One particularly important part of what we might call the ‘pirate consciousness’ was revenge upon the captains and masters who had previously exploited them. The pirate Howell Davis stated: “their reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants and cruel commanders of Ships.” On capturing a merchantman pirates would commonly administer the ‘Distribution of Justice’, “enquiring into the Manner of the Commander’s Behaviour to their Men, and those, against whom Complaint was made” were “whipp’d and pickled.” Interestingly, one of the favourite torments inflicted upon captured captains was the ‘Sweat’—a word meaning to drive hard or to overwork—in which the offender was made to run round and round the mizzenmast between decks to the tune of a merry jig while he was encouraged to go faster by the surrounding pirates jabbing his backside with “Points of Swords, Penknives, Compasses, Forks &c.” It seems the pirates were determined to give the master a taste of his own medicine—creating a literally vicious circle or treadmill reminiscent of the seaman’s labouring life. The most militant of these sea-borne righters-of-wrong has to be Philip Lyne, who when apprehended in 1726 confessed he “had killed 37 Masters of Vessels.”(21)

Radical historian Marcus Rediker has uncovered interesting evidence of pirates’ concern with retribution in the names of their ships—the largest single group of names are the ones involving revenge, for example Blackbeard’s ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge or John Cole’s wonderfully named New York Revenge’s Revenge. Merchant Captain Thomas Checkley got it just right when he described the pirates who captured his ship as pretending “to be Robbin Hoods Men.” There is further evidence for this in the name of another ship—the Little John belonging to pirate John Ward. Peter Lamborn Wilson says: “[this] offers us a precious insight into his ideas and his image of himself: clearly he considered himself a kind of Robin Hood of the seas. We have some evidence he gave to the poor, and he was clearly determined to steal from the rich.”(22)

The response of the state to these merry men of the seven seas was brutal—the crime of piracy carried the death sentence. The early years of the 18th century saw “royal officials and pirates [locked] into a system of reciprocal terror” as pirates became more antagonistic to mainstream society and the authorities ever more determined to hunt them down. Rumours that pirates who had taken advantage of the 1698 royal pardon were on surrendering denied the benefits of the pardon only increased mistrust and antagonism; the pirates resolved “no longer to attend to any offers of forgiveness but in case of attack, to defend themselves on their faithless countrymen who may fall into their hands.” In 1722 Captain Luke Knott was granted £230 for the loss of his career, after turning over 8 pirates, “his being obliged to quit the Merchant service, the Pirates threatening to Torture him to death if ever he should fall into their hands.” It was by no means an empty threat—in 1720 pirates of the crew of Bartholomew Roberts “openly and in the daytime burnt and destroyed… vessels in the Road of Basseterre [St. Kitts] and had the audaciousness to insult H.M. Fort,” avenging the execution of “their comrades at Nevis”. Roberts then sent word to the governor that “they would Come and Burn the Town [Sandy Point] about his Ears for hanging the Pyrates there.” Roberts even had his own pirate flag made showing him standing on two skulls labelled ABH and AMH—’A Barbadian’s Head’ and ‘A Martinican’s Head’—later that same year he gave substance to his vendetta against the two islands by hanging the governor of Martinique from a yardarm. As bounties were offered for the capture of pirates, the pirates responded by offering rewards for certain officials. And when pirates were captured or executed, other pirate crews often revenged their brethren, attacking the town that condemned them, or the shipping of that port. This sort of solidarity shows that there had developed a real pirate community, and that those sailing under ‘the banner of King Death’ no longer thought of themselves as English or Dutch or French but as pirates.(23)

The Golden Age of piracy was also the hey-day of the Atlantic slave trade. The relationship between piracy and the slave trade is complex and ambiguous. Some pirates participated in the slave trade and shared their contemporaries’ attitude to Africans as commodities for exchange.

However, not all pirates participated in the slave trade. Indeed large numbers of pirates were ex-slaves; there was a much higher proportion of blacks on pirate ships than on merchant or naval vessels, and only rarely did the observers who noted their presence refer to them as ‘slaves’. Most of these black pirates would have been runaway slaves, either joining with the pirates on the course of the voyage from Africa, deserting from the plantation, or sent as slaves to work on board ship. Some may have been free men, like the “free Negro” seaman from Deptford who in 1721 led “a Mutiney that we had too many Officers, and that the work was too hard, and what not.” Seafaring in general offered more autonomy to blacks than life on the plantation, but piracy in particular, could—although it was a risk—offer one of the few chances at freedom for an African in the 18th century Atlantic. For example, a quarter of the two-hundred strong crew of Captain Bellamy’s ship the Whydah were black, and eyewitness accounts of the sinking of the pirate vessel off Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1717 report that many of the corpses washed up were black. Pirate historian Kenneth Kinkor argues that although the Whydah was originally a slave ship, the blacks on board at the time of the sinking were members of the crew, not slaves. Partially because pirates, along with other tars, “entertain’d so contemptible a Notion of Landsmen,” a black man who knew the ropes was more likely to win respect than a landsman who didn’t. Kinkor notes: “Pirates judged Africans more on the basis of their language and sailing skills—in other words, on their level of cultural attainment—than on their race.”(24)

Black pirates would often lead the boarding party to capture a prize. The pirate ship the Morning Star had “a Negro Cook doubly arm’d” in the boarding party and more than half of Edward Condent’s boarding party on the Dragon were black. Some black pirates became quartermasters or captains. For example, in 1699, when Captain Kidd dropped anchor in New York, two sloops were there to meet him, one of whose “Mate was a little black man… who, as it was said, had been formerly Captain Kidd’s Quarter Master.”(25)

In the 17th century blacks found on pirate ships were not tried with the other pirates because it was assumed they were slaves, but by the 18th century they were being executed alongside their white ‘brethren’. Still the most likely fate for a black pirate, if he was captured, was to be sold into slavery, whether he was a freeman or not. When Blackbeard was captured by the Royal Navy in 1718, five of his eighteen man crew were black and according to the Governor’s Council of Virginia the five blacks were “equally concerned with the rest of the Crew in the same Acts of Piracy.” A “resolute Fellow, a Negroe” named Caesar was caught just as he was about to blow up the whole ship rather than be captured and most likely returned to slavery.(26)

In 1715 the ruling Council of the Colony of Virginia worried about the connections between the “Ravage of Pyrates” and “an Insurrection of the Negroes.” They were right to be concerned. By 1716 the slaves of Antigua had grown “very impudent and insulting” and reportedly many of them “went off to join those pirates who did not seem too concerned about color differences.” These connections were trans-Atlantic; stretching from the heart of Empire in London, to the slave colonies in the Americas and the ‘Slave Coast’ of Africa. In the early 1720s a gang of pirates settled in West Africa, joining and intermixing with the Kru—a West African people from what is now Sierra Leone and Liberia, renowned both for their seamanship in their long canoes and when enslaved for their leadership of slave revolts. The pirates were probably members of Bartholomew Roberts’ crew who had fled into the woods when attacked by the Navy in 1722. This alliance is not so unusual when you consider that of the 157 men who didn’t escape and were either captured or killed on board Roberts’ ship, 45 of them were black—probably neither slaves nor pirates but “Black saylors, commonly known by the name of gremetoes”—independent African mariners primarily from the Sierra Leone region, who would have joined the pirates “for a small demand of wages.”(27)

We can see the way these connections were spread and the how the pirates’ legacy was disseminated even after their defeat in the fate of some of those captured on Roberts’ pirate ship. “Negroes” from his crew grew mutinous over the poor conditions and “thin Commons” they received from the Navy. “Many of them” had “lived a long time” in the “pyratical Way”, which obviously for them had meant better food and more freedom.(28)

Lionel Wafer was a French surgeon who joined the buccaneer crews in the Caribbean in 1677. While returning from a voyage to the East Indies he met with an accident and was forced to recuperate in an Indian village, eventually adopting Indian customs. This is his description of the return of some English sailors to the village:

“I sat awhile, cringing upon my hams among the Indians, after their fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the waist, and with my nose-piece hanging over my mouth. ‘Twas the better part of an hour before one of the crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried out, “Here’s our doctor,” and immediately all congratulated my arrival among them.”(29)

This sort of dropping out and going native was not always accidental. The buccaneers of the Caribbean originally got their name from boucan, a practice of smoking meat they had learnt from the native Arawak Indians. The buccaneers were originally land squatters on the large Spanish owned island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic)—they turned to piracy following Spanish attempts to oust them. On Hispaniola they followed a way of life essentially identical to the native peoples who had preceded them. This sort of ‘marooning life’ was very clearly identified with piracy—apart from the buccaneers of Hispaniola and Tortuga the main other group of European dropouts in the New World were the logwood cutters of Bay of Campeche (now Honduras and Belize), a “rude drunken crew” who were considered by most observers to be interchangeable with pirates. They consciously chose a non-accumulative life living in independent communal settlements on the world’s periphery.(30)

The pirates’ relations with the native peoples they encountered were split. Some pirates would enslave peoples they encountered, make them work, rape the women and steal. But other pirates settled down and intermarried—becoming part of the society. Particularly in Madagascar, the pirates mixing with the native population had produced “a dark Mulatto Race there.” Contacts and cultural exchange between pirates, seamen and Africans led to the clear similarities between sea shanties and African songs. In 1743 some seamen were court-martialled for singing a “negro song”. These sort of connections went in both directions and were not as rare as you might imagine. A pirate called William May, stranded on the Madagascan island of Johanna got a shock when he was addressed in fluent English by one of the “negroes”. He learned that the man had been taken from the island by an English ship and had lived for a while in Bethnal Green in London, before returning home. His new friend saved him from being captured by the English and taken to Bombay and hanged.(31)

It is a common feature of what you might call ‘pirate ideology’ that pirates thought of themselves as free kings, as autonomous individual emperors. This was partly to do with the dream of wealth—Henry Avery was idolised for the enormous wealth he plundered; some believed he had set up his own pirate kingdom. Yet there was a pirate who achieved an even more remarkable rags-to-riches story, for he started out as a slave in the French colony of Martinique: Abraham Samuel, “Tolinor Rex”, the King of Fort Dauphin. Samuel was a runaway slave who joined the crew of the pirate ship John and Rebecca, eventually becoming quartermaster. In 1696 the pirates captured a large and valuable prize and decided to retire and settle down in Madagascar. Samuel ended up in the abandoned French colony of Fort Dauphin where he was identified by a local princess as the child she had borne to a Frenchman during the occupancy of the colony. Samuel suddenly found himself declared heir to the vacant throne of the kingdom. Slavers and merchants flocked to do business with “King Samuel” but he retained sympathies for his pirate comrades, allowing and assisting them to loot the merchants who came to trade with him. There were a number of similar, if less flamboyant, characters in the ports and harbours of Madagascar—pirates or slavers who had become local leaders with private armies of as many as 500 men.(32)

The pirates certainly seem to have had more fun than their poor suffering counterparts on naval or merchant vessels. They sure had some pretty wild parties—in 1669 just off the coast of Hispaniola, some of Henry Morgan’s buccaneers blew up their own ship during a particularly riotous party, which like all good pirate celebrations included much drunken firing of the ship’s guns. Somehow they set light to the gunpowder in the ship’s magazine and the resulting explosion totally destroyed the ship. On some voyages alcohol ran “as freely as ditchwater” and for many tars the promise of unrestricted grog rations had been one of the main reasons behind leaving the merchant service to become a pirate in the first place. However this sometimes backfired—one group of pirates took three days to capture a ship because there were never enough sober men available. Sailors in general loathed a “drink-water” voyage—one reason being that in the tropics the water tended to get things living in it and you had to strain it through your teeth.(33)

No pirate celebration would be complete without music. Pirates were renowned for their love of music and often hired musicians for the duration of a cruise. During the trial of “Black Bart” Bartholomew Roberts’ crew in 1722, two men were acquitted as being only musicians. The pirates seem to have employed music in battle, as it was said of one of the men, James White, that his “business as music was upon the poop in time of action.”(34)

For some men the freedom that piracy offered from the constrained world they had left behind extended to sexuality. European society of the 17th and 18th centuries was savagely anti-homosexual. The Royal Navy periodically conducted brutal anti-buggery campaigns on ships on which men might be confined together for years. In both the navy and the merchant service it was considered that sexuality was inimical to work and good order on board ship, as Minister John Flavel wrote of seamen to merchant John Lovering: “The Death of their Lusts, is the most Probable Means to give Life to your Trade.” B.R. Burg in Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition suggests that the vast majority of pirates were homosexual, and although there isn’t really enough evidence to support this, nevertheless to indulge in these things a pirate colony was probably just about the safest place you could be. Some of the early buccaneers of Hispaniola and Tortuga lived in a kind of homosexual union known as matelotage (from the French for ‘sailor’ and possibly the origin of the word ‘mate’ meaning companion), holding their possessions in common, with the survivor inheriting. Even after women joined the buccaneers, matelotage continued with a partner sharing his wife with his matelot. Louis Le Golif in his Memoirs of a Buccaneer complained about homosexuality on Tortuga, where he had to fight two duels to keep ardent suitors at bay. Eventually the French Governor of Tortuga imported hundreds of prostitutes, hoping thereby to wean the buccaneers away from this practice. The pirate captain Robert Culliford, had a “great consort,” John Swann, who lived with him. Some men bought “pretty boys” as companions. On one pirate ship a young man who admitted a homosexual relationship was put in irons and maltreated, but this seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. It is also significant that in no pirate articles are there any rules against homosexuality.(35)