The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  4. Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 219; J. D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 95–96, 227; Maxwell P. Schoenfeld, “The Restoration Seaman and His Wages,” American Neptune 25 (1965): 285.

  5. Sir William Petty, A Treatise of Taxes (London, 1662), chap. 10, 12.

  6. Sir William Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691), 1:102.

  7. Sir William Petty, Political Arithmetick (London, 1690), republished in C. H. Hull, ed., The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (London, 1899), 1:259–60.

  8. J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Praeger, 1971), 19, 13; P. K. Kemp and Christopher Lloyd, Brethren of the Coast: Buccaneers of the South Seas (New York: St. Martin’s, 1960), 128; C. H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (1910; reprint, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966), 233.

  9. Gloria Britannia: Or, the Boast of the British Seas (London, 1689), quoted in J. D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, 1.

  10. Ernest Fayle, A Short History of the World’s Shipping Industry (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933), 207; Harper, The English Navigation Laws, 61, 161; Ian K. Steele, The Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration 1696–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 44, 54; James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 163; Barry Supple, Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance, 1720–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 3.

  11. As we have argued in Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook” and reply to Robert Sweeny, in Labour/Le Travail 10 (1982): 87–121 and 14 (1984): 173–81; and Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  12. Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners of the Eighteenth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), 91; Edward Ward, The London Spy (1697; reprint, London: Cassell, 1927); Barnaby Slush, The Navy Royal: Or a Sea-Cook Turn’d Projector (London, 1709); C. L. R. James, “The Atlantic Slave Trade,” in his The Future in the Present (London: Allison and Busby, 1977).

  13. The pamphlet literature included George St.-Lo, England’s Safety (London, 1693); England’s Interest, Or, a Discipline for Seamen (London, 1694); Robert Crosfield, Truth Brought to Light (London, 1694); Encouragement for Seamen and Manning (London, 1695); William Hodges, Dialogue concerning the Art of Ticket-Buying (London, 1695); Great Britain’s Groans (London, 1695); Misery to Misery (London, 1695); Humble Proposals for the Relief, Encouragement, Security, and Happiness of the Seamen of England (London, 1695); John Perry, Regulation for Seamen (London, 1695); Discourse upon Raising Men (London, 1696); Thomas Mozin and Nicholas Jennings, Proposal for the Incouragement of Seamen (London, 1697); and Ruin to Ruin (London, 1699).

  14. J. R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1996); J. D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, 15; John Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, 1689–1697: Its State and Direction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

  15. Harper, English Navigation Laws, 55; E. H. W. Meyerstein, ed., Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere: A Relation of the Several Adventures by Sea with the Dangers, Difficulties, and Hardships I Met for Several Years (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 37; Petty, Political Arithmetick, 281; Ehrman, Navy in the War of William III, 115.

  16. Michael Cohn and Michael K. H. Platzer, Black Men of the Sea (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978).

  17. “Richard Simons Voyage to the Straits of Magellan & S. Seas in the Year 1689,” Sloane MSS. 86, British Library, f.57; William Matthews, “Sailors’ Pronunciation in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Anglia: Zeitshrift für Englische Philologie 59 (1935): 193–251.

  18. Robert McCrum, et al., The Story of English (New York: Viking, 1986), chap. 6; B. Traven, The Death Ship: The Story of an American Sailor (New York: Collier, 1962), 237.

  19. J. L. Dillard, All-American English (New York: Random House, 1975), develops the thesis of maritime languages. See also Nicholas Faraclas, “Rivers Pidgin English: Tone, Stress, or Pitch-Accent Language?” Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 14, no. 2 (fall 1984): 75. Ian F. Hancock, “A Provisional Comparison of the English-based Atlantic Creoles,” African Language Review 8 (1969).

  20. Nicholas Faraclas, “Rumors of the Demise of Descartes Are Premature,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 3 (1988): 119–35. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 86; Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 30.

  21. Arthur L. Hayward, ed., Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals . . . (London, 1735), 37.

  22. Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 147–51.

  23. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars; Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 259, 264, 287–88; To his Highness Lord Protector (London, 1654).

  24. Richard Overton, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (London, 1646); Don M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1944), 80, 95, 227, 287, 347, and 405.

  25. Kemp and Lloyd, Brethren of the Coast; Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 71, 73; J. S. Bromley, “Outlaws at Sea, 1660–1720: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity among the Caribbean Freebooters,” in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rude, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montreal: Concordia University, 1985), 3.

  26. See A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1952), chap. 1; F. Graus, “Social Utopias in the Middle Ages,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 3–19; William McFee, The Law of the Sea (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951), 50, 54, 59, 72.

  27. Kemp and Lloyd, Brethren of the Coast, 3; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line, 62, 176; Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Pirates continued to lead what they called the “marooning life” into the 1720s. See Examination of Thomas Jones, Feb., 1724, High Court of Admiralty Papers (HCA) 1/55, fo. 52, Public Record Office, London.

  28. Christopher Hill, “Radical Pirates?” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 20; William Dampier, A New Voyage around the World (London, 1697), 219–20; Kemp and Lloyd, Brethren of the Coast, 17; Bromley, “Outlaws at Sea,” 6, 8, 9.

  29. “Simsons Voyage,” Sloane MSS 86, 43; Bromley, “Outlaws at Sea,” 17; Marcus Rediker, “The Common Seaman in the Histories of Capitalism and the Working Class,” International Journal of Maritime History 1 (1989): 352–53.

  30. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson . . . (London, 1791), 86; Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 25 (1968): 379, 375–76, 406; Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 246–47, 257, 262–68; Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (1724, 1728; reprint, Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 244, 359 (hereafter cited as C. Johnson, History); A. G. Course, The Merchant Navy: A Social History (London: F. Muller, 1963), 61; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 144, 154–55.

  31. Gov. Lowther to Council of Trade, in W. Noel Sainsbury et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies (London, 1860–), 39:350; Piracy Destroy’d (London, 1700), 3–4, 12; R. D. Merriman, ed., Queen Anne’s Navy: Documents concerning the Administration of the Navy of Queen Anne, 1702–1714 (London: Navy Records Society, 1961), 170–72, 174, 221–22, 250; C. Lloyd, The British Seaman, 124�
�49; Peter Kemp, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck (London: Dent, 1970), chaps. 4, 5.

  32. Course, Merchant Navy, 84; C. Lloyd, The British Seaman, 57. Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea (London, 1712), v-vi, 14–16; Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, ed. G. E. Manwaring (1712; reprint, New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), xiv, xxv; George Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World (London, 1726), 34–36, 38, 46, 157, 214, 217; William Betagh, A Voyage Round the World (London, 1728), 4.

  33. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, chap. 6.

  34. C. Johnson, History, 213, 423; Examination of John Brown (1717) in John Franklin Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 294; William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (1734; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1971), 199; Hayward, ed., Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 37; C. Johnson, History, 42, 296, 337.

  35. Sec An Account of the Conduct and Proceedings of the Late John Gow, alias Smith, Captain of the Late Pirates . . . (1725; reprint, Edinburgh: Gordon Wright Publishing, 1978), introduction.

  36. C. Johnson, History, 338, 582; “Proceedings of the Court held on the Coast of Africa,” HCA 1/99, fo. 101; Boston Gazette, 24–31 October 1720, 21–28 March 1726; Snelgrave, New Account, 225, 241; Boston News-Letter, 14–21 November 1720; Testimony of Thomas Checkley (1717), in Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy, 304; The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), 11.

  37. An Account of . . . the Late John Gow, 3; C. Johnson History, 244, 224. Bartholomew Roberts’s crew was taken in 1722 because many of the men were drunk when the time came for an engagement. See C. Johnson, History, 243, and John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, & the West Indies . . . (1735; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1970), 192.

  38. C. Johnson, History, 129, 135, 167, 205, 209, 211, 212, 222, 280, 308, 312, 343, 353, 620; American Weekly Mercury, 17 March 1720; Snelgrave, New Account, 233–38.

  39. Walter Hamilton to Council of Trade and Plantations, 6 January 1718, Colonial Office Papers (CO) 152/12, fo. 211, Public Record Office, London; Boston Gazette, 6–13 July 1725; James Vernon to Council of Trade and Plantations, 21 December 1697, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series 16 (1697–98), 70; Tryals of Thirty-Six Persons for Piracy (Boston, 1723), 3; Clive Senior, A Nation of Pirates: English Piracy in Its Heyday (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1976), 22; Kenneth Kinkor, “From the Seas! Black Men under the Black Flag,” American Prospects 10 (1995): 27–29.

  40. American Weekly Mercury, 17 March 1720; C. Johnson, History, 82; Information of Joseph Smith and Information of John Webley (1721), HCA1/18, fo. 35; Information of William Voisy (1721) HCA 1/55, fo. 12. Native Americans also manned pirate ships, though in much smaller numbers. See The Trials of Five Persons for Piracy, Felony, and Robbery (Boston, 1726).

  41. Testimony of Richard Hawkins, Political State of Great Britain 28 (1724): 153; Boston News-Letter, 17–24 June 1717; The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates (London, 1719), 46; C. Johnson, History, 173, 427, 595. See also Boston News-Letter, 29 April–6 May 1717.

  42. Boston News-Letter, 4–11 April 1723.

  43. John Gay, Polly, An Opera (London, 1729).

  44. R. Reynall Bellamy, ed., Ramblin’ Jack: The Journal of Captain John Cremer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 144; Hugh F. Rankin, The Golden Age of Piracy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 82. See Virginia Council to the Board of Trade, 11 August 1715, CO 5/1317.

  45. C. Johnson, History, 273.

  46. H. Ross, “Some Notes on the Pirates and Slavers around Sierra Leone and the West Coast of Africa, 1680–1723,” Sierra Leone Studies 11 (1928): 16–53; C. Johnson, History, 131; L. G. Carr Laughton, “Shantying and Shanties,” Mariner’s Mirror 9 (1923): 48–50; Trial of John McPherson and others, Proceedings of the Court of Admiralty, Philadelphia, 1731, HCA 1/99, fo. 3; Information of Henry Hull (1729) HCA 1/56, fo. 29–30.

  47. Marcus Rediker, “Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates,” in Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Atlantic Seafaring, 1700–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Jo Stanley, Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages (London: HarperCollins, 1995).

  48. Cotton Mather, Instructions to the Living, From the Condition of the Dead: a Brief Relation of Remarkables in the Shipwreck of above One Hundred Pirates . . . (Boston, 1717), 4; Meeting of 1 April 1717, in H. C. Maxwell Lyte, ed., Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations . . . (London: H. M. S.O., 1924), 3:359; C. Johnson, History, 7; American Weekly Mercury, 24 November 1720; New England Courant, 19–26 March 1722.

  49. C. Johnson, History, 115–6; “Proceedings,” HCA 1/99, fo. 158; Snelgrave, New Account, 203.

  50. C. Johnson, History, 244; Bromley, “Outlaws at Sea,” 11, 12; Atkins, Voyage, 191.

  51. Parker v. Boucher (1719), HCA 24/132; Wise v. Beekman (1716), HCA 24/131. For other instances of conflicts that ended up in court, see Coleman v. Seamen (1718) and Desbrough v. Christian (1720), HCA 24/132; Povey v. Bigelow (1722), HCA 24/134; Wistridge v. Chapman (1722), HCA 24/135. All, Public Record Office, London.

  52. Information of Alexander Thompson (1723), HCA 1/55, fo. 23; see also Petition of John Massey and George Lowther (1721), CO 28/17, fo. 199.

  53. “Proceedings,” HCA 1/99, fo. 4–6; see also Atkins, Voyage, 91, 186–87.

  54. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 150. “The Memoriall of the Merchants of London Trading to Africa” (1720), Admiralty Papers (ADM) 1/3810, Public Record Office, London; American Weekly Mercury, 30 March-6 April 1721.

  55. Boston Gazette, 13–20 June 1720; “Anonymous Paper relating to the Sugar and Tobacco Trade” (1724), CO 388/24, fo. 186–87.

  56. Atkins, Voyage, 98; Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 155; Boston Gazette, 27 August-3 September 1722; New England Courant, 3–10 September 1722.

  57. “Proceedings,” HCA 1/99, fo. 98; Stanley Richards, Black Bart (Llandybie, Wales: C. Davies, 1966), 107.

  58. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 162.

  59. Ibid., 164, 165; Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 150.

  60. Douglas North and Gary B. Walton emphasize the destruction of piracy as a major source of productivity advance in eighteenth-century shipping. See their “Sources of Productivity Change in Colonial American Shipping,” Economic History Review 67 (1968): 67–78.

  61. C. Johnson, History, 43; Leo Francis Stock, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments respecting North America (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute, 1930), 3:364, 433, 453, 454; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 235–37. Walpole’s direct involvement can be seen in Treasury Warrant to Capt. Knott, T52/32 (10 August 1722), P. R. O., and in American Weekly Mercury, 1–8 July 1725. Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor: Power and the Law on the Seas, 1450–1850,” in James D. Tracy, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 196–227, and Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  62. W. E. May, “The Mutiny of the Chesterfield,” Mariners’ Mirror 47 (1961): 178–87; Aimé Césaire, “Nursery Rhyme,” in The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983), 265.

  Chapter Six

  1. Daniel Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants (New York, 1744), edited and republished by Thomas J. Davis in The New York Slave Conspiracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 15, 443,
16, 452, 448–49. (All subsequent references are to this edition, hereafter cited as Horsmanden, Journal.)

  2. Horsmanden, Journal, 15, 16, 155, 409, 446–47, 448; Boston Gazette, 15–22 June 1741; Lieutenant Governor George Clarke to Lords of Trade, 24 August 1741, in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1855), 4:201–3.

  3. Horsmanden, Journal, 29. See also T. J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 78.

  4. Horsmanden, Journal, 112, 160, 159, 42, 198, 418, 313, 246, 458, 436.

  5. Ibid., 441, 432, 6, 10, 11, 12.

  6. Anonymous letter to Cadwallader Colden, 23 July (?) 1741, in Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, 1715–1748, Collections of the New-York Historical Society (1937), 8:270–72; Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 116, 121, 118, 119; Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 13–139.

  7. William Smith, Jr., The History of the Province of New York (1757; reprint, ed. Michael Kammen, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), 1:24–59; Ferenc M. Szasz, “The New York Slave Revolt of 1741: A Re-examination,” New York History 48 (1967): 215–30; Leopold S. Launitz-Schurer, Jr., “Slave Resistance in Colonial New York: An Interpretation of Daniel Horsmanden’s New York Conspiracy,” Phylon 41 (1980): 137–52.

  8. T. J. Davis, Rumor of Revolt, xii, xiii, 44, 226, 250, 258, 260, 277.

  9. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), chap. 5; Jacob Price, “Economic Function of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 173; Horsmanden, Journal, 217, 34, 204, 211, 211, 288, 258.