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Title: Pirate Utopias
Author: Do or Die
Date: Friday June 18th 1999
Language: en
Topics: Do or Die, pirates, piracy, proto-anarchism
Source: http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no8/

Do or Die

Pirate Utopias

"In an honest Service, there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard

Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and

Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the

Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at

choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one shall be my Motto" - Pirate

Captain Bartholomew Roberts.[1]

During the 'Golden Age' of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, crews

of early proletarian rebels, dropouts from civilization, plundered the

lucrative shipping lanes between Europe and America. They operated from

land enclaves, free ports; 'pirate utopias' located on islands and

coastlines as yet beyond the reach of civilization. From these

mini-anarchies - 'temporary autonomous zones' - they launched raiding

parties so successful that they created an imperial crisis, attacking

British trade with the colonies, and crippling the emerging system of

global exploitation, slavery and colonialism.[2]

We can easily imagine the attraction of life as a sea-rover, answerable

to no-one. Euro-American society of the 17th and 18th centuries was one

of emergent capitalism, war, slavery, land enclosures and clearances;

starvation and poverty side-by-side with unimaginable wealth. The Church

dominated all aspects of life and women had few options beyond marital

slavery. You could be press-ganged into the navy and endure conditions

far worse than those experienced on board a pirate ship: "Conditions for

ordinary seamen were both harsh and dangerous - and the pay was poor.

Punishments available to the ship's officers included manacling,

flogging and keel-hauling - the victim being pulled by means of a rope

under the hull of the ship from one side to the other. Keel-hauling was

a punishment which often proved fatal."[3] As Dr. Johnson famously

observed: "no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get

himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the

chance of being drowned... A man in jail has more room, better food, and

commonly better company."[4]

In opposition to this, pirates created a world of their own making,

where they had "the choice in themselves" - a world of solidarity and

fraternity, where they shared the risks and the gains of life at sea,

made decisions collectively and seized their life for themselves in the

present, denying its use to the merchants as a tool for the accumulation

of dead property. Indeed, Lord Vaughan, Governor of Jamaica, wrote:

"These Indyes are so Vast and Rich, And this kind of rapine so sweet,

that it is one of the hardest things in the World to draw those from it

which have used it for so long."[5]

The Rise of Piracy

The era of Euro-American piracy is ushered in by the discovery of the

New World and the enormous empire seized by the Spanish in the Americas.

New technologies allowed long sea voyages to be made with regularity and

accuracy, and the new empires that emerged were not based so much on

control of the land as control of the seas. The Spanish were the world

superpower of the 16th century, but did not go unchallenged for long;

the French, Dutch and English all struggled to overtake the Spanish in

the scramble for empire. In their quest to do so they were not above

using piracy to attack the hated Spanish and fill their coffers with the

vast wealth the Spanish had plundered from the Native Americans. In

wartime this raiding would be legitimised as legal privateering but the

rest of the time it was simply piracy with state-sponsorship (or at

least toleration and encouragement). Over the course of the 17th century

these embryonic empires finally overtook the Spanish and established

themselves. With the new technologies shipping was no longer just used

for luxury goods but became the basis of an international trading

network essential to the origin and growth of capitalism. The massive

expansion of sea-borne trade in this period necessarily also created a

large population of seafarers - a new class of wage-workers that had not

previously existed. For many of them piracy seemed an attractive

alternative to the harsh realities of the merchant service or the navy.

But as the new empires - especially the British Empire - matured,

attitudes to piracy changed: "The roistering buccaneer did not suit the

hard-headed merchants and imperial bureaucrats, whose musty world of

balance sheets and reports came into violent conflict with that of the

pirates." The ruling class recognised that stable, orderly, regular

trade served the interests of a mature imperial power far better than

piracy. So piracy was forced to evolve in the late 17th and early 18th

century. Pirates were no longer state-sponsored gentleman-adventurers

like Sir Francis Drake but dropout wage slaves, mutineers, a

multi-ethnic melting pot of rebellious proles. Where there had once been

a blurring of the edges between legitimate commercial activity and

piracy, now pirates found they had few of their old friends left and

were increasingly regarded as "Brutes, and Beasts of Prey." As

mainstream society rejected the pirates, they likewise became

increasingly antagonistic in their rejection of it. From this point

onwards the only pirates were those who explicitly rejected the state

and its laws and declared themselves in open war against it. Pirates

were driven further away from the centres of power as the American

colonies, originally beyond state control and relatively autonomous,

were brought into the mainstream of imperial trade and governance. There

developed a deadly spiral of increasing violence as state attacks were

met with revenge from the pirates leading to greater state terror.[6]

"a dunghill wheron England doth cast forth its rubbish"

The Caribbean islands in the second half of the 17th century were a

melting pot of rebellious and pauperised immigrants from across the

world. There were thousands of deported Irish, Liverpool beggars,

Royalist prisoners from Scotland, pirates caught on the English high

seas, highwaymen caught on the Scottish borders, exiled Huguenots and

Frenchmen, outlawed religious dissenters and the captured prisoners of

various uprisings and plots against the King.

The proto-anarchist revolutionary movements of the Civil War of the

1640s had been suppressed and defeated by the time of the dawn of the

great age of piracy in the late 17th century but there is good evidence

to show that some of the Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy

Men etc. fled to the Americas and the Caribbean where they inspired or

joined these insurrectionary pirate crews. Indeed, a group of pirates

settled in Madagascar at a place they had "given the name of Ranter

Bay."[7] After the defeat of the Levellers in 1649, John Lilburne

offered to lead his followers to the West Indies, if the government

would foot the bill. It also seems that the Ranters and Diggers lasted

longer in the Americas than in Britain - as late as the 1690s there were

reported to be Ranters in Long Island. This isn't surprising really as

the New World territories were used by Britain as penal colonies for its

discontented and rebellious poor. In 1655 Barbados was described as "a

dunghill wheron England doth cast forth its rubbish." Among these

undesirables there would have been numbers of radicals - those who had

provided the spark for the revolution of 1640. "Perrot, the bearded

ranter who refused to doff his hat to the Almighty, ended up in

Barbadoes," as did many others such as the Ranter intellectual Joseph

Salmon. That the Caribbean had become a haven for radicals did not go

unnoticed: in 1656 Samuel Highland advised Parliament not to sentence

the Quaker heretic James Nayler to transportation lest he infect other

settlers. It was clear at this time that the new British colonies to the

west were seen as a haven of relative religious and political liberty;

that much further beyond the grasp of law and authority.[8]

Before European merchants discovered the African slave trade and the

commercial possibilities of shipping Africans to the Caribbean,

thousands of poor and working class Europeans were shipped to the new

colonies as indentured servants - effectively a slave trade of its own.

The only difference between the trade in indentured servants and the

African slave trade was that in theory the slavery of these immigrants

was not considered eternal and hereditary. However, many were tricked

and their contracts extended indefinitely so they never won their

freedom. Slaves, a lifetime investment, were often treated better than

the indentured servants.[9]

However, the masters had great difficulty holding on to their servants

who tended to go native and abscond to the freedom of the myriad islands

of the Antilles, or to isolated bits of coastline or jungle. Here they

often formed little self-governing bands or tribes of dropouts and

runaways, in many ways mimicking the native peoples before them. These

men - sailors and soldiers, slaves and indentured servants, formed the

basis for the Caribbean piracy that emerged in the 17th century -

maintaining their egalitarian tribal structure even when at sea. As

their numbers grew and more men flocked to the red flag, their attacks

on the Spanish became more audacious. After a raid they would make for a

city like Port Royale in Jamaica, to spend all their money in one great

binge of whoring, gambling and drinking before returning to their

hunter-gatherer existence on out of the way islands.[10]

There were also of course up to 80,000 black slaves working on the

plantations who were prone to frequent and bloody revolts, as well as

the last few remaining indigenous Indian inhabitants of the islands. In

1649 a slave rebellion on Barbados coincided with a white servants'

uprising. In 1655, following a common pattern, the Irish joined with the

blacks in revolt. There were similar rebellions in Bermuda, St.

Christopher and Montserrat, whilst in Jamaica transported Monmouthite

rebels united with 'maroon' Indians in revolt. This hodge-podge of the

dispossessed were described in 1665 as "convict gaol birds or riotous

persons, rotten before they are sent forth, and at best idle and only

fit for the mines." To which a lady colonist of Antigua added "they be

all a company of sodomists." This was the seething multi-racial hotbed

of anger and class tension into which our transported or voluntarily

exiled Ranters, Diggers and Levellers would have arrived and out of

which the great age of Euro-American piracy took shape with the

emergence of the buccaneers in the Caribbean around the middle of the

17th century.[11]

Arrgh, Jim Lad!

The overwhelming majority of pirates were merchant seamen who elected to

join the pirates when their ships were captured, although a small number

were mutineers who had collectively seized their ship. "According to

Patrick Pringle's Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most successful

among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported criminals. The

high seas made for an instantaneous levelling of class inequalities."

Many pirates displayed a fine sense of class consciousness; for example,

a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a

merchant vessel he had just taken as a prize. The captain of the

merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirate crew:

"I am sorry they won't let you have your Sloop again, for I scorn to do

any one a Mischief, when it is not for my Advantage; damn the Sloop, we

must sink her, and she might be of Use to you. Tho', damn ye, you are a

sneaking Puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by

Laws which rich Men have made for their own Security, for the cowardly

Whelps have not the Courage otherwise to defend what they get by their

Knavery; but damn ye altogether: Damn them for a Pack of crafty Rascals,

and you, who serve them, for a Parcel of hen-hearted Numskuls. They

villify us, the Scoundrels do, when there is only this Difference, they

rob the Poor under the Cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the Rich

under the Protection of our own Courage; had you not better make One of

us, than sneak after the Arses of those Villains for Employment?"

When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the

laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:

"You are a devilish Conscience Rascal, damn ye, I am a free Prince, and

I have as much Authority to make War on the whole World, as he who has a

hundred Sail of Ships at Sea, and an Army of 100,000 Men in the Field;

and this my Conscience tells me; but there is no arguing with such

sniveling Puppies, who allow Superiors to kick them about Deck at

Pleasure."[12]

Piracy was one strategy in an early cycle of Atlantic class struggle.

Seamen also used mutiny and desertion and other tactics in order to

survive and to resist their lot. Pirates were perhaps the most

international and militant section of the proto-proletariat constituted

by 17th and 18th century sailors. There were, for example, some hardcore

trouble-makers like Edward Buckmaster, a sailor who joined Kidd's crew

in 1696, who had been arrested and jailed a number of times for

agitation and rioting, or Robert Culliford, who repeatedly led mutinies,

seizing the ship he was serving on and turning pirate.[13]

During wartime, due to the demands of the navy, there was a great

shortage of skilled maritime labour and seamen could command relatively

high wages. The end of war, especially Queen Anne's War, which ended in

1713, cast vast numbers of naval seamen into unemployment and caused a

huge slump in wages. 40,000 men found themselves without work at the end

of the war - roaming the streets of ports like Bristol, Portsmouth and

New York. In wartime privateering provided the opportunity for a

relative degree of freedom and a chance at wealth. The end of war meant

the end of privateering too, and these unemployed ex-privateers only

added to the huge labour surplus. Queen Anne's War had lasted 11 years

and in 1713 many sailors must have known little else but warfare and the

plundering of ships. It was commonly observed that on the cessation of

war privateers turned pirate. The combination of thousands of men

trained and experienced in the capture and plundering of ships suddenly

finding themselves unemployed and having to compete harder and harder

for less and less wages was explosive - for many piracy must have been

one of the few alternatives to starvation.[14]

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Having escaped the tyranny of discipline aboard merchant vessels the

most striking thing about the organisation of pirate crews was their

anti-authoritarian nature. Each crew functioned under the terms of

written articles, agreed by the whole crew and signed by each member.

The articles of Bartholomew Roberts' crew begin:

"Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh

Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and may use them at

Pleasure, unless a Scarcity make it necessary, for the Good of all, to

vote a Retrenchment."[15]

Euro-American pirate crews really formed one community, with a common

set of customs shared across the various ships. Liberty, Equality and

Fraternity thrived at sea over a hundred years before the French

Revolution. The authorities were often shocked by their libertarian

tendencies; the Dutch Governor of Mauritius met a pirate crew and

commented: "Every man had as much say as the captain and each man

carried his own weapons in his blanket." This was profoundly threatening

to the order of European society, where firearms were restricted to the

upper classes, and provided a stark contrast to merchant ships where

anything that could be used as a weapon was kept under lock and key, and

to the navy where the primary purpose of the marines stationed on naval

vessels was to keep the sailors in their place.[16]

Pirate ships operated on a 'No Prey, No Pay' basis, but when a vessel

was captured the booty was divided up by a share system. This sort of

share system was common in mediaeval shipping, but had been phased out

as shipping became a capitalist enterprise and sailors wage labourers.

It still existed in privateering and whaling but pirates developed it

into its most egalitarian form - there were no shares for owners or

investors or merchants, there was no elaborate hierarchy of wage

differentiation - everyone got an equal share of the booty and the

captain usually only 1 or 1 1/2 share. The wreck of Sam Bellamy's pirate

ship the Whydah, which was discovered in 1984, provides good evidence of

this - among the artefacts recovered was rare West African gold Akan

jewellery which "had been hacked apart with clear knife marks, which

suggested that there had been an attempt to divide it equally."[17]

The harshness of life at sea made mutual aid into a simple survival

tactic. The natural solidarity of fellow tars was carried over into

pirate organisation. Pirates often went into 'consortship' with one

another, where if one died the other got his property. Pirate articles

also commonly included a form of mutual aid where injured shipmates

unable to participate in the fighting would receive their share as a

pension. Pirates took this sort of solidarity very seriously - at least

one pirate crew compensated their wounded only to discover they had

nothing left. From the articles of Bartholomew Roberts' crew: "If... any

Man should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, he was to

have 800 Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts,

proportionably." And from those of George Lowther's crew: "He that shall

have the Misfortune to lose a Limb, in Time of Engagement, shall have

the Sum of one hundred and fifty Pounds Sterling, and remain with the

Company as long as he shall think fit."[18]

Pirate captains were elected and could be de-elected at any time for

abuse of their authority. The captain enjoyed no special privileges: He

"or any other Officer is allowed no more [food] than another man, nay,

the Captain cannot keep his Cabbin to himself." Captains were deposed

for cowardice, cruelty and revealingly, for refusing "to take and

plunder English Vessels" - the pirates had turned their backs on the

state and its laws and no lingering feelings of patriotism were to be

allowed. The captain only had right of command in the heat of battle,

otherwise all decisions were made by the whole ship's company. This

radical democracy was not necessarily very efficient; often pirate ships

tended to wander rather aimlessly as the crew changed its mind.[19]

The crew of Thomas Anstis ridicule the law by holding a mock trial. The

judge, using an old tarpaulin as a robe and a mop-end as a wig, sits in

a mangrove tree and declares: "I'll have you know, Raskal, we don't sit

here to hear Reason - we go according to Law."

The original buccaneers had called themselves the 'brethren of the

coast' - an apt term as pirates swapped ships, met up at rendez-vous

points, joined together with other crews for combined raids and met up

with old ship mates. Although it might seem surprising that over the

whole expanse of the world's oceans the pirates kept in touch and met up

with each other, they continually returned to the various 'free ports'

where they were welcomed by black market traders who would buy their

goods. Pirate crews recognised each other, didn't attack each other and

often worked together in large fleets. For example in 1695 the crews of

Captains Avery, Faro, Want, Maze, Tew and Wake all met up for a combined

raid on the annual Muslim pilgrim fleet to Mecca, the six ships

containing at least 500 men. They also met up and had parties together;

like the "saturnalia" when the crews of Blackbeard and Charles Vane

joined forces on North Carolina's Ocracoke Island in 1718 (see picture

on page 71). There is even evidence that there was a unique pirate

language, which is a real sign the pirates were evolving their own

distinct culture. Philip Ashton, who spent sixteen months among pirates

in 1722-3, reported that one of his captors "according to the Pirates

usual Custom, and in their proper Dialect, asked me, If I would sign

their Articles". There is also a hilarious account of how a pirate

captive "sav'd his life [by] meer Dint of Cursing and Damning" -

suggesting that one feature of this pirate language was the liberal use

of blasphemy and swearing. Through splitting and coalescing and men

jumping from ship to ship a great continuity existed amongst the various

pirate crews, sharing the same cultures and customs and over the course

of time developing a specifically 'pirate consciousness.' The prospect

that this pirate community might take a more permanent form was a threat

to the authorities who feared that they might set up "a Commonwealth" in

uninhabited regions, where "no Power in those Parts of the World could

have been able to dispute it with them."[20]

The crew of Thomas Anstis ridicule the law by holding a mock trial. The

judge, using an old tarpaulin as a robe and a mop-end as a wig, sits in

a mangrove tree and declares: "I'll have you know, Raskal, we don't sit

here to hear Reason - we go according to Law."

Revenge

One particularly important part of what we might call the 'pirate

consciousness' was revenge upon the captains and masters who had

previously exploited them. The pirate Howell Davis stated: "their

reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base

Merchants and cruel commanders of Ships." On capturing a merchantman

pirates would commonly administer the 'Distribution of Justice',

"enquiring into the Manner of the Commander's Behaviour to their Men,

and those, against whom Complaint was made" were "whipp'd and pickled."

Interestingly, one of the favourite torments inflicted upon captured

captains was the 'Sweat' - a word meaning to drive hard or to overwork -

in which the offender was made to run round and round the mizzenmast

between decks to the tune of a merry jig while he was encouraged to go

faster by the surrounding pirates jabbing his backside with "Points of

Swords, Penknives, Compasses, Forks &c." It seems the pirates were

determined to give the master a taste of his own medicine - creating a

literally vicious circle or treadmill reminiscent of the seaman's

labouring life. The most militant of these sea-borne righters-of-wrong

has to be Philip Lyne, who when apprehended in 1726 confessed he "had

killed 37 Masters of Vessels."[21]

'The Pirates Striking off the arm of Captain Babcock': Babcock's ship

was intercepted en route from Bombay, some of the crew joined the

pirates and turned against their own captain - apparently cutting his

arm off.

Radical historian Marcus Rediker has uncovered interesting evidence of

pirates' concern with retribution in the names of their ships - the

largest single group of names are the ones involving revenge, for

example Blackbeard's ship the Queen Anne's Revenge or John Cole's

wonderfully named New York Revenge's Revenge. Merchant Captain Thomas

Checkley got it just right when he described the pirates who captured

his ship as pretending "to be Robbin Hoods Men." There is further

evidence for this in the name of another ship - the Little John

belonging to pirate John Ward. Peter Lamborn Wilson says: "[this] offers

us a precious insight into his ideas and his image of himself: clearly

he considered himself a kind of Robin Hood of the seas. We have some

evidence he gave to the poor, and he was clearly determined to steal

from the rich."[22]

The response of the state to these merry men of the seven seas was

brutal - the crime of piracy carried the death sentence. The early years

of the 18th century saw "royal officials and pirates [locked] into a

system of reciprocal terror" as pirates became more antagonistic to

mainstream society and the authorities ever more determined to hunt them

down. Rumours that pirates who had taken advantage of the 1698 royal

pardon were on surrendering denied the benefits of the pardon only

increased mistrust and antagonism; the pirates resolved "no longer to

attend to any offers of forgiveness but in case of attack, to defend

themselves on their faithless countrymen who may fall into their hands."

In 1722 Captain Luke Knott was granted £230 for the loss of his career,

after turning over 8 pirates, "his being obliged to quit the Merchant

service, the Pirates threatening to Torture him to death if ever he

should fall into their hands." It was by no means an empty threat - in

1720 pirates of the crew of Bartholomew Roberts "openly and in the

daytime burnt and destroyed... vessels in the Road of Basseterre [St.

Kitts] and had the audaciousness to insult H.M. Fort," avenging the

execution of "their comrades at Nevis". Roberts then sent word to the

governor that "they would Come and Burn the Town [Sandy Point] about his

Ears for hanging the Pyrates there." Roberts even had his own pirate

flag made showing him standing on two skulls labelled ABH and AMH - 'A

Barbadian's Head' and 'A Martinican's Head' - later that same year he

gave substance to his vendetta against the two islands by hanging the

governor of Martinique from a yardarm. As bounties were offered for the

capture of pirates, the pirates responded by offering rewards for

certain officials. And when pirates were captured or executed, other

pirate crews often revenged their brethren, attacking the town that

condemned them, or the shipping of that port. This sort of solidarity

shows that there had developed a real pirate community, and that those

sailing under 'the banner of King Death' no longer thought of themselves

as English or Dutch or French but as pirates.[23]

Piracy and Slavery

The Golden Age of piracy was also the hey-day of the Atlantic slave

trade. The relationship between piracy and the slave trade is complex

and ambiguous. Some pirates participated in the slave trade and shared

their contemporaries' attitude to Africans as commodities for exchange.

A group of pirates, among them Gibbs and Wansley, burying their treasure

on Barron Island. This engraving is unusual for the rare depiction of an

African-American pirate, although in fact there were many of them.

However, not all pirates participated in the slave trade. Indeed large

numbers of pirates were ex-slaves; there was a much higher proportion of

blacks on pirate ships than on merchant or naval vessels, and only

rarely did the observers who noted their presence refer to them as

'slaves'. Most of these black pirates would have been runaway slaves,

either joining with the pirates on the course of the voyage from Africa,

deserting from the plantation, or sent as slaves to work on board ship.

Some may have been free men, like the "free Negro" seaman from Deptford

who in 1721 led "a Mutiney that we had too many Officers, and that the

work was too hard, and what not." Seafaring in general offered more

autonomy to blacks than life on the plantation, but piracy in

particular, could - although it was a risk - offer one of the few

chances at freedom for an African in the 18th century Atlantic. For

example, a quarter of the two-hundred strong crew of Captain Bellamy's

ship the Whydah were black, and eyewitness accounts of the sinking of

the pirate vessel off Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1717 report that many

of the corpses washed up were black. Pirate historian Kenneth Kinkor

argues that although the Whydah was originally a slave ship, the blacks

on board at the time of the sinking were members of the crew, not

slaves. Partially because pirates, along with other tars, "entertain'd

so contemptible a Notion of Landsmen," a black man who knew the ropes

was more likely to win respect than a landsman who didn't. Kinkor notes:

"Pirates judged Africans more on the basis of their language and sailing

skills - in other words, on their level of cultural attainment - than on

their race."[24]

Black pirates would often lead the boarding party to capture a prize.

The pirate ship the Morning Star had "a Negro Cook doubly arm'd" in the

boarding party and more than half of Edward Condent's boarding party on

the Dragon were black. Some black pirates became quartermasters or

captains. For example, in 1699, when Captain Kidd dropped anchor in New

York, two sloops were there to meet him, one of whose "Mate was a little

black man... who, as it was said, had been formerly Captain Kidd's

Quarter Master."[25]

In the 17th century blacks found on pirate ships were not tried with the

other pirates because it was assumed they were slaves, but by the 18th

century they were being executed alongside their white 'brethren'. Still

the most likely fate for a black pirate, if he was captured, was to be

sold into slavery, whether he was a freeman or not. When Blackbeard was

captured by the Royal Navy in 1718, five of his eighteen man crew were

black and according to the Governor's Council of Virginia the five

blacks were "equally concerned with the rest of the Crew in the same

Acts of Piracy." A "resolute Fellow, a Negroe" named Caesar was caught

just as he was about to blow up the whole ship rather than be captured

and most likely returned to slavery.[26]

In 1715 the ruling Council of the Colony of Virginia worried about the

connections between the "Ravage of Pyrates" and "an Insurrection of the

Negroes." They were right to be concerned. By 1716 the slaves of Antigua

had grown "very impudent and insulting" and reportedly many of them

"went off to join those pirates who did not seem too concerned about

color differences." These connections were trans-Atlantic; stretching

from the heart of Empire in London, to the slave colonies in the

Americas and the 'Slave Coast' of Africa. In the early 1720s a gang of

pirates settled in West Africa, joining and intermixing with the Kru - a

West African people from what is now Sierra Leone and Liberia, renowned

both for their seamanship in their long canoes and when enslaved for

their leadership of slave revolts. The pirates were probably members of

Bartholomew Roberts' crew who had fled into the woods when attacked by

the Navy in 1722. This alliance is not so unusual when you consider that

of the 157 men who didn't escape and were either captured or killed on

board Roberts' ship, 45 of them were black - probably neither slaves nor

pirates but "Black saylors, commonly known by the name of gremetoes" -

independent African mariners primarily from the Sierra Leone region, who

would have joined the pirates "for a small demand of wages."[27]

We can see the way these connections were spread and the how the

pirates' legacy was disseminated even after their defeat in the fate of

some of those captured on Roberts' pirate ship. "Negroes" from his crew

grew mutinous over the poor conditions and "thin Commons" they received

from the Navy. "Many of them" had "lived a long time" in the "pyratical

Way", which obviously for them had meant better food and more

freedom.[28]

Going Native

Lionel Wafer was a French surgeon who joined the buccaneer crews in the

Caribbean in 1677. While returning from a voyage to the East Indies he

met with an accident and was forced to recuperate in an Indian village,

eventually adopting Indian customs. This is his description of the

return of some English sailors to the village:

"I sat awhile, cringing upon my hams among the Indians, after their

fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the waist,

and with my nose-piece hanging over my mouth. 'Twas the better part of

an hour before one of the crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried

out, "Here's our doctor," and immediately all congratulated my arrival

among them."[29]

This sort of dropping out and going native was not always accidental.

The buccaneers of the Caribbean originally got their name from boucan, a

practice of smoking meat they had learnt from the native Arawak Indians.

The buccaneers were originally land squatters on the large Spanish owned

island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) - they

turned to piracy following Spanish attempts to oust them. On Hispaniola

they followed a way of life essentially identical to the native peoples

who had preceded them. This sort of 'marooning life' was very clearly

identified with piracy - apart from the buccaneers of Hispaniola and

Tortuga the main other group of European dropouts in the New World were

the logwood cutters of Bay of Campeche (now Honduras and Belize), a

"rude drunken crew" who were considered by most observers to be

interchangeable with pirates. They consciously chose a non-accumulative

life living in independent communal settlements on the world's

periphery.[30]

The pirates' relations with the native peoples they encountered were

split. Some pirates would enslave peoples they encountered, make them

work, rape the women and steal. But other pirates settled down and

intermarried - becoming part of the society. Particularly in Madagascar,

the pirates mixing with the native population had produced "a dark

Mulatto Race there." Contacts and cultural exchange between pirates,

seamen and Africans led to the clear similarities between sea shanties

and African songs. In 1743 some seamen were court-martialled for singing

a "negro song". These sort of connections went in both directions and

were not as rare as you might imagine. A pirate called William May,

stranded on the Madagascan island of Johanna got a shock when he was

addressed in fluent English by one of the "negroes". He learned that the

man had been taken from the island by an English ship and had lived for

a while in Bethnal Green in London, before returning home. His new

friend saved him from being captured by the English and taken to Bombay

and hanged.[31]

It is a common feature of what you might call 'pirate ideology' that

pirates thought of themselves as free kings, as autonomous individual

emperors. This was partly to do with the dream of wealth - Henry Avery

was idolised for the enormous wealth he plundered; some believed he had

set up his own pirate kingdom. Yet there was a pirate who achieved an

even more remarkable rags-to-riches story, for he started out as a slave

in the French colony of Martinique: Abraham Samuel, "Tolinor Rex", the

King of Fort Dauphin. Samuel was a runaway slave who joined the crew of

the pirate ship John and Rebecca, eventually becoming quartermaster. In

1696 the pirates captured a large and valuable prize and decided to

retire and settle down in Madagascar. Samuel ended up in the abandoned

French colony of Fort Dauphin where he was identified by a local

princess as the child she had borne to a Frenchman during the occupancy

of the colony. Samuel suddenly found himself declared heir to the vacant

throne of the kingdom. Slavers and merchants flocked to do business with

"King Samuel" but he retained sympathies for his pirate comrades,

allowing and assisting them to loot the merchants who came to trade with

him. There were a number of similar, if less flamboyant, characters in

the ports and harbours of Madagascar - pirates or slavers who had become

local leaders with private armies of as many as 500 men.[32]

Sex and Drugs and Rock n' Roll

The pirates certainly seem to have had more fun than their poor

suffering counterparts on naval or merchant vessels. They sure had some

pretty wild parties - in 1669 just off the coast of Hispaniola, some of

Henry Morgan's buccaneers blew up their own ship during a particularly

riotous party, which like all good pirate celebrations included much

drunken firing of the ship's guns. Somehow they set light to the

gunpowder in the ship's magazine and the resulting explosion totally

destroyed the ship. On some voyages alcohol ran "as freely as

ditchwater" and for many tars the promise of unrestricted grog rations

had been one of the main reasons behind leaving the merchant service to

become a pirate in the first place. However this sometimes backfired -

one group of pirates took three days to capture a ship because there

were never enough sober men available. Sailors in general loathed a

"drink-water" voyage - one reason being that in the tropics the water

tended to get things living in it and you had to strain it through your

teeth.[33]

No pirate celebration would be complete without music. Pirates were

renowned for their love of music and often hired musicians for the

duration of a cruise. During the trial of "Black Bart" Bartholomew

Roberts' crew in 1722, two men were acquitted as being only musicians.

The pirates seem to have employed music in battle, as it was said of one

of the men, James White, that his "business as music was upon the poop

in time of action."[34]

For some men the freedom that piracy offered from the constrained world

they had left behind extended to sexuality. European society of the 17th

and 18th centuries was savagely anti-homosexual. The Royal Navy

periodically conducted brutal anti-buggery campaigns on ships on which

men might be confined together for years. In both the navy and the

merchant service it was considered that sexuality was inimical to work

and good order on board ship, as Minister John Flavel wrote of seamen to

merchant John Lovering: "The Death of their Lusts, is the most Probable

Means to give Life to your Trade." B.R. Burg in Sodomy and the Pirate

Tradition suggests that the vast majority of pirates were homosexual,

and although there isn't really enough evidence to support this,

nevertheless to indulge in these things a pirate colony was probably

just about the safest place you could be. Some of the early buccaneers

of Hispaniola and Tortuga lived in a kind of homosexual union known as

matelotage (from the French for 'sailor' and possibly the origin of the

word 'mate' meaning companion), holding their possessions in common,

with the survivor inheriting. Even after women joined the buccaneers,

matelotage continued with a partner sharing his wife with his matelot.

Louis Le Golif in his Memoirs of a Buccaneer complained about

homosexuality on Tortuga, where he had to fight two duels to keep ardent

suitors at bay. Eventually the French Governor of Tortuga imported

hundreds of prostitutes, hoping thereby to wean the buccaneers away from

this practice. The pirate captain Robert Culliford, had a "great

consort," John Swann, who lived with him. Some men bought "pretty boys"

as companions. On one pirate ship a young man who admitted a homosexual

relationship was put in irons and maltreated, but this seems to have

been the exception rather than the rule. It is also significant that in

no pirate articles are there any rules against homosexuality.[35]

Pirate Women

The freedom of life under the Jolly Roger extended to another perhaps

surprising group of sea-robbers: women pirates. Women weren't quite as

rare at sea in the 17th and 18th centuries as you might imagine them to

have been. There was a fairly well established tradition of women

cross-dressing in order to seek their fortune, or to follow husbands or

lovers to sea. Of course the only women we know about are the ones that

got caught and exposed. Their more successful sisters have sailed off

into anonymity. Even so, it would seem that women aboard pirate ships

were few. Ironically this may have contributed to the pirates'

downfall - they were relatively easy for the state to crush because the

pirate community was widely dispersed and inherently fragile; they found

it hard to reproduce or replenish their numbers. By comparison, the much

longer lived and more successful pirates of the South China Seas were

organised in family groups with men, women and children all at sea

together - thus there was always a new generation of pirates to

hand.[36]

Just as pirates in general defined themselves in opposition to the

emerging capitalist social relations of the 17th and 18th centuries, so

also some women found in piracy a way to rebel against the emerging

gender roles. For example, Charlotte de Berry, born in England in 1636,

followed her husband into the navy by dressing as a man. When she was

forced aboard an Africa-bound vessel, she led a mutiny against the

captain who had assaulted her, cutting off his head with a dagger. She

then turned pirate and became captain, her ship cruising the African

coast capturing gold ships. There were also other less successful women

pirates; in Virginia in 1726, the authorities tried Mary Harley (or

Harvey) and three men for piracy. The three men were sentenced to hang

but Harley was released. Mary's husband Thomas was also involved in the

piracy but seems to have escaped capture. Mary and her husband had been

transported to the colonies as convicts a year earlier. Three years

later in 1729, another deported female convict was on trial for piracy

in the colony of Virginia. A gang of six pirates were sentenced to hang,

including Mary Crickett (or Crichett), who along with Edmund Williams,

the leader of the pirate gang, had been transported to Virginia as a

felon in 1728.[37]

However, the women pirates about whom we know the most are Anne Bonny

and Mary Read. Mary Read was born as an illegitimate child, and brought

up as a little boy by her mother in order to pass her off to her

relatives as her legitimate son. She had to be tough to deal with the

harsh circumstances of her life and by the time she was a teenager she

was already "growing bold and strong." Mary seems to have liked her male

identity and enlisted herself as a sailor on a man-of-war and then as an

English soldier in the war in Flanders. At the end of the war she joined

a Dutch ship bound for the West Indies. When her ship was captured by

'Calico' Jack Rackham's pirate crew, which included Anne Bonny, she

decided to throw her lot in with the pirates. She seems to have taken to

pirate life and began a new romance with one of the crew. When her lover

got into an argument with a fellow pirate and was challenged to settle

it in the pirate's customary way "at sword and pistol", Mary saved her

lover by picking a fight with the contender, challenging him to a duel

two hours before that he was due to fight with her lover and then

running him through with her cutlass.[38]

Anne Bonny was born the illegitimate child of a "Maid-Servant" in

Ireland and raised in male disguise, her father pretending she was the

child of a relative entrusted to his care. He eventually took her to

Charleston, South Carolina, where they no longer needed to keep up the

pretence. Anne grew up into a "robust" woman of "fierce and couragious

temper." Indeed, one time "when a young Fellow would have lain with her

against her Will, she beat him so, that he lay ill of it a considerable

time." She ran away to the Caribbean where she fell in love with the

captain of a pirate crew called 'Calico' Jack Rackham (so-called because

of his outlandish and colourful clothing). Anne and 'Calico' Jack,

"finding they could not by fair means enjoy each other's Company with

Freedom, resolved to run away together, and enjoy it in Spight of all

the World." They stole a ship from the harbour and for the next couple

of years Bonny was Rackham's shipmate and lover as their crew (which

soon also included Mary Read disguised in male clothing, who joined them

from a ship they captured) raided shipping in the Caribbean and American

coastal waters.[39]

One of the witnesses at their trial, a woman called Dorothy Thomas, who

had been taken prisoner by the pirates, said the women "wore Mens

Jackets, and long Trousers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads,

and that each of them had a Machet[e] and Pistol in their Hands."

Despite the fact Read and Bonny were in men's clothing, their prisoner

was no fool; she said that "the Reason of her knowing and believing them

to be Women was, by the largeness of their Breasts."

Other prisoners taken by the pirates reported that Bonny and Read "were

both very profligate, cursing, and swearing much, and very ready and

willing to do any Thing on board." Both women appear to have exercised

some leadership; for example, they were part of the group designated to

board prizes - which was a role reserved for only the most fearless and

respected members of the crew. When the pirates "saw any vessel, gave

Chase or Attack'd," the pair "wore Men's Cloaths," but at other times,

"they wore Women's Cloaths."[40]

Rackham, Bonny and Read were all caught in 1720 by a British navy sloop

off Jamaica. The crew were all totally drunk (a common event) and hid in

the hold - there was only one other apart from Bonny and Read who was

brave enough to fight. In disgust, Mary Read fired a pistol down into

the hold "killing one and wounding others." Eighteen members of the crew

had already been tried and sentenced to hang by the time the women came

to court. Three of them, including Rackham, were later hung in chains at

prime locations to act as a moral instruction and "Publick Example" to

the seamen who would pass their rotting corpses. However, Mary Read

insisted that "Men of Courage" - like herself - did not fear death.

Courage was a primary virtue amongst the pirates - it was only courage

that ensured their continued survival. 'Calico' Jack Rackham had been

promoted from quartermaster to captain when the then current captain,

Charles Vane, had been deposed by his crew for cowardice. So it was an

ignominious end for Rackham to be told by Anne Bonny before he was due

to be hanged that "if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been

hang'd like a Dog." Both Bonny and Read escaped execution because they

"pleaded their Bellies, being Quick with Child, and pray'd that

Execution might be staid."[41]

Misson and Libertalia

The most famous pirate utopia is that of Captain Misson and his pirate

crew, who founded their intentional community, their lawless utopia of

Libertalia in northern Mada-gascar in the Eighteenth century.[42]

Misson was French, born in Provence, and it was while in Rome on leave

from the French warship Victoire that he lost his faith, disgusted by

the decadence of the Papal Court. In Rome he ran into Caraccioli - a

"lewd Priest" who over the course of long voyages with little to do but

talk, gradually converted Misson and a sizeable portion of the rest of

the crew to his brand of atheistic communism:

"...he fell upon Government, and shew'd, that every Man was born free,

and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he

respired... that the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one

wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was

owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusilanimous

Subjection on the other."

Embarking on a career of piracy, the 200 strong crew of the Victoire

called upon Misson to be their captain. They collectivised the wealth of

the ship, deciding "all should be in common." All decisions were to be

put to "the Vote of the whole Company." Thus they set out on their new

"Life of Liberty." Off the west coast of Africa they captured a Dutch

slave ship. The slaves were freed and brought aboard the Victoire,

Misson declaring that "the Trading for those of our own Species, cou'd

never be agreeable to the Eyes of divine Justice: That no Man had Power

of Liberty of another" and that "he had not exempted his Neck from the

galling Yoak of Slavery, and asserted his own Liberty, to enslave

others." At every engagement they added to their numbers with new

French, English and Dutch recruits and freed African slaves.

While cruising round the coast of Madagascar, Misson found a perfect bay

in an area with fertile soil, fresh water and friendly natives. Here the

pirates built Libertalia, renouncing their titles of English, French,

Dutch or African and calling themselves Liberi. They created their own

language, a polyglot mixture of African languages, combined with French,

English, Dutch, Portuguese and native Madagascan. Shortly after the

beginning of building work on the colony of Libertalia, the Victoire ran

into the pirate Thomas Tew, who decided to accompany them back to

Libertalia. Such a colony was no new idea to Tew; he had lost his

quartermaster and 23 of his crew when they had left to form a settlement

further up the Madagascan coast. The Liberi - "Enemies to Slavery,"

aimed to boost their numbers by capturing another slave ship. Off the

coast of Angola, Tew's crew took an English slave ship with 240 men,

women and children below decks. The African members of the pirate crew

discovered many friends and relatives among the enslaved and struck off

their fetters and handcuffs, regaling them with the glories of their new

life of freedom.

The pirates settled down to become farmers, holding the land in common -

"no Hedge bounded any particular Man's Property." Prizes and money taken

at sea were "carry'd into the common Treasury, Money being of no Use

where every Thing was in common."

The Empire Strikes Back: The End of the Golden Age of Piracy

The Golden Age of Euro-American piracy was roughly from 1650 to 1725

with its peak in about 1720. There were very specific conditions and

circumstances that led to this hey-day on the high seas. The period

opens with the emergence of the buccaneers on the Caribbean islands of

Hispaniola and Tortuga. For most of this period piracy was centred

around the Caribbean, and with good reason. The Caribbean islands

provided innumerable hiding places, secret coves and uncharted islands;

places where pirates could take on fresh water and provisions, rest up

and lie in wait. The location was perfect; lying just on the route taken

by the heavily laden treasure fleets from South America back to Spain

and Portugal, the Caribbean was effectively impossible for any navy to

police and many islands were unclaimed or uninhabited. All in all it

added up to a freebooter's paradise.

In 1700 a new law was introduced to allow for the swift trial and

execution of pirates wherever they may be found. Previously they had to

be transported back to London to stand trial and be executed at the low

tide mark at Wapping. The 'Act for the More Effectual Suppression of

Piracy' also enforced the use of the death penalty and gave rewards for

resisting pirate attack, but most importantly, it was not trial by jury

but by a special court of naval officers. The famous Captain Kidd was

one of the first victims of this new law - indeed the law was partially

rushed through specifically so that it could be applied to him. He was

hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping and his body was then placed in a

gibbet, coated with tar to help preserve it, and hung at Tilbury Point

to be a "terror to all that saw it." The blackened and rotting corpse

was intended to serve as a very clear reminder to the common seaman of

the risks of resisting the disciplines of wage labour.[43]

Kidd's case was unusual in that he was executed in London. After 1700,

under the provisions of the new law the war against the pirates would

increasingly take place around the peripheries of Empire, and it

wouldn't just be one or two corpses that dangled from crosstrees down

near the tidemark but sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. In one

particularly significant case in 1722 the British Admiralty tried 169

pirates of Bartholomew Roberts' crew and executed 52 of them at Cape

Coast Castle on the Guinea Coast. The 72 Africans on board, free or not,

were sold into slavery, which perhaps some of them had escaped for a

short while.[44]

It was the disappearance of the unique favourable conditions of the

Golden Age that ended the reign of the pirates. With the development of

capital in the 17th century came the rise of the state, fostered by the

imperial wars that wracked the globe from 1688 onwards. The requirements

of conducting these vast wars necessitated a huge increase in state

power. When, in 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended war between the

European nations, the state's ability to actually police piracy was

massively increased. The end of the war also allowed naval ships to

concentrate on hunting down the pirates and granted the British even

larger commercial interests in the Caribbean, giving an extra incentive

to these efforts. As the new, more powerful state consolidated its

monopoly on violence, the colonies were brought into line. The practice

of dealing with pirates and investing in pirate voyages had continued in

the colonies long after it had become unacceptable at home; it was wiped

out by an extension of state power from the mother country to enforce

discipline on the colonies. The beginning of the end was marked by

ex-buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan's return to Jamaica as Governor with

express orders to destroy the pirates. Naval patrols flushed them from

their lairs and mass hangings eliminated the leaders. Ultimately the

pirates' war on trade had become too successful to be tolerated; the

state was fighting to allow commerce to flow unimpeded and capital to

accumulate, bringing wealth to the merchants and revenue to the

state.[45]

If we want to look for the heirs of the libertarian piracy of the Golden

Age we shouldn't necessarily only be looking at more recent pirates, but

rather at how piracy fed into the Atlantic class struggle. Just as some

of the initial impetus behind the piracy of the 17th and 18th centuries

had come from land-based radical movements like the Levellers, the flow

of ideas and practices circulated around the Atlantic world, emerging in

sometimes surprising places. In 1748 there was a mutiny aboard the HMS

Chesterfield, near Cape Coast Castle off the west coast of Africa. One

of the ringleaders - John Place - had been there before; he was one

those captured with Bartholomew Roberts back in 1722. It was "old hands"

like John Place who kept alive the pirate tradition and ensured the

continuity of ideas and practices. The mutineers hoped pirate-fashion

"to settle a colony". The term 'to strike' originated in mutiny,

particularly the "Great Mutinies" at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 when

sailors would strike their sails to disrupt the ceaseless flow of trade

and the state's war machine. These English, Irish and African sailors

established their own "council" and "shipboard democracy" and some even

talked of settling a "New Colony" in America or Madagascar.[46]

The pirates prospered in a power vacuum, during a period of upheaval and

war that allowed them the freedom to live effectively outside the law.

With the coming of peace came an extension of control and an end to the

possibility of pirate autonomy. This is not so surprising really when we

consider that periods of war and turmoil have often allowed for

revolutionary experiments, enclaves, communes and anarchies to flourish.

From the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries, to D'Annunzio's

piratical Republic of Fiume in the First World War, the Paris Commune in

the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, The Diggers' land communes in

the English Civil War and the Makhnovist peasants in the Ukraine during

the Russian Revolution, it is often in interstice and interregnum that

experiments in freedom can find space to flower.

"Is this Utopian? A map of the world which does not include Utopia is

not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which

Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out,

and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of

Utopias." - Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism[47]

The Black Flag

"Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is

the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the

human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black

is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against

humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or

another."[48]

We all know that pirates flew the 'Jolly Roger' - the skull and

cross-bones flag. The most likely derivation of the name 'Jolly Roger'

is as an Anglicisation of the French Jolie Rouge - the red or 'bloody'

flag that pirates originally used before the more well-known black. The

red flag is widely known as the international symbol of proletarian

revolution and revolt and the black flag has historically been the flag

of the anarchist movement. (These two colours were most famously

combined in the anarcho-communist red and black flags of the Spanish

revolution of 1936.) [49]

The earliest definite report of the black flag being flown by anarchists

or used in working class revolt is of the famous anarchist Louise Michel

leading a crowd of rioting unemployed to ransack bakers' shops with a

black flag on March 9th 1883. However there are reports that she had

flown a skull and cross-bones flag 12 years earlier in 1871, while

leading the women's battalions of the insurrectionary Paris Commune. The

Paris Commune even had a daily paper called Le Pirate.[50]

In June 1780 when the prisons of London were broken open and the

prisoners freed during the Gordon Riots we find this description: "A

giant of a man had been seen riding a cart-horse and waving an immense

black and red flag, like the standard bearer of an opposing army." This

man's name was James Jackson and he led the masses to destroy London's

main prison with a shout of "A-hoy for Newgate!" It would not be reading

too much into it to suggest that this "a-hoy!" might indicate Jackson

was a sailor - sailors had always been the most militant section of the

working class, in which case this black and red flag signalling a call

to freedom on the streets of London could easily have direct links to

the black and red flags of the Caribbean several years earlier. This

thus considerably pre-dates Louise Michel and almost puts us back in the

hey-day of the pirates.[51]

The red and black flew again in the Caribbean in 1791. After a huge

slave revolt, part of the old pirate stronghold of Hispaniola took

instead the Native American name "Haiti" and became the world's first

independent black republic. Led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the rebels

defeated the forces of three empires to win their liberty. The red and

black flag of Haiti became a banner of freedom to eighteenth and

nineteenth century blacks, especially to sailors who would sail to

Haiti, become Haitians and then return home flying a red and black flag.

American slaves aboard naval and merchant vessels would flee and seek

refuge in Haiti.[52]

Of a certain William Davidson, we are informed: "at a demonstration he

protected the black flag with skull and cross bones, 'Let us die like

Men and not be sold like Slaves,' the flag said." Davidson was a black

man born in 1786 and executed in 1820. He was born in Kingston,

Jamaica - erstwhile 'wickedest city on the earth' and notorious pirate

capital. He spent three years at sea, was a trade unionist, read Tom

Paine and may have had some connection to Toussaint L'Ouverture and the

revolution in Haiti. He was finally executed on Mayday 1820 with others

for being part of the 'Cato Street conspiracy' to assassinate the entire

cabinet while they were at dinner. This was intended to lead to attacks

on Mansion House and the Bank of England, the seizing of artillery and

to give the spark for a revolution in Britain![53]

Be Proud to fly the Jolly Roger!

Waging War on the Whalers

Since 1977, modern-day, real-life pirates Sea Shepherd have roamed the

world's oceans attacking and sinking whaling vessels and driftnetters.

The black ship with a black pirate flag is equipped with spikes for

ripping open the sides of enemy vessels and bows reinforced with 18 tons

of concrete for ramming them. Flying their own version of the Jolly

Roger - a skull above a crossed shepherd's crook and trident -

'Neptune's Navy' have engaged in over 20 years of guerrilla war for

marine ecology: "Any whaling ship on the ocean is a target for Sea

Shepherd."

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

3107A Washington Boulevard

Marina del Ray

CA 90292

USA

Tel: +1 (310) 301 7325

Source: David B. Morris - Earth Warrior (Golden, Colorado, Fulcrum,

1995)

Notes

[1] Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson) - A General History of the

Pyrates, Edited by Manuel Schonhorn, (London, Dent, 1972), p. 244

[2] For example, the East India Company was brought near to collapse by

piracy in 1690s. Robert C. Ritchie - Captain Kidd and the War against

the Pirates, pp. 128-34

[3] Larry Law - Misson and Libertatia, (London, A Distribution/Dark Star

Press, 1991), p. 6

[4] Marcus B. Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea:

Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo- American Maritime World

1700-1750, p. 258

[5] Op. Cit. 4, p. 255; Op. Cit. 2, p. 29, 142

[6] Op. Cit. 4, p. 272 n52, 274 - "as more pirates were captured and

hanged, the greater cruelty was practiced by those who were still

alive"; Op. Cit. 2, p. 2

[7] Marcus B. Rediker - 'Libertalia: The Pirate's Utopia' in David

Cordingly (ed.) - Pirates, p. 126

[8] Christopher Hill - 'Radical Pirates?' in Collected Essays, Vol. 3,

pp. 162, 166-9; Peter Lamborn Wilson - 'Caliban's Masque: Spiritual

Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America', in Sakolsky and Koehnline

(eds.) - Gone to Croatan: The Origins of North American Dropout Culture

(New York/Edinburgh, Autonomedia/AK Press, 1993), p. 107; Op. Cit. 2,

pp. 14-15

[9] Jenifer G. Marx - 'Brethren of the Coast' in Cordingly (ed.) -

Pirates, pp. 47, 49-50; Op. Cit. 4, pp. 69, 81- 2; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 65,

211, 226

[10] Richard Platt and Tina Chambers (Photographer) - Pirate (Eyewitness

Books) (London, Dorling Kindersley, 1995), pp. 20, 26-7; Op. Cit. 2, pp.

22-23

[11] Hill - 'Radical Pirates?', pp. 169-170

[12] Op. Cit. 4, p. 258; Hakim Bey - T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous

Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York, Autonomedia,

1991) pp. 23, 139; Op. Cit. 1, p. 587

[13] Op. Cit. 2, pp. 65, 117-8

[14] Ibid. pp. 42, 234

[15] Op. Cit. 1, p. 211

[16] Op. Cit. 2, p. 124

[17] Lawrence Osborne - 'A Pirate's Progress: How the Maritime Rogue

Became a Multicultural Hero' Lingua Franca March 1998

http://www.linguafranca.com/ 9803/osborne.html (unpaginated) [ They've

stopped publishing 22/7/02 ]

[18] Op. Cit. 2, p. 59, 258 n38; Op. Cit. 4, p. 264; Op. Cit. 1, pp.

212, 308, 343

[19] Op. Cit. 4, p. 262

[20] Op. Cit. 2, pp. 87-88, 117; Douglas Botting and the Editors of

Time-Life Books - The Pirates (Time Life's The Seafarers Series)

(Amsterdam, Time-Life, 1979), p. 142; Op. Cit. 4, p. 278; Op. Cit. 1, p.

[21] Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 271; Op. Cit. 2, p. 234;

Botting - The Pirates, p. 61; Op. Cit. 4, pp. 269-272

[22] Op. Cit. 4, p. 269; Peter Lamborn Wilson - Pirate Utopias: Moorish

Corsairs and European Renegadoes, p. 57

[23] Op. Cit. 4, pp. 255, 274, 277; Op. Cit. 2, p. 234; Botting - The

Pirates, pp. 48, 166; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, p. 35

[24] Op. Cit. 7, pp. 133-4; W. Jeffrey Bolster - Black Jacks: African

American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.

12-13; Op. Cit. 1, p. 228; Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated)

[25] Op. Cit. 7, p. 133; Bolster - Black Jacks, p. 15

[26] Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated); Op. Cit. 7, pp. 133-4, 249 n37;

Bolster - Black Jacks, p. 14; Op. Cit. 1, p. 82

[27] Op. Cit. 7, pp. 134, 249 n42, 250 n44; Bolster - Black Jacks, pp.

50-1

[28] Op. Cit. 7, p. 134; Op. Cit. 1, p. 273

[29] Lionel Wafer - Voyage de Mr. Wafer, Ou l'on trouve la description

de l'Isthme de l'Amérique (Publisher not stated, Paris? 1723)

http://www.buccaneer.net/piratebooks.htm

[30] Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 26-7; Op. Cit. 4, p. 146;

Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 7

[31] Op. Cit. 1, p. 131; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 86-7, 104, 118

[32] Op. Cit. 2, pp. 84-5

[33] Ibid. pp. 59, 69, 72-3; Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 64

[34] Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, p. 115

[35] Ibid. pp. 122-5; Marcus B. Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly

Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates' in M. Creighton

and L. Norling (eds.) - Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Atlantic

Seafaring, 1700-1920 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1995),

p. 9; Op. Cit. 2, pp. 123-4; Marx - 'Brethren of the Coast', p. 39

[36] Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 8-11, 233 n26; Op.

Cit. 1, p. 212; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32-3, 62; Op. Cit. 4,

p. 285; Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin and Gabriel Kuhn (trans.

Nicholas Levis) - Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger, pp.

36-7

[37] Platt and Chambers - Pirate, p. 33; Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the

Jolly Roger', pp. 10, 232-233 n24, n25

[38] Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 3-5, 8, 13; Platt

and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32-3

[39] Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 5-7, 13-16, 234

n41; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32-3; Op. Cit. 1, pp. 623-6

[40] Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 7-8

[41] Ibid. pp. 2-3, 5-7, 13-14; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, pp. 32, 35;

Op. Cit. 1, pp. 158-9

[42] The whole of the following narrative is drawn from Captain Charles

Johnson's General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most

notorious Pyrates, published in London in 1728, (Op. Cit. 1, pp.

383-439). Because Johnson's book is the only source for the history of

Captain Misson, the story is almost universally asserted to be

fictional. However the overall credibility of Johnson's book has been

established - it would appear that this is the only fictional episode in

an otherwise reliable work of history. The General History was published

only a very few years after the events it recorded took place, and yet

no one at the time denounced the Misson story as fiction. The story of

Misson was believed. And it was believed because it was believable.

There were radical, libertarian pirates, and there were pirate

settlements on Madagascar - all the elements of the story fit with what

we know of pirates. Perhaps the Misson story is a fiction with a solid

basis in fact; perhaps like the story of Robin Hood it collects together

a wide range of different experiences in one narrative. In either case

the story of Libertalia represents the literary expression of the living

traditions, practices and dreams of the Atlantic proletariat. On the

Misson story and the reliability of the General History see: Maximillian

E. Novak - 'Introduction' to Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson) -

'Of Captain Misson' (1728) extract from the General History - Augustan

Reprint Society, Publication number 87 (W. A. Clark Memorial Library,

University of California, Los Angeles, 1961), pp. i-iii; Op. Cit. 3, pp.

6-8; Op. Cit. 7, pp. 125-7, 249 n2, n7; Manuel Schonhorn -

'Introduction' to Op. Cit. 1, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii; Rediker - 'Liberty

beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 230-1 n4, n11; Botting - The Pirates, pp.

6, 21-22; Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, pp. 10-11, 77

[43] Op. Cit. 2, pp. 153-4, 228, 235; Cordingly - Life Among the

Pirates, p. 237

[44] Op. Cit. 2, p. 235; Botting - The Pirates, pp. 174-5

[45] Op. Cit. 2, pp. 7, 128, 138, 147-51; Op. Cit. 20 (unpaginated)

[46] Op. Cit. 7, pp. 137-8

[47] The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow, Harper Collins, 1994),

p. 1184

[48] Howard J. Ehrlich (ed.) - Reinventing Anarchy, Again (Edinburgh, AK

Press, 1996), p. 31

[49] Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, pp. 2, 138-143: "Red or

'bloody' flags are mentioned as often as black flags until the middle of

the eighteenth century"; Op. Cit. 2, p. 22; Platt and Chambers - Pirate,

p. 35

[50] Woodcock - Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements

(London, Penguin, 1963), p. 284; Jason Wehling - 'History of the Black

Flag: Why Anarchists fly it. What are its origins?', in Fifth Estate

(Vol. 32, #1, Summer 1997), p. 31; Le Pirate: Journal Quotidien #1-4

(1871) in University of Sussex Commune Collection - continuation of Le

Corsaire.

[51] John Nicholson - The Great Liberty Riot of 1780 (London, Bozo,

1985), pp. 44-46

[52] Bolster - Black Jacks, pp. 152-3

[53] For more on this check out two excellent pieces by Peter

Linebaugh - ' Jubilating: Or, How The Atlantic Working Class Used the

Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, With Some Success' in 'The New

Enclosures': Midnight Notes #10 (1990), p. 92; and 'All the Atlantic

Mountains Shook', in Eley and Hunt (eds.) - Reviving the English

Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the work of Christopher Hill

(London, Verso, 1988), p. 214. All you Sussex bioregionalists out there

will be thrilled to discover a Brighton connection to this notorious

conspiracy - one of the three executed was a Brighton butcher called

James Ings (perhaps recruited for his skill with a carving knife?), who

said: "I will cut every head off that is in the room and Lord

Castlereagh's head and Lord Sidmouth's I will bring away in a bag. For

this purpose I will provide two bags." See Rocky Hill - Underdog

Brighton: A Rather Different History of the Town (Brighton, Iconoclast

Press, 1991), pp. 23-4, and John Stanhope - The Cato Street Conspiracy

(London, Johnathan Cape, 1962), p. 87