Pirates!!!!!!

[CameronBornAndBred]

The last paper I ever wrote at Duke was about buccaneer culture and democracy, focusing specifically on their treatment of homosexuals and blacks. I'll never forget the look I got from the checkout kid at the Carolina library when I walked up with "Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition".

Were the buccaneers good to homosexuals and black people?

I actually googled that title Friday and read some of the book they had excerpts of. Interesting read, and interesting choices the author made. In his preface he talks about why he titled it the way he did as opposed to "homosexuality and the pirate tradition". I don't have a link, but if you google it you can find it.

[wilson]

Were the buccaneers good to homosexuals and black people?

Pirates (for the purposes of this discussion, we'll just subsume buccaneers under that heading) were indeed "good" to homosexuals and blacks. Because the environment was so heavily male, homosexuality among pirate crews was fairly common...think along the lines of modern stereotypes regarding such single-sex communities as prisons. Other shipboard communities also had their share of homosexuality; for instance, whaling crews frequently turned to these kinds of relations, as their voyages carried them very far abroad and typically lasted two or three years.
Blacks, too, were welcomed into pirate crews. The general thinking was that any man who was willing to undertake the risk to life and limb was worthy of his shipmates' respect. Moreover, greater solidarity was very useful among pirate crews, as cohesion and cooperation was crucial to the quick, precise types of strikes they aimed to mount. Pirate crews were among the most democratic and inclusive of all shipboard societies. Every man got a share of any plunder (though captain, first mate, and a few other shipboard leaders would have gotten extra shares). Crews also had set scales of remuneration for the loss of a leg, arm, finger, etc. during battle.

Also, pirate crews were unique in the maritime world in that their captains were elected by the crew. A merchant or navy vessel had a designated captain, whose authority was not to be questioned. This often made for brutal, despotic regimes on board (with exceedingly harsh consequences, quite frequently leading to maiming or death, for those who did deign to challenge the captain). A pirate captain, however, could simply be removed and replaced by another elected captain if he treated his crewmen too harshly. This is what earned pirates their widespread reputation as mutineers, but as you can see, this isn't entirely true. To be fair, though, a deposed captain often didn't experience the most, ahem, peaceful transfer of power. On the other hand though, this ensured a degree of two-way respect between captain and crew that frequently was not the case on non-pirate vessels. That "pirate code" made famous in the Pirates of the Caribbean films is no myth, and the universal brutality of pirates, from the lowliest sailor to the most notorious captain, helped preserve a degree of peace among a given vessel's pirates.

A Marxist (in the social/historical sense, not the Communist one...there's quite a difference) historian named Marcus Rediker has done a good deal of excellent work on the preceding. His two most relevant works to the preceding discussion would be Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 and The Many-Headed Hydra, which directly deals with subaltern (a fancy historian's word basically meaning non-male and/or non-white and/or non-"elite" people) peoples on the sea and their ideas on freedom and equality. He is rightly known as one of the foremost maritime social historians in he world. He has been at the University of Pittsburgh for about the past 25 years. His latest work is entitled The Slave Ship: A Human History. It's a brilliantly focused and presented study of the very limited environment of a slave ship as a singular social space.

Seriously, keep these questions coming, people...I know perhaps too much about pirates, and it's all too rare that I really get to put a MA in Maritime Studies to use (especially in so easygoing a context)!

[Lavabe]

Direct, from the former pirate colony of Libertalia (better known today as Diego-Suarez/Antsiranana, Madagascar):

This mural is from the former reataurant/snack-shop known as Libertalia.

Where in Diego do pirates eat? At the Pirate Snack Bar, of course.

A little faded, but the provincial symbol is the pirate ship, as you can see in this photo of one of the outside walls of the government building.

Cheers,
Lavabe

[Turk]

Wilson, you would make a great Dread Pirate Roberts....

Have you ever tried any of th Aubrey / Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey%E2% ... rin_series

[wilson]

Wilson, you would make a great Dread Pirate Roberts....

Have you ever tried any of th Aubrey / Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey%E2% ... rin_series

Indeed, I have. My uncle might be the world's biggest fan of that series (he's read it all the way through twice), and he got me started a couple of years back, though I have only read the first two books. It will be quite a while before I have enough pleasure reading time to get through the whole series.
Patrick O'Brian was also quite a good historian. He published a solid corpus of 19th-century British maritime stuff during his lifetime.

[wilson]

Wilson, you would make a great Dread Pirate Roberts....

Oh, and many thanks for this shout-out. I will always have a twinge of hope that someday I'll get to walk out of whatever history department I'm working in at the time, having abruptly quit to answer the call of being the next DPR.

[bjornolf]

Wilson, you would make a great Dread Pirate Roberts....

Oh, and many thanks for this shout-out. I will always have a twinge of hope that someday I'll get to walk out of whatever history department I'm working in at the time, having abruptly quit to answer the call of being the next DPR.

Haven't we all?

[Lavabe]

Nearly ONE FULL YEAR between posts in this thread... GO FIGURE!!

The reason for posting here is twofold:
1) MUST get wilson to post!
2) I just found out that GWYN CAMPBELL (that's his real name) is THE historical expert on pirates from Libertalia, where I am based out of in northern Madagascar. I wondered if wilson has read any of his material.

AR!!

[captmojo]

If you're in Columbia and have the time...
http://www.museum.state.sc.us/exhibits/pirates.aspx
...if not, there's a video tour here.
There is more stuff from NC than SC.

[Lavabe]

There is more stuff from NC than SC.

It's a bigger state. ;)