The self-righteousness of pirates was strongly linked to a world—traditional, mythical, or Utopian—“in which men are justly dealt with,” as described by Hobsbawm.81 It found expression in their social rules, their egalitarian social organization, and their notions of revenge and justice. By walking “to the Gallows without a Tear,” by calling themselves “Honest Men” and “Gentlemen,” and by speaking self-servingly but proudly of their “Conscience” and “Honor,” pirates flaunted their certitude.82 When, in 1720, ruling groups concluded that “nothing but force will subdue them,” many pirates responded by intensifying their commitment.83 Edward Low’s crew in 1724 swore “with the most direful Imprecations, that if ever they should find themselves overpower’d they would immediately blow their ship up rather than suffer themselves to be hang’d like Dogs.” These sea robbers would not “do Jolly Roger the Disgrace to be struck.”84
The consciousness of kind among pirates manifested itself in an elaborate social code. Through rule, custom, and symbol, the code prescribed specific behavioral standards intended to preserve the social world that pirates had creatively built for themselves. As the examples of revenge reveal, royal officials recognized the threat of the pirates’ alternative order. Some authorities feared that pirates might “set up a sort of Commonwealth”85—and they were precisely correct in their designation—in uninhabited regions, since “no Power in those Parts of the World could have been able to dispute it with them.”86 But the consciousness of kind never took national shape, and piracy was soon suppressed.
The End of Piracy
Contemporary observers usually attributed the rise of piracy to the demobilization of the Royal Navy at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. A group of Virginia merchants, for instance, wrote to the Admiralty in 1713, setting forth “the apprehensions they have of Pyrates molesting their trade in the time of Peace.”87 The navy plunged from 49,860 men at the end of the war to 13,475 just two years later, and only by 1740 did it increase to as many as 30,000 again.88 At the same time, the expiration of privateering licenses—bills of marque—added to the number of seamen on the loose and looking for work in the port cities of the empire. Such underemployment contributed significantly to the rise of piracy,89 but it is not a sufficient explanation, since, as already noted, the vast majority of those who became pirates were working in the merchant service at the moment of their joining.
The surplus of labor at the end of the war had extensive, sometimes jarring social and economic effects. It produced an immediate contraction of wages; merchant seamen who made 45–55 shillings per month in 1707 made only half that amount in 1713. It provoked greater competition for seafaring jobs, which favored the hiring of older, more experienced seamen. And over time, it affected the social conditions and relations of life at sea, cutting back material benefits and hardening discipline.90 War years, despite their deadly dangers, provided seafarers with tangible benefits. Atlantic seamen of 1713 had performed wartime labor for twenty of the previous twenty-five years and for eleven years consecutively.
Conditions did not worsen immediately after the war. As 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.”91 This small-scale boom gave employment to some of the seamen who had been dropped from naval rolls. But by late 1715 a slump in trade began, to last into the 1730s. All of these difficulties were exacerbated by the intensification of maritime discipline over the course of the eighteenth century.92 Many seamen knew that things had once been different and, for many, decisively better.
By 1726, the menace of piracy had been effectively suppressed by governmental action. Circumstantial factors such as the remobilization of the Royal Navy cannot account fully for its demise. The number of men in the navy increased from 6,298 in 1725 to 16,872 in 1726 and again to 20,697 in 1727, which had some bearing on the declining number of sea robbers. Yet some 20,000 sailors had been in the navy in 1719 and 1720, years when pirates were numerous.93 In addition, seafaring wages only occasionally rose above 30 shillings per month between 1713 and the mid-1730s.94 The conditions of life at sea did not change appreciably until war broke out in 1739.
The pardons offered to pirates in 1717 and 1718 failed 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. Moreover, accepting and abiding by the rules of the pardon would have meant for most men a return to the dismal conditions they had escaped. Their tactic failing, royal officials intensified the naval campaign against piracy—with great and gruesome effect. Corpses dangled in chains in British ports around the world “as a Spectacle for the Warning of others.”95 No fewer than 418, and probably between 500 and 600 Atlantic pirates were executed between 1716 and 1726 (see “The Hanging of Stede Bonnet”). The state also passed harsh legislation that criminalized all contact with pirates. After 1721 anyone who “truck[ed], barter[ed], exchange[d]” with pirates, furnished them with stores, or even consulted with them might be punished with death.96
The hanging of pirate captain Stede Bonnet in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1719. Seamen looked on from the crow’s nests of ships at anchor in Charleston’s harbor. (London, 1724)
The campaign to cleanse the seas was supported by clergymen, royal officials, and publicists who sought through sermons, proclamations, pamphlets, and the newspaper press to create an image of the pirate that would legitimate his extermination. Piracy had always depended in some measure on the rumors and tales of its successes, especially among seamen and dealers in stolen cargo. After the capture and mass hanging of the crew of Black Bart Roberts in 1722 and another spate of executions and burst of propaganda in 1723–1724, the pirate population began to decline. By 1726, only a handful of the fraternity remained.
Pirates themselves unwittingly took a hand in their own destruction. From the outset, theirs had been a fragile social world. They produced nothing and had no secure place in the economic order. They had no nation, no home; they were widely dispersed; their community had virtually no geographic boundaries. Try as they might, they were unable to create reliable mechanisms through which they could either replenish their ranks or mobilize their collective strength. These deficiencies of social organization made them, in the long run, vulnerable to attack by the imperial state.
Conclusion
The pirate was, perhaps above all else, an unremarkable man caught in harsh, often deadly circumstances. Wealth he surely desired, but a strong social logic informed both his motivation and his behavior. Emerging from proletarian backgrounds and maritime employments, and loosed from familial bonds, pirates developed common symbols and standards of conduct. They forged spontaneous alliances, refused to fight each other, swore to avenge injury to their own kind, and even retired to pirate communities. They erected their own ideal of justice, insisted upon an egalitarian, if unstable, form of social organization, and defined themselves against other social groups and types. So, too, did they perceive many of their activities as ethical and justified, not unlike the eighteenth-century crowds described by E. P. Thompson.97 But pirates, experienced as cooperative seafaring laborers and no longer disciplined by law, were both familiar with the workings of an international market economy and little affected by the uncertainties of economic change. Their experience as free wage laborers and as members of an uncontrolled, freewheeling subculture gave pirates the perspective and occasion to fight back against brutal and unjust authority and to construct a new social order where King Death would not reign supreme. Theirs was probably a contradictory pursuit. For many, piracy, as a strategy of survival, was ill fated.
Piracy, in the end, offers us an extraordinary opportunity. Here w
e can see how a sizable group of workers—poor men in canvas jackets and tarred breeches—constructed a social world where they had “the choice in themselves.”98 The choice did not exist on the merchant ship or the man-of-war. The social order and practices established by pirates recalled several key features of ancient and medieval maritime life. They divided their money and goods into shares; they consulted collectively and democratically on matters of moment; they elected a quartermaster, who, like the medieval “consul,” adjudicated the differences between captain and crew.99
Pirates constructed a culture of masterless men. They were as far removed from traditional authority as any men could be in the early eighteenth century. Beyond the church, beyond the family, beyond disciplinary labor, and using the sea to distance themselves from the powers of the state, they carried out a strange experiment. The social constellation of piracy, in particular the complex consciousness and egalitarian impulses that developed once the shackles were off, provides valuable clarification of more general social and cultural patterns among seamen in particular and the laboring poor in general. Here we can see aspirations and achievements that under normal circumstances were heavily muted, if not in many cases rendered imperceptible altogether, by the power relationships of everyday life.
The final word on piracy must belong to Barnaby Slush, the man who understood and gave poetic expression to so many aspects of the common seaman’s life in the early eighteenth century:
Pyrates and Buccaneers, are Princes to [Seamen], for there, as none are exempt from the General Toil and Danger; so if the Chief have a Supream Share beyond his Comrades, ’tis because he’s always the Leading Man in e’ry daring Enterprize; and yet as bold as he is in all other Attempts, he dares not offer to infringe the common laws of Equity; but every Associate has his due Quota . . . thus these Hostes Humani Generis as great robbers as they are to all besides, are precisely just among themselves; without which they could no more Subsist than a Structure without a Foundation.100
Thus did pirates express the collectivistic ethos of life at sea by the egalitarian and comradely distribution of life chances, the refusal to grant privilege or exemption from danger, and the just allocation of shares. Their notion of justice—among themselves and in their dealings with their class enemies—was indeed the foundation of their enterprise. Equally, piracy itself was a “structure” formed upon a “foundation” of the culture and society of Atlantic deep-sea sailors in the eighteenth century.
FIVE
A Motley Crew in the American Revolution
In October 1765 a mob of sailors wearing blackface and masks, and armed with clubs and cutlasses, visited the home of wealthy Charleston merchant Henry Laurens. Eighty strong and warm with drink and anger, they had come to protest the Stamp Act, recently passed by Parliament to raise tax revenues in the American colonies. Responding to the rumor that Laurens had stored in his home the stamped paper everyone would be forced to buy in order to conduct the business of daily life, they chanted, “Liberty, liberty, and stamped paper!” and demanded that he turn it over so that they could destroy it in an act of defiance. Laurens was rattled, as he later explained: they “not only menaced very loudly but now & then handled me pretty uncouthly.” Finally convinced that Laurens did not have the paper, the men dispersed across the waterfront, shedding their disguises and straggling into the smoky taverns and bare boardinghouses, onto the damp wharves and creaky ships.
Their protest had consequences. Parliament, taken aback by colonial protests, would soon repeal the Stamp Act. And in Charleston, one thing led to another, as a mob met in January 1766 to cry again for liberty. This time the protesters were African slaves, whose action caused greater fear and “vast trouble throughout the province.” Armed patrols stalked the city’s streets for almost two weeks, but the tumult continued. Since Charleston’s harbor was crowded with ships, the seafarers were soon “in motion and commotion again,” styling themselves, said a cynical Laurens, the “Protectors of Liberty.” South Carolina governor William Bull looked back over the events of late 1765 and early 1766 and blamed Charleston’s turmoil on “disorderly negroes, and more disorderly sailors.”1
Laurens and Bull identified a revolutionary subject, often described by contemporaries as a “motley crew.” Rarely discussed in the American Revolution, the history of the motley crew extends from the piracies of the 1710s and 1720s to the slave revolts and urban insurrections of the 1730s and 1740s. The defeat of these movements allowed slavery and maritime trade to expand, as gangs of slaves extended plantation acreage and gangs of sailors manned ever-growing fleets of naval and merchant vessels. Britain confirmed its place as the world’s greatest capitalist power by defeating France in the Seven Years’ War in 1763, protecting and expanding its lucrative colonial empire and opening vast new territories in North America and the Caribbean for the hewing of wood and the drawing of water. And yet at the very moment of imperial triumph, slaves and sailors opened a new cycle of rebellion.2
Operations on sea and land, from mutiny to insurrection, made the motley crew the driving force of a revolutionary crisis in the 1760s and 1770s. They helped to destabilize imperial civil society and pushed America toward the world’s first modern colonial war for liberation. By energizing and leading the movement from below, the motley crew shaped the social, organizational, and intellectual histories of the era. Their stories demonstrate that the American Revolution was neither an elite nor a national event, because its genesis, process, outcome, and influence depended on the circulation of proletarian experience around the Atlantic. Such circulation would continue into the 1780s, as the veterans of the revolutionary movement in America would carry their knowledge and experience to the eastern Atlantic, initiating pan-Africanism, advancing abolitionism, and helping to revive dormant traditions of revolutionary thought and action in England and Europe more broadly. The motley crew would help to break apart the first British empire and inaugurate the Atlantic’s age of revolution.
Two meanings of “motley crew” appear in this chapter. The first meaning refers to an organized gang of workers, a squad of people performing similar tasks or performing different tasks contributing to a single goal. The gangs of the tobacco and sugar plantations were essential to the accumulation of wealth in early America. Equally essential were the crews assembled from the ship’s company, or ship’s people, for a particular, temporary purpose, such as sailing a ship, making an amphibious assault, or collecting wood and water. These crews knew how to pull together, or to act in unison, not least because they labored beneath the whip. The first meaning, then, is technical to plantation and seafaring work. The economies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic depended on this unit of human cooperation.
The second meaning describes a social-political formation of the eighteenth-century port city. “Motley crew” in this sense was closely related to the urban mob and the revolutionary crowd, which, as we shall see, was usually an armed agglomeration of various crews and gangs that possessed its own motility and was often independent of leadership from above. It provided the driving force from the Stamp Act crisis to the “Wilkes & Liberty” riots, to the series of risings of the American Revolution. The revolts of the eighteenth-century Atlantic depended on this broader social form of cooperation.
To say that the crew was motley is to say that it was multiethnic. This was characteristic of the recruitment of ships’ crews since transoceanic voyaging began with Columbus and Magellan. Its diversity was an expression of defeat—consider the deliberate mixing of languages and ethnicities in the packing of slave ships—but defeat was transformed into strength by agency, as when a pan-African, and then African American, identity was formed of the various ethnicities and cultures. Originally “ethnic” designations, such as the “free-born Englishman,” could become generalized, as shown by the case of the African sailor Olaudah Equiano.
This chapter will show how the second (political) meaning emerges from the first (technical) one, broadening the cooper
ation, extending the range of activity, and transferring command from overseers or petty officers to the group. We will observe the transition from one to the other in the actions of the motley crew in the streets of the port cities. As sailors moved from ship to shore, they joined waterfront communities of dockers, porters, and laborers, freedom-seeking slaves, footloose youth from the country, and fugitives of various kinds. At the peak of revolutionary possibility, the motley crew appeared as a synchronicity or an actual coordination among the “risings of the people” of the port cities, the resistance of African American slaves, and Indian struggles on the frontier. Tom Paine feared precisely this combination, but it never materialized. On the contrary, the reversal of revolutionary dynamics, toward Thermidor, shifted the milieu of the motley crew, as refugees, boat people, evacuees, and prisoners became the human form of defeat.
Sailors
Sailors were prime movers in the cycle of rebellion, especially in North America, where they helped to secure numerous victories for the movement against Great Britain between 1765 and 1776. They led a series of riots against impressment beginning in the 1740s, moving Tom Paine (in Common Sense) and Thomas Jefferson (in the Declaration of Independence) to list impressment as a major grievance. Their militancy in port grew out of their daily work experience at sea, which combined daring initiative and coordinated cooperation. Sailors engaged in collective struggles over food, pay, work, and discipline, and brought to the ports a militant attitude toward arbitrary and excessive authority, an empathy for the grievances of others, and a willingness to cooperate for the sake of self-defense. As Henry Laurens discovered, they were not afraid to use direct action to accomplish their goals. Sailors thus entered the 1760s armed with the traditions of what we call “hydrarchy,” a tradition of self-organization of seafaring people from below. They would learn new tactics in the age of revolution, but so too would they contribute the vast amount they already knew.3
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