Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not,
Who would be free themselves must strike the first blow?
The street-fighting, direct-action abolitionist David Ruggles used the phrase in 1841 in an open letter announcing a black antislavery convention. Henry Highland Garnet would repeat it as he remembered the Amistad rebellion and called for mass resistance at a national black convention in Buffalo in 1843: American slaves who would be free “themselves must strike the first blow!” The phrase would reach its classic expression when John Brown and his fellow insurrectionists decided to “strike the first blow” in Harpers Ferry in 1859 and Frederick Douglass used it to encourage African Americans to join the Union Army in 1863. “Joseph Cinquez” had been pictured on the deck of the Amistad having struck a first blow as a pirate wielding a cane knife. He linked the antislavery movement from below to white middle-class abolitionism in a strategic and growing alliance. He symbolized a revolutionary future.65
The Amistad affair had a special meaning for black Americans. This was clearly expressed by the weekly newspaper the Colored American, published in New York by African American editors Samuel Cornish, Phillip Bell, and Charles Bennett Ray, who sounded a distinctive, often revolutionary message about the case from the beginning, comparing Cinqué to the great liberators George Washington and Toussaint Louverture and demanding that the African prisoners be emancipated immediately. When, after gaining their freedom, the Amistad Africans toured the eastern United States to raise money for their repatriation to Sierra Leone, the African American community turned out in huge numbers, especially when events were held in their churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Church Street in New York. At one gathering there, the reporter for the Colored American noted, “We do not recollect of ever having seen a larger assemblage of our people upon any occasion.” During the meeting itself the community gave the Amistad Africans a loud and passionate embrace. The feeling was acknowledged and returned by the Amistad African Kinna, who said to his African American supporters, “You are my brethren, the same color as myself.” The Amistad case helped draw many African Americans into what had been mostly a white, middle-class abolitionist movement and helped to move many black leaders, including Henry Highland Garnett, to more militant stands against slavery.66
The “Bloody Flag” of Piracy
On August 24, 1839, when newspapers were aflame with speculation about the black pirates, Captain Henry Bullinger and his crew encountered the Amistad at sea, as he noted in his logbook:
“We asked if they wanted a pilot, and receiving no answer we hailed again and inquired if they wanted to go to New York. They said in broken English no; but that they were going to some other country, pointing to the N. E. They asked for water, but would not come for it. We then hoisted the American flag, and hailed them the third time and told them to follow us—that we were going to take them to New York.”
Upon this attempt to capture the schooner, the men on the Amistad “rushed to the quarter deck and armed themselves with muskets and cutlasses and hoisted the bloody flag at the peak.” The red or “bloody” flag, like the black flag, was commonly used by eighteenth-century pirates to signal defiance: they would accept no quarter and they would grant none. They would fight to the death. Cinqué, after all, preferred death to slavery, as the penny press had made clear. Perhaps the Amistad Africans really were pirates after all.67
Epilogue
I conclude with words written by the West Indian novelist Jamaica Kincaid:
In the Antigua that I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around us were named after some other English maritime criminals. There was Rodney Street, there was Hood Street, and there was Drake Street.1
Note that phrase: English maritime criminals. To many in the English-speaking world, these words will sound heretical if not downright treasonous. I am sure the author meant them to be. In any case, they express an important truth that has been central to his book: those historical figures some see as heroes, others see as criminals. And the reverse is true: those historical figures some see as criminals, others see as heroes. This is often the way of the outlaw. Lord Nelson, hero to many, is a criminal to Jamaica Kincaid. Conversely, pirates, criminals to many, and certainly to Nelson, were heroes, in their own day as in ours, to many. It is all a question of perspective—more specifically, a question of who has power to impose perspective in the interpretation of history, as in the naming of streets, the building of museums, and the writing of books.
The old history will not do anymore—the exclusive focus on the Nelsons, Rodneys, Hoods, and Drakes, the great and the powerful of the world’s navies and merchant shipping industries; the well born and the well heeled; the admirals, the commodores, the captains; the merchants, the businessmen, the entrepreneurs; on their battles by sea and their transoceanic imperial adventures; on the national glories heaped upon them; and on the national mythologies made of and through them. Perhaps the best-known writer of the old maritime history in America was Samuel Eliot Morison, the Boston patrician, patriotic admiral, and Harvard historian who wrote about the Christopher Columbuses and the John Paul Joneses of the world. This kind of history looks from the top down—history, in my view, seen from the wrong end of the spyglass.2
Like many other books written over the past generation, this chronicle has looked from below, shifting focus from the admirals and other elites to workers black and white, male and female, of many nations, races, and ethnicities. We have followed motley crews into crowded grogshops with scraping fiddles and wild brawls; into cold, damp jails; and onto ships with their rolling decks, billowing sails, whispered conspiracies, stowaways, and liberation. As Jesse Lemisch remarked in 1968, as history “from the bottom up” began to challenge the old history from above, this broader, more inclusive approach to the past is much more in keeping with democratic and egalitarian ideals than is the top-down variety. We now know to ask about the Afro-Caribbean woman whose nursing saved Nelson’s life in 1780, and the mutineers flogged and executed by the likes of Rodney, Hood, and Drake.3
We have seen how seafaring people influenced people up above—how their yarns gave ideas to playwrights, novelists, poets, and philosophers. We have seen how the actions of the motley crew in Boston in 1747 gave a young Sam Adams the idea that all people were “by Nature on a Level; born with an equal Share of Freedom, and endow’d with Capacities nearly alike.” This radical idea would be reactivated by a motley crew of sailors and slaves a generation later and enshrined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
We have seen how runaway seamen and enslaved Africans congregated, cooperated, and together imagined and sometimes actually built subversive alternatives to capitalism—pirate crews, maroon communities, and underground revolutionary movements of various sorts. Outlaws created independent organizations and autonomous zones that offered freedoms simply not available to the laboring many in the societies they left behind. The lords of the Atlantic struggled mightily to destroy these subversive alternatives as part of their own drive to dominance, fearing that freer ways of life might inspire others with similar grievances. Sometimes the authorities won the battle but lost the war: they obliterated the counterculture of pirates, hanging hundreds on gibbets around the Atlantic, but the swashbucklers came back around as folk heroes, more popular today than ever.
We now look back on the motley crews of the past with greater understanding than ever before, not least because contemporary globalization makes it easier to understand the importance of the original transnational worker, the deep-sea sailor, and the centrality of the seas in human endeavor as a place where important historical processes such as the genesis of ideas and class formation have taken place. Long derided as marginal and liminal, quaint and exotic, the seaman at long last emerges as a preeminent worker of the world, a cosmopolitan in the truest sense, who shaped the history of our planet in profound and lasting way
s.
I close with the story of one of my favorite historical figures, who embodied many of the themes of this book. I refer to an enslaved man known to us by the name of Caesar. He first appears in the historical record in 1759, in an act of resistance against slavery near Philadelphia: he ran away from his master, who in response ran an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette in an effort to recover his wayward property. In the ad we learn that Caesar had the kind of job that put him close to freedom: he had worked as “a Ferry man at Chester Town . . . for many years.” His master believed he escaped by sea as the “Cook of a Vessel, as he has been much used on board of Ships.” Somehow, Caesar was caught and reenslaved, we know not how, but he shows up again ten years later, in 1769, having escaped another master, this time in Boston. He was now supposed to be “strolling about the country.”4
What distinguished Caesar from the many thousands of men and women who emancipated themselves by running away by sea to become outlaws on the great Atlantic was his unusually fierce determination. For according to his second master, Caesar was “noted in town by having no legs.” His first master had written that Caesar “has both his legs cut off, and walks on his Knees.” Whether he lost his legs in punishment for previous acts of running away is unknown. In any case, it was, as the old saying goes, no easy walk to freedom. But a walk, and a sail, to freedom it certainly was, in the way of the outlaw.
Acknowledgments
Thinking back over the thirty-odd years of scholarship surveyed and synthesized in this book, I could name and thank a cast of thousands for their contributions. Since that is impossible I have chosen to single out five historian-activists who blazed the trail of history from below, showing me and many others the way. Their names appear on the dedication page.
Chapter 1 was conceived for a conference on “The Eighteenth Century Cosmopolis: Global Cities and Citizens in the Age of Sail,” but not completed because of illness. It was finished and delivered as a keynote four years later at another conference, “Community at Sea in the Age of Sail,” at Aalborg University in May 2012. Thanks to Kathleen Wilson, Johan Heinson, and Torben Neilsen.
Chapter 2 was written for, and presented at, the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in St. Louis, in 1986. Thanks to my fellow panelists—two gifted historians—Daniel Vickers and Philip D. Morgan.
Chapter 3 was delivered as the keynote address at a conference on “Escape,” held in Strachan, Tasmania, Australia, in 2006. Thanks to Cassandra Pybus, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, and Lucy Frost.
Chapter 4 originally appeared as “‘Under the Banner of King Death’: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716–1726” in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1981 (3rd series, vol. 38, pp. 203–227). It is supplemented by material subsequently presented in my book Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004). I owe much to the late Michael McGiffert for the former, and to my editor at Beacon, past and happily present, Gayatri Patnaik.
Chapter 5 is a revised and rewritten version of Chapter 5 of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which I coauthored with Peter Linebaugh (Beacon Press, 2000). Thanks to our editor, Deb Chasman, and to Peter for allowing me to include our joint essay in this collection.
Chapter 6 is a revised and rewritten version of Chapter 8 of my book The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking Penguin, 2007). Thanks to Wendy Wolf and Ellen Garrison for their smart, skilled work on the book.
Chapter 7 is largely new but does draw on my book The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Viking Penguin, 2012). Thanks again to the superb Wendy Wolf.
Portions of the Epilogue come from a keynote lecture delivered at the international congress “Outlaws in the Caribbean, Past and Present,” University of Vienna, May 2010. Thanks to Christian Cwik and Michael Zeuske.
I have made only modest revisions to the three already published essays, preferring to let them stand with the scholarship with which they were engaged at their moment of publication. They are, in their own ways, historical documents, and I have sought to preserve that part of their identity.
I shout out thanks to the motley crew known as the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, especially to my always steady shipmate, Rob Ruck. I also wish to acknowledge and thank those whose creative work in a variety of fields has been an inspiration to me in recent years: Bill Bollendorf, the late Dennis Brutus, Tony Buba, Alessandro Camon, Anna Colin, Martín Espada, Alex Farquharson, Dave Kovics, Carmit Levité, Manuel Monestel, Karen Somerville, the late Barry Unsworth, Naomi Wallace, Nigel Williams, and Frantz Zéphirin (whose art is on the book cover). I owe special gratitude to N. John Cooper, my dean at the University of Pittsburgh, who made it possible for me to work with many of these gifted people. Thanks to my family—Wendy, Zeke, and Eva—for everything, over many years.
Warm thanks to my stellar editor at Beacon Press, Gayatri Patnaik, with whom I have been happy and privileged to work again. Her assistant, Rachael Marks, has done all kinds of useful things in helping this book make its way to print. Thanks too to my extraordinary agent, Sandy Dijkstra, who found this project the perfect home, and to my assistant Eileen Weiner, who read the entire manuscript with care and insight.
This book has something of a sound track. It began long ago and recently concluded with the poetry and music of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell in my ears, and no less in my mind and heart. As LKJ wrote in “Di Great Insohreckshan,” about the Brixton uprising of 1981,
evry rebel jussa revel in dem story
dem a taak bout di powah an di glory.
Notes
Preface
1. T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2003).
2. These are themes in the classic works by Eric Hobsbawm: Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Praeger, 1959); Bandits (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969).
3. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007); Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012).
Prologue
1. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Highlights of the new maritime history include Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650–1775 (London: Methuen, 2007).
2. See Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären E. Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
3. Marcus Rediker, “Toward a People’s History of the Sea,” in David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, eds., Maritime Empires: The Operation and Impact of Nineteenth-Century British Imperial Trade (Suffolk, England: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 198; Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 106–32. Cohen uses the term “hydrophasia” to describe the disregard of the sea (14). See also Allan Sekula’s brilliant Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 48.
4. Joseph Conrad, Nigger of the Narcissus (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1914), 45; Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (19
86): 22–27. An important step forward in the study of maritime space was a conference organized by Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun called “Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, c. 1500–c. 1900,” held in Greifswald, Germany, in July 2000, on ships, port cities, and the seas, “transnational contact zones.” See the collection of essays edited by Klein and Mackenthun entitled Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004).
5. Derek Walcott, Poems, 1965–1980 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 237.
6. Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).
7. Quoted in Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 42.
8. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 2.
9. Eric Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century,” 5 (1954), 40; Sir William Petty, Political Arithmetick or a Discourse Concerning, the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings: Husbandry, Manufacture, Commerce, Fishery, Artizans, Seamen, Soldiers; Publick Revenues, Interest, Taxes, Superlucration, Registries, Banks, Valuation of Men, Increasing of Seamen, of Militia’s, Harbours, Situation, Shipping, Power at Sea (London: Robert Clavel, 1690).
10. Rediker, Slave Ship, chap. 10.
11. C. L. R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chalieu, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1974), 115.
Chapter One
1. Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (1724, 1728; repr. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 7. It was long believed that this book was written by Daniel Defoe, but the claim has been challenged in recent years. See David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (New York: Random House, 1997), xix–xx. My own view is that the book had multiple authors and that Defoe was one of them.
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