Welcome back to part two of our double episode on the Golden Age of piracy. If you haven't listened to part one yet, then I recommend you go back and listen to that first.
Ala Matina penal Oh, bela child, bela child, Bela Chichi Chi Lamatino.
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Last episode, we looked at the world that gave rise to the Golden Age of piracy, brutal working conditions, exploitation, and the same who chose to fight back by creating a new social order at sea.
They took to the open seas, far away from authority of any kind, declaring war on the world They came from.
Pirates depended on the great expanses of waters and seas oceans because they were very hard for the navies of the world to police.
But when the whole world is against you, where do you go?
Because you can't stay at sea forever. You have to go ashore. You have to get food, you have to get the barnacle scraped off the side of the vessel. You need to have a place you can go.
Though the imperial powers of the day had their grip on much of the world, there were some places where they were weak and their resources were stretched. Then.
For example, on some of the smaller Caribbean islands and lesser ports in Cuba or Puerto Rico or Sandamang, some of the bigger islands of the Caribbean, there were small ports. And the reason these ports were attractive was because there were usually petty merchants, you know, not the wealthy people who you know, were attached to the to the British government, but petty merchants who would be very glad to get the pirates' prizes, and they would let them have it for a very cheap price.
Pirates established bases all along the Atlantic, on the coast of North America, parts of West Africa, and especially the Indian Ocean. Madagascar in particular, was one of the more notorious pirate haunts.
In the Bahamas, a pirate stronghold called the Republic of Pirates was established from roughly seventeen oh six to seventeen eighteen. It was a self governed, anarchistic pirate utopia where famous pirates like Blackbeard and Anne Bonnie operated outside of imperial rule and traditional hierarchies.
The republic was a base from where pirates could raid merchant ships and disrupt trade.
In places like these, pirates established trading networks with merchants who had no loyalty to any empire, just a willingness to do business.
And of course, pirates also had popular followings in these smaller ports because they would come ashore flush with money and they were going to spend it and give it away, and they would sometimes free enslaved people and free indentured servants, and they would come back to the ship with them.
Most people love to see a pirate ship roll into town. For many Amantipaida, a party or even a shot at a new life.
I've argued these pirate ships are like floating maroon communities, you know, the maroon communities made up of people who escaped the plantation system and move, for example, into the Blue Mountains of Jamaica or some other inaccessible place where they can build These very different social worlds separate from the plantation.
Marcus describes pirate ships as a kind of autonomous zone outside the reach of kings and empires, operating on their own rules.
It's a place where the people who are essentially refugees of the capitalist shipping industry can build their own world in ways like maroons could do on land, in forests, on mountains, and the sea is a very similar kind of place.
Not to mention, the kinds of sailors who ended up becoming pirates were often the most skilled ones.
And you know, once they're in control of those ships, they can sail them better than anybody else. It's very hard to capture them, so their skill is also related to their issue of freedom. But slowly the authorities do kind of cut off their contacts in different landed societies and makes it easier to capture them.
And the reason the authorities of the day put so much effort into trying to capture pirates was that in building a more egalitarian society for themselves, they post a legitimate threat to the status quo.
The pirates of the third generation seventeen teens in seventeen twenties captured thousands of merchant ships. This created a massive crisis in this very lucrative world of global trade.
Marcus says in the seventeen teens. In seventeen twenties, maritime insurance rates skyrocketed.
In some cases, insurance rates doubled or even tripled, and.
In places like the Caribbean and West Africa, insurance rates could be as high as fifteen to thirty percent of a ship's total value.
And that reflected the power of pirates directly, that they were capturing so many ships. It was so dangerous that these insurance houses in the metropolis in London and Paris, wherever they were, they were very keenly aware of it, and they were very worried about all the risks. So there is a major disruption of the capitalist trading system.
Unlike financial crises caused by capitalism's own contradiction, this was something else entirely.
This is a human creation. In other words, this is not one of those crises of overproduction or you know, the things that are irrational in the way that capitalism works. This is poor people banding together and fighting back and creating massive problems for the architects of the world economy. And as you would expect, they come down with great violence on the heads of these people who are disrupting their sources of income and profits.
Pirates not only threatened the global economy, but a way of living that was the exact opposite of their formally oppressive existence on navy and merchant.
Vessels, and they defied the social hierarchies of the day, fully aware that their decision to turn pirate would come with consequences.
But they didn't care. Freedom was more important to them.
These common sailors, most of whom will never know, make this decision to cross the line to become pirates. They live very well. For as long as they live. They feast all the time, they drink, elect their own leaders. They divide up everything equally. Many of them know that they're going to die. And this is another thing, you know, this Jolly Roger. There's a sense of humor among the pirates,
which is really it's gallows humor. They know they're going to die as long as they stick with it, and most of them stick with it till the end.
In Marcus's book, he talks at length about the sense of humor pirates had in light of this awareness that their freedom would likely be short lived.
A group of pirates captured a ship that was carrying proclamations of the king, these big bundles of you know, broadsides, and oddly enough, the broadside was offering a forgiveness of crimes to pirates who would come in and accept the king's pardon and then go straight join the royal navy or do something like that. So the pirates have plundered this ship and they say, give us, give us all those proclamations, and the merchants, the merchant captain says, why
do you want those? And they say, we're in need of toilet paper, and so they can't think of any better way than to use the king's proclamation for that purpose, so that there is that sense of humor. But again this is an instance where ordinary working people create a crisis of the world economy.
That rebellious spirit shaped everything about a life aboard a pirate ship, including their infamous love of merriments. Music, dancing, sex, and storytelling. Weren't just ways to pass time. They were essential to morale. Reum flowed freely, and the crew lived by their own.
Rules, and those rules extended beyond partying. Pirate ships have their own systems for survival, ones that prioritize fairness and collective care, as we covered in Part one. Unlike merchant or navy ships, where captains held unchecked power, pirate crews elected their leaders democratically. The loot capture during raids was also divided equitably among the crew, regardless of their rank or role on the ship.
A captain could be voted out at any time, and the quartermaster made sure no one abused their authority, and when pirates got injured, they weren't left behind.
There's even an argument to be made that pirates established the first social security system.
In the popular imagination, pirates are often depicted with things like eye patches, pig legs, and hooks for hands, and that may not be entirely accurate, but Marcus says it does get to an essential truth.
Being a sailor on any kind of vessel was a dangerous line of work, and it often resulted in getting aimed or killed.
Pirates accommodated for this. Many of their charters contain rules that required the sailors to put a portion of all plunder toward a common fund.
And that fund was used to provide for in or disabled crewmates.
Even more than that, those who became disabled on the job weren't discriminated against, and on a couple occasions even rose to the rank of captain.
Maimed pirates were guaranteed food and drink, among other things as part of this makeshift welfare system and a strong sense of solidarity and mutual support.
One notable example of the determination pirates had to care for one another comes in April seventeen seventeen, when Blackbeard and his crew blockaded the city of Charleston until they were able to buy medical supplies necessary to treat their sick and wounded.
One South Carolinian wrote of this blockade, quote, the trade of this place was totally interrupted, and added that the entire province was in quote a great terror.
In this way, the pirate's disruption of trade and the global economy went beyond their desire to buck the system and declare war on the whole world.
Their disruption was often for the express purpose of what people might now call mutual aid.
This culture of autonomous, democratic control over their own shipps, as well as their organization of their social hierarchy, arose out of a long fought battle during the sixteen forties and fifties, before the so called Golden Age of piracy.
You may remember from our first episode that prior to this era of piracy, privateers and buccaneers laid the groundwork for the more proletarian crews that made up the Golden Age.
As these mercenaries waged war against Spain on behalf of the upper classes of England, France and the Netherlands, they were also building their more egalitarian tradition.
At the time, it was known as the Jamaica discipline or the law of privateers. It was considered the antithesis of discipline and law, and was rooted in what Marcus calls a distinctive conception of justice and a class hostility to shipmasters, owners and gentlemen adventurers.
It was based on the democratic control of authority as well as provision for the injured, and it was modeled after a fictional peasant utopia called the Land of Cocaine, where work had been abolished and property redistributed.
Jamika discipline was shaped by the harsh working conditions of the time and had a few basic tenets.
One a sense of justice that reimagined the brutal and hierarchical systems of merchant and navy ships. Pirates wanted to establish a more egalitarian and democratic order of things, as evidenced by the way they voted on just about everything.
Two class hostility. Pirates were former sailors, working people from the lower classes who had been exploited and mistreated all their lives. Their code was explicitly antagonistic toward the ruling classes.
Three, as we've discussed, provisions for the injured and a common fund to take care of pirates who had become disabled on the job.
Four democratic controls on authority. As we mentioned in episode one, captains and officers were elected by the crew. Their power was limited. There were methods of removing captains who abused their power, and most major decisions were put to a vote outside of times of battle when quick thinking was essential.
Marcus says, these ordinary working people came from all sorts of different backgrounds.
Pirate ships were motley cruz. This is a phrase that I've used quite a bit in my work because it captures both the multi ethnic and multi national nature of a lot of ships, not only pirate ships, merchant ships, naval ships. I mean, the maritime labor market is international from the fifteenth sixteenth century. You look at the people who accompanied Columbus and Magellan, and there are Africans and Italians and Greeks and all kinds of people.
This multinational coalition of sailors also comprised people of African descent.
One major reason why that would be is that pirates did not have racial criteria for joining their band. In other words, what they wanted to know basically two things. Are you committed to the pirate enterprise? And two can you fight? And if you answer yes to both of those and believe me, a person who was an escape ee from plantation society would be a very committed member of your pirate crew given what they would have to go back to.
Right, and many pirates of African descent played leading roles aboard their ships, and.
That's because quite a few of them we now know, had military training back in Africa. This is very important. So when you know how to fight, when you know how to use a gun, when you have military discipline, this is a very attractive thing for allowing people to come on board the ships. So that's also a leveling sort of thing.
Pirate ships were one of the only places in the Western hemisphere at the time that black men could attain power and money. Many black pirates were escaped slaves, and one of the most famous of these was a man known as Black Caesar. Legend has it that he was an African chieftain who evaded capture by slavers multiple times
through his strength and cunning, but was eventually kidnapped. The slave ship that was transporting him to the America's encountered a hurricane, and he and a friend escaped in a rowboat during the chaos. Black Caesar went on to raid ships in the Florida Keys for almost a decade before joining Blackbeard's crew.
Now there are also women pirates, and this is crucial. Now there aren't a lot of them, there are probably quite a few more than we know, because there were a lot of women in this period who dressed as men and went to sea or went to war. It was very common. Two women who were very famous in their own day, and Bonnie and Mary Reid were as tough and as good a fighter as any male sailor.
Marcus says at one point Bonnie and Reid actually ended up on the same ship, and.
The story of how they were captured is interesting because as often happened. A lot of the pirates seize their freedom to get drunk, and so when a naval vessel comes near, it turns out a lot of Anne and Mary's shipmates are drunk, and so they run down into the hold of the vessel to hide. Is if that's going to help them, And so Anne and Mary and one other pirate they stay on the main deck. They're firing the cannon and try to keep the naval vessel
away from them. They don't succeed. They're captured. They're all taken into Jamaica to be hanged. Anne and Mary are not hanged because they're both.
Pregnant, or at least they claimed to be.
And British law at that time did not permit the hanging of pregnant women. So at the gallows, and this will give you a pretty good idea of Anne Bonnie's spirit.
At the gallows. Jack Rackham, her lover, who was the captain of the vessel and who had gone down in the hole to hide, is standing there with a rope around his neck, and he looks at Anne and she's not giving him a sympathetic look, and Jack Calico Jack says, an, don't look at me that way, and Anne was reported to have said, Jack, if you had fought like a man, you wouldn't now be hanged like a dog. So this was Anne Bonnie's toughness. Mary Reid was every bit it's tough.
And though it was less common than their forward thinking gender and racial attitudes, the pirate ship even allowed for the kinds of sexual relationships that were prohibited amongst polite society.
It was just a freer place. And I find it fascinating that even though in all other maritime enterprises sexual contact between men is criminalized and ruthlessly punished, none of the articles for pirate ships mentioned this as an issue at all. So we don't have a lot of evidence about what happened on pirate ships, but we do know that they were freer places in that regard, as in almost all others.
But that freedom came with the price. The authorities of the day did everything they could do not only capture and execute pirates, but make examples out of them.
The government of England has long been, as my friend Peter Liinbach calls it a fanatocracy, that you rule people by killing them, you rule people by public executions. So in every port city. Anytime a group of pirates were captured, there would be a show trial, and there would be a highly public spectacle of execution, because again they wanted to send a message to common sailors who were joining these pirate ships.
Around one in ten pirates met their fate at the gallows. The dead bodies of executed pirates were often left hanging outside of ports, rotting in the sun, a brutal warning to anyone tempted to follow their path.
It sends the message this is what happens if you defy the existing order.
Or if you get in the way of the ruling class accumulating more wealth.
But sometimes it didn't work out the way the authorities wanted it to, because these pirates would seize the moment of their own execution to continue their critique of the way they were treated as common sailors.
Many pirates face the gallows without fear. Some use their final moments to call out the injustice that had driven them to piracy in the first place.
One of the most famous examples was William Fly, a notorious pirate who approached his execution in seventeen twenty six with complete disdain.
He's going to be hanged. The famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather keeps talking to him, trying to get him to convert right, to admit that what he had done was wrong, and William Fly just completely refused. He's having none of it. He gets on the gallows and he makes a speech in which he says to all the ship captains out there in the audience, treat your sailors well, or this is going to happen, right. And this guy Fly had
so much confidence in himself and his message. When he got up on the gallows and the hangman put the note the noose around his neck, William Fly took it off and said, you don't even know how to tie a proper noose, do you. And of course sailors who worked with rope all the time at sea were experts in tying knots. So his Fly actually retied the knot that would go around his neck, just to show them that he wasn't afraid. He was going to die game, and he was going to die cursing the powers that be.
The pirates who pulled these kinds of stunts at the gallows did so knowing full well that a large number of people in the crowd were actually on their side.
That's why the authorities didn't just stage these public executions. They had large numbers of armed soldiers to prevent the crowd from rescuing people from the gallows, and that did happen a couple of times. It happened once for sure in Jamaica, where a rowdy mob went and rescued the pirate before he was hanged.
The pirates responded to the terror of the ruling class in kind.
In the last episode, Marcus talked about how pirates used the Jolly Roger to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies.
But he also says many pirates use their senses of humor, absurdity, and their flair for the dramatic to turn that fear back on the ruling class.
Pirates understood the drama of social life, and one who understood it very well was a man named Edward Teach,
also known as Blackbeard. He was a huge man, six foot eight or six foot nine in the average in the time when most people were about five foot six, and he would do things like when he went into battle, he had this big long black Beard He would take sparklers and put them in his beard and his hair and then set them on fire so that he had this satanic halo around his head, which was absolutely terrifying to everybody, because you know, his idea was, you're afraid
of satanic imagery. Okay, I'm that I am your greatest nightmare. Right. So he's he's playing this part right, and it's a part meant to terrify, if not terrorize, your enemies.
Marcus says, this dynamic of terror, this back and forth, is essential to understanding the Golden Age of piracy.
But we do have to add one more terror to this story, which is the terror that ship captains used as they tried to control common sailors in their workplaces. That in some ways is the original terror, right, That's the terror against which piracy grew up. So there is this It's a dialectic, or almost a trialectic of terror
at three different levels. And the pirates were they understood their role, and they wanted to be remembered as heroes, as people who in that moment of execution, had the courage to stand up to the authorities.
This struggle between what Marcus calls the two terrors would eventually bring the Golden Age of piracy to an end.
But then the British government passed a new law in seventeen twenty one that said, anyone who cooperates with pirates, and they're targeting these petty merchants who would bind, sell and trade with them. Anyone who cooperates with pirates is subject to the same punished schmuts as pirates themselves, meaning we will hang you too.
The authorities thought that if they could separate pirates from their basis of support, they wouldn't have the resources to continue disrupting trade.
Hundreds and hundreds of pirates were hanged, and essentially the struggle was forced back down below decks. In other words, you couldn't really capture pirate ships anymore. You didn't have a place where you could take them to refit. The smaller merchants or the allies that you had were terrified now of the government that they too were going to be hanged. So what happened was that piracy was I won't say eliminated, but reduced to a very large extent.
But stamping out piracy didn't mean stamping out rebellion. The fight against exploitation just found new battlegrounds.
The defeat, you might say, of this generation of pirates forced people into other forms of resists. One of the things that I noticed, which was quite fascinating and doing my research, is that in the period after piracy declines, the murder rate between captains and common sailors skyrockets. So this is kind of displaced into another kind of more individual violence.
In addition to individual acts of rebellion, collective resistance also took shape. A few decades later. In seventeen sixty eight, the word strike was first used to describe work protests, when sailors struck down the sales of their ships in order to create a work stoppage.
Sailors are natural born storytellers. Storytelling is a maritime art because you know, when you're at sea and you're separated from loved ones and your ship is under sail, there's not that much to do, so people tell stories. So these pirates became an endless source of stories. Stories of courage, stories of resistance, stories of standing up to the authorities, stories of thumbing your nose at them when you're on the gallows.
By the seventeen thirties, the golden age of piracy was over. Naval patrols, intensified punishments, grew harsher, and colonial powers worked together to stamp out piracy. The world had changed and there was no longer room for pirates.
In fact, some of the pirates we talked about in Part one didn't make it out of the Golden Age alive.
Blackbeard was hunted down and killed in battle in seventeen eighteen. Black Caesar was a bored Blackbeard ship at the time, and was hanged in Virginia in seventeen eighteen.
Bartholemew Roberts, one of the most successful pirates of all time, was shot and killed. In seventeen twenty.
Two, William Kidd was hanged in London, his body left to rot over the Thames as a warning.
Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid avoided execution by claiming to be pregnant. As Marcus said.
Earlier, Read died in prison, and Bonding's fate remains unknown.
But the legends of these pirates didn't die with them. They reappeared elsewhere, on stage and paintings and in the pages of books and perpetuity.
Three hundred years later, we're still thinking, talking, and daydreaming about them.
We remember the pirates, we remember their names. People love pirates today. We don't remember the people who killed them. So in a very real sense, the pirates have kind of won that. They sort of lost the battle, but won the war. And if the war is for a sense of justice, then then pirates have been the long term winners. And all this because people love them as folk heroes. They still do. I mean, I've been working on pirates off and on for decades, and everywhere I
go around the world it's the same. People are just fascinated by them, and they're especially inspired by their courage. So that's a way in which they weren't defeated.
Ala Martina Penala oh bela Chile, Bela Chile, Bela chi Cho chow Alamatino.
That brings us to the end of our double episode. Thanks to Marcus Reddicker for taking the time to talk to us.
We definitely recommend you get a copy of Marcus's book Villains of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, as well as his graphic novel under the banner of King Death Pirates of the Atlantic, a graphic novel with David Lester, both available on the links in the show notes.
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Our theme tune is Bella Chow. Thanks for permission to use it from Disky del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. This episode was written by me Audrey Kamp.
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.
By luck Chou by luck Out, by luck Out John no matamba can be said Tony