Name:
Directions:
4 sentences
of summary about the article(s). Include the most important points. Your
summary should show that you read carefully and have a good understanding of
the articles.
3 sentences
of your personal response/opinion. What do you think about these readings?
2 quotes that
stand out (quotes can be important sentences or phrases written by the author).
Include a couple sentences on the significance of each quoted sentence/phrase. Why
did you choose it/what does it mean for this article?
1 question or
connection—several sentences about something you still wonder or don't
understand about this article, OR about something in the text you can connect
to.
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10
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9-8
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7-6
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5
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4-1
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All items in the 4/3/2/1 are
thoroughly completed.
Answers are all in complete sentences.
Answers show complete understanding of
the 4/3/2/1.
Student went above and beyond what was
expected (analysis & thoroughness).
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One
part of the assignment may not be thorough enough.
Answers are mostly in complete
sentences.
Answers show substantial understanding
of the question(s), but more analysis could lead to greater understanding.
Student met expectations of activity.
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More than half the assignment is
completed, but not analyzed thoroughly enough.
Answers show understanding of the
question(s), but they could use more detail, analysis, examples, and/or
connections.
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More than half the assignment is
incomplete.
Answers shows limited understanding of
the question(s), and needs a lot more detail and analysis.
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Assignment is either dreadfully
incomplete or needs significantly more detail and analysis.
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Name ________________________
What do the pirates of yore tell us about their
modern counterparts?
4 Sentence Summary:
3 Sentences of Personal Opinion:
2 Quotes and Why They Stand Out:
1 Question or Connection:
Bootylicious
What do the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts?
by Caleb
Crain September 7, 2009
Pirates had strict but unconventional codes of behavior,
and some historians claim them as early progressives—with democracy, economic
fairness, racial tolerance, and even health care.
On the evening of April 1, 1719, an English
slave ship came to anchor near the mouth of the Rokel River, off the coast of
what is now Sierra Leone. In the hold were linen and woollen goods that could
be traded for slaves, fava beans to feed them, and, for the officers, cheese,
butter, sugar, and Westphalia ham, as well as live geese, turkeys, ducks, and a
sow. The captain, a devout man named William Snelgrave, was apprehensive,
because the west coast of Africa was rife with pirates, who prized slave ships,
not only for their cargo but also for their size and sturdiness.
At eight o’clock, a watchman heard a rowboat. Snelgrave called for lanterns
and ordered twenty armed sailors on deck, and others down into the steerage,
where they could fire out of the ship’s portholes. He then hailed the
approaching boat, whose occupants replied that they had come from Barbados on a
ship with the soothing name Two Friends. But they were invisible in the dark,
and Snelgrave was mistrustful. Rightly so: soon after Snelgrave’s crew brought
him light, the strangers opened fire.
None of Snelgrave’s armed men were on deck yet, and when he called out for
those in the steerage to shoot, they didn’t. This was the first of several
mysteries that Snelgrave encountered during his experience with the pirates. He
went down to the steerage and found his men standing around, claiming that the
chest in which they stored their muskets and cutlasses was missing. Unopposed,
the pirates rushed aboard, firing guns and tossing primitive grenades. Reaching
the steerage, they asked who the captain was, and Snelgrave admitted, as he
later recalled in a memoir, that “I had been so till now.” How dare he order
his people to shoot, a pirate said, sticking a pistol into his chest. Snelgrave
brushed it away just before it went off, and the pirate crashed the butt of it
over his head. Climbing to the quarterdeck, Snelgrave was attacked by another
pirate, this time with a sword. “To avoid it I stooped so low, that the
Quarter-deck Rail received the Blow; and was cut in at least an inch deep,” he
wrote. This pirate, too, began pistol-whipping Snelgrave, until some of
Snelgrave’s crew cried out, “For God’s sake don’t kill our Captain, for we
never were with a better Man.” At this, the pirate left Snelgrave alone, and
the one who had tried to shoot him took his hand and promised that “my Life was
safe provided none of my People complained against me.” Here was a second
mystery: among pirates, the fate of rulers was up to the ruled.
Snelgrave spent a month in the company of the pirates, as they looted his
vessel, and he was able to solve at least one puzzle. The night the ship was
taken, his first mate, keen to join a pirate ship, had quietly countermanded
his orders, even telling the crew, a quarter of whom defected after the
surrender, that Snelgrave himself wanted to join the pirates. New mysteries
unfolded with the opportunity to study pirate character at first hand. The
pirates indulged themselves immoderately—literally washing the decks with
claret and brandy—yet they declined to take luxury seriously; one called
Snelgrave’s gold watch “a pretty Foot-ball” and gave it a kick. They insisted
that their true motive was not greed but justice. One pirate captain asserted
that “their Reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base
Merchants, and cruel Commanders of Ships.” Moreover, the pirate captains had
almost no special privileges, and slept on deck like their men, not in beds.
Pirate life seemed a medley of indulgence and strict equity, mockery and
idealism, anarchy and discipline. Snelgrave regretted that his observations of
them were “not so coherent as I could wish,” and could not decide what they
added up to.
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What if they added up to a picture of working-class heroes? In 1980, the
Marxist historian Christopher Hill, wondering what became of the king-beheading
spirit of the English Civil War, noted that when the monarchy was restored, in
1660, many radicals emigrated to the Caribbean. Their revolutionary idealism
may have fallen like a lit match into the islands’ population of paupers,
heretics, and transported felons. Elaborating Hill’s suggestion, the historian
Marcus Rediker spent the following decades researching pirate life and came to believe
that pirate society “built a better world”—one with vigorous democracy,
economic fairness, considerable racial tolerance, and even health care—in many
ways more praiseworthy than, say, the one that Snelgrave supported by slave
trading. True, pirates were thieves and torturers, but there was something
promising about their alternative to capitalism. Other scholars claimed pirates
as precursors of gay liberation and feminism. But, as pirate scholarship
flourished, so did dissent. In 1996, David Cordingly dismissed the idea of
black equality aboard pirate ships, pointing out that a number of pirates owned
black slaves, and warned against glamorizing criminals renowned among their
contemporaries for “their casual brutality.” Before long, the contending voices
of pirate studies had become a “cacophony,” according to one academic.
Meanwhile, the idea that pirates are in some way dissident, rather than merely
criminal, entered the mainstream. During the recent spate of pirate activity
off the coast of Somalia, one pirate told the Times, “We don’t consider
ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our
seas and dump waste in our seas.”
A brisk, clever new book, “The Invisible Hook” (Princeton; $24.95), by
Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a
child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps
when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly
challenging pirates’ leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent
espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but
from a desire for profit. “Ignoble pirate motives generated ‘enlightened’
outcomes,” Leeson writes. Whether this should comfort politicians on the left
or on the right turns out to be a subtle question.
There have probably been pirates for as long as people have travelled by
water, and their anarchic sense of humor dates back at least to the ancient
world. According to Plutarch, when pirates captured someone who declared
himself to be Roman they apologized profusely, even offering him a toga so that
other pirates wouldn’t make the same mistake. Once they got the Roman to
believe in their contrition, the pirates let a ladder down into the sea. He was
free to go, they told him, at which point “if he resisted they themselves threw
him overboard, and drowned him.”
Modern piracy has its origins in the wars that the great European powers
fought over trade in the centuries following the discovery of the New World.
Like Donald Rumsfeld, Renaissance monarchs seem to have believed in military
outsourcing, and they cheaply and quickly acquired navies by granting private
vessels, known as privateers, the right to raid enemy ships and pay themselves
out of the plunder, a share of which they were to pass along to the government.
If all went well—especially if the ships taken belonged to the Spanish, who
hauled a fortune in American gold and silver across the Atlantic twice a
year—the contracting government grew a little richer. So long as one of the
nations involved considered it legal, privateering wasn’t technically piracy,
but the Spanish liked to put the paperwork making this claim around the necks
of privateers that they hanged. The privateers themselves, according to a 1724
account, tended to “make very little Distinction betwixt the Lawfulness of one,
and the Unlawfulness of the other,” especially when peace intermittently
threatened to deprive them of an income. In December of 1670, for example,
Henry Morgan ignored a letter telling him that England had signed a treaty with
Spain in July and went on to sack the Spanish-owned city of Panama. Morgan had
scored princely sums elsewhere, however, so when he was eventually arrested and
sent to London, he was knighted and appointed deputy governor of Jamaica.
The men who sailed with Morgan were known as buccaneers. They were French
and English men who had gone native on Hispaniola, the island now occupied by
Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and on Tortuga, a tiny island to the north.
Their name came from a wooden frame, called a boucan by the Carib
Indians, on which they smoked wild boar and cattle. They were the ones who
developed the first pirate code of ethics, the Custom of the Coast, at the core
of which was an explicit agreement about the sharing of booty, power, and
responsibility called a chasse partie. Before attacking Panama, for
instance, the buccaneers stipulated that Morgan was to get a hundredth part of
the loot, with the rest divided into shares for the more than two thousand men
in the expedition: each captain under Morgan was to get eight shares, and each
man one share. They also allocated set-asides for professionals (two hundred
pesos for each surgeon, a hundred for each carpenter), incentive payments
(fifty to anyone who captured a Spanish flag, five to anyone who threw a
grenade into a fort), and compensations for injury (a hundred for a lost eye,
fifteen hundred for two legs). Pirates usually further agreed to maroon
pilferers, to give “good quarter” to any victim who asked, and to keep their
weapons clean. Sometimes they went so far as to forbid gambling and onboard
romance (“No Boy or Woman to be allowed amongst them,” one such contract read)
and to restrict late-night drinking to the deck.
Because criminal agreements have no legal force, it’s tempting to think of
pirate articles as quaint—if not misguided, considering how often they showed
up in court as evidence against their signatories. Leeson is at pains to show
the articles as a rational choice, enabling pirates to create a voluntary
association that was stable and orderly. By setting terms in advance, punishing
embezzlement harshly, and keeping the pay gap between captain and men low, the
articles reduced conflict over property claims. By limiting drinking and
requiring clean weapons, they curbed individual behaviors that might otherwise
have damaged the crew’s fighting ability. And by rewarding special achievements
and providing health insurance they encouraged enthusiasm and risk-taking. The
results were impressive. “As great robbers as they are to all besides,” a sea
cook observed in 1709, they “are precisely just among themselves.” No one could
join a pirate crew without swearing to the articles, which, Leeson explains,
reduced what economists call the “external costs” of decision-making—in this
case, the discontent of anyone who thought them unfair, a dangerous sentiment
when betrayal meant hanging. Articles also made it harder for leaders to cheat,
because their public nature enabled every pirate to tell if a rule had been
broken. The only rules as tough and flexible, Leeson provocatively suggests,
were the covenants that founded New England’s Puritan churches.
When Morgan campaigned against the Spanish in 1670 and 1671, he was both
elected by the buccaneers and commissioned by the Jamaican governor. But when
he returned to the Caribbean, in 1675, he had to choose sides. Planters now
dominated Jamaican society, and thought the cost of disrupted shipping not
worth the occasional benefits of poaching Spanish currency. Morgan turned
planter himself, declared pirates “ravenous vermin,” and began hanging them.
When piracy next broke out, it was in another part of the world.
In May, 1694, a group of English sailors in a Spanish port grew tired of
waiting for overdue wages. They cut their ship’s anchor, and the ringleader,
Henry Every, slipped into the captain’s cabin. “I’ll let you into a Secret,”
Every said. “I am Captain of this Ship now.” After sending ashore the captain
and others unwilling to turn pirate, Every warned the world by letter that “my
Men are hungry, Stout, and resolute,” and then sailed for the Indian Ocean.
There his crew took two rich prizes—a ship belonging to a wealthy Muslim
merchant and another belonging to Aurangzeb, the Grand Moghul of India. The
loot amounted to a thousand pounds per pirate, “the equivalent of twenty years’
wages aboard a merchant ship,” Colin Woodard explains in his book “The Republic
of Pirates.” The Indians, furious, held England’s East India Company
responsible, and imprisoned its officers for almost a year. The success
inspired imitators, including William Kidd, whose seizure, in 1698, of a cargo
belonging to the Moghul’s secretary of state exasperated the Indians even
further; they threatened to flay an English administrator alive. Though England
turned a blind eye to the pirates’ activities for a while, it couldn’t afford
to imperil trade with India, and so, at the end of the seventeenth century, it
sent men-of-war to suppress the Indian Ocean pirates. Still, the dynamics of
geography and trade that attracted men like Every to the Horn of Africa remain,
and the opening of the Suez Canal has probably made the pickings even richer.
Somali pirates prowl the same waters today.
A decade and a half after Every and Kidd, piracy rose once more, incited by
a 1713 peace that made killing Spaniards illegal again and by a 1715 hurricane
that spilled Spanish gold off the coast of Florida, like so much blood into a
shark tank. From 1716 to 1726, between one and two thousand pirates, based
mainly in the Bahamas and operating in the Caribbean and off the coasts of
North America and West Africa, took nearly two and a half thousand merchant
vessels. For more than a decade, English shipping stopped growing. An
eighteenth-century historian estimated the damage as equal to that caused by
Spain and France during the thirteen-year War of Spanish Succession. These are
the pirates that everyone remembers: Edward Teach, called Blackbeard, on
account of “that large Quantity of Hair, which, like a frightful Meteor,
covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet”; plump,
incompetent Stede Bonnet, the gentleman pirate who spent his inheritance on a
pirate sloop and went to sea with his library and his dressing gown; irascible
Samuel Bellamy, who considered himself one of “Robbin Hoods Men” and damned
“all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich Men have made”;
the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who fought in men’s clothes and
escaped hanging thanks to their pregnancies; and Bartholomew Roberts, who
looted more than four hundred ships and defended the pirate life as one of
“Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power” well worth the risk
of “a sower Look or two at choaking” at the end. Their personalities were
immortalized in “A General History of the Pyrates,” long thought to have been
by Daniel Defoe but more probably the work of Nathaniel Mist, a sailor turned
journalist who often drew his words “from the Mouths of the Pyrates themselves.”
Almost every other scrap of print about them has recently been republished in
the four facsimile volumes of “British Piracy in the Golden Age” (Pickering
& Chatto; $625).
Not all these pirates were British, but most were. The average age was
twenty-eight, and only four female pirates have ever been discovered, so the
ambience on board was, Leeson writes, “energetic and testosterone filled,
probably similar to a college fraternity only with peglegs, fewer teeth, and
pistol dueling.” A pirate crew numbered on average eighty, whereas it took only
sixteen to staff a merchantman, so pirates shouldered a much lighter share of
work, a fortunate state of affairs because, as a contemporary observed, “they
mortally hate it.”
Friendships and working relationships linked pirate society across ships.
Most captains knew one another personally, and many hunted together for a
spell. Through their shared culture, they refined shipboard democracy. The
supreme power aboard a pirate ship was the common council, which Marcus Rediker
calls a “floating town meeting.” Whoever had sworn to the articles could vote.
Captains were elected, and ate the same food as their men. Only when the ship
was fighting or fleeing could a captain make decisions on his own, and he could
be deposed if the crew thought him cowardly or his treatment of prisoners too
cruel or too kind. In daily matters, his power was checked by that of another
elected official, the quartermaster, who distributed food and booty and
administered minor punishments.
In Leeson’s opinion, there was a sound economic basis for all this
democracy. Most businesses suffer from what economists call the
“principal-agent problem”: the owner doesn’t work, and the workers, not being
stakeholders, lack incentives; so a certain amount of surveillance and coercion
is necessary to persuade Ishmael to hunt whales instead of spending all day in
his hammock with Queequeg. Pirates, by contrast, having stolen the ships they
sailed, were both principals and agents; they still needed a captain but,
Leeson explains, “they didn’t require autocratic captains because there
were no absentee owners to align the crew’s interests with.” The insight
suggests more than Leeson seems to want it to—does inequity always entail
political repression?—and late in the book he backtracks, cautioning that the
pirate example “doesn’t mean democratic management makes sense for all firms,”
only that management style should be adjusted to the underlying ownership
structure. But a certain kind of reader is likely to ignore the hedging, and
note that the pirates, two centuries before Lenin, had seized the means of
production.
Leeson’s analysis unriddles a number of Snelgrave’s mysteries. Merchant
sailors quietly gave in to pirate attacks because of a principal-agent
problem—it wasn’t their cargo—and because doing so enabled them to adopt a way
of life that was a hundred to a thousand times more lucrative. Snelgrave may
have been under the impression that pirates forced men to join, but this was
for the most part a myth, devised for the sake of a legal defense if caught.
Until their final, desperate days, pirates took few conscripts, because so many
sailors begged to enlist and because conscripts had the unpleasant habit of
absconding and testifying against pirates in court. As for the death-defying
attitude—“a merry Life and a short one” was Bartholomew Roberts’s motto—pirates
cultivated it to convince people that they had what economists call a high
discount rate. If future punishments meant so little, their wildest threats were
credible.
For a similar reason, they tortured and let it be known that they tortured.
The reputation made their work easier, as most prisoners tended to follow the
example of the captain who explained that he revealed his stash because
“hearing their Design was to torture me with lighted Matches betwixt my
Fingers, I thought the Loss of the Use of my Hands would be but poorly
compensated with the saving 100 Ounces of Gold.” Blackbeard’s reputation was so
daunting that he seems not to have had to torture or even kill anyone until his
final battle. Just as useful was a reputation for treating captives well if
they coöperated—thus the solicitude toward Snelgrave. As pirates explained to a
captive in 1722, they “valued themselves upon this very Thing of being civil to
their Prisoners, and not abusing their Persons.” To communicate these
intentions from afar, pirates developed a special signal, a sort of trademark
for the pirate brand: a black flag “in the Middle of which is a large white
Skeleton, with a Dart in one Hand, striking a Bleeding Heart, and in the other
an Hour Glass,” as one captain described it. While Jolly Roger flew, there was
still time to ask for quarter, but once the pirates struck this black flag and
raised a red one it was too late. There were several variations, including “a
White Death’s Head and Crossed Bones.” The flag’s threat was credible, Leeson
explains, because everyone knew that authorities hanged anyone caught flying
it. And a good thing, too, the pirate Mary Read declared. Any lighter
punishment, “and the Ocean would be crowded with Rogues.” Maybe she had
supply-and-demand curves tattooed on her biceps, too.
Though some pirates kept slaves and others traded in them, blacks composed
a quarter to a third of some pirate crews, and on some ships they bore arms,
had voting rights, and shared the booty. Leeson proposes that pirates had an
economic incentive to treat blacks as equals instead of keeping them as slaves.
Prejudice needlessly deprives a business of skilled labor, he points out. Also,
while the benefit of a slave would be diluted among a pirate crew, the
potential cost would not be: an embittered slave who betrayed a pirate ship
could cost every pirate his whole neck. Were pirates liberal about sexual
orientation as well? In 1983, a scholar of gay history noted that pirates lived
exclusively with men for long periods, much like modern prisoners, and
suggested that they must have had the same kind of sex. Though it sounds
plausible, there’s little evidence, aside from a buccaneer’s servant who once
confessed “that his Master had oft times Buggered him,” and a semi-formal
institution of buccaneer partnership known as matelotage, in which two
men agreed that whoever died first would leave his goods to the other, after
giving “part to the dead man’s friends or to his wife.” Unromantically, but
probably correctly, Leeson labels matelotage an insurance policy.
Pirates were probably no more sodomitic than the average British sailor.
Some pirate characteristics resist cost-benefit analysis. None is really
adequate for the pirate custom of interviewing sailors about their captain’s
character. Leeson suggests that punishing abusive captains might have won
pirates good will from the rank and file, but surely the profit motive was
stronger in the impatient pirate captain who exclaimed, “What have we to do to
turn Reformers, ’tis Money we want.” Nor can economics give a satisfying
explanation of why Kidd’s sailors decided to “clapp their Backsides” as they
sailed past a royal yacht, or why another crew whiled away a day mock-trying
one another for piracy:
Attorney General: Here is a Fellow before you that is a sad Dog, a sad sad Dog; and I humbly hope your Lordship will order him to be hang’d out of the Way immediately. . . .
Prisoner: But, I hope, your Lordship will hear some Reason.
Judge: D’ye hear how the Scoundrel prates?—What have we to do with Reason?—I’d have you to know, Raskal, we don’t sit here to hear Reason;—we go according to Law.—Is our Dinner ready?
Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel that psychology might be as useful an
explanatory tool as economics. There is an element of repetition, even
compulsion, in pirate life: first we stole; then we killed and raped; then we
squandered our loot on whores and drink. Lather, rinse, repeat. And, in the
pirate habit of punishing disobedience with torture, the combination of
pettiness and authoritarianism can bring to mind a vindictive
junior-high-school principal. But the insult they offered to the status quo
remains galvanizing, as our continued fascination with them attests. “Yes,” one
declared on the gallows, “I do heartily repent. I repent I had not done more
Mischief.”
In the second decade of the eighteenth century, Britain saw a growth
opportunity in the slave trade, and pirates stood in the way. In 1717, George I
offered amnesty to pirates who retired, and, in 1721, Parliament wrote a new
law that sentenced to death those who traded with pirates and imprisoned for
six months sailors who failed to defend their ships. In 1718, a new governor
hanged eight pirates in the Bahamas, flying Jolly Roger over the gallows, and
in 1722 a British naval captain hanged fifty-two at a slave traders’ fortress
in present-day Ghana, displaying their corpses in chains along the shore. By
1724, pirates were in steep decline.
Piracy seems to thrive when capitalism is advancing—when it has put enough
wealth in motion to tempt criminals to kill for it but not yet enough for
sailors to die in its defense—and perhaps, as in Somalia, when government is
retreating. In several ways, Somalia’s contemporary pirates resemble those of
three centuries ago. Violent and dangerous, they nonetheless are careful not to
hurt coöperative hostages; they look to piracy to take them from poverty to a
life of leisure; they have been known to regulate their own behavior with
written rules; and they believe that their cause is just. The timing of their
end, too, will probably be similar, coming whenever a major power decides that
a crackdown costs less than the nuisance.
Are pirates socialists or capitalists? Lately, it’s become hard to tell the
categories apart. Toward the end of his book, Leeson suggests that pirate
self-governance proves that companies can regulate themselves better than
governments can, as if he sees the pirate ship as a prototype of the modern
corporation, sailing through treacherously liberal waters. Such arguments
haven’t aged well over the past year, but even in piracy’s golden age people
were aware that an unregulated marketplace invites predators. During the South
Sea Bubble of 1720, speculators claiming to be able to make wealth out of debt
fleeced British investors and ruined many banks. Pirates who spent that year
killing and plundering, Nathaniel Mist grumpily wrote, could salve their guilty
consciences, if they had any: “Whatever Robberies they had committed, they
might be pretty sure they were not the greatest Villains then living in the
World.” ♦
Name:
Directions:
4 sentences
of summary about the article(s). Include the most important points. Your
summary should show that you read carefully and have a good understanding of
the articles.
3 sentences
of your personal response/opinion. What do you think about these readings?
2 quotes that
stand out (quotes can be important sentences or phrases written by the author).
Include a couple sentences on the significance of each quoted sentence/phrase. Why
did you choose it/what does it mean for this article?
1 question or
connection—several sentences about something you still wonder or don't
understand about this article, OR about something in the text you can connect
to.
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10
|
9-8
|
7-6
|
5
|
4-1
|
|
All items in the 4/3/2/1 are
thoroughly completed.
Answers are all in complete sentences.
Answers show complete understanding of
the 4/3/2/1.
Student went above and beyond what was
expected (analysis & thoroughness).
|
One
part of the assignment may not be thorough enough.
Answers are mostly in complete sentences.
Answers show substantial understanding
of the question(s), but more analysis could lead to greater understanding.
Student met expectations of activity.
|
More than half the assignment is
completed, but not analyzed thoroughly enough.
Answers show understanding of the
question(s), but they could use more detail, analysis, examples, and/or
connections.
|
More than half the assignment is
incomplete.
Answers shows limited understanding of
the question(s), and needs a lot more detail and analysis.
|
Assignment is either dreadfully
incomplete or needs significantly more detail and analysis.
|
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