British Pirates in Print and Performance

M. Powell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137339928
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fictional or real, pirates haunted the imagination of the 18th and 19th century-British public during this great period of maritime commerce, exploration, and naval conflict. British Pirates in Print and Performanc e explores representations of pirates through dozens of stage performances, including adaptations by Byron, Scott, and Cooper.

Chapter 1

A Nation of Pirates

To speak very generally, pirates are always of interest to the reading public, but not always in the same genres; they are covered by newspapers and ballads when active and frightening, and fictionalized or personified on stage when less so. Hence, their romanticized, fictional versions tend to gain strength after a real pirate’s retirement or death.¹ This may also partly explain why the pirates of the Golden Age (1650–1726) are by far the most popular to write about in the nineteenth century, despite both historical distance and the rash of very real and violent Atlantic piracy that broke out between 1815 and 1835 as a result of the Napoleonic era’s birthing the Haitian Revolution and widespread anti-Spanish rebellions throughout Latin and South America, accompanied by masses of new privateers and pirates.² Of course, in retelling the Golden Age tales, historical lore is inevitably mixed up with later periods and other stories: seventeenth-century buccaneers might appear in fiction or on stage waving black flags (not common until the eighteenth century), wearing earrings (not common until nearly the nineteenth century), and making people walk the plank (pirates didn’t really do this; slavers did). When Treasure Island was published in 1881–82, it had been many decades since the average British citizen had anything to fear from pirates, and piracy could once again become a point of national pride, a bit of spice for the plucky island nation’s character, just as it had been (or so they say) in Elizabeth I’s day. Witness Squire Trelawney on the legendary Captain Flint: “He was the bloodthirstiest buccaneer that sailed. Blackbeard was a child to Flint. The Spaniards were so prodigiously afraid of him that, I tell you, sir, I was sometimes proud he was an Englishman” (31).

A great deal can be encompassed in the British notion of a pirate: fear, pride, otherness, sameness, tragedy, rebellion, fun, fantasy. Sometimes a pirate is, in the final balance, hardly piratical at all. The practice of piracy—using a boat to steal things from other people—has existed since at least a thousand years BCE; probably it has existed for as long as humans or the more dexterous of our primate ancestors have had both property and boats. Pirates appear as plot elements even in very old stories, including the Decameron (1353) and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (200 CE), which Margaret Anne Doody identifies as one of the very first ancient novels.³ This volume intends to follow the voyages of literary and stage piratical characters from the so-called Golden Age at the end of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the romantic movement in the first third or so of the nineteenth. The term “pirate” itself has been used in English writing since the fifteenth century, but the British Isles certainly saw figures we might recognize as pirates much earlier than that, for the Vikings, Scandinavian sea raiders, pillaged Europe from approximately the eighth century through the Norman Conquest. (Indeed, the easy conflation between scurvy pirates and viking “sea-kings” causes no small amount of romantic confusion in Sir Walter Scott’s 1822 swashbuckler The Pirate.) Most often the figures we track make things simple for the prospective audience by calling themselves “pirates” in a forthright manner, so much so that sorting through texts with such common titles as The Pirate or The Pirates or The Pirate’s Bride has proven to be no small challenge. Yet the question of what makes a pirate a pirate is not a closed one; rather, it depends a great deal upon audience and context.

1. A Pirate by Any Other Name

“Pirate” is a legal as well as a social term: a true pirate is hostis humani generis, the enemy of all humankind, considered to have no nation or national protections, and fair game for anyone who captures him (in the overwhelming majority of cases, the pirate is and was a “him,” although we will cover the exceptions that prove the rule in chapter 7).⁴ But there is more than one way to name a pirate, and very often the act of piracy proves to be a matter of perspective, a determination made by the eye of the beholder as much as the actions of the seaman. For a long time, the more common English term for pirate was “rover” or “sea-rover”: Aphra Behn plays upon this in her roguish Willmore, seafaring rake hero of The Rover (1677); so does Joseph Conrad in his Rover (1923) and James Fenimore Cooper in The Red Rover (1829; see chapter 5).

Matters become more complicated in the seventeenth century, when buccaneers (more than a high price for corn, as the old joke goes) develop into an important Caribbean population. Buccaneers were men who survived by hunting and smoking the flesh of wild cows on Hispaniola, Tortuga, and Jamaica; the term itself comes from the French boucanier, and from buccan, an Arawak word for a tool used in smoking meat. The rough-living buccaneers had a huge advantage in their intimate knowledge of local waters and shores, and used it to attack Spanish-held coastal towns and shipping lanes, often allying with local natives to do so. They were also called “filibusters” or “freebooters” (from the Spanish filibustero or Dutch vrjibuiter), somewhat looser terms that could also indicate anyone fighting a recognized but unofficial war. Such characters were not always depicted or perceived as a threat: “From the days of Drake and Hawkins, freebooters enjoyed the support of the English authorities, provided they only plundered the Spanish.”⁵ The early Jamaican (English) buccaneers expressed loyalty to the crown, at least outwardly. It was not really until piracy, especially Red Sea piracy and the exploits of Captains Tew, Avery, and Kidd, became a problem for the East India Company, that the government felt it advisable to temper their support.

Further muddying the waters, however, is the fact that some buccaneers, such as François l’Ollonais and Henry Morgan, worked as privateers. A privateer is essentially a legal pirate: it is a private ship, often owned and outfitted by a group of investors and carrying a letter of marque, which authorizes it to attack the sea trade of specific other nations during times of war. Privateering was especially important to Elizabeth I’s war against the Spanish, giving rise to the careers of her famous Sea Dogs, such as the aforementioned John Hawkins, Francis Drake, and Walter Raleigh. Like the Sea Dogs, successful later privateers could become heroes to their nations; Henry Morgan was knighted in 1674 and then became lieutenant governor of Jamaica.

Unfortunately, dependence on privateering forces causes substantial problems, for two main reasons: First, what is perfectly legal and even righteous privateering in the eyes of one nation may amount to filthy theft to another. Drake and Morgan were not very beloved by the Spanish. The Scotsman John Paul Jones was celebrated as a father of the American navy and immortalized by Cooper but reviled as a traitor by the English. (The Scottish reaction to his career was complex.) The habitual turncoat Jean Lafitte was (eventually) likewise a hero to the Americans and a pirate to the British. On the other side of things, Europeans tended to denounce Islamic privateers (more commonly known as “corsairs”) as implacable barbarians, despite the fact that corsairing, essentially a shakedown racket involving taking Christian slaves as hostages for ransom, was generally both state sanctioned and a well-organized business, one also perpetrated by Greek and especially Maltese groups against the Ottomans and Barbaries. The Indian Kanhoji Angre (1669–1729) fought with great success against European shipping; for this he was made an admiral by one side and called “pirate” by the other. And yet in 1773, long past his death, a description of a public masquerade at the Pantheon mentioned, among the more memorable costumes, “Angria, the pirate, a good mask.”⁶ And so the reputation of a privateer-pirate depends not only upon nation, but upon period, too; historical distance adds to piratical attractions.

The second problem with privateering is that privateers were continually, it seemed, exceeding the bounds of their regulations: a privateer outside his letter of marque is definitely a pirate in any sense of the word. The more violent of Henry Morgan’s exploits, which were of marginal legality, were immortalized by Alexandre Exquemelin in The Buccaneers of America (1678/1684); Morgan, irate, more or less successfully sued its English publishers.⁷ William Kidd, commissioned to hunt pirates and harass French shipping, instead attacked Dutch and Indian ships and was hanged for it, indignantly protesting his innocence to the end, even though, were he really not a pirate, he still murdered his gunner.⁸ Across eras as well as cultures, one of the surest ways for a nation to guarantee itself a pirate problem is to commission privateers in plenty as a cheap means of waging war and then, once the official war is ended, make no provision for the mariners suddenly thrown out of work but used to and perhaps fond of the life of prize hunting, their ranks swollen with similarly discharged naval sailors. This happened in the Caribbean in the wake of the Spanish fall from influence, in the West Indies and South America following Napoleon, and in the China seas in the early nineteenth century. As the General History of the Pyrates succinctly puts it, “Privateers in Time of War are a Nursery for Pyrates against a Peace” (4). Enemy corsairs could be and were managed with treaties, but what does one do with the pirates of one’s own making? The answer seems to be that one hunts them down and then laments them with nostalgic fondness.

2. English Pirates in English Literature and the General History

For the most part, this volume is concerned only with “true” piracy, but given the frequent slippage among pirates, privateers, corsairs, and buccaneers, both in actual practice and in literary language, our readers will see other terms in circulation. Indeed, while some texts, especially in the later nineteenth century, simply do not care to make the distinction between pirate and not-quite-pirate, others, such as Frederick Marryat’s Privateer’s Man (1846) work to expose any such distinction as specious.⁹ (Captain Marryat, unlike Squire Trelawney, was a distinguished officer of the Royal Navy, and without being dour about it, he nevertheless sides with law and order and organized service.) The question of how authors think a British reader, a member of the “island nation,” ought to feel about piracy is not always so clear. Many of our examples left critics divided, perhaps because the authors themselves were so. Complicating and likely enabling the lingering nostalgia for piracy that the English could be proud of was piracy’s ever-increasing displacement from the centers of English homelife. While piracy was once endemic even among the ruling families of England and Ireland, by the late seventeenth century, piracy only very rarely happened near home.

A century before the Golden Age, in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, the country had an international reputation as a “nation of pirates”: most English pirates essentially operated as privateers, financially backed and protected from legal repercussions by the gentry and even nobility.¹⁰ These were profitable ventures that rarely attacked English ships, and pirates and privateers were crucial to maintaining a national maritime presence against Spain. Even after James I, who was volubly hostile to piracy, ascended to the throne, Ireland continued to be an important haven and operating base for Atlantic piracy.¹¹ The beneficial English legacy of piracy is why some texts, such as The Fair Maid of the West (ca. 1597–1630), openly celebrated piracy done right as a patriotic, transformative experience. Even the hero of Hamlet (ca. 1599–1602) would have been summarily murdered in act 4 if not for the fortunate intervention of the pirates who rescue him and send him back to Denmark. Once piracy had been denounced and pirates condemned as the so-called villains of all nations, and pushed from the shores of England toward those of America and the Caribbean, lingering affinities would remain, for pirates continued to harass the Spanish abroad, while some also became important explorers. The buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp was the first Englishman known to round Cape Horn. William Dampier, a privateer who sailed with Bart Sharp and was at times a bit piratical, was the first English author to describe Australia firsthand in his bestselling New Voyage Round the World (1697). Morgan was embarrassed and infuriated at being called a pirate, but soon after his lawsuits, as we shall see, the ballad sellers were merrily circulating their tales of “Bold Captain Avery,” showing the complex reception of piracy by the Anglophone public.

Yet except on stage, where they became very popular indeed, it was uncommon by the Restoration and eighteenth century to picture English pirates actually in England. Instead, while there were many pirates besides the ones operating in the Caribbean (the Mediterranean was a very hot spot; witness Byron’s Corsair), Caribbean piracy is where we get the lion’s share of the nineteenth century’s, and hence our own, culture’s widespread notions about pirates. Or, as the historian Christopher Hill remarked, “Who say pirates says West Indies.”¹² We would add, not only West Indies, but also Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724–28).¹³

The General History is a strange melange of news, history, and fantasy whose role in later pirate writing is difficult to oversta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Striding the Deck, Strutting the Stage
• 1 A Nation of Pirates
• 2 Pirates on Stage
• 3 Byron’s The Corsair
• 4 Scott’s The Pirate
• 5 Cooper’s The Pilot and The Red Rover
• 6 Pirate Sex
• 7 She-Pirates
• 8 Pirate Clichés
• Appendix: Chronology of Pirate Plays in Britain
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index