E103: Pirates, part 1

The year is seventeen twenty five. You're a sailor chopped on a merchant ship, and during backbreaking work and brutal conditions, your quarters, cramped and crawling with disease, are shared with enslaved people, Your wages paltry if they ever come, and the whip is never far from reach.

Then over the horizon a ship emerges, It's black flag billowing in the wind. As it closes in, you see them, a crew of outlaws, men and women of every race, clad and stolen finery and ragged silks. They shout, laugh and rifle through cargo. There's no fear in their faces, only defiance, only freedom.

One of them calls to you, why break your back for a captain who sees you as nothing? Take your share, take your life.

You have a choice, stay and die defending the profits of your employers, or leap into a life of rebellion on the high seas.

This is working class history.

Ala Martina ha Oh, bela child, bela child, bela child, Chochio Lamatino.

Before we get started, you may have noticed there's a new voice with me today who also doesn't have a British accent. My friend and colleague Audrey is here and I want to let her introduce herself.

Hi. I'm Audre Kemp. I'm a journalist and community organizer. I've spent years covering labor and power, and I'm excited to dive into this story with you all.

And as always, our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise, and other For example, our patreons of orders can listen to both parts of this double episode without ads. Now join us or find out more at patreon dot com slash working Class history link in the show notes.

Yes, greetings, my name is Marcus Reddicker, and I am the author of a book called Villains of All Nations. Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, published by Beacon Press in two thousand and four.

Marcus describes in his book that to the authorities of their time, pirates were seen as dangerous outlaws. The term pirate comes from a Greek word meaning one who attacks ships, and Roman law labeled them quote enemies of all mankind.

By the early eighteenth century, piracy had become a crisis for European empires. During this time, an estimated five thousand to ten thousand pirates prowled the seas, seizing hundreds of merchant ships, looting cargo and disrupting trades so severely that insurance rates skyrocketed and navy scrambled to hunt them down.

And they didn't just take ships, they took riches that rivaled the fortunes of entire colonies.

One of the most legendary pirate raids took place in seventeen twenty one, when John Taylor and Olivier le Vassel seized the Portuguese treasure ship Nosus Sonora Dicabo off the coast of Yennom Island. The hall diamonds, gold, and other treasures worth around two hundred million US dollars in today's currency, making it one of the richest pirate captures in history.

But piracy wasn't just about plunder. It was a response to the brutal conditions of early capitalism.

Global trade enriched merchants and shipowners, but sailors were left behind. They were underpaid, overworked, and eventually disposable.

Many turned to piracy not just to survive, but to escape a system that had abandoned them.

The pirates strived to build something new, a society where they elected their own leaders, shared their plunder equally, and lived on their own terms.

And their rebellion would define what we now call the Golden Age of Piracy, spanning from the sixteen fifties to the seventeen thirties. During this era, figures like Blackbeard, Bartholomew Blackbart, Roberts, and Anne Bonnie made their names. Roberts, who's one of the most successful pirates ever, captured over four hundred ships throughout his career.

Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid, both women fought alongside their crewmates, disguising themselves in men's clothing to claim their place in battle and defy the gender norms of their time.

And then there was Blackbeard, who set his own beard on fire to terrify his enemies.

The Golden Age of Piracy looms very large in the global imagination, but in fact it's not actually a single unitary thing. There were three distinct generations of pirates within the Golden Age. The first was in the sixteen sixties and sixteen seventies. An emblematic figure here is Sir Henry Morgan, and in fact he stole so much silver from the Spanish and took it to Jamaica that he was knighted. He became Sir Henry Morgan and became Lieutenant governor of this incipient slave colony.

Over time, piracy evolved, the motivations, targets, and even the way pirates operated changed from one generation to the next.

The first generation of pirates were called buccaneers, which operated primarily in the Caribbean during the mid seventeenth century.

And that word comes from a style of capturing, cooking, and eating wild game on the various Caribbean islands on something that the French called a bucan, and so they became buccaneers because many of the early buccaneers lived this kind of roving life from one island to another.

The buccaneers mainly targeted the Spanish Empire, stealing enormous wealth from the Spanish crown and weakening Spain's grip on the New World. England saw an opportunity, granting privateers legal cover to attack Spanish vessels.

The second generation is where you see a change in the attitude from above. This is the generation of the sixteen nineties. There are two emblematic figures for this generation. One is Henry Avery, who captured a part of the treasure fleet of one of the rulers of India and got away with a massive heist of jewels and wealth, and he was never caught, so Henry Avery became kind of a folk hero.

Another key figure of this era was William Kidd, born in Dundee, Scotland in sixteen fifty four. Kid made a name for himself as a privateer in New York. In sixteen ninety five, he got a royal commission to hunt down pirates and enemy ships in the Indian Ocean as part of England's plan to protect its trade routes.

But when he got there, far beyond the reach of royal authority, he actually turned pirate himself, and this was a very big embarrassment for some of his wealthy English merchant backers. So he eventually was brought back to London and in an act that symbolized the changing attitude of the English government towards piracy, William Kidd was hanged. So from now on, piracy is not going to be acceptable.

The reason for these changing attitudes about piracy, like most things in history, was money.

In the late seventeenth century, one of the things that's happening is that the Caribbean colonies of England and other countries are producing massive amounts of sugar. The sugar is emerging as a very important commodity in the economy of Atlantic capitalism.

By seventeen hundred, piracy had become a massive thorn in the side of colonial powers like England, France, and Spain. Pirate's targeted show the backbone of the colonial economy, driving up security and insurance costs and causing disruptions so severe that the losses outweighed the cost of competing with one another.

Faced with a shured threat, these powers found less incentive to fight each other with privateers and instead unite it against the common enemy, ushering in a new era of piracy.

So the third generation of pirates are active in the seventeen teens and seventeen twenties, and what's especially important about them is that there are no longer any wealthy people involved.

It was during this new proletarian, working class era of piracy when pirates started to see their very existence as a rebellion against the hierarchies of capital and began building their own, more egalitarian system. Their ships became spaces of democracy, fairness, and unity, directly challenging the systems they had escaped, and.

This is one of the things that they were known for, and they were known for this in their own day. In other words, the elites who are hunting them down to kill them are going after them not only because they disrupted the commerce which was so valuable to these European imperial powers, but also because they posed a challenge to the standard way of running a ship.

Life aboard a pirate ship existed in stark contrast to other more common jobs at sea, like being in the navy or sailing aboard a merchant vessel.

So that the Royal Navy, for example, was very far from democratic. It was a violent, brutal, disciplinary regime. Similarly, the merchant shipping industry captains had tremendously concentrated powers, and pirates, in their democratic and egalitarian ways, posed real challenges to those other ways of organizing maritime labor.

And the pirate's ability to not only imagine a better world for themselves, but to actually try and build one captured the imagination of the public as well.

So this is the last generation of the Golden Age. It's dramatic. It was something that everybody wanted to read about. Whenever the authorities captured a group of pirates, they would be hangings that were public spectacles, but vast numbers of people would turn out, many of them to cheer the pirates because they were working class heroes.

But in order to understand what makes the piracy of the eighteenth century so radical, first we have to understand transatlantic trade and the burgeoning capitalism of the sixteenth century.

This is the period in which England is leading the way and moving out into the world, actually following Spain, who had a great deal of success in extracting gold and silver from the indigenous peoples and their lands in the Americas. But along come the Dutch and the English. They didn't find gold and silver, but they found something even better. They found things like sugar and tobacco and rice and these commodities that are going to be the lifeblood of the Atlantic economy.

A lot of historians say the most important machine to the rise of capitalism is a steam engine, but Marcus has a different theory.

It's the tall ship, which is actually a piece of technology that permitted Europe to conquer the rest of the world and to create these vast bluewater empires. You know, the maritime powers in the sixteenth seventeenth, eighteenth century occupy only a tiny part of the Eurasian land mass on the western end. But think about where those languages are spoken today, English, French, Dutch, Spanish. These are global languages and this reflects the power of those ships as instruments of conquest.

And those ships can't sail around the world without the labor of highly skilled and trained sailors who could handle everything from navigation and rigging to carpentry. Their expertise kept the ships running and the trade routes alive.

The ships don't sail by themselves. There's a labor issue here. So in this context, the growth of these empires and the growth of capitalism as a system has several crucial components. One of these is what Marks called primitive accumulation of capital, by that meaning the separation of workers from their means of subsistence. This happens through the enclosure movement in England.

Marcus explains that the plantation system central to global trade networks was responsible for the largest plant accumulation of wealth the world had ever seen. The system depended on the exploitation of millions of enslaved Africans, funneling immense wealth into the hands of a few. That wealth in turn financed further colonial expansion and the growth of European industries.

So we're talking talking about massive amounts of money to be taken back to Europe plunder, but also the regular profits of production for the world market the plantation system produces for the world market. That's just the way it works.

By seventeen hundred. European empires had built vast wealth through plundered resources and slave labor, but they were constantly at war with each other, competing for control.

There are a series of Anglo Dutch wars in the seventeenth century, and in seventeen oh two there breaks out was called the War of Spanish Succession, and a fair amount of this war is about who will control the slave trade.

This war, which lasted from seventeen oh two to seventeen thirteen, pulled in major European powers like France, Britain, and the Dutch Republic, all vying for dominance.

And during that time, one of the ways that European powers waged war against each other is through something called privateering, and by that is meant a private merchant ship is geared out as a vessel of war and then given a bill of mark by a king or his minions to wage war on behalf of the king against the king's enemies, so to attack Spanish ships if you're English, or even French ships. That is essentially legal piracy.

These privateers made a lot of money, but.

When the war comes to an end, two things happen that are really important to understanding the rise of piracy. First, all those privateers are demobilized. In other words, once there's peacetime, the king can't give out these letters of mark there's no legal piracy going on. And secondly, the big navies of these European empires also demobilized, so thousands of sailors

That left the port cities of the Atlantic. Teaming was skilled unemployed sailors, and.

The ruling class responded to this labor surplus the way it always does.

This army of the unemployed has very palpable impact on the way sailors who do have jobs are treated. They are treated much worse. They are treated more violently by the captains. Their wages go down. Wartime wages for sailors are pretty decent, but once there's this massive glut of labor, the wages come way down to a third of the level of wartime. The quality of food declines, the use of the lash increases.

Thousands of seasoned sailors, many of them former privateers, were broke, angry and out of options, so they did what they knew best. They took to the sea. But this time they weren't sailing under a king's banner. They were sailing under the black flag.

Pirates in the third generation of the Golden Age were just ordinary working sailors. They were not aristocrats who had lost their honor and go out to sea to marry the colonial governor's daughter. You know, it's nothing like that. It's just ordinary working people whose lives are really difficult, especially in this period after the War of Spanish.

Succession, there were two primary ways a sailor could become a pirate around this time.

The way that most people think that you become a pirate is through mutiny. That you basically organize an opposition within a ship a merchant ship almost always, and you rise up and you capture the ship, you create your own black flag, and you sail off toward the horizon as a new pirate crew. But that's probably a relatively small percentage of the people who become pirates.

More often, however, pirates didn't have to take over a ship. They just had to capture one, and for mistreated navy or merchant sailors this could be an opportunity, and.

When pirates captured a prize vessel, they would perform a very interesting ritual. They would come on board, and they wouldn't start plundering right away. They would call all the sailors up on deck, the sailors of the captured ship. They would bring the captain up on deck to face those sailors.

And then the pirates, all of whom used to be common sailors like the ones aboard the captured ship, and all of whom had been whipped, starved, and cheated out of their wages by merchant or navy. Captains would ask a question that would change the fate of everyone on board.

How does your captain treat you?

And if they say, our captain treats us very badly. He doesn't pay us our proper wages, he doesn't give us the food we're supposed to get, and worst of all, he beats us all the time. If sailors step forward and say that in that moment, when the pirates have just captured their ship, that captain is in a lot of trouble. Because pirates will act as avengers for their seafaring brothers, and they will give that captain a whipping, usually in the very place where he would tie up

But the pirates weren't just out for vengeance. They had a system, a rough kind of justice.

If a sailor should step forward and said, our captain is a decent man. He treats us well, he pays us our wages. In that case, the pirates would not only not punish the captain, they might give him money.

One famous example of this was William Snellgrave, a merchant captain captured by pirates in seventeen nineteen off the coast of Sierra Leone. Despite being severely injured in the attack, he was spared, likely because his crew respected.

Him, and the pirates gave him money and said, go home to London and show the merchants what happens when a captain treats his sailors well. So they would reward the decent captains, and they would punish the much more numerous violent captains.

And once the captain's fate was decided, the Pirates turned to the rest of the crew with another offer.

The pirates when they're getting ready to depart the prize ship, they said, okay, boys, who's with us? Do you want to come on board and join the pirate ship? And believe me, if you spoke out a bit against your captain, you had better go with the pirates because there was going to be trouble if you didn't. So this is the way they recruited people by doing things in defense of the common sailor, and also in telling them, look, you're going to join a ship where we vote on everything.

From that moment on, the pirates and whoever chose to join them would sail off into the sunset and the open sea out there.

No captains or merchants had any power over them. They were miles away, not only from the authority of their former employers, but also from the institutions that reproduce the has seen social order churches, governments, families, et cetera.

They were free to create a new order, one that worked on their own terms.

They just get to decide for themselves how they want to run the ship, what do they do, how do they do it. Do they do it in the same way as the Royal Navy and the merchant shipping industry, And the answer resoundingly is no, they didn't do it that way. They created a very different kind of social order.

Of course, some things had to say the same.

As ship still needed someone who could read charts, navigate the seas, and keep them on course.

You've got to have that. If you don't have that, the ship doesn't work properly. So you've got to choose someone who has those skills. But even so, the pirates would elect the person they wanted to lead them. Okay, so now this is at a time Bear in mind, this is at a time when poor people like sailors had no democratic rights anywhere in the world. Okay, nowhere did they have this kind of power. Because in most

But even the best captains could abuse their power, so the pirates built in a safeguard.

They created a new position called the quartermaster, who would basically do two things. One keep an eye on the captain, make sure he doesn't abuse his power, and two divide up everything equally that they take when they capture prize vessels. And what's fascinating about this is that for that job, you're going to elect the most trustworthy person on the ship. It's the person you would trust to be fair to everybody and the person that you would trust to be

And they didn't stop there. Pirates elected officers for all sorts of roles.

In fact, they voted on just about everything.

One ship captain said, it's who was totally unaccustomed to this. He says, they're just constantly voting on everything. Where do we want to sail the ship, where's the best place to capture vessels? Who do we want to do this? Who do we want to do that? And the sovereign power was the crew as a collective. They had something called the Common Council, in which everybody had to vote. Everybody came out, they had debates. You know, some said let's go here, or they said let's go there, and

Democratic way of running the ship was crucial to pirate culture, and so was equality among the sailors.

And here you'd have to look at this in comparative perspective. A captain on a royal naval vessel would probably make sixty to eighty to one hundred times as much in pay as the lowest common sailor. For the captain of a merchant ship, it might be ten, twenty, thirty, forty times as much, depending on how much of the cargo the captain owned, and they frequently did own quite a bit of it. But pirates didn't operate that way. First of all, they abolished the wage. They said, we're not

Every crew member received at least one share.

Skilled workers like gunners, carpenters, or navigators earn slightly more due to the crucial roles they played on the ship.

A specialist might get one in a quarter or one and a half shares, but that was about the limit.

Look at the wage hierarchy, and look how the pirates have radically compressed it so that the distance between the top and the bottom is really minimal. And this, of course also appealed to the common sailor. They loved this idea. They loved the idea that the captain was not getting one hundred times as much as anybody else. So this

That radical rejection of class hierarchy wasn't just about wages. It showed up in how pirates carried themselves too.

Take Walter Kennedy for example. He came from a poor family in London, got by through burglary and pickpocketing, and eventually found his way to the Royal Navy. When he turned pirate, he made a name for himself by sharing loot equitably and refusing to follow the rigid social order of the time. People even called him the robin Hood of the Sea.

But Kennedy's class defiance didn't stop there. When he was captured and put on trial, he showed up wearing a powdered wig, a symbol of the elite he had spent his life fighting against. It was a final act of mockery, a pirate's way of thumbing his nose at the system, even in the face of death.

That defiance wasn't just personal, it was collective, and nothing symbolized that more than the flag they flew, the Jolly Roger.

Let's start with a name.

Jolly Roger had a specific meaning that came from the underworld, as it was often called in the port cities where people would speak a particular kind of language. It was called can't thieves can't. It was a very specialized vocabulary. And jolly is sort of well known, but Roger meant to copulate. Okay, to Roger, someone was to fuck them. So basically the Jolly Roger. The basic message of the Jolly Roger was fuck you. And I think this is kind of what they were trying to convey.

But beyond giving anyone who looked at it the middle finger, the symbolism of the Jolly Roger conveyed the pirate's ideals, especially in contrast to the world they had left behind.

Flags represent group identification with an idea or a set of principles. So you have flags of empires, for example, the Union Jack. What pirates began to do in the seventeen teens was to create their own flags. And this is you know, you've got to remember too, how important flags were to life at sea. This is how you signal from ship to ship, what you're doing, where you're going, who you are. Right there are all these banners and flags flying on every vessel.

And the significance of flags as symbols of empire and hegemony make the iconography of the jolly Roger that much more subversive.

Some people say that the origin of the pirate flag name jolly Roger comes from the French joles rouge.

Which means pretty red in French.

A lot of the early pirate flags were red, but it turns out black became the dominant color, and by the time we get into this third generation, almost all the pirate flags are black.

And against that black flag.

They choose the image of death, the death's head that could be a skull and crossbones, as it is now very commonly depicted, but in many cases, probably in most cases, it was an entire skeleton, as they called it, an anatomy, with a skull, and you could see all the bones of the body. And the skull was usually holding two things. It was holding in one hand an hourglass and in the other hand a sword or a spear or a dart.

Marcus says that on one level, these images are pretty straightforward.

Prize ship sees a pirate ship bearing down on them, up goes the jolly Roger, and you look at this image of death, and you see the weapon, and you see the hourglass, and what are you going to conclude? Would surrender or you will die, right, That's what they're That's what they're saying. They it's the black pirate flag is an instrument of terror. It's meant to terrify their prey so they won't fight back.

In contrary to popular belief, a pirate would almost always prefer the outcome.

Pirates would just always much prefer that people give up, And most most merchant ships did give up. They didn't want to fight these guys because they were very skillful. There were a lot more of them on a pirate ship, and you were going to lose. And if you piss them off by shooting at them, it's going to be worse for you when they capture you, that's for sure.

But beyond just surrender or die. Marcus also says there's a second layer of symbolism to the Jolly Roger.

And he says it speaks directly to the social order that all these pirates came from. Aboard naval and merchant ships.

Captains who kept logs of their voyages would frequently draw in their log a skull and a crossbone to indicate the death of a sailor. It's a fairly common practice. So what sailors did when they became pirates, they seized that symbolism of the skull and crossbones and put it on their flag. Right, we're inverting the meaning of this, Right,

A symbol of the death of a common sailor holds an hourglass and a sword.

There you go, death, violence, limited time. These are things that were really crucial to the lives of common sailors, and they put that on their banner, and then they fought back against those conditions under that manner. And so I think this is very revealing of their consciousness as workers, that these are the conditions we're in, and we're going to put this on the flag. We're going to have our own flag. You know, to hell with all those nation states. You know, we are free people and we

Alamatina a penal sata oh very lagi, very largile, very Largiuou.

That's all we've got time for in this episode. Join us in Part two, where we talk more about everyday life aboard a pirate chip, the rules pirates lived, by, the alliances they built, and how their fight for freedom ultimately led to their downfall.

Part two is available now for early listening for our supporters on Patreon.

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If you'd like to learn more about the Golden Age of piracy, check out the web page for this episode, where you'll find further reading and more. You can also get Marcus's book Fill of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates and the Golden Age, and.

His graphic novel under the Banner of King Death, Pirates of the Atlantic, a graphic novel with David Lester, and the links in the show note.

Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusamano, Nick Williams, and Old Norm.

Our theme tune is Bella Chow. Thanks for permission to use it from Disky dol Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. This episode was written by me Audrey Kemp.

And me Tyler Hill, produced by me Tyler Hill. Anyway, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.

Moon