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Title: Pirate anarchy Author: anonymous Language: en Topics: pirates, history Source: [[https://anarchyinaction.org/index.php?title=Pirate_anarchy]]
Escaping from life in tyrannical monarchies, the seventeenth and
eighteenth-century pirates took to plundering merchant ships in the
Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. Between
and within crews, pirates organized themselves in an egalitarian manner
complete with highly democratic constitutions, checks and balances and a
loose confederation of crews. At any given time, there were an estimated
1,000 to 2,000 pirates and an even larger number of buccaneers, who were
were essentially part-time pirates that spent a portion of their time
engaging in state-sanctioned plundering. A study of pirate crews between
1716 and 1726 found that the average crew had 80 members, although crews
of 150 to 200 members were not uncommon. An analysis of 23 pirate crews
between 1682 and 1726 found that over a quarter of the average crew was
of African descent.[1]
Aside from the democratically elected captain and quartermaster, all
pirates on a ship received an equal share of the loot. The captain and
quartermaster received up to twice the normal share, but they were
expected to store their wealth and make it available to the crew it
times of need.[2] Pirates could recall and replace captains for a number
of reasons including corruption, cowardice and poor judgement. Although
the captain assumed full authority in times of chase and battle, when
snap-decisions needed to be made, he had very little to no coercive
power during all other times.[3] Crews sometimes executed captains who
exceeded their limited authority.[4] The quartermaster, who distributed
food and loot, adjudicated crew conflicts, and administered punishment.
By separating the powers into two offices, pirate crews created a system
of checks and balances that prevented the captain from assuming the
kinds of autocratic power seen on the merchant ships.[5]
Written constitutions called “articles of agreement” set rules for the
ship and specified the limits of the authority of the captain, the
quartermaster and other officers. The crew had to reach full consensus
to approve the articles. Articles from Captain Robert’s ship laid out
guidelines for how to make decisions (by majority vote), how to settle
disputes (by duel), and how to distribute loot (officers get one
and-a-quarter to two shares, everyone else gets one share). The articles
also stipulated rules against stealing from other members, striking one
another at sea, and bringing women onto the ship. Punishments included
banishment, slitting of the ears and nose, and death.[6]
Although a “substantial minority” of pirates traded slaves, free
Africans and African Amerericans, including ex-slaves, were common on
pirate ships. “Negroes and Molattoes” are recorded “on almost every
pirate ship,” and only rarely as slaves, according to Peter Linebaugh
and Marcus Rediker.[7].
There were some women pirates, including Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who
“cursed and swore like sailors, carried their weapons like those well
trained in the ways of war, and boarded prize vessels as only the most
daring and respected members of pirate crews were permitted to do.”[8]
Pirates created stateless, egalitarian base communities on land. One
prominent base existed on New Providence in Nassau, Bahamas from 1716 to
1718. Gabriel Kuhn cites an estimate that the settlement had a
population of 2,000 people including pirates and other residents. There
were no laws or government. Pirates were said to have spent their days
drinking, gambling, sleeping with sex workers, and lying on hammocks.
Frank Sherry describes this temporary pirate utopia:
A shanty- town—a zany collection of stores, shacks, whorehouses, and
saloons, cobbled together from driftwood and canvas with palm thatch for
roofs—stretched in a half circle along the sandy shore of the harbor.
The wreckage of captured prizes lay rotting on the beach, their ribs
exposed like long-dead carcasses. Dozens of vessels—pirate sloops and
captured merchants—crowded the harbor, their masts looked like a
leafless forest from the shore. In this place, their own crazy
metropolis, the pirates of the western world drank, argued among
themselves, gambled away fortunes, paid in stolen coin for the bodies of
the prostitutes who flocked to the town, and lived in an uproarious
present until their coin was gone and they had to go to sea once more.
It was said that the stench from Nassau—a combination of roasting meat,
smoke, human offal, rum, unwashed bodies, and rotting gar- bage, all
stewing together under the tropical sun—could be detected far out to
sea, long before the island itself was visible. New Providence and its
wild harbor town were in many ways a pirate heaven as well as a pirate
haven. Free from all laws other than the laws of piracy, it made
available all the rough joys that the outlaw brotherhood held dear.[9]
In Hakim Bey’s account quoted below, Libertatia features prominently,
even though most historians agree Libertatia was fictional.[10]
After the fall of Tortuga, the Buccaneer ideal remained alive all
through the “Golden Age” of Piracy (ca. 1660–1720), and resulted in
land-settlements in Belize, for example, which was founded by
Buccaneers. Then, as the scene shifted to Madagascar — an island still
unclaimed by any imperial power and ruled only by a patchwork of native
kings (chiefs) eager for pirate allies — the Pirate Utopia reached its
highest form.
Defoe’s account of Captain Mission and the founding of Libertatia may
be, as some historians claim, a literary hoax meant to propagandize for
radical Whig theory — but it was embedded in The General History of the
Pyrates (1724–28), most of which is still accepted as true and accurate.
Moreover the story of Capt. Mission was not criticized when the book
appeared and many old Madagascar hands still survived. They seem to have
believed it, no doubt because they had experienced pirate enclaves very
much like Libertatia. Once again, rescued slaves, natives, and even
traditional enemies such as the Portuguese were all invited to join as
equals. (Liberating slave ships was a major preoccupation.) Land was
held in common, representatives elected for short terms, booty shared;
doctrines of liberty were preached far more radical than even those of
Common Sense.
Libertatia hoped to endure, and Mission died in its defense. But most of
the pirate utopias were meant to be temporary; in fact the corsairs’
true “republics” were their ships, which sailed under Articles. The
shore enclaves usually had no law at all. The last classic example,
Nassau in the Bahamas, a beachfront resort of shacks and tents devoted
to wine, women (and probably boys too, to judge by Birge’s Sodomy and
Piracy), song (the pirates were inordinately fond of music and used to
hire on bands for entire cruises), and wretched excess, vanished
overnight when the British fleet appeared in the Bay. Blackbeard and
“Calico Jack” Rackham and his crew of pirate women moved on to wilder
shores and nastier fates, while others meekly accepted the Pardon and
reformed. But the Buccaneer tradition lasted, both in Madagascar where
the mixed-blood children of the pirates began to carve out kingdoms of
their own, and in the Caribbean, where escaped slaves as well as mixed
black/white/red groups were able to thrive in the mountains and
backlands as “Maroons.” The Maroon community in Jamaica still retained a
degree of autonomy and many of the old folkways when Zora Neale Hurston
visited there in the 1920’s (see Tell My Horse). The Maroons of Suriname
still practice African “paganism.”[11]
[1] Peter Leeson, “An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate
Organization,” Journal of Political Economy, 2007, vol. 115, no. 6,
http://www.peterleeson.com/An-arrgh-chy.pdf.
[2] Gabriel Kuhn, Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age
Piracy (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 32.
[3] Leeson, An-arrgh-chy.
[4] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 162.
[5] Leeson, An-arrgh-chy.
[6] Leeson, “An-arrgh-chy”.
[7] Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 165.
[8] Linebaugh and Reiker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 167.
[9] Kuhn, Life Under the Jolly Roger, 141–142.
[10] Leeson, “An-arrgh-chy”. Kuhn, Life Under the Jolly Roger, 144.
[11] Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zones’, hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html