Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
The image of the pirate as romantic outlaw and rebel has had a hold on our hearts since the 17th century. But historians’ views on pirates have been more nuanced, seesawing between portrayals of pirates as rebels or radicals and pirates as brutal men no different from, if better dressed than, common thieves. In Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (1996), British historian David Cordingly expressly set out to contrast the popular image of pirates with what he saw as the decidedly less attractive reality. He aimed to debunk the myths that, as he points out, have been reinforced over the centuries mostly through children’s entertainments such as Peter Pan and Treasure Island–a medium not known for its accuracy. No less a Royal Navy partisan than Patrick O’Brian, author of Master and Commander, endorsed Cordingly’s work, saluting him for finally telling the truth about “these awful men.”
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In Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, the most recent recontextualization of pirate facts, Marcus Rediker takes a sympathetic approach even as he focuses on some of the less sexy aspects of piracy, like the systems of government aboard pirate ships and the extent to which pirates disrupted the 18th-century slave trade. Essentially an academic monograph, the book is neither a dry history nor a romantic account–or rather, any romance it contains is of the Marxist variety. A professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a self-described activist and people’s historian, Rediker specializes in maritime history. He makes the case that the pirates of the short-lived Golden Age (1716-’26, when piracy flourished before being crushed by the authorities) were true radicals rather than mere rebels. In Rediker’s view these men (and a few women) sought to create an alternative seafaring society organized around norms explicitly counter to those of the dominant maritime culture. Pirates may have adopted a devil-may-care attitude–“a short life and a merry one” was their motto–but they were organized, with all the notions of collectivity and militancy that word implies. Contrary to the fantasy that’s at the heart of their enduring appeal, at the individual level each pirate did not simply do just as he or she pleased.
Cordingly, on the other hand, duly notes the pirates’ systems of governance, but devotes as much time to suggestions by hostile contemporaries that “pirate democracy” mainly meant a lot of time wasted quarreling over the division of loot. He notes the presence of Africans aboard pirate ships, sometimes in significant numbers, but suggests that these men were treated as just so much booty after being captured in raids of slave ships. In Rediker’s view both Africans and African-Americans, liberated slaves and freemen alike, were pirates along with men of French, Spanish, Dutch, English, Irish, Welsh, Native American, and Caribbean origin, often all on the same ship, owing allegiance to no nation. The pirates felt a kinship with the escaped slaves who had formed maroon communities in the Caribbean: they too called themselves marooners, with at least one ship, that of Captain Thomas Cocklyn, bearing the name Maroon.
When historical analyses are persuasive, it’s sometimes because they say what we want to hear. Without denying that pirates were bad, Rediker argues that they were rarely as savage as the authorities would have the people believe. And don’t we all want to think the best of pirates, to believe that they just seem bad? Apparently we do: romantic notions about pirates are not exclusively the product of time and distance. Particularly in the Caribbean and the American South, pirates had sympathizers and collaborators on land. The authorities needed to convince people that the pirates were “enemies of all mankind,” not worthy of sympathy or support. In this context uncritical acceptance of “official” record and opinion on pirates can seem a bit naive. Perhaps the solution to the historians’ maze of biases is to go straight to the sources, when they’re available. Both Rediker and Cordingly refer extensively to the 18th-century book A General History of the Pyrates, by someone calling himself Captain Charles Johnson (the real author is thought to be Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe). Colorful, entertaining, and with the advantage of being close to the action, “Johnson” is drawn on selectively by all historians of pirates to bolster their sometimes contradictory claims.
