Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  Pirates

  The canoe kept gaining as Henry and his companions watched anxiously, ready to fire. Soon the approaching men “waved their hats and hailed us,” by which gesture it was clear that they were not Indians, who did not wear hats. They seemed to be “white men.” “We enquired,” wrote Henry, “What they were?” They replied, “Englishman in distress, &c., and waited for an opportunity to go off the island.” The men in the boat were no doubt relieved, but perhaps they should not have been. It turned out that the canoemen were something rather more than marooned Englishmen. They were pirates, all twenty-six of them on the island. Formerly part of a multiethnic crew with Captain Yanche, who marauded against the Spanish in the Caribbean, they had gone on a raid against Indians in Florida (to capture canoes), gotten separated from the rest, and come to Margarita in hopes of finding a vessel that would carry them back to an English port.

  Henry and crew were, understandably, not exactly forthcoming about who they were and what they were doing. The pirates assumed they were debtors fleeing those to whom they owed money, as was common in the Caribbean at the time. Thomas Waker, who actually was a debtor, broke solidarity with his shipmates and sought to curry favor with the pirates by explaining that most of them were not debtors but rather rebels, thinking this would make the sea robbers more likely to take him over his shipmates. He miscalculated, badly. The pirates not only resented his treachery, they, according to Henry, “loved us the better, confessing they were rebels too,” adding that “if the Duke of Monmouth had had 1,000 of them, they would soon have put to flight the King’s army.” Their affinity discovered, the pirates took the bedraggled men ashore and gave them fresh water and food and a chance to rest and recover from their hard voyage.

  Later, when the escapees explained their intention to sail on to Curaçao, the pirates, said Henry, “endeavoured to persuade us from it: alleging the insufficiency of our boat, and the dangers we were so lately exposed unto.” The pirates wanted Henry and his men to go marauding with them on the Spanish Main. Most of the gang from Barbados were willing, but not Henry, who was apparently inclined to risk his neck at sea for freedom but not upon the gallows for piracy. He in turn persuaded the others not to go. Not to be outdone in the argument, the pirates promptly burned their boat, “supposing then that we would choose rather to go with them” rather than stay on the island, where they would risk attack by the Spanish or starvation before anyone arrived to pick them up. Henry was undeterred, but he was worried about survival. He therefore paid the pirates thirty pieces of eight to leave behind an Indian they had captured in Florida. He would feed those who remained—the eight escapees and or pirates who decided to stay behind—with his ability to catch fish.6

  Maroon

  The privateers (a legal-sounding name for pirates) “had no sooner left us, but we found ourselves, of necessity, obliged to seek out for provisions.” This was the new material reality for Henry and the others, who were now officially marooned. When he was narrating this part of his story, Henry’s voice suddenly changed: he became something of a natural historian, describing in detail the island he had come by accident to inhabit—how it got its name, its geology and topography, and most crucially its resources, especially the salt deposits and how they were formed, and its animal and plant life. Henry knew that such descriptions were popular parts of the travel literature of his day. In any case, this was making the most of necessity: Henry and his fellow maroons had to figure how to feed themselves in this strange land. This required new kinds of knowledge and new forms of cooperation. There was an “art”—and a history—of marooning. Henry and his mates were suddenly, and literally, commoners. They had to wrest sustenance from an island commons with an unfamiliar ecology.7

  In the first foray for food the escapees were “led by the example of those four privateers that stayed behind.” These men had already lived on the island for a while, but more important, they had other kinds of knowledge that would prove invaluable, for buccaneers had long lived as hunting and gathering maroons, sometimes by choice, to escape various Caribbean authorities, and sometimes by necessity, as had happened to all of the men on Margarita. The crew immediately began “to turn turtle,” that is, search during the nighttime hours for the amphibious creatures and flip them over on their backs, where they would remain until the hunters returned the following day to kill and eat them. Cooking was done in the old buccaneer manner, barbecuing the turtle meat on wooden spits (boucans, used to cook slaughtered wild cattle, whence the name boucanier). Any meat left over would be cut into long strips, salted, dried in the sun, and saved as their “winter store,” as the buccaneers had long done. Henry called turtle flesh “very delightsome and pleasant to the taste, much resembling veal.” The men also collected turtle eggs, their season fortunately being April, May, and June, beating the yolks in calabashes with salt before frying them, pancake-style, in tortoise fat.

  A second major source of food lay in the fishing skill of the Native American whom Henry had retained. He “was so dextrous that with his bow and arrow, he would shoot a small fish at a great distance.” He also caught crawfish and shellfish (whelks), which made for a welcome change of diet. This too reflected longstanding buccaneer tradition. West Indian freebooters had for decades worked out alliances with the multiethnic Miskito Indians from the coast of Nicaragua. The buccaneers would provide military assistance in the Miskito struggle against the Spanish; the Miskito would provide skilled fishermen who would sail with the buccaneers and provide food for them. Knowledge of the local ecology was prized.8

  The next major task, since hurricane season was coming on, was “building houses to defend us from the stormy weather.” They built simple structures and covered them with coarse grass that grew by the seaside. Their household goods consisted of two or three earthen jars left by the pirates, calabashes, and shells. The maroons spent much time in their “little huts or houses, . . . sometimes reading or writing.” They were slowly making the island their own.

  Henry turned his medical and scientific reading to new account on the island, searching out “vegetable productions” that would prove to be “of great service to us.” He found a plant he called a “Turks’ Head” that had a small nut that tasted like a strawberry, and another called the curatoe (agave) that had a variety of uses: its juice could be used as soap; its fibers made good thread; its leaves could be boiled to produce a “balsom [poultice] for wounds.” The body of the plant, when heated and placed in a hole in the sand for five or six days, produced “a most pleasant and spiritous alcoholic liquor,” which tasted like “the syrup of baked pears.” Another pleasure was smoking a plant called “Wild Sage” in “a crab’s claw.” Despite Henry’s inventiveness, however, island life remained “desolate and disconsolate.”

  Homecoming

  After four months on the island, the maroons at last spied two vessels, a sloop and a man-of-war sailing toward them. Both were full of pirates. The captain of the warship learned from the four pirates on the island that one of their number was a doctor and sent for him. Henry was welcomed aboard the ship with trumpets, greeted by the captain and ship’s doctor, and taken into the great cabin, where he was wined, fed, and given gifts. The conversation touched on the defeat of the Duke of Monmouth, which the pirates “seemed to deplore.” They too were rebels against the English state. Henry had found compatriots on the western side of the Atlantic in the battle that had cost him his freedom in the first place.

  Henry requested that he and his mates be taken to a port where they might find a ship bound for England, but the pirate captain informed him that the matter would have to be voted on by the crew, who met, debated, and decided to allow only Henry to sail with them, because they did not want to share the “rich prize” they had apparently just taken with the newcomers (which was their established practice). They did, however, entertain and give abundant provisions to the men on the island. Two days later, on May 25, 1687, they sailed away, Henry feeling “not a little
grieved at my departure.”

  They sailed north, between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, where they captured a ketch sailing from New York to Providence in the Bahamas, a place that had recently been resettled after a Spanish attack. Seafaring people, many of them formerly pirates, had erected a “little commonwealth,” which was “under the Protection of no Prince.” They built a small fort, made and enacted their own laws, and selected an Independent, “a very sober man,” as their governor. The pirates were warmly received and liked the place so much that they ran their ship aground and burnt her, “giving the guns to the inhabitants to fortify the island.”9

  In two weeks Henry continued on with the crew of the ketch for Carolina and eventually to New York. There he met someone he knew in Barbados (who “would not discover me”) who relayed the stories of how the runaways had been pursued by their masters, how colonial authorities throughout the Caribbean had been alerted of the escape, how promises of severe punishment had been made should they ever be returned, how rumors ran wild about their adventures, and how, in the end, it was “concluded that we had perished in the sea.” From New York, Henry recrossed the Atlantic to Amsterdam, from there to the Isle of Wight, from there to Southampton, and eventually to his family, who greeted him “as one risen from the dead.” Henry’s final words were praise to God for preserving him against “all dangers and times of trial.” These last he wrote “From my lodging, at the sign of the Ship, in Paul’s Churchyard, London. June the 10th, 1689.”

  Conclusion

  In the end Henry Pitman was typical of countless other rebels who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found themselves flung to the edges of the Atlantic in the aftermath of a failed rebellion. Whenever authorities repressed a riot by an urban mob, a strike by workers, a mutiny by soldiers or sailors, or a revolt by servants or slaves, they often hanged a few of the rebels and sent a larger number into a miniature diaspora—such was the experience of defeat. What was unusual in Henry’s case is that by the time he returned to England, those who had exiled him, the government of James II, had themselves been overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, by which means Henry the “convict rebel” suddenly became a heroic martyr of Protestant resistance to the “Arbitrary Power” of the dreaded papists. This change of political power is precisely what made the publication of Henry’s narrative possible.10

  As we have seen, many kinds of knowledge—technical, natural, and social—were necessary to his escape. First among these was navigation, without which the eight men could never have imagined trying to escape by sea to a destination six hundred miles away. Henry gathered a compass, a quadrant, a chart, a half-hour glass, a half-minute glass, and log and line for getting bearings and plotting his course. Henry did not say where he learned navigation, but it was almost certainly during a stint in the Royal Navy, a common career choice for young physicians in his day. He was not the only Monmouth rebel with valuable maritime experience. Indeed we know from accounts of other escapes made by the Monmouth rebels that seafaring skill was central to the design. A planter named Jeaffreson of Nevis wrote that he and other plantation owners had trouble keeping their new bonded laborers “who could jump on the first ship they found, find work, and sail away.” The knowledge of medicine and of carpentry (Whicker) also came in handy.11

  Related to technical knowledge was a necessary multifaceted knowledge of nature, which of course navigation itself demanded—of winds, tides, latitude (accurate ways to plot longitude had not been developed), and geography. Some of this was a matter of formal education, some of it a matter of experience. Henry knew the wind patterns of the southern Caribbean, he knew the locations of the various islands. He knew political geography—where English, Dutch, and Spanish colonies were located—and he knew economic geography, the patterns of ships as they engaged in the salt trade, for example. Equally important was the knowledge of nature once he and his mates were marooned on the island of Margarita, and here it is doubtful that they would have survived if not for the pirates who shared with them the buccaneer’s knowledge of marooning amid the Caribbean ecology, and if not for the Native American whose fishing skill fed them. These were the Calibans to Henry’s Prospero, to use Shakespeare’s example of how the lowly fed and sustained one of higher station.12

  Neither the technical nor the natural knowledge would have been sufficient without corresponding social knowledge—how to cooperate, how to make alliances. From the beginning Henry knew that his escape would depend on a broad and various lot of people, but even he could not have known just what a big and motley crew they would be: the indebted woodcarver John Nuthall; his fellow political prisoners and transported felons; two enslaved Africans; three shiploads of pirates; a Florida Indian; fellow maroons; and numerous crews of sailors who carried him hither and yon. The “shipmates” with whom he originally came over to the island, with whom he had suffered a deadly “middle passage” (and no doubt because of it developed strong bonds), were especially important as the core members of the conspiracy, but all of the above played essential roles. The pirates, with their own hard-won wisdom about survival and traditions of self-organization, were particularly instrumental. The circulation of proletarian knowledge and experience, not to mention simple mutual aid, was perhaps the linchpin of Henry Pitman’s successful escape.

  In the end, Henry’s bid for freedom required that he and his mates know how two modes of production actually, concretely worked. The first was the capitalist economy as it operated in the Caribbean and across the Atlantic—the workings of plantations and ships, colonies and imperial metropolis. The second was the commoning noncapitalist economy of the uninhabited islands of the Caribbean such as Margarita. He had to know the resources of the latter and be able to find the “necessaries of life” there, while he had to know the commodities, connections, and variety of workers of the former. The central lesson of Henry’s case is this: no matter how the story may be told, his escape, like almost all others, was not only not individualistic, it was collective and in this instance triply so—collective in the planning and execution by a group; collective in its sharing of knowledge; and collective in its dependence on cooperation in the division of labor.13

  This conclusion takes on additional meaning if we compare Henry with Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist in Daniel Defoe’s famous novel a generation later that would inspire a new generation of maritime novelists. The parallels between the real character and the fictional one are numerous: both were middling types who were enslaved and managed to escape in small open boats; both were subsequently marooned, in similar kinds of places, in similar geographic locations; both had minions, Henry his Indian, Robinson his Friday; both returned home to embrace the nation. None of this is accidental, as British historian Tim Severin has recently and convincingly shown. Although the marooned Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk may have been the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, Henry Pitman was the actual prototype, the literal model for the modern individualist hero. But notice what Defoe did in the translation of Henry’s story: he makes Crusoe the solitary, independent individual, shorn of all natural ties, living outside society, involved only with nature.14

  Crusoe would in turn pass into the classical political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others as homo economicus, the progenitor and epitome of bourgeois individualism for the eighteenth century and after. This was, of course, as Karl Marx pointed out, an illusion and a deception, both of which were necessary to the mythology of capitalism. And here we find an odd parallel, for like Crusoe, the runaway slave, the person who dared to escape the peculiar institution to freedom, has been treated in the historiography of slave resistance as the individualist, over and against the collectivist who rose in insurrection. The story of Henry Pitman shows that both judgments, about Crusoe and about the escapee, are fundamentally wrong.15

  FOUR

  Under the Banner of King Death

  Pirates

  Writing to the Board of Trade in 1724, Governor Alexan
der Spotswood of Virginia lamented his lack of “some safe opportunity to get home” to London. He insisted that he would travel only in a well-armed man-of-war.

  Your Lordships will easily conceive my Meaning when you reflect on the Vigorous part I’ve acted to suppress Pirates: and if those barbarous Wretches can be moved to cut off the Nose & Ears of a Master for but correcting his own Sailors, what inhuman treatment must I expect, should I fall within their power, who have been markt as the principle object of their vengeance, for cutting off their arch Pirate Thatch [Teach, also known as Blackbeard], with all his grand Designs, & making so many of their Fraternity to swing in the open air of Virginia.1

  Spotswood knew these pirates well. He had authorized the expedition that returned to Virginia boasting Blackbeard’s head as a trophy. He had done his share to see that many pirates swung on Virginia gallows. He knew that pirates had a fondness for revenge, that they often punished ship captains for “correcting” their crews, and that a kind of “fraternity” prevailed among them. He had good reason to fear them.

  Between 1716 and 1726 Atlantic pirates created an imperial crisis with their relentless and successful attacks upon merchants’ property and international commerce. Accordingly, these freebooters occupy a grand position in the long history of robbery at sea. Their numbers, near five thousand, were extraordinary, and their plunderings were exceptional in both volume and value.2 This chapter explores the social and cultural dimensions of piracy, focusing on pirates’ experience, the organization of their ships, and their social relations and consciousness. It concludes with observations on the social and economic context of the crime and its culture. Piracy represented “crime” on a massive scale. It was a way of life voluntarily chosen, for the most part, by large numbers of men who directly challenged the ways of the society from which they excepted themselves. How did piracy look from the inside and what kinds of social order did pirates forge beyond the reach of traditional authority? Beneath the Jolly Roger, “the banner of King Death,” a new social world took shape once pirates had, as one of them put it, “the choice in themselves.” It was a world profoundly shaped and textured by the experiences of work, wages, culture, and authority accumulated in the normal, rugged course of maritime life and labor in the early eighteenth century.3