Life Under the Jolly Roger

Reflections on Golden Age Piracy

Gabriel Kuhn

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781629638034
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Over the last couple of decades, an ideological battle has raged over the political legacy and cultural symbolism of the "golden age" pirates who roamed the seas between the Caribbean Islands and the Indian Ocean from roughly 1690 to 1725. They are depicted as romanticized villains on the one hand and as genuine social rebels on the other. Life Under the Jolly Roger examines the political and cultural significance of these nomadic outlaws by relating historical accounts to a wide range of theoretical concepts—reaching from Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres to Mao Zedong and Eric J. Hobsbawm via Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. With daring theoretical speculation and passionate, respectful inquiry, Gabriel Kuhn skillfully contextualizes and analyzes the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and disability in golden age pirate communities, while also surveying the breathtaking array of pirates' forms of organization, economy, and ethics.

Life Under the Jolly Roger also provides an extensive catalog of scholarly references for the academic reader. Yet this delightful and engaging study is written in language that is wholly accessible for a wide audience.

This expanded second edition includes two new prefaces and an appendix with interviews about contemporary piracy, the ongoing fascination with pirate imagery, and the thorny issue of colonial implications in the romanticization of pirates.

1. Background

1.1. Privateers, Buccaneers, Pirates: Matters of Terminology

“ONE GREAT DIFFICULTY WHICH the author of this work is met with is to decide who was, and who was not, a pirate,”¹ wrote Philip Gosse in 1924, as part of the introduction to The Pirates’ Who’s Who. The same difficulty is still faced by anyone writing about pirates today. In general, a wide definition of piracy competes with a narrow one.

The former builds on the suggestion that a pirate, in the words of David Cordingly, simply “was, and is, someone who robs and plunders on the sea.”² In a similar vein, German author Reiner Treinen writes that “generally, we can understand sea robbery and piracy as analogies to common robbery and the activities of common robber gangs.”³ Obviously, the problem with this definition is that it depends on our understanding of “robbery”—a notion that has been highly contested throughout history, usually based on conflicting political interests. While, for example, in the eyes of the Spanish all ships preying on Spanish commerce in the Caribbean were “sea robbers” and hence “pirates,” many were licensed raiders (“buccaneers” acting as “privateers”) in the eyes of the English, French, or Dutch. As Hans Turley suggests, “the buccaneer differs from the pirate because he was an outlaw-made-national-hero.”⁴ It will not surprise us then that some observers have also coined the term “patriotic piracy”⁵ for the activities of the buccaneers.

The narrow definition of piracy attempts to escape this conundrum, as it considers pirates only those sea robbers who carry no license by any legal authority, who target all ships, regardless of the national colors they fly, and who are “unwilling to be registered or corrupted by either money or office.”⁶ These are the “hostes humani generis,” the “enemies of mankind,”⁷ the “villains of all nations.”⁸ Their activities have been coined by some as “autonomous piracy”⁹—in the eyes of the authorities, “a Kind of Piracy which disgraces our Civilisation.”¹⁰ In order to distinguish them from licensed sea robbers, these pirates have been called “the pirates proper,”¹¹ “out-and-out pirates,”¹² “full-blown pirates,”¹³ or “pirate[s] in the truest sense.”¹⁴ In the English legal dictum of the early 18th century, they were defined with the following words: “A pirate is in a perpetual war with every individual, and every state, Christian or infidel. Pirates properly have no country, but by the nature of their guilt, separate themselves, and renounce on this matter, the benefit of all lawful societies.”¹⁵ This definition also accounts for the succinct observation that “piracy was never merely robbery”¹⁶—a fact on which much of its mythology is grounded.

This book will mainly work with the narrow definition of piracy. In fact, the group of pirates on which it focuses not only excludes those being licensed by legal authority, but also those who operated from secure land bases. The reason for this is the particular attention given to the nomadic element of golden age piracy—a feature that asks for a special and unique analytical approach. Despite certain structural similarities stemming from their common profession, historical pirate communities like those of the British Channel, the Barbary Coast, or the China Sea constitute fundamentally different social phenomena, as their relations to the land, local communities, and political authorities were much more clearly defined, even if great diversity existed within their respective modes of organization and activities.¹⁷ The same goes for current pirate communities like those operating along the Northeast African coast. Robert C. Ritchie provides a useful distinction when dividing pirates according to two different methods of operation:

One can be defined as organized marauding, the other as anarchistic marauding. Many men were involved in both; yet a distinction can be made. Organized pirates remained attached to a port as their base of operation. Anarchistic marauding involved leaving behind the base of operation and wandering for months—even years—at a time.¹⁸

An explanation of terms that commonly appear in connection with pirate history follows:

A buccaneer was originally a hunter on the island of Hispaniola (today divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti). This was the meaning of the term for the first half of the 17th century. As the buccaneers gradually turned to sea robbery and raiding—often licensed, sometimes not—the term became a synonym for Caribbean pirates. It was used as such until about 1690, when buccaneer culture came to its end and gave way to “proper,” or golden age, piracy. Due to the strong cultural ties between the buccaneers and the golden age pirates, the former will feature prominently in this book.

A privateer is a sea robber who acts under the license of a legal authority. In the Caribbean of the 17th century, such a license was usually conferred by a letter of marque. In a sense, privateers were seaborne mercenary forces who engaged in “piracy with state-sponsorship.”¹⁹ Captain Johnson described privateering indecisively as “something like pirating.”²⁰ Privateering served those in power well, since it “was a useful extension of naval warfare which not only created an income for the government issuing the privateering contract, but also helped to harass enemy shipping in times of war, without the issuing authority having to do anything.”²¹ Most buccaneers worked as privateers. According to Jenifer G. Marx, buccaneering became “a peculiar blend of piracy and privateering in which the two elements were often indistinguishable.”²² Despite this, the implications of both activities seen separately remained diametrically opposed. In Janice E. Thomson’s words: “Privateering reflected state rulers’ efforts to build state power; piracy reflected some people’s efforts to resist that project.”²³

Flibustier was the French term for a buccaneer. It has sometimes retrospectively been translated into the English filibuster, even though this term only came to be used in the 18th century, partly in connection with illegal American military infiltration into Latin America, and more lastingly as the signifier for a legal procedure.

Corsair was a French term sometimes used synonymously with pirate, but usually reserved for the pirates of the Mediterranean.

Sea dog was often used for the English privateers of the 16th century, the most famous being Francis Drake.

Other synonyms for pirate not employed here include sea rover, freebooter, marooner, the picturesque picaroon, or swashbuckler, which originally served as a 16th-century term for brigands and was was first applied to pirates by 19th-century novelists and 20th-century scriptwriters.²⁴

1.2. What “Golden Age”? A Little History

The following pages provide a brief overview of the development of piracy in the Caribbean leading up to the “golden age,” during which the operations of originally Caribbean-based pirates extended along the coasts of the Americas, into the Indian Ocean, and, finally, to the west coast of Africa.

Different historians have given the golden age different time frames, depending both on their respective definitions of piracy and the weight given to certain historical events and developments. While most place the end of golden age piracy somewhere between 1722 (the death of Captain Roberts and the mass arrest of his crew) and 1730 (the execution of Olivier La Buse), there is less of an agreement on its beginnings. While some include even the age of the buccaneers and let the golden age begin around 1650, others quote years as late as 1716, when the last major outbreak of non-licensed piracy in the Caribbean took shape.

It seems most useful to follow those scholars who place the beginning of the golden age in the early 1690s. At that time, some Anglo-American privateers and mutineers began to sail their vessels into the Indian Ocean to prey on ships of all nations, those of the English and their allies included. It is told that the New England privateer captain Thomas Tew convinced his crew to go pirating in 1692 by suggesting “that it was better to risk your life for plunder than for government.”¹ If there is any truth to this tale, then this moment seems indeed decisive for the pirate phenomenon studied in this volume.

The following timeline intends to shed some light on the genesis and development of the golden age:

1492: Christopher Columbus and his crew arrive at the island of Hispaniola.

1492–c. 1620: Spain establishes a near-exclusive hold on the Caribbean region and punishes “interlopers” indiscriminately. Most famously, a short-lived French Huguenot settlement in Florida is crushed with brutal force in 1565. Throughout the entire period, there is no peace beyond the line, meaning that whatever peace treaties are signed in Europe, they do not apply to the areas west of the meridian the Spanish drew in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas to demarcate their newly “discovered” American territories.

c. 1520–1550: French privateers start preying on Spain’s transatlantic trade. At first, Spanish ships are almost exclusively attacked on their return journeys to Europe. In the 1530s, however, French ships begin to venture into the Caribbean itself, initiating a period that turns the region into “a happy hunting-ground”² and “a paradise for an adventurous robber.”³

c. 1550–1600: English privateers, the sea dogs, increasingly penetrate the Caribbean realm to attack Spanish commerce. Francis Drake, called “my pirate” by Queen Elizabeth, is the most legendary. The era of the sea dogs ends with the death of Philip ii in 1598.

c. 1600–1635: Dutch privateers cause enormous damage to Spanish commerce in the Caribbean and weaken the Spanish hold over the area to a degree that allows the establishment of non-Spanish settlements which, in the words of one historian, “developed out of the piracy of the preceding century.”⁴ The Dutch privateers also make it possible for Dutch traders to take control of Caribbean commerce for decades.⁵

During the same period, men who have been described as “a remarkable blend of human flotsam”⁶ as well as “a motley crowd”⁷ begin to form a “male, maritime and migrant culture”⁸ in the western parts of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti), leading a “half-savage, independent mode of life,”⁹ sustained by hunting wild boars and cattle. The animals are remnants of Spanish settlements evacuated by the Spanish authorities in 1603 after its inhabitants had been suspected of trading with rival European nations.¹⁰ This marks the beginning of the buccaneers, “these strange people,”¹¹ “a ruffiantly, dare-devil lot, who feared neither God, man, nor death,”¹² “tough frontiersmen living beyond the law,”¹³ “outlaw hunters”¹⁴ “scarcely less wild than the animals they hunted,”¹⁵ “men who could never live in the bosom of ordered society, men who lived for the moment, swaggerers, lovers of glory, men sometimes cruel, often generous, but cowards, never.”¹⁶

The buccaneers are named after a meat-smoking device apparently called buccan in the language of the indigenous Caribs. Some conservative historians have drawn a rather dramatic picture of the buccaneers’ existence:

They were savages in dress and habits. No amount of bathing could eradicate the stink of guts and grease that clung to them. Their rough homespun garments were stiff with the blood of slaughtered animals. They made their round brimless hats, boots, and belts of untanned hides, and smeared their faces with tallow to repel insects. On the coast they lived in shacks covered with palm leaves and slept in sleeping bags next to smoking fires to ward off mosquitoes.¹⁷

This has led certain authors to the pointed conclusion that “life among the ‘Brethren of the Coast’ cannot have been pleasant for anyone with a sensitive nose.”¹⁸ Others, however, have conceded that “for many it was a good life, impossible to duplicate in Europe: enough to eat, independence, freedom from masters.”¹⁹

“The origins of these men we do not know,” writes C.H. Haring,²⁰ but it has to be assumed that they constituted a blend of “stragglers from all three nations”—meaning France, England, and the Netherlands—“stranded, marooned, or shipwrecked crewmen; deserters; runaway bond servants and slaves; adventurers of all sorts.”²¹ Maybe they indeed included “all such as disliked organised society.”²² “All, whatever they were originally, seem to have been hearty, care-free men who preferred a life of semi-savagery to the tiresome laws and orders of the civilised world.”²³

c. 1620–1640: Despite fierce Spanish resistance, the English, French, and Dutch all establish holds in the Caribbean, particularly on the islands of the Lesser Antilles. The colonial tables in the Caribbean are about to turn. As one historian has noted, “living cheek by jowl with their enemies, they brought the Spanish crown a century of unrelieved woe.”²⁴

c. 1630–1650: The number of buccaneers on Hispaniola steadily increases due to displaced settlers, runaway slaves, and fugitive or dismissed indentured laborers. According to Stephen Snelders, “the Brethren of the Coast functioned as a kind of chaotic attractor, serving as a focus for adventurous, rebellious, and outlaw elements,”²⁵ while Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh suggest that “buccaneering syphoned off the most adventurous, pugnacious, and greedy of the landless males of the crowded English islands.”²⁶

Worried about the expansion of the multinational buccaneering community in the heart of their empire, the Spanish conduct ill-conceived attempts at chasing the buccaneers from the island in the 1630s by killing off the herds of boars and cattle. The attempt backfires. The buccaneers stay but have to turn to new means of livelihood. One is sea robbery. By the 1630s, buccaneer gangs in dugout canoes or flyboats embark on nightly attacks against Spanish galleons. By the 1650s, the term buccaneer “was exclusively used to refer to maritime raiders.”²⁷

During the same time, the island of Tortuga (across a small strait off Hispaniola’s northwestern tip) turns into a buccaneer center and remains highly contested for decades. With the well-protected island as a safe haven, the buccaneers slowly develop into a community that will have “a tremendous impact on the life of the West Indies”²⁸ and prove much more disastrous to the Spanish than the presence of some “savage hunters” in the remote areas of Hispaniola could have ever been.

1655–1697: The English expedition sent to the Caribbean by Oliver Cromwell takes Jamaica in 1655. Subsequently, many English buccaneers from Hispaniola and Tortuga flock to the island—enough that by the 1660s, buccaneering has turned into “the island’s principal source of revenue.”²⁹ This constitutes a split in the buccaneer community along national lines. While the English buccaneers establish themselves ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the Japanese Edition
• 0. Introduction
• 1. Background
• 2. “Enemy of His Own Civilization”: An Ethnography of Golden Age Piracy
• 3. “Social Origins,” or The European Legacy: Golden Age Piracy and Cultural Studies
• 4. “Ni dieu, ni maître”: Golden Age Piracy and Politics
• 5. Conclusion : The Golden Age Pirates’ Political Legacy
• 6. Notes on Pirate Literature
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index