Golden Age

To their admirers, pirates are romantic villains: fearsome men willing to forge a life beyond the reach of law and government, liberated from their jobs and the constraints of society to pursue wealth, merriment, and adventure. Three centuries have passed since they disappeared from the seas, but the Golden Age pirates remain folk heroes and their fans are legion. They have been the models for some of fiction’s greatest characters – Captain Hook and Long John Silver, Captain Blood and Jack Sparrow – conjuring images of sword fights, plank walking, treasure maps, and chests of gold and jewels. Engaging as their legends are – particularly as enhanced by Robert Louis Stevenson and Walt Disney – the true story of the pirates of the Caribbean is even more captivating: a long-lost tale of tyranny and resistance, a maritime revolt that shook the very foundations of the newly formed British Empire, bringing transatlantic commerce to a standstill and fueling the democratic sentiments that would later drive the American revolution. At its center was a pirate republic, a zone of freedom in the midst of an authoritarian age.

The Golden Age of Piracy lasted only ten years, from 1715 to 1725, and was conducted by a clique of twenty to thirty pirate commodores and a few thousand crewmen. Virtually all of the commodores knew one another, having served side by side aboard merchant or pirate vessels or crossed paths in their shared base, the failed British colony of the Bahamas. While most pirates were English or Irish, there were large numbers of Scots, French, and Africans as well as a smattering of other nationalities: Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and Native Americans. Despite differences in nation, race, religion, and even language, they forged a common culture. When meeting at sea, pirate vessels frequently joined forces and came to one another’s aid, even when one crew was largely French and the other dominated by their traditional enemies, the English. They ran their ships democratically, electing and deposing their captains by popular vote, sharing plunder equally, and making important decisions in an open counsel – all in sharp contrast to the dictatorial regimes in place aboard other ships. At a time when ordinary sailors received no social protections of any kind, the Bahamian pirates provided disability benefits for their crews.

Pirates have existed for a long time. There were pirates in Ancient Greece and during the Roman Empire, in medieval Europe, and during the Qing Dynasty in China. Even today, pirates plague the world’s sea lanes, seizing freighters, container ships, even passenger liners, looting their contents, and, not infrequently, killing their crews. they are distinct from privateers, individuals who in wartime plunder enemy shipping under license from their government. Some mistake Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan for pirates, but they were, in fact, privateers, and undertook their depredations with the full support of their sovereigns, Queen Elizabeth and King Charles II. Far from being considered outlaws, both were knighted for their services, and Morgan was appointed lieutenant governor of Jamaica. William Dampier was a privateer, as were most of the English buccaneers of the late 1600s. Even the infamous Captain William Kidd was a well-born privateer who became a pirate accidentally, by running afoul of the directors of the East India Company, England’s largest corporation.

The Golden Age pirates were distinct from both the buccaneers of Morgan’s generation and the pirates who preceded them. In contrast with the buccaneers, they were notorious outlaws, regarded as thieves and criminals by every nation, including their own. Unlike their pirate predecessors, they were engaged in more than simple crime and undertook nothing less than a social and political revolt. They were sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves rebelling against their oppressors: captains, ship owners, and the autocrats of the great slave plantations of America and the West Indies.

Dissatisfaction was so great aboard merchant vessels that typically when the pirates captured one, a portion of its crew enthusiastically joined their ranks. Even the Royal Navy was vulnerable; when HMS Phoenix confronted the pirates at their Bahamian lair in 1718, a number of the frigate’s sailors defected, sneaking off in the night to serve under the black flag. Indeed, the pirates’ expansion was fueled in large part by the defections of sailors, in direct proportion to the brutal treatment in both the navy and merchant marine.

Not all pirates were disgruntled sailors. Runaway slaves migrated to the pirate republic in significant numbers, as word spread of the pirates attacking slave ships and initiating many aboard to participate as equal members of their crews. At the height of the Golden Age, it was not unusual for escaped slaves to account for a quarter or more of a pirate vessel’s crew, and several mulattos rose to become full-fledged pirate captains. This zone of freedom threatened the slave plantation colonies surrounding the Bahamas. In 1718, the acting governor of Bermuda reported that the “negro men [have] grown so impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising [against us and] ... fear their joining with the pirates.”

Some pirates had political motivations as well. The Golden Age erupted shortly after the death of Queen Anne, whose half-brother and would-be successor, James Stuart, was denied the throne because he was Catholic. The new king of England and Scotland, Protestant George I, was a distant cousin of the deceased queen, a German prince who didn’t care much for England and couldn’t speak its language. Many Britons, including a number of future pirates, found this unacceptable and remained loyal to James and the House of Stuart. Several of the early Golden Age pirates were set up by the governor of Jamaica, Archibald Hamilton, a Stuart sympathizer who apparently intended to use them as a rebel navy to support a subsequent uprising against King George. As Kenneth J. Kinkor of the Expedition Whydah museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, puts it, “these were more than just a few thugs knocking over liquor stores.”

The pirate gangs of the Bahamas were enormously successful. At their zenith they succeeded in severing Britain, France, and Spain from their New World empires, cutting off trade routes, stifling the supply of slaves to the sugar plantations of America and the West Indies, and disrupting the flow of information between the continents. The Royal Navy went from being unable to catch the pirates to being afraid to encounter them at all. Although the twenty-two-gun frigate HMS Seaford was assigned to protect the Leeward Islands, her captain reported he was “in danger of being overpowered” if he were to cruise against the pirates. By 1717, the pirates had become so powerful they were able to threaten not only ships, but entire colonies. They occupied British outposts in the Leeward Islands, threatened to invade Bermuda, and repeatedly blockaded South Carolina. In the process, some accumulated staggering fortunes, with which they bought the loyalty of merchants, plantation owners even the colonial governors themselves.

The authorities made the pirates out to be cruel and dangerous monsters, rapists and murderers who killed men on a whim and turtured children for pleasure, and indeed some were. Many of these tales were intentionally exaggerated, however, to sway a skeptical public. To the consternation of the ship and plantation owners of the Americas, many ordinary colonists regarded the pirates as folk heroes. Cotton Mather, Massachusetts’ leading Puritan minister, fumed about the level of support for the pirates among the “sinful” commoners of Boston. In 1718, as South Carolina authorities prepared to bring a pirate gang to trial, their sympathizers broke the pirates’ leader out of prison and nearly took control of the capital, Charleston. “People are easily led to favor these Pests of Mankind when they have hopes of sharing in their ill-gotten wealth,” Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood complained in the same year, adding that there were “many favorers of the pirates” in his colony. (Woodard 1-5)