Villains of All Nations Page 7
The knowledgeable officer pointed toward, but in the end did not specify, the essential point: the thirst, hunger, wounds from lashings, and premature death that these helped to engender were central to deep-sea faring in this period, and even more central to the decision to go “upon the account.” Seafaring was one of the most dangerous occupations of a dangerous occupational age, with causes both natural and man-made. A common saying among sailors was, “There was the pox above-board, the plague between decks, hell in the forecastle, and the devil at the helm.” We do not have a broad and reliable statistical picture of the mortality of deep-sea sailors in this period, but we do know that in the deadly African slave trade the rates for seamen were equal to or higher than those of the formally enslaved. And we know that sailors who had worked in the slave trade made up a substantial minority of pirates. Moreover, in this period dangers of the sailors’ workplace produced an endless array of mutilated bodies, evident in every port city as sailors lame and crippled begged hither and yon.42
Many sought to escape the dreadful working conditions prevailing between 1716 and 1726. John Phillips ranted and raved against captured merchant John Wingfield; he “abused him calling him a Super Cargo Son of a B—h that he starved the Men, and that it was such Dogs as he as put men on Pyrating.” John Jessop preferred the “jovial Life” among the pirates, “swearing ’twas better living among them than at Cape Coast Castle,” the infamous and deadly British slave-trading fortress in West Africa. On the gallows of Providence in the Bahama Islands, pirate Daniel Macarty “began to rattle, and talk [with other pirates] with Great Pleasure, and much boasting of their former Exploits when they had been Pyrates, crying a Pyrate’s Life to be the only one for a Man of any Spirit.” Enslaved Africans, as we have seen, sought to escape slavery; fishermen sought to escape peonage; transported felons sought to escape long terms of servitude; and sailors sought to escape impressment or deadly conditions aboard ship.43
Some mariners cast their lot with pirates in order to escape any sort of work at all. A transatlantic merchant ship of 250 tons, which would have had a working crew of 15 to 18 “hands,” would, if taken and refitted by pirates, have been manned by 80 to 90 men, each of whom, accordingly, had much less work to do. As pirate Joseph Mansfield said in 1722, “the love of Drink and a Lazy Life” were “stronger Motives with him than Gold.” Admiral Vernon knew of such motives and sought to address them in his own way. From Jamaica jails he took sixteen suspected pirates aboard his man-of-war and immediately assigned them to backbreaking work at the pump, thinking “it might be of service to carry them out of the way of falling into their old Courses,” and, moreover, “might be a Means to learn them ... Working,” which “they turned Rogues to avoid.” Woodes Rogers, governor of the Bahamas and another man who knew pirates well, noted that when it came to work, “they mortally hate it.” Samuel Buck knew the pirate community in the Bahamas before Rogers arrived and echoed the governor’s words: “working does not agree with them.”44
In the end, Walter Kennedy was a typical pirate in several key respects. He was born into poverty in a port city; he was experienced in the rough conditions of life at sea, in both the navy and the merchant service; he was apparently unmarried; and he was in his mid-twenties. These traits served as bases of unity with others when, in search of something better, he decided to become a pirate. And yet he, like the others, was not merely escaping oppressive circumstances. He was escaping to something new, a different reality, something alluring about which he had heard tales in his youth.
4. “The New Government of the Ship”
BARNABY SLUSH, A “SEA-COOK,” knew sailors; he knew pirates; and he knew why the one became the other. This sage but anonymous commentator on life at sea in the early eighteenth century explained that those who risked their lives to sail under the Jolly Roger were motivated by more than greed. They sought to live in a new social order, under different governing assumptions.
Pyrates and Buccaneers, are Princes to [Seamen], for there, as none are exempt from the General Toil and Danger; so if the Chief have a Supream Share beyond his Comrades, ’tis because he’s always the Leading Man in e’ry daring Enterprize; and yet as bold as he is in all other attempts, he dares not offer to infringe the common laws of Equity; but every Associate has his due Quota ... thus these Hostes Humani Generis as great robbers as they are to all besides, are precisely just among themselves; without which they could no more Subsist than a Structure without a Foundation.1
Those demonized by the rulers of society as the “common enemies of mankind,” he suggested, were heroes to the common sailor. One major reason was how the outlaws organized their ships, which attracted many seamen. How did poor, motley, and single seafaring workers from many parts of the world equalize “the General Toil and Danger”? How did the “Chief” pirate lead in “e’ry daring Enterprize”? How did the comrades divide their shares? How did “every Associate” get his “due Quota”? What were “the common laws of Equity,” and how did pirates implement them? How did they manage to be “precisely just among themselves”? What did justice mean to those whom the law sought to “bring to justice” by hanging?
This chapter explores these questions within a larger social and cultural history of the pirate ship, focusing on its social organization and the relations among the people who sailed it. It argues that piracy, for the most part, represented a way of life voluntarily chosen by large numbers of men who directly challenged the ways of the society from which they excepted themselves. Beneath the Jolly Roger, “the banner of King Death,” and far beyond the reach of traditional authority, a new social order took shape once pirates had, as Walter Kennedy put it, “the choice in themselves.”2
The seafaring experience of work, class, and power described in the previous chapters had a vital bearing on the ways pirates organized their daily activities. Contemporaries who claimed that pirates had “no regular command among them” mistook a different social order—different from the ordering of merchant, naval, and privateering vessels—for disorder. This new social order, articulated in the organization of the pirate ship, was conceived and deliberately constructed by the pirates themselves. Its hallmark was a rough, improvised, but effective egalitarianism that placed authority in the collective hands of the crew, which is to say that the core values of the broader culture of the common sailor were institutionalized aboard the pirate ship. It was a world turned upside down, as we will see in examining how pirates made decisions, how they designed and selected their leaders, and how they organized the distribution of plunder, food, and discipline—how, in short, they created and perpetuated their culture. They—and all of their formidable adversaries—were conscious that pirates had created “a new government of the ship.”3
If the social order of the pirate ship represented something new in the early eighteenth century, it was nonetheless a long time in formation. Piracy itself was ancient and had changed over time. In the British Atlantic, piracy had long served the needs of the state and the merchant community. But there was a long-term tendency for the control of piracy to devolve from the top of society to the bottom, from the highest functionaries of the state (late sixteenth century), to big merchants (early seventeenth century), to smaller, usually colonial merchants (late seventeenth century), and finally to the common men of the deep (early eighteenth century). When this devolution reached bottom, when seamen—as pirates—organized a social world apart from the dictates of mercantile and imperial authority and used it to attack merchants’ property (as they had begun to do in the 1690s), then those who controlled the state resorted to massive violence, both military (the navy) and penal (the gallows), to eradicate piracy, as we will see in chapters 7 and 8.4
It took a long time for seamen to obtain autonomous control of the ship and to organize its miniature society as they wanted. The struggles that sailors waged in revolutionary England in the 1640s and 1650s over subsistence, wages, and rights and against impressment and violent discipli
ne took a new, more independent form among the buccaneers in America. Even as buccaneering benefited the upper classes of England, France, and the Netherlands in their New World struggles against their common enemy, Spain, ordinary seamen were building a tradition of their own, which at the time was called the Jamaica Discipline or the Law of the Privateers. The tradition, which the authorities considered the antithesis of discipline and law, boasted a distinctive conception of justice and a class hostility to shipmasters, owners, and gentlemen adventurers. It also featured democratic controls on authority and provision for the injured.5 In fashioning their own social order, buccaneers drew on the peasant utopia called the Land of Cockaygne, where work had been abolished, property redistributed, social distinctions leveled, health restored, and food made abundant. They also drew on international maritime custom, in which ancient and medieval seafarers divided their money and goods into shares, consulted collectively and democratically on matters of the moment, and elected consuls to adjudicate differences between captain and crew.6
The early makers of the tradition were what one English official in the Caribbean called “the outcasts of all nations”—convicts, prostitutes, debtors, vagabonds, escaped slaves and indentured servants, religious radicals, and political prisoners, all of whom had migrated or been exiled to the new settlements “beyond the line.” Another royal administrator explained that the buccaneers were former servants and “all men of unfortunate and desperate condition.” Many French buccaneers, like Alexander Exquemelin, had been indentured servants and before that, textile workers and day laborers. Most of the buccaneers were English or French, but Dutch, Irish, Scottish, Scandinavian, Native American, and African men also joined up, often after they had, in one way or another, escaped the brutalities of the Caribbean’s nascent plantation system.7
These workers drifted to uninhabited islands, where they formed maroon communities. Their autonomous settlements were multiethnic and organized around hunting and gathering—they hunted wild cattle and pigs and gathered the king of Spain’s gold. These communities combined the experiences of peasant rebels, demobilized soldiers, dispossessed smallholders, unemployed workers, and others from several nations and cultures, including the Carib, Cuna, and Moskito Indians.8 One of the most potent memories and experiences that underlay buccaneer culture, writes Christopher Hill, was the English Revolution: “A surprising number of English radicals emigrated to the West Indies either just before or just after 1660,” including Ranters, Quakers, Familists, Anabaptists, radical soldiers, and others who “carried with them the ideas which had originated in revolutionary England.” A number of buccaneers hunted and gathered while dressed in the “faded red coats of the New Model Army.” One was “a stout grey-headed” and “merry hearted old Man,” aged eighty-four, “who had served under Oliver in the time of the Irish Rebellion; after which he was at Jamaica, and had followed Privateering ever since.” In the New World such veterans insisted on the democratic election of their officers just as they had done in a revolutionary army on the other side of the Atlantic. Another source of buccaneering culture, according to J.S. Bromley, was a wave of peasant revolts that shook France in the 1630s. Many French freebooters came, as engagés, “from areas affected by peasant risings against the royal fisc and the proliferation of crown agents.” Protesters “had shown a capacity for self-organization, the constitution of ‘communes,’ election of deputies and promulgation of Ordonnances,” all in the name of the “Commun peuple.” Such experiences, once carried to the Americas, shaped the lifeways among the buccaneering “Brethren of the Coast.”9
The early experiences were passed on to later generations of sailors and pirates by the hearty souls who survived the odds against longevity in seafaring work. When a privateering captain took on board four seasoned buccaneers in 1689, he designated them “to be a mess by themselves, but the advantage of their conversation and intelligence obliged him afterward to disperse them amongst the Shipps Company.” Some of the old-timers served on Jamaican privateers during the War of Spanish Succession, then took part in the new piracies after the Treaty of Utrecht. The Jamaica Discipline and the exploits it made possible also lived on in folktale, song, ballad, and popular memory, as we saw in the case of Walter Kennedy, not to mention the popular published (and frequently translated) accounts of Alexander Exquemelin, Père Jean-Baptiste Labat, and others who knew life among the buccaneers firsthand.10 Therefore when sailors encountered the deadly conditions of life at sea in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they had an alternative social order within living memory.
The codes of the buccaneers evolved into the articles of the later pirates, among whom a striking uniformity of rules and customs prevailed. Each ship functioned under the terms of these compacts, drawn up at the beginning of a voyage or upon the election of a new captain and agreed to by the crew. By these written agreements, crews allocated authority, distributed plunder, food, and other resources, and enforced discipline.11 These arrangements made the captain the creature of his crew, or, as Captain Charles Johnson put it, “They permit him to be Captain, on Condition, that they may be Captain over him.”12
Demanding someone both bold of temper and skilled in navigation, the men elected their leader. They wanted leadership by example, not leadership by ascribed status and hierarchy. They therefore gave the captain few privileges; he “or any other Officer is allowed no more [food] than another man, nay, the Captain cannot keep his Cabbin to himself.”13 Some pirates “messed with the Captain, but withal no Body look’d on it, as a Mark of Favour, or Distinction, for every one came and eat and drank with him at their Humour.” A merchant captain held captive by pirates noted with displeasure that crew members slept on the ship wherever they pleased, “the Captain himself not being allowed a Bed.” Pirates took “the liberty of ranging all over the ship,” a practice called “laying rough.” The determined reorganization of space and privilege aboard the ship was crucial to the remaking of maritime social relations.14
The crew granted the captain unquestioned authority “in fighting, chasing, or being chased,” but “in all other Matters whatsoever” he was “governed by a Majority.”15 A scandalized merchant captain noted, “The Captain seems to have no Manner of Command, but in time of Chace or Engaging, then [he] is absolute.” As the majority elected, so did it depose. Captains were snatched from their positions for cowardice, cruelty, or refusing “to take and plunder English Vessels.”16 One captain incurred the class-conscious wrath of his crew for being too “Gentleman-like.”17 Occasionally, a despotic captain was summarily executed. Recall Walter Kennedy’s comment that most sea robbers, “having suffered formerly from the ill-treatment of their officers, provided carefully against any such evil” once they arranged their own command. The democratic selection of officers stood in stark, telling contrast to the near-dictatorial arrangement of command in the merchant service and Royal Navy.18
To prevent the misuse of authority, pirates elected an officer called the quartermaster, whose powers counterbalanced those of the captain. William Snelgrave explained that the quartermaster “has the general Inspection of all Affairs, and often controuls the Captain’s Orders: This Person is also to be the first Man in boarding any Ship they shall attack; or go in the Boat in any desperate Enterprize.” Another prisoner, Captain Richard Hawkins, called the quartermaster the “chief Director” of the pirate ship. Captain Charles Johnson wrote, “The Quarter-Master’s Opinion is like the Mufti’s among the Turks; the Captain can undertake nothing which the Quarter-Master does not approve. We may say, the Quarter-Master is an humble Imitation of the Roman Tribune of the People; he speaks for, and looks after the Interest of the Crew.” Johnson also called the quartermaster a “civil Magistrate” and a “prime minister.” Like a mufti, the quartermaster was the keeper of pirate tradition, the one who issued final judgments about cultural practice. Like a tribune (originally, the leader of a tribe) in ancient Rome, he protected the people from the powerful, the pleb
eians from the patricians. The quartermaster, who was considered not an officer in the merchant service but rather just a “smart” (that is, knowledgeable, experienced) seaman, was elevated among the pirates to a supremely valued position of trust, authority, and power.19
One of the quartermaster’s main purposes was to prevent the galling and divisive use of privilege and preferment that characterized the distribution of “the necessaries of life” in other maritime occupations. He dispensed food among the crew equally and fairly, an especially important practice when provisions were scarce and the crew on short allowance. “Then they put all under the care of their Quarter-master, who discharges all things with an Equality to them all, every Man and Boy faring alike,” wrote seaman Clement Downing.20 As the most trusted man on board the ship, the quartermaster was placed in charge of all booty, from its initial capture, to its transit and storage aboard the pirate ship, to its disbursement to the crew. This responsibility began with the selection and organization of the boarding party that would attack a prospective prize or board a vessel that had already surrendered. Since members of the boarding party got special privileges—a choice of the best weapon on board (usually a pistol) or a new shift of clothes—the men sometimes “tangled among themselves” for the right to go aboard. The quartermaster therefore had to regulate access in the fairest way possible. On some ships the quartermasters kept “watchbills,” or lists, so as to give everyone an equal chance to board prize vessels. On others they simply called out, “Who will go on board?” and selected the party from among the volunteers; newcomers to the crew were usually excluded. At times the volunteers were so numerous that they almost sank the boats.21