Outlaws of the Atlantic Read online

  Also by Marcus Rediker

  The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

  The Slave Ship: A Human History

  Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

  The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

  (with Peter Linebaugh)

  Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750

  Outlaws of the Atlantic

  Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail

  MARCUS REDIKER

  Beacon Press, Boston

  To Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and Gary Nash

  and to the memory of

  Alfred F. Young and Edward Thompson

  my teachers in history from below

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  ONE The Sailor’s Yarn

  TWO Edward Barlow, “Poor Seaman”

  THREE Henry Pitman, “Fugitive Traitor”

  FOUR Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates

  FIVE A Motley Crew in the American Revolution

  SIX African Rebels: From Captives to Shipmates

  SEVEN “Black Pirates”: The Amistad Rebellion, 1839

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  I begin this book about Atlantic outlaws with a story about my late mother, Lucille Fadell Robertson, who was born in a little town called Dunmor in the utterly landlocked state of Kentucky. As far as I could tell as a child, Dunmor was made up entirely of poor people. My mother’s father, my grandfather, was a coal miner. Her mother died when she was two years old, no uncommon thing among people of her class. Like many poor rural people, my mother had a dense network of kin, including double first cousins. One of them was a factory worker of artistic bent. Over the years he sent us an endless series of sentimental paintings. One day my mother pointed proudly to a recent arrival and proclaimed, “It’s a painting of the bank in Russellville, Kentucky.”

  “It’s what?” I was puzzled. “Why would anyone want to paint the bank of Russellville, Kentucky?” I asked innocently. “Ooooh,” came the retort, “Mr. Hotshot Professional Historian doesn’t know the historical significance of the bank of Russellville, Kentucky.” I hung my head. “No, Mother, I don’t. Tell me.” She smiled as she answered with a history lesson: “The Russellville bank was the first bank the James boys robbed.”

  She referred, of course, to Jesse and Frank James, the notorious James boys, who robbed banks all over the Upper South and Midwest and became two of the greatest outlaws in all of American history. My embarrassment faded as I sensed an opportunity. I asked, “What did all of the people around Dunmor think of the James boys?” She paused a second, pensively, and answered in her lilting Southern Kentucky accent: “They’s good boys. Jus’ got in a lil’ trouble, is all.”

  A little trouble? They committed dozens of bank and train robberies and many murders. Local, state, and federal authorities engaged them in an all-out manhunt, which resulted in torrid shoot-outs and more deaths. Jesse himself was eventually killed in 1882 by a bounty hunter, who later committed suicide in trembling fear that Frank James would track him down and kill him. By the standards of small, quiet Dunmor (current population 317), this seemed to me to be something rather more than “a little trouble.” I was amused, and not a little excited, to discover these outlaws kicking around in our family history. I ventured another question: The people around Dunmor didn’t care that the James boys robbed the bank in Russellville? My mother did not need to pause and think this one over. She replied sharply: “People in Dunmor didn’t have any money in that bank. They were too poor.”1

  Thanks to my cousin’s painting, I learned that the people of Dunmor, including my mother, did not consider the James boys to be criminals or even bad people. They were good boys who just got into a little trouble. That’s all. They were outlaws who commanded some degree of popular support and even pride in what they had done. Or to put the point a different way, the law does not a criminal make. The James boys were classic “social bandits” as described by historian Eric Hobsbawm.2

  I have been writing about outlaws my entire career as a historian, so it is a special pleasure to gather my thoughts and writings on the subject and to present this volume, Outlaws of the Atlantic. I first wrote about sailors, mutineers, and pirates, the quintessential outlaws, in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987) and followed up on the topic on a grander scale in Villains of All Nations (2004). The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), written with Peter Linebaugh, concerned the role of outlaws in the making of Atlantic capitalism: the sailors, slaves, indentured servants, and others who were, many of them, launched into oceanic orbits by convictions for crime and who once upon the great Atlantic became new kinds of outlaws such as pirates and smugglers, rebels and revolutionaries of various sorts. Then came The Slave Ship and The Amistad Rebellion, both of which emphasized uprisings from below decks by enslaved Africans whose determined actions deeply shaped the histories of slavery and abolition.3

  This book explores the sea as a setting for human activity and historical change against the backdrop of the Atlantic and global rise of capitalism. The Prologue sets the scene of the Atlantic in the “age of sail.” Chapter 1 treats the sailor as yarn spinner and global vector of communication, showing how Jack Tar, as he was called, because of his tarred breeches, influenced the lofty histories of philosophy, political thought, drama, poetry, and literature. The sea appears as a place of profound, although seldom understood, communication. The next six essays offer a roughly chronological survey of resistance by sea that covers sailors, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans as mutineers, runaways, and pirates—maritime rebels of all kinds—from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, the age of wooden ships and iron men. Chapter 2 studies the life of seaman Edward Barlow and the sea as a place of work. Chapter 3 offers another “biography from below,” following Henry Pitman, who after Monmouth’s Rebellion in England in 1685 was sold as the commodity called “indentured servant.” He used the sea as a place of escape. Chapter 4 takes as its subject the pirates of the 1710s through the 1720s and analyzes the sea as a place for the construction of an alternative social order. Chapter 5 discusses the Atlantic sailor, the enslaved African, and the interracial mob as revolutionary agents in the coming of the American Revolution—the sea as a site for the generation of radical ideas. Chapter 6 studies eighteenth-century West Africans as both the commodity called “slave” and as agents who profoundly resisted that conceptualization and practice. They made the sea a site of rebellion. This theme continues in the final chapter, where the makers of the Amistad rebellion (1839) used the sea as a setting of struggle while others saw their rising through the lens of a pirate story, which shaped the outcome of the historic case. The book ends with thoughts about the “outlaw Atlantic,” showing how sailors, slaves, pirates, and motley crews shaped a history we have long regarded as white, elite, national, and landed. These cosmopolitan workers of the world have much to say to us in a new era of globalization.

  Prologue

  The European deep-sea sailing ship—and the seamen who made it go—transformed the world. On the Santa Maria, on which Columbus crossed the Atlantic, on the Victoria, on which Magellan circled the globe, and on the ever-growing fleets of merchant and naval vessels that linked the seven seas, their continents, and their peoples, the motley crews who worked aboard the most sophisticated machines of their day made history. By moving commodities such as silver, spices, and sugar over long distances they built the
world market and the international economy. By carrying traders, settlers, and empire builders to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, they changed the global political order. Deep-sea sailors thus made possible a profound transformation: the rise of colonialism, capitalism, and our own vexed modernity.

  Yet sailors have never gotten their due in the history books. Bertolt Brecht asked, “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” He answered, “The books are filled with the names of kings,” but then he wondered, “Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?” Explorers like Columbus and Magellan, and admirals like Horatio Nelson, have long dominated our view of the history of the sea, but that at last has begun to change. Histories of “great men” and national glory by sea have, over the past generation, been challenged by chronicles of common sailors and their many struggles. Maritime history has grown to include indentured servants and enslaved Africans, whose transatlantic lives were mediated by a gruesome yet formative Middle Passage across the sea. The rise of social history since the 1970s has of course transformed our view of many historical subjects, but few have witnessed as dramatic a reorientation as maritime history.1

  Within the more recent rise of transnational and world history the sailor has begun to move from the margins—his customary position in national histories—to a more central position as one whose labors not only connected, but made possible, a new world. It is increasingly obvious that crucial historical processes unfolded at sea and that seafaring people were history makers of the first importance. This collection of my work over the past thirty years focuses on both transformations, bringing together the Atlantic and global histories of seafaring and slavery, the rise of capitalism and the many challenges to it from below—often literally, from below decks.2

  In writing maritime history from below, I have encountered not only the elitism of the old maritime history but an obstacle more subtle and less understood: the uninspected assumption that only the landed spaces on the earth’s surface are real. Perhaps it is not quite right to call this assumption a matter of thought; it is more an instinct, a mental reflex, and perhaps all the more powerful and pervasive for being unconsidered. One suspects that it is a matter of mentalité, a deep structure of Western thought that has an ancient history. Yet it must also be noted that this way of looking at the world—I call it terracentric—was surely strengthened by the rise of the modern nation-state in the late eighteenth century, after which power and sovereignty would be linked to specific ethnic, civic, and national definitions of “the people” and their land, their soil. At the same time the Romantic generation simultaneously “evacuated” the sea of real ships and sailors—“dirty bilge water and people at work,” writes literary scholar Margaret Cohen—substituting a sea wild and sublime, populated with imaginary figures, fit for aesthetic contemplation.3

  The other side of terracentrism is the unspoken proposition that the seas of the world are unreal spaces, voids between the real places, which are landed and national. This logic—the bias of landed society—is evident in the work of thinkers as radically different as novelist Joseph Conrad and philosopher Michel Foucault. Conrad, who spent considerable time at sea, called the oceangoing ship “a fragment detached from the earth.” The statement suggests that the ship is disconnected not only from the land, but somehow from the planet, existing in a realm apart. Foucault called the ship “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself, and at the same given over to the infinity of the sea.” The ocean, in this formulation, is not only a place apart, it is “no place”—the original meaning of utopia. In both cases there is a refusal to consider the ocean as a real, material place of human work and habitation, a place where identities have been formed, where history has been made.4

  The West Indian poet Derek Walcott exposed and attacked Western terracentric bias in his poem “The Sea Is History,” which reflects on the experience of the peoples of the African diaspora:

  Where are your monuments, your battles, your martyrs?

  Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

  in that gray vault. The Sea.

  The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.5

  Walcott challenges us to overcome a deeply inculcated, often unconscious terracentrism, which would have us believe that the oceans are empty places, without history. It is our job to unlock the gray vault and make it give up its deep, hidden secrets.

  This book tries to unlock these secrets by examining the Atlantic Ocean as a historical space within which the formation of empires and rise of capitalism depended on a specific maritime technology: the Northern European deep-sea sailing ship. During the “age of sail,” roughly 1500 to 1850, this was the world’s most sophisticated and important machine. The novelist Barry Unsworth called it an “engine of wood and canvas and hemp.” This global instrument of European power made possible extraordinary things—plunder, conquest, and finally a political and economic dominance that has lasted to this day.6

  “A Ship of War, of the Third Rate, with Rigging, &c., at Anchor”

  This image of a third-rate man-of-war demonstrates the architecture of the deep-sea sailing ship: the three decks; the numerous compartments; the storage of supplies in casks and hogsheads; the small arms, gunpowder, and cannon; and the extraordinary complexity of rigging. The “gunned warship” combined mobility, speed, and great destructive power. When it showed up in parts of the world that had never before witnessed such a machine, it caused wonder. It was called a “floating island” and indeed it was: some men-of-war had crews of a thousand men, as many as a small town. The firing of the guns turned astonishment to terror. One observer noted that it was enough to make non-Europeans “worship Jesus Christ.”7

  The armed European deep-sea sailing ship was the means by which a vast oceanic commons was made safe for private property. It projected European imperial sovereignty onto the seas around the world. It made possible the circulation of commodities and the resulting global accumulation of capital from the late fifteenth century onward, unleashing a profound set of interrelated changes. Perhaps the greatest of these was the creation of the world market, whose existence can be summed up simply: no ships, no world market, because water links the continents of the globe. And of course the ship moved only because of the collective labor of the sailor, who slowly and fitfully knit together the world economy, integrating the various regions (Africa, the Americas, Asia) at different moments into an expanding whole.8

  Historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “the creation of a large and expanding market for goods and a large and available free labor force go together, two aspects of the same process.” So it was that the deep-sea sailing ships of Europe were operated by an ever-growing mass of free wage laborers. Global shipping required a maritime proletariat, whose members, aboard ship, were called “hands.” Sailors usually had no means of production (no land, skill, or craft tools) and were thereby reduced to the labor of their hands to get a living. In organizing the sailing ships of the world, the ruling classes of Europe learned to think about labor as a commodity, buying and selling the labor power of seamen in an international market, for money. As the father of modern economics, Sir William Petty, wrote in 1690, “the Labour of Seamen, and Freight of Ships, is always of the nature of an Exported Commodity, the overplus whereof, above what is Imported, brings home mony, &c.”9

  The European rulers of the terraqueous globe also saw that there were other important ways to think about labor power as a commodity. Tall ships were once again central to the process. The slave ship Brooks sailed out of Liverpool between 1782 and 1804 and carried more than five thousand Africans across the Atlantic to the burgeoning slave societies of the Americas. This familiar image (Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck), drawn by abolitionists, was designed to make real to contemporary readers the human horrors of the slave trade—the tight packing of bodies in cramped spaces below decks. No small part of the horror lay in the systematic annihilation of individual identity bui
lt into the process. The slave ship appeared as a factory, mass-producing African bodies for the plantations of the Americas. Labor power was brutally rendered for what it was: a commodity. The sinister industrial quality of the image drove the point home.10

  “Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck” (Bristol Record Office)

  This image bears useful comparison to another, less familiar one, of a naval vessel from the same era, HMS Bedford. Here labor power is represented, not by actual bodies, but more discreetly as individually drawn hammocks in which sailors slept below decks, with not much more room than enslaved Africans had on slave ships. If the representation of the Brooks was meant to shock and horrify, the image of the Bedford had a more prosaic purpose: to show how hundreds of sailors (originally shown in blue) and marines (in red) might physically inhabit the lower deck of a warship. In both cases the depiction of labor power as a commodity was the order of the day. The fundamental class relationships of modern capitalism, involving both slave and free labor, were thus mediated by the ship.

  Lower deck of HMS Bedford (National Maritime Museum)

  As European rulers organized a transoceanic capitalist economy, they necessarily created new relationships among workers, in their own nations and around the world. To put the same point a different way, the organization of production for greater profits required a new cooperative division of labor worldwide. As the great West Indian scholar/activist C. L. R. James wrote: “The more capital succeeds in organizing itself, the more it is forced to organize the working class.” The dynamics of transoceanic accumulation depended on collective working relationships among ever larger and more diverse bodies of workers, to produce and transport the commodities of the world. Agricultural laborers had to be linked to craft workers, who in turn had to be linked to dockworkers and sailors. As these linkages multiplied with the expansion of the capitalist economy, something new began to happen: these groups of people brought together by the productive power of capital began to conceive projects of their own. In short they transmuted their cooperation for capital into something else. For example, the sailors who cooperated to sail the ships of London discovered their common interests in 1768, when after a wage cut they went from vessel to vessel, striking (taking down) the sails and immobilizing the world’s greatest shipping fleet. The “strike” was born and would circulate rapidly among working people around the world. Other forms of resistance, from running away, to mutiny, piracy, slave revolt, urban riots and insurrections, and even revolution—all examined in this book—emerged from new forms of cooperation. Atlantic commercial networks of accumulation became Atlantic networks of self-activity and subversion. The organization of capitalism and empire from above created resistance to capitalism and empire from below, as we shall see in the following chapters.11