Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  The sailor knew, by personal experience, that these Atlantic powers waged what seemed to be incessant war against each other. The typical working sailor in 1716 was a man in his late twenties who had known war for much of his life. Indeed, unless he had been “bred to the sea” as a young boy (that is, served an apprenticeship), his entire working life would have been spent within whiff of the cannon smoke of national and imperial hostility. The great Anglo-French rivalry that would dominate the eighteenth-century Atlantic had begun in 1689 with the opening shots of the War of the League of Augsburg, which would last until 1697. After five pirate-plagued years of peace, the War of Spanish Succession broke out in 1702 between Spain and France on one side and Britain on the other, lasting until 1713. Twenty of the sailors’ first twenty-five years were passed in an Atlantic world at war.3

  The sailor knew that these wars were fought, for the most part, over wealth, a substantial portion of which was based on the key commodities of the Atlantic trades in which he worked—gold, silver, fish, furs, servants and slaves, sugar, tobacco, and manufactures. Earlier clashes among the great powers had centered on land and the acquisition of new territories, and all had been suffused with religious fervor as Protestant and Catholic nations waged bloody, self-righteous war. But by the early eighteenth century, the realms of the various empires were largely fixed (and would remain so for half a century) and religious war had given way to trade war. The Atlantic empires competed fiercely with each other, pursuing policies that would enhance their own power over and against their rivals, all certain that control of the seas was a key to increased trade, larger profits, far-reaching markets, economic growth, and national power. England in particular went through a “commercial revolution” between 1660 and 1700, when its trade tripled and it became a major player in the rapidly expanding Atlantic economy. New, independent traders surged to the fore to replace the old chartered companies of merchants. The Royal African Company, for example, lost its monopoly on the slave trade in stages, beginning in 1698 and ending in 1712, as the government unleashed hungry free traders on “black gold.” Commercial and naval power expanded together as the Atlantic empires regarded long-distance trade, in the words of J.H. Parry, as “a mild form of war.” The truth of this claim was evident in the well-armed merchantmen who plied the seas and in the fleets of half-commercial, half-military privateers (private men-of-war), which were mobilized by kings and queens to attack and plunder the trading vessels of wartime enemies, especially in the West Indies, where the imperial powers lived at close quarters in the “cockpit of war.” Whether by moving commodities or waging war by sea, the sailor provided the labor power of transatlantic endeavor.4

  The sailor knew that thousands of people were moving and laboring around the Atlantic, some willingly, some unwillingly, with many of them, like himself, subjected to violence. By 1716 a worldwide process of expropriation, called primitive accumulation, had already torn millions of people from their ancestral lands in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had already died in the genocidal assault on the New World, killed by warfare and the fatal spread of European diseases against which they had no immunities. Thousands of others relocated to the interiors of the Americas to escape the European settlers who hugged the coasts of North and South America. By 1716 2.5 million Africans had been ripped from their villages by warriors and raiders and sold to European merchants for shipment to Europe and the Americas. The enclosure movement and other mechanisms of dispossession had set thousands in motion on the roads and ways of England in particular and Europe in general. Masses of people flocked to the cities, where they found work, frequently as waged laborers, in manufacturing and especially in armies and navies, as war required vast amounts of labor. Hundreds of thousands more would embark for colonial plantations as laborers, whether free or unfree. Expropriation had “freed” millions of workers for redeployment to the far-flung edges of empire, often as indentured servants or slaves, on plantations that would produce what may have been the largest planned accumulation of wealth the world had yet seen. It was said that sugar, the leading and most lucrative Atlantic commodity of the eighteenth century, was made with blood. By 1716 big planters drove armies of servants and slaves as they expanded their power from their own lands to colonial and finally national legislatures. Atlantic empires mobilized labor power on a new and unprecedented scale, largely through the strategic use of violence—the violence of land seizure, of expropriating agrarian workers, of the Middle Passage, of exploitation through labor discipline, and of punishment (often in the form of death) against those who dared to resist the colonial order of things. By all accounts, by 1713 the Atlantic economy had reached a new stage of maturity, stability, and profitability. The growing riches of the few depended on the growing misery of the many.5

  The sailor knew that trade was the unifying process of the world economy, that the oceangoing ship was the machine that made it possible, and that his own labor made the ship go. But he also knew that 1716 was a tough time for seafaring workers like himself. The end of the War of Spanish Succession had resulted in an extensive demobilization of the navies of Britain, France, and Spain. The British Royal Navy in particular plunged from 49,860 men in 1712 to 13,475 just two years later, and only by 1740 would the number of men increase to as many as 30,000 again. At the same time, privateering commissions (bills of marque) expired, adding to the number of sailors who were loose and looking for work in the port cities of the world. In England, wrote Captain Charles Johnson, multitudes of unemployed seamen were “straggling, and begging all over the Kingdom.” Yet conditions for seamen did not worsen immediately, as historian Ralph Davis explained: “the years 1713–1715 saw—as did immediate post-war years throughout the eighteenth century—the shifting of heaped-up surpluses of colonial goods, the movement of great quantities of English goods to colonial and other markets, and a general filling in of stocks of imported goods which had been allowed to run down.” This small-scale boom gave employment to some of the seamen who had been dropped from naval and privateering rolls. But by late 1715, a slump in trade had begun, lasting into the 1730s. The huge surplus of maritime labor produced jarring social effects. Wages contracted sharply, and merchant seamen who made 45–55s. per month in 1707 made only half that amount a few years later. Sailors were forced to compete for scarce jobs, and those lucky enough to find berths discovered that their customary arrangements aboard ship now included poorer-quality food and harsher discipline, which intensified over the course of the eighteenth century. War years, despite their deadly dangers, provided tangible benefits. The working seaman of 1716 knew that conditions had once been different, and for many they were decisively better.6

  The sailor knew that the rulers of the Atlantic empires had taken a harsh new view of pirates as the enemies of imperial designs rather than as allies who might help to accomplish them. For much of the seventeenth century, pirates had been indirectly employed by the Netherlands, France, and England to harass Portugal and especially Spain in the New World, as well as to capture a portion of their glittering wealth. Operating largely from Caribbean islands, especially Jamaica, the sea rovers sacked Spanish American ports such as Veracruz and Panama City, repeatedly trashing Catholic churches and in many instances toting back to their ships as much silver plate as they could carry. But by the 1680s ruling-class attitudes had changed. Jamaica’s bigwigs could make more money, more predictable money, by cultivating sugar, and members of Parliament in England sought a more stable and reliable system of international trade. Pirates, who disrupted both projects, began to be hanged in significant numbers in the 1690s. According to historian Max Savelle, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 “was thought of, both in Europe and in America, as a settlement that would establish a lasting peace in America, based on the principle of the balance of colonial power.” Britain in particular hoped so because its traders, at home and in the colonies (especially Jamaica), had won the Asiento, an agreement with the Spanis
h government that allowed them officially to import 4,800 slaves per year and to smuggle a huge number more. The “Returns of the Assiento and private Slave-Trade” proved a more dependable way to exploit Spanish wealth. Pirates now stood squarely in the way of the hoped-for stability and profits.7

  The sailor knew that whatever the attitude from on high, the Atlantic was a big place, that the empires were overextended and could not easily police the seas on which they depended, and that these circumstances created openings from below. The Atlantic powers, especially Spain and increasingly France and England, possessed large masses of far-flung lands, but they could not easily control the sea-lanes on which their commerce to and from them depended. As the Dutch legal scholar Cornelius van Bynkershoek wrote in 1702, “The power of the land properly ends where the force of arms ends.” The sea, in his view, “can be considered subject as far as the range of cannon extends,” which was the original formulation of the three-mile limit of national sovereignty over coastal waters. But his most important conclusion was, “The vast ocean cannot be possessed.” It was a commons, a place to be used by many, including the sailor who dared to turn pirate.8

  The sailor who embraced the Jolly Roger after 1716 came from a potent experience of life and labor in a wooden world. The sailor’s workplace, the deep-sea sailing ship, was something of a factory in those days, a place where “hands”—those who owned no property and who therefore sold their labor for a money wage—cooperated to make the machine go. Sailing these small, brittle wooden vessels over the forbidding oceans of the globe, the seaman took part in a profoundly collective work experience, one that required carefully synchronized cooperation with other maritime workers for the sake of survival. Facing a ship captain of almost unlimited disciplinary power and an ever readiness to use the cat-o’-nine-tails, the sailor developed an array of resistances against such concentrated authority that featured desertion, work stoppages, mutinies, and strikes. Indeed, the sailor would invent the strike during a wage dispute in London in 1768 when he and his mates went from ship to ship, striking—lowering—the sails in an effort to make merchants grant their demands. Facing such natural and man-made dangers, which included a chronic scarcity of food and drink and a galling system of hierarchy and privilege, the sailor learned the importance of equality: his painfully acquired experience told him that a fair distribution of risks would improve everyone’s chances for survival. Separated from loved ones and the rest of society for extended periods, the sailor developed a distinctive work culture with its own language, songs, rituals, and sense of brotherhood. Its core values were collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, all of which were summarized in the sentence frequently uttered by rebellious sailors: “they were one & all resolved to stand by one another.” All of these cultural traits flowed from the work experience, and all would influence both the decision to turn pirate and how pirates would conduct themselves thereafter, as we will see in subsequent chapters.9

  If the sailor of 1716 had a set of experiences that would condition his attitude to piracy in the early eighteenth century, so did his class counterparts, the shipowner, merchant, and ruler of the Atlantic empires. As dominant groups their attitudes were embodied in legislation and had the force of law. When piracy broke out after the War of Spanish Succession, the governing law in effect in the English Atlantic was “An Act for the more effectual Suppression of Piracy” (11 and 12 Wm III, c. 7), originally drafted in 1698 and 1699 and made perpetual in 1700, in response to the last major peacetime explosion of piracy, in the 1690s. This act incorporated elements from earlier legislation (28 Hen VIII, c. 15, 1536), which had been modernized in the early seventeenth century by Sir Edward Coke, who added the implication of petit treason and imported the phrase hostes humani generis (common enemies of mankind) from Roman law to describe pirates. In Rex v. Dawson, a trial involving members of Henry Avery’s pirate crew in 1696, the Admiralty judge Sir Charles Hedges had rather grandly ruled that English courts and English judges such as he had jurisdiction over all people—anywhere on earth—who interfered with English commerce. The act of 1700 expanded the definition of the pirate beyond the person who committed robbery by sea to include the mutineer who ran away with the ship and the sailor who interfered with the defense of his vessel when pirates attacked. It also provided pensions for those wounded in defending the ship; in the event of death the money would go to the sailor’s wife and children. Merchant seamen who deserted their ships—they were believed to be prime recruits for pirate ships—would be stripped of their wages.10

  The law was renewed in 1715 and again in 1719, but between those dates, in 1717 and again in 1718, the King offered pardons to try to rid the sea of robbers. Since the graces specified that only crimes committed at certain times and in particular regions would be forgiven, many pirates saw enormous latitude for official trickery and refused to surrender. Others accepted the amnesty and then simply resumed their piracies, as Governor Robert Johnson of South Carolina explained to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1718: “I don’t perceive H.M. gracious proclamacon of pardon works any good efect upon them, some few indead surrender and take a certificate of there so doing and then severall of them return to the sport again.” Governor Walter Hamilton of Antigua agreed, writing to the same body: “your Lords-ships may now plainly perceive how little Acts of Grace and Mercy work on these vermine,” many of whom, it seemed, took the pardon, went back to plundering, then took it again. In any case, for most men, accepting and abiding by the rules of the pardon would have meant a return to the dismal conditions from which they had escaped.11

  Their tactic failing, English imperial rulers toughened the law of piracy in 1721 (8 Geo I, c. 24, 1721), promising death to anyone who cooperated with pirates and the loss of wages and six months’ imprisonment to those who refused to defend their ship. They also decreed that naval ships were not to trade but to chase and fight pirates, which they had shown considerable disinclination to do, much to the dismay of both merchants and royal officials. Seamen injured in battle against pirates “shall be provided for as if they were actually in the service of the Crown,” explained the Boston News-Letter. Parliament also left no doubt about the transoceanic reach of the new act of 1721: it “shall extend to all his Majesty’s Dominions in Asia, Africa, and America.” According to Alfred P. Rubin, the leading scholar of the international law of piracy, the main impulse behind these laws was to protect “private property crossing national boundaries.”12

  From antiquity onward, piracy always depended on a particular set of material circumstances to emerge and flourish. The most essential precondition through the ages has been the existence of trade, in which valuable commodities are transported by sea through remote, poorly defended regions populated by poor people. These poor people in turn had to have access to seagoing craft, which were usually smaller, lighter, faster, and more maneuverable than the heavy-laden vessels they chased and sought to capture. Pirates had to have the skills to handle their craft exceptionally well, underlining the old adage that “the pick of all seamen were pirates.” They had expert local knowledge of winds and waters, shoals and coastlines, sea-lanes and shipping patterns. They had places to lurk and hide near the main routes of trade and communities of people to support them. They also had fences and markets to and in which they could sell or trade the goods they captured.13

  All of these conditions obtained in the 1710s and 1720s. Trade, as we have seen, was a dynamic engine of global economic development, a source of gleaming wealth, and yet the imperial nations of the day did not have the military capacity to project their sovereignty over all of the world’s seas and oceans. Captain Charles Johnson emphasized the “great Commerce” of Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England in and around the West Indies, where great sums of money, provisions, clothing, and naval stores might be had. Poor people, especially highly skilled, unemployed, and desperate sailors, thronged almost every port city. It was not difficult for them to get possession, by the
ft or mutiny, of what was perhaps the world’s most sophisticated and economically valuable piece of technology of the day, the deep-sea sailing ship, especially small, fast, and well-armed craft such as sloops. The West Indies were a classical setting and “a natural Security” for such people and ships, as its small inlets, lagoons, and shallow waters made it difficult for larger vessels such as men-of-war to pursue the bandits by sea. Admiral Edward Vernon once remarked that dispatching a large naval vessel after a pirate ship was like sending “a Cow after a Hare.” The only way the big, slow creature would ever catch one was by accident. These small islands also abounded with provisions—water and food, turtle, seafowl, shellfish and fish. And there were, at least early in the period under consideration, always people who were willing to support pirates, merchants willing to buy and sell their booty. Pirates “continually found Favours and Encouragers,” even in Jamaica after the sugar planters consolidated their ruthless power. The coexistence of these conditions is the major reason the explosion of piracy was not only likely but predictable after the War of Spanish Succession.14