the captain needed majority consent to punish the men, and vital decisions were put to a vote. Historians place a lot of importance on “articles” signed through pirate crews, adding Kidd’s. By the eighteenth century, those onboard constitutions had become strangely democratic. On its terms, captains were generally elected, the wounded earned a reward, and pay was made in inventory rather than wages, and captains rarely received more than double what sailors earned. (The average ratio of CEO pay to median employee pay in the United States’ largest corporations is now over two hundred to one. )
Examples of pirate items are found in “A General History of Pirates,” a 1724 book that is the source of much of pirate history (for decades, it was attributed to Daniel Defoe). A second volume explored the lives of pirates. Unorthodox politics in more detail. It describes a short-lived colony in Madagascar called Libertalia, where pirates abandoned their national loyalties to become Liberi, the other town of liberty. They formed a democracy, pooled their treasures, freed any slaves they found, and have shunned cash as “useless where everything was in common. “
Libertalia, as we now know, a fiction. However, the American anarchist Hakim Bey latched onto 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 the team of “Calico” Jack Rackham, dressing as a man and fighting as a pirate. On board, Bonny felt a “special affection” for a “handsome young man” and revealed her secret to him. His handsome teammate replied, awkwardly, that he, too, was a woman in disguise; her call was Mary Read. Their cute story in “A General Hitale” is hard to swallow, however, there are plenty of records that Bonny and Read wore panties and sailed with Calico Jack. And, although we only know of a handful of women who abandoned domestic chores to devote themselves to the pirate life, historian Jo Stanley speculates that “many more” were lost in Hitale.
The most tempting hypothesis considers the sexuality of pirates. Although pirates have long been portrayed as overly heterosexual types of Errol Flynn, historian B. R. Burg made national headlines in the 1970s by proposing that homosexuality was prevalent among pirates. Could we expect turbulent men who would have been selected to live in a transgressive and exclusively male environment to renounce sex?They created a “functional and resilient society of Sodomist pirates,” he wrote: a floating net where men can simply love freely.
Popular culture has joined Burg’s thesis. In the 1991 film “Hook,” Dustin Hoffguy and Bob Hoskins quietly portrayed Captain Hook and Smee as what Hoffguy called “a pair of old queens. “Johnny Depp has said he played Jack Sparrow as a gay boy in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films (2003-17). This trend culminated in the rainbow-filled HBO Max exhibit “Our Flag Means Death” (2022-23), in which Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet are boyfriend and girlfriend.
The trope of the homosexual pirate encapsulates the broader understanding of pirate shipping as nautical autarky, disconnected from land, not even sexual. The myth of the buried treasure completes this picture. The concept is that, instead of spending their loot, pirates hid it in secret places they only shared with each other, through whispered confidences and enigmatic maps. We believe that pirates inhabit closed worlds, with ships as homes, their gear 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 sex at sea. The evidence is “so sparse that it is almost nonexistent,” said a scholar who followed in Burg’s footsteps. There is also no evidence that pirates hoarded their treasures in buried chests. Much of the evidence is that pirates spend their loot on women on land. Pirate ships would possibly have been oases of freedom, but they were also narrow ships, where rations were low and tensions high. When they were disembarked, the men fired like cannonballs in the direction of taverns and brothels. The pieces flew in all directions. A buccaneer gave a woman five hundred pieces of 8 – a tempting sum – to see her naked.
This is what pirates look like: they are not nautical rebels, but enthusiastic participants in port economies. This role is highlighted in two vital 2015 books, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740” by Mark G. Hanna and “Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves” by Kevin P. McDonald. These two monographs are educational monographs with little patience for bragging. Instead, they see pirates as people strongly tied 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 cash in the Spanish-American colonies?For the Spaniards, this was surely the case, and they called the evil El Draque (the Drapassn) 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, on board. the shipment, and 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 enough authority to borrow from England’s rivals. Ideally, this license took the form of authorization sheets, called letters of marque or reprisals, 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 saw himself when he led a royal commission to capture French ships (and some others to attack pirates). He had to squint to see that his main product (Quedagh Merchant, an Indian company run by English businessmen) was French. But it was a great time to squint. The privateers relied on invalid, expired or after-the-fact letters, when they had them.
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. The English colonies, on the other hand, suffered from chronic shortages of the steel they needed to pay England’s taxes and buy their products. An observer in the early eighteenth century estimated that an average coin lasted only six months in America 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-coin coins” and “doubloons” sound like colorful pirate speeches, but they were the English names of 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 colonial societies. The well-known dollar signal, in fact, was originally the American symbol of the peso, the mythical “eight coin”. the main currency, so it has become the signal of the currency.
Pirate sexuality is applicable here, as sex was a very important conduit through which foreign currencies entered the colonies. The ports favored by pirates were hotbeds of prostitution. It was illegal, and in the pirates’ den of Port Royal, Jamaica, “ordinary harlots” were imprisoned in a “cage near the turtle market,” one guest wrote. But instead of locking these women in the pound, Jamaica deserves to have statues erected to them in the face of the colonial liquidity crisis. The largest statue would have to be that of the nameless woman who convinced a pirate to give her five hundred pieces of 8 just to see her strip naked. Forget Blackbeard; She’s 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 lawyers were generally outnumbered in colonial America. But why were there any, given that the country had few silver mines? The answer, Mark Hanna explains, is that goldsmiths worked as fences, transmuting “pirate metal” into respectable wealth. The first currency in the Thirteen Colonies was created in 1652 through John Hull, who made Massachusetts pine shillings from Spanish bullion. Hull was a goldsmith; His brother Edward was a pirate.
John Hull was accused of supporting his brother’s pirate ship, but was acquitted. These effects were common, Hanna and McDonald note. Although piracy is a crime, it can also be a blessing from heaven, and the friendliness of the locals made prosecution difficult. provides the example of one Moses Butterworth, who had sailed with Kidd. When Butterworth attempted to hack into present-day New Jersey, an armed defense force stormed the courthouse. The judge unsheathed his sword, but he could not more than One Hundred men armed with pistols and clubs. They freed Butterworth and captured the governor and sheriff, taking them prisoner. They then detained the governor for 4 days, after which Butterworth was long gone. (He arrived 3 years later in Newport, Rhode Island, commanding 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 spiced rum lovers 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 given a state funeral at Port Royal, with twenty-two gun salutes. The pirates would have benefited from an amnesty to target the mourners.
Like Morgan, Kidd faces prison. But, even with an arrest warrant issued, he disembarked to discuss his case with the Massachusetts Council. He helped make Lord Bellomont, then governor of New York, Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, one of Kidd’s main supporters. He sent Lady Bellomont an enameled box containing 4 diamonds set in gold. He explained to the board that his actions, although technically illegal, were justifiable. Kidd can be forgiven for hoping for mercy. And we would forgive him for his surprise 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 gentle 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 Kidd’s misfortune 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 argument convincingly made by the economic historian Nuala Zahedieh, who studies the English Caribbean. Sugar planters expected to make large profits, but they had to make significant investments (buying slaves, clearing land, building roads and ports) before they knew them. Understandably, London’s supporters were suspicious. The most “promising” economic base for Jamaica, one of its governors thought, was therefore raids. It was an “ideal job to start with,” Zahedieh acknowledges, as it required only a small initial outlay, even more modest since hackers worked to obtain inventories and not salaries. Array Piracy was dangerous, but it temporarily generated the money needed to obtain the plantations. The theft at sea thus helped to 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, by the end of the 17th century, had retired from piracy and invested in slavery and plantations. 18th century pirates did not have such simple tactics. They were locked in the sea and the ports were blocked in front of them. . That’s when they raised the black flag and fought against the global total. But one way to say it is that the global total fought against them.
According to Marcus Rediker, this gave rise to pirate radicalism. As merchants withdrew from piracy, it became more proletarian. Its leveling and libertarian tendencies were clearer after 1716, when sailors took over their workplaces (ships) and founded their own companies. Their global “upside down,” Rediker writes, a contented brotherhood in which no one would hit anyone with the dry Pizle of an elephant. No wonder the powers that be refuse to rest until each and every pirate is freed, imprisoned, hanged or drowned. .
However, not all historians consider black-flag pirates to be political visionaries. Let’s take as an example their projects of distribution of wealth. Are they evidence of socialism?Zahedieh points out that payment through shares can also be understood as a way to reduce 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. to 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 their brains, hence Kidd’s wealthy investors. Later hackers lacked “a transparent target,” Blakemore writes, and were “more directionless. “
Kidd’s seizure of the Quedagh Merchant, one of the last mythical captures. Now that mass scores are rare and hanging looms, 18th century pirate ships have become less desirable places to work and relied more on coercion to fill their ranks. One of the reasons for their multiracialism was that they had difficulty recruiting white men. The motley crews that seem so admirable today are perhaps less a product 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 balanced on piles of ropes, their feet dancing wildly in the air. The corpses of infamous pirates were later displayed in macabre exhibitions. Kidd is suspended in chains for years over the River Thames.
The finish of British piracy was, curiously, the starting of the British obsession with pirates. There was a a success play in 1713, “The Successful Pyrate. “In 1719, Daniel Defoe published “Robinson Crusoe,” founded on the plight of a noted deserted buccaneer. (Defoe wrote a genuine pirate novel in 1720. ) In 1724, the widely read “General History” set the terms in which we still talk about piracy. At the very moment when the pirates disappeared, they have become immortal.
It may simply be perceived as nostalgia, since pirates are a bygone era. But was their way of life lost? The twilight of the pirates was the dawn of the slave trade, American plantations, and Britain’s global empire. The looting was not so much abandoned as redirected and made routine. Perhaps seeing the global as the pirates did, with theft as an adventure. and stolen goods as loot, helped soothe British consciences. In life, the pirate had been seen as an obstacle. Upon his death, he served—with machete in the air and eyepatch on—as a mischievous mascot for a predatory age. ♦
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