Pirate

When people think of pirates, they usually envision swashbuckling, adventurous figures who spent their time searching for buried treasure. This is a distorted, romantic view that has come down to us. In reality, pirates were little more than thieves and murderers, dedicated to robbery, pillage, and enslavement. Their business was a continuous, organized activity – from which both nations and individuals benefited. People eagerly bought plunder from pirates, and perhaps the most profitable plunder of all were [the] men and women [whom the] pirates enslaved. (Meltzer, sleeve notes)

Romantic tales usually portray pirates as soldiers of fortune or wronged noblemen seeking justice. Or as anything but what they really were (and are).

The truth is, most pirates were plain men who had gone to sea as boys. Even the most famous pirate chiefs began their careers as ordinary seamen. Only after they turned to piracy was their talent for command discovered by the men who elected them to leadership. For in such a society of outlaws, merit not birth, counted most. But why become a pirate?

Some sailors came to it after deserting the navy. Often they had been “press-ganged” in the first place; that is, forced to join the navy against their wishes. Or perhaps they deserted because they couldn’t tolerate the harsh discipline aboard a warship. Then there were the seamen serving on a merchant ship captured by pirates. If these men looked strong and bold, they were invited to join the pirate crew.

Mutiny was another path to piracy. Merchant seamen who dared to mutiny would seize the ship of their captain, get rid of him, and sail off under the pirate flag. They were the toughest of all pirates, for when they mutinied, they knew hanging would be the punishment if they were caught. Yet men took that great risk because they knew society did not respect the labor of ordinary seamen. They had no hope of ever rising above that lowest of positions. In the huge merchant fleets of colonial empires, seamen sweated out a life so cruel that they often came to hate the shipowners and ship captains.

Children, too, often served on pirate ships. When the sea raiders plundered coastal villages, they might capture boys as young as ten or twelve to serve the officers as cabin boys or to be apprenticed to craftsmen, such as the ships’ carpenters. Mostly, though, it was teenagers [who] pirates forced into service. In battle, the teenagers had an important job to do: they fed the powder and shot to the gunners. When booty was distributed among the crew, the youngest, too, got their share. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, children of the poorer classes commonly worked as servants, apprentices, or farm laborers. If dissatisfied with their lot, they fled from their masters and wandered the roads, towns, and cities. Inevitably some turned to piracy as a life with richer promise. That was the main reason most men turned to piracy – the chance of getting rich through plunder. Isn’t that what draws all thieves into their trade? But there was another reason, too: the desire for revenge upon the cruel and unjust society most pirates had suffered under. You could see that in the very names pirates chose for their ships: Revenge, Holy Vengeance, Defiance, Black Revenge.

Merchants and planters in the colonies of Virginia and the West Indies were always short of labor and were eager to take anybody offered to them. Kidnappers in English cities would snatch children of the streets and ship them to new masters abroad for a good price. If pirates captured the transport, the unwilling emigrants were often not reluctant to join up with these lawbreakers. Going to sea was never an easy calling, certainly in the days before seamen’s unions and government regulations improved conditions aboard ships. The crews lived scarcely better than slaves. Small pay, scanty, awful food and water, and brutal discipline made many an honest sailor ready to turn pirate. Mary Read, a female pirate, was asked by her captain (before he knew she was a woman) why she followed a life so full of danger and the near certainty that one day she would be hanged. What she answered was reported thus:

As to the hanging she thought it no great hardship, for were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so infest the seas that men of courage would starve. That if it was put to her choice, she would not have the punishment less than death, the fear of which kept dastardly rogues honest; that many of those who were now cheating the widows and orphans and oppressing their poor neighbors who had no money to obtain justice, would then rob at sea and the ocean would be as crowded with rogues as the land, so that no merchant would venture out, and the trade in the little time would not be worth following.

Unemployment was another reason seamen turned to piracy. When James I became King of England in 1603, after the death of Elizabeth, he decided peace was better than war. Then why spend money on building up the navy? He also stopped the practice of privateering. Soon after, he banned all English seamen from seeking work on foreign ships. Rather than starve, jobless seamen became pirates. No wonder men became outlaws, wrote Captain John Smith in 1630: Some, because they became slighted of those for whom they had got much wealth; some, for that they could not get their due; some, for that had lived bravely, would not abase themselves to poverty; some vainly, only to get a name; others, for revenge, covetousness, or as ill; and as they found themselves more and more oppresed, their passions increasing with discontent, made themselves turn pirate.

By 1618, there were ten times as many English pirates as there had been during the whole long reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Captain Smith understood what drove most men to lawlessness when he urged all merchants and their men not to be sparing of decent pay for their men, “for neither soldiers nor seamen can live without means, but necessity will drive them to steal, and when they are once entered into that trade, they are hardly reclaimed.” It was but one small step from poverty to piracy.

And finally, Bartholomew Roberts echoed what others said when he told why men in his time turned to piracy. “In an honest service there is thin rations, low wages, and hard labor; in this [piracy], plenty, satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.” (Meltzer 29-31)

Piracy was much older [than privateering] and threaded through the history of all seafaring nations. Julius Caesar had been captured by pirates off the island of Pharmacusa and spent thirty-eight days gambling and declaiming his own verses with the corsairs; he joked that when he won his release, he would come back and crucify all of them, which the pirates found hilarious. When he’d bought his release, he quickly borrowed a fleet of ships, tracked down the pirates, and crucified them. St. Patrick was seized by pirates, who sold him as a slave in Ireland. On his return from his battles with the Turks, the ship of Miguel de Cervantes, later the author of Don Quixote, was intercepted by Barbary pirates, and he spent five miserable years as an Algerian captive, repeatedly attempting to escape. Who were the pirates of the West Indies? They were an assemblage of runaway slaves (the famous maroons), political refugees, disaffected sailors, indentured servants whose masters had tossed them off the plantation, hard-bitten adventure seekers, the flotsam and jetsam of the New World. (Talty 36)