April 16, 2025 • 36 mins
First in a double podcast about the Golden Age of Piracy, with historian Marcus Rediker. The legendary pirates of this era weren’t just thieves—they were daring rebels challenging the very systems of power and authority of their time. Fighting every colonial empire, and creating their own ways of living free from authority, pirates became symbols of liberty and resistance to working-class and poor people everywhere.
Our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory
Part 1 covers the historical and economic background, the different eras of piracy in the golden age, about life at sea, how people became pirates.
Our patreon supporters can listen to part 2 now early, covering the extent of piracy, how pirates organise themselves, how colonial powers fought them, the decline of pirates, and their legacy today: available here for early listening for our patreon supporters.
More information, and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode here: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e103-pirates/
Get Marcus's Books:
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
Our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory
Part 1 covers the historical and economic background, the different eras of piracy in the golden age, about life at sea, how people became pirates.
Our patreon supporters can listen to part 2 now early, covering the extent of piracy, how pirates organise themselves, how colonial powers fought them, the decline of pirates, and their legacy today: available here for early listening for our patreon supporters.
More information, and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode here: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e103-pirates/
Get Marcus's Books:
- Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
- Marcus Rediker and David Lester, Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel
- Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
- Written by Audrey Kemp and Tyler Hill
- Produced by Tyler Hill
- Episode graphic: Painting depicting the capture of Blackbeard, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1920. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
- Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
The year is seventeen twenty five. You're a sailor chopped
on a merchant ship, and during backbreaking work and brutal conditions,
your quarters, cramped and crawling with disease, are shared with
enslaved people, Your wages paltry if they ever come, and
the whip is never far from reach.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Then over the horizon a ship emerges, It's black flag
billowing in the wind. As it closes in, you see them,
a crew of outlaws, men and women of every race,
clad and stolen finery and ragged silks. They shout, laugh
and rifle through cargo. There's no fear in their faces,
only defiance, only freedom.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
One of them calls to you, why break your back
for a captain who sees you as nothing? Take your share,
take your life.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
You have a choice, stay and die defending the profits
of your employers, or leap into a life of rebellion
on the high seas.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
This is working class history.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Ala Martina ha Oh, bela child, bela child, bela child,
Chochio Lamatino.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Before we get started, you may have noticed there's a
new voice with me today who also doesn't have a
British accent. My friend and colleague Audrey is here and
I want to let her introduce herself.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Hi. I'm Audre Kemp. I'm a journalist and community organizer.
I've spent years covering labor and power, and I'm excited
to dive into this story with you all.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
And as always, our podcast is brought to you by
our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and in
return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads,
bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise, and other For example,
our patreons of orders can listen to both parts of
this double episode without ads. Now join us or find
out more at patreon dot com slash working Class history
(02:10):
link in the show notes.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Yes, greetings, my name is Marcus Reddicker, and I am
the author of a book called Villains of All Nations.
Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, published by Beacon Press
in two thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Marcus describes in his book that to the authorities of
their time, pirates were seen as dangerous outlaws. The term
pirate comes from a Greek word meaning one who attacks ships,
and Roman law labeled them quote enemies of all mankind.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
By the early eighteenth century, piracy had become a crisis
for European empires. During this time, an estimated five thousand
to ten thousand pirates prowled the seas, seizing hundreds of
merchant ships, looting cargo and disrupting trades so severely that
insurance rates skyrocketed and navy scrambled to hunt them down.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And they didn't just take ships, they took riches that
rivaled the fortunes of entire colonies.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
One of the most legendary pirate raids took place in
seventeen twenty one, when John Taylor and Olivier le Vassel
seized the Portuguese treasure ship Nosus Sonora Dicabo off the
coast of Yennom Island. The hall diamonds, gold, and other
treasures worth around two hundred million US dollars in today's currency,
making it one of the richest pirate captures in history.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
But piracy wasn't just about plunder. It was a response
to the brutal conditions of early capitalism.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Global trade enriched merchants and shipowners, but sailors were left behind.
They were underpaid, overworked, and eventually disposable.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Many turned to piracy not just to survive, but to
escape a system that had abandoned them.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
The pirates strived to build something new, a society where
they elected their own leaders, shared their plunder equally, and
lived on their own terms.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And their rebellion would define what we now call the
Golden Age of Piracy, spanning from the sixteen fifties to
the seventeen thirties. During this era, figures like Blackbeard, Bartholomew Blackbart, Roberts,
and Anne Bonnie made their names. Roberts, who's one of
the most successful pirates ever, captured over four hundred ships
throughout his career.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid, both women fought alongside their crewmates,
disguising themselves in men's clothing to claim their place in
battle and defy the gender norms of their time.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And then there was Blackbeard, who set his own beard
on fire to terrify his enemies.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
The Golden Age of Piracy looms very large in the
global imagination, but in fact it's not actually a single
unitary thing. There were three distinct generations of pirates within
the Golden Age. The first was in the sixteen sixties
and sixteen seventies. An emblematic figure here is Sir Henry Morgan,
(04:56):
and in fact he stole so much silver from the
Spanish and took it to Jamaica that he was knighted.
He became Sir Henry Morgan and became Lieutenant governor of
this incipient slave colony.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Over time, piracy evolved, the motivations, targets, and even the
way pirates operated changed from one generation to the next.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
The first generation of pirates were called buccaneers, which operated
primarily in the Caribbean during the mid seventeenth century.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
And that word comes from a style of capturing, cooking,
and eating wild game on the various Caribbean islands on
something that the French called a bucan, and so they
became buccaneers because many of the early buccaneers lived this
kind of roving life from one island to another.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
The buccaneers mainly targeted the Spanish Empire, stealing enormous wealth
from the Spanish crown and weakening Spain's grip on the
New World. England saw an opportunity, granting privateers legal cover
to attack Spanish vessels.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
The second generation is where you see a change in
the attitude from above. This is the generation of the
sixteen nineties. There are two emblematic figures for this generation.
One is Henry Avery, who captured a part of the
treasure fleet of one of the rulers of India and
(06:24):
got away with a massive heist of jewels and wealth,
and he was never caught, so Henry Avery became kind
of a folk hero.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Another key figure of this era was William Kidd, born
in Dundee, Scotland in sixteen fifty four. Kid made a
name for himself as a privateer in New York. In
sixteen ninety five, he got a royal commission to hunt
down pirates and enemy ships in the Indian Ocean as
part of England's plan to protect its trade routes.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
But when he got there, far beyond the reach of
royal authority, he actually turned pirate himself, and this was
a very big embarrassment for some of his wealthy English
merchant backers. So he eventually was brought back to London
and in an act that symbolized the changing attitude of
(07:16):
the English government towards piracy, William Kidd was hanged. So
from now on, piracy is not going to be acceptable.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
The reason for these changing attitudes about piracy, like most
things in history, was money.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
In the late seventeenth century, one of the things that's
happening is that the Caribbean colonies of England and other
countries are producing massive amounts of sugar. The sugar is
emerging as a very important commodity in the economy of
Atlantic capitalism.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
By seventeen hundred, piracy had become a massive thorn in
the side of colonial powers like England, France, and Spain.
Pirate's targeted show the backbone of the colonial economy, driving
up security and insurance costs and causing disruptions so severe
that the losses outweighed the cost of competing with one another.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Faced with a shured threat, these powers found less incentive
to fight each other with privateers and instead unite it
against the common enemy, ushering in a new era of piracy.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
So the third generation of pirates are active in the
seventeen teens and seventeen twenties, and what's especially important about
them is that there are no longer any wealthy people involved.
This is the proletariant phase. This is the phase in
which common sailors get control of an entire generation of plundering,
(08:46):
and this, of course fuels all of the imperial governments
to catch as many of these people as they can
and to hang them up in gibbets at the entrance
of every harbor as a deliberate act of terror, meant
to send a message to common sailors. If you turn pirate,
(09:07):
we will hunt you down and we will kill you.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
It was during this new proletarian, working class era of
piracy when pirates started to see their very existence as
a rebellion against the hierarchies of capital and began building
their own, more egalitarian system. Their ships became spaces of democracy, fairness,
and unity, directly challenging the systems they had escaped, and.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
This is one of the things that they were known for,
and they were known for this in their own day.
In other words, the elites who are hunting them down
to kill them are going after them not only because
they disrupted the commerce which was so valuable to these
European imperial powers, but also because they posed a challenge
(09:52):
to the standard way of running a ship.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Life aboard a pirate ship existed in stark contrast to
other more common jobs at sea, like being in the
navy or sailing aboard a merchant vessel.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
So that the Royal Navy, for example, was very far
from democratic. It was a violent, brutal, disciplinary regime. Similarly,
the merchant shipping industry captains had tremendously concentrated powers, and pirates,
in their democratic and egalitarian ways, posed real challenges to
(10:24):
those other ways of organizing maritime labor.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
And the pirate's ability to not only imagine a better
world for themselves, but to actually try and build one
captured the imagination of the public as well.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So this is the last generation of the Golden Age.
It's dramatic. It was something that everybody wanted to read about.
Whenever the authorities captured a group of pirates, they would
be hangings that were public spectacles, but vast numbers of
people would turn out, many of them to cheer the
(10:58):
pirates because they were working class heroes.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
But in order to understand what makes the piracy of
the eighteenth century so radical, first we have to understand
transatlantic trade and the burgeoning capitalism of the sixteenth century.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
This is the period in which England is leading the
way and moving out into the world, actually following Spain,
who had a great deal of success in extracting gold
and silver from the indigenous peoples and their lands in
the Americas. But along come the Dutch and the English.
(11:33):
They didn't find gold and silver, but they found something
even better. They found things like sugar and tobacco and
rice and these commodities that are going to be the
lifeblood of the Atlantic economy.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
A lot of historians say the most important machine to
the rise of capitalism is a steam engine, but Marcus
has a different theory.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
It's the tall ship, which is actually a piece of
technology that permitted Europe to conquer the rest of the
world and to create these vast bluewater empires. You know,
the maritime powers in the sixteenth seventeenth, eighteenth century occupy
(12:15):
only a tiny part of the Eurasian land mass on
the western end. But think about where those languages are
spoken today, English, French, Dutch, Spanish. These are global languages
and this reflects the power of those ships as instruments
of conquest.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
And those ships can't sail around the world without the
labor of highly skilled and trained sailors who could handle
everything from navigation and rigging to carpentry. Their expertise kept
the ships running and the trade routes alive.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
The ships don't sail by themselves. There's a labor issue here.
So in this context, the growth of these empires and
the growth of capitalism as a system has several crucial components.
One of these is what Marks called primitive accumulation of capital,
(13:08):
by that meaning the separation of workers from their means
of subsistence. This happens through the enclosure movement in England.
It happens through the slave trade in West Africa, where
many millions of Africans, through war and other forms of dispossession,
are going to be separated from the land, loaded onto
(13:29):
slave ships, and carried to the Americas to build this
nascent plantation system.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Marcus explains that the plantation system central to global trade
networks was responsible for the largest plant accumulation of wealth
the world had ever seen. The system depended on the
exploitation of millions of enslaved Africans, funneling immense wealth into
the hands of a few. That wealth in turn financed
further colonial expansion and the growth of European industries.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
So we're talking talking about massive amounts of money to
be taken back to Europe plunder, but also the regular
profits of production for the world market the plantation system
produces for the world market. That's just the way it works.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
By seventeen hundred. European empires had built vast wealth through
plundered resources and slave labor, but they were constantly at
war with each other, competing for control.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
There are a series of Anglo Dutch wars in the
seventeenth century, and in seventeen oh two there breaks out
was called the War of Spanish Succession, and a fair
amount of this war is about who will control the
slave trade.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
This war, which lasted from seventeen oh two to seventeen thirteen,
pulled in major European powers like France, Britain, and the
Dutch Republic, all vying for dominance.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
And during that time, one of the ways that European
powers waged war against each other is through something called privateering,
and by that is meant a private merchant ship is
geared out as a vessel of war and then given
a bill of mark by a king or his minions
(15:11):
to wage war on behalf of the king against the
king's enemies, so to attack Spanish ships if you're English,
or even French ships. That is essentially legal piracy.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
These privateers made a lot of money, but.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
When the war comes to an end, two things happen
that are really important to understanding the rise of piracy. First,
all those privateers are demobilized. In other words, once there's peacetime,
the king can't give out these letters of mark there's
no legal piracy going on. And secondly, the big navies
(15:50):
of these European empires also demobilized, so thousands of sailors
are basically paid off. Sometimes actually they're builked of their wages,
but they leave the ships and the navies move from
much higher level of mobilization to a much lower level.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
That left the port cities of the Atlantic. Teaming was
skilled unemployed sailors, and.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
The ruling class responded to this labor surplus the way
it always does.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
This army of the unemployed has very palpable impact on
the way sailors who do have jobs are treated. They
are treated much worse. They are treated more violently by
the captains. Their wages go down. Wartime wages for sailors
are pretty decent, but once there's this massive glut of labor,
(16:38):
the wages come way down to a third of the
level of wartime. The quality of food declines, the use
of the lash increases.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Thousands of seasoned sailors, many of them former privateers, were broke,
angry and out of options, so they did what they
knew best. They took to the sea. But this time
they weren't sailing under a king's banner. They were sailing
under the black flag.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Pirates in the third generation of the Golden Age were
just ordinary working sailors. They were not aristocrats who had
lost their honor and go out to sea to marry
the colonial governor's daughter. You know, it's nothing like that.
It's just ordinary working people whose lives are really difficult,
(17:28):
especially in this period after the War of Spanish.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Succession, there were two primary ways a sailor could become
a pirate around this time.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
The way that most people think that you become a
pirate is through mutiny. That you basically organize an opposition
within a ship a merchant ship almost always, and you
rise up and you capture the ship, you create your
own black flag, and you sail off toward the horizon
(17:59):
as a new pirate crew. But that's probably a relatively
small percentage of the people who become pirates.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
More often, however, pirates didn't have to take over a ship.
They just had to capture one, and for mistreated navy
or merchant sailors this could be an opportunity, and.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
When pirates captured a prize vessel, they would perform a
very interesting ritual. They would come on board, and they
wouldn't start plundering right away. They would call all the
sailors up on deck, the sailors of the captured ship.
They would bring the captain up on deck to face
those sailors.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
And then the pirates, all of whom used to be
common sailors like the ones aboard the captured ship, and
all of whom had been whipped, starved, and cheated out
of their wages by merchant or navy. Captains would ask
a question that would change the fate of everyone on board.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
How does your captain treat you?
Speaker 4 (18:57):
And if they say, our captain treats us very badly.
He doesn't pay us our proper wages, he doesn't give
us the food we're supposed to get, and worst of all,
he beats us all the time. If sailors step forward
and say that in that moment, when the pirates have
(19:20):
just captured their ship, that captain is in a lot
of trouble. Because pirates will act as avengers for their
seafaring brothers, and they will give that captain a whipping,
usually in the very place where he would tie up
sailors to whip them. That tie him up in the
(19:42):
same place and give him the beating of his life,
and in some instances they killed him. In some instances
they gave the captain a whipping and then threw him
overboard and especially bad cases.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
But the pirates weren't just out for vengeance. They had
a system, a rough kind of justice.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
If a sailor should step forward and said, our captain
is a decent man. He treats us well, he pays
us our wages. In that case, the pirates would not
only not punish the captain, they might give him money.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
One famous example of this was William Snellgrave, a merchant
captain captured by pirates in seventeen nineteen off the coast
of Sierra Leone. Despite being severely injured in the attack,
he was spared, likely because his crew respected.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
Him, and the pirates gave him money and said, go
home to London and show the merchants what happens when
a captain treats his sailors well. So they would reward
the decent captains, and they would punish the much more
numerous violent captains.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And once the captain's fate was decided, the Pirates turned
to the rest of the crew with another offer.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
The pirates when they're getting ready to depart the prize ship,
they said, okay, boys, who's with us? Do you want
to come on board and join the pirate ship? And
believe me, if you spoke out a bit against your captain,
you had better go with the pirates because there was
going to be trouble if you didn't. So this is
(21:16):
the way they recruited people by doing things in defense
of the common sailor, and also in telling them, look,
you're going to join a ship where we vote on everything.
We're going to elect our captain, We're going to elect
a quartermaster to keep an eye on the captain to
make sure he treats everybody fairly, and we're going to
(21:36):
divide up everything we get very equally. It's not going
to be the way it is on these naval and
merchant ships.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
From that moment on, the pirates and whoever chose to
join them would sail off into the sunset and the
open sea out there.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
No captains or merchants had any power over them. They
were miles away, not only from the authority of their
former employers, but also from the institutions that reproduce the
has seen social order churches, governments, families, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
They were free to create a new order, one that
worked on their own terms.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
They just get to decide for themselves how they want
to run the ship, what do they do, how do
they do it. Do they do it in the same
way as the Royal Navy and the merchant shipping industry,
And the answer resoundingly is no, they didn't do it
(22:29):
that way. They created a very different kind of social order.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Of course, some things had to say the same.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
As ship still needed someone who could read charts, navigate
the seas, and keep them on course.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
You've got to have that. If you don't have that,
the ship doesn't work properly. So you've got to choose
someone who has those skills. But even so, the pirates
would elect the person they wanted to lead them. Okay,
so now this is at a time Bear in mind,
this is at a time when poor people like sailors
(23:04):
had no democratic rights anywhere in the world. Okay, nowhere
did they have this kind of power. Because in most
every country, if there is some voting. It's for people
of property, and these pirates didn't have property, so they
couldn't vote. So they vote, so they vot. They vote
(23:25):
for a captain.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
But even the best captains could abuse their power, so
the pirates built in a safeguard.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
They created a new position called the quartermaster, who would
basically do two things. One keep an eye on the captain,
make sure he doesn't abuse his power, and two divide
up everything equally that they take when they capture prize vessels.
And what's fascinating about this is that for that job,
(23:53):
you're going to elect the most trustworthy person on the ship.
It's the person you would trust to be fair to
everybody and the person that you would trust to be
suspicious of captains. So they voted on that. So it's
like a dual executive in which there's this balance of
(24:14):
power so that people are not abused.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
And they didn't stop there. Pirates elected officers for all
sorts of roles.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
In fact, they voted on just about everything.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
One ship captain said, it's who was totally unaccustomed to this.
He says, they're just constantly voting on everything. Where do
we want to sail the ship, where's the best place
to capture vessels? Who do we want to do this?
Who do we want to do that? And the sovereign
power was the crew as a collective. They had something
(24:46):
called the Common Council, in which everybody had to vote.
Everybody came out, they had debates. You know, some said
let's go here, or they said let's go there, and
then they would have a vote. This is all very
unusual for the times.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Democratic way of running the ship was crucial to pirate culture,
and so was equality among the sailors.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
And here you'd have to look at this in comparative perspective.
A captain on a royal naval vessel would probably make
sixty to eighty to one hundred times as much in
pay as the lowest common sailor. For the captain of
a merchant ship, it might be ten, twenty, thirty, forty
(25:29):
times as much, depending on how much of the cargo
the captain owned, and they frequently did own quite a
bit of it. But pirates didn't operate that way. First
of all, they abolished the wage. They said, we're not
wage laborers. We're partners in this enterprise. So it's like
a cooperative we're partners, and so we're going to pay
(25:51):
everybody according to shares, not the money wage. And this
too is kind of fascinating because this is the period
when wage labor is a sndant, this is part of
the rise of capitalism. But the pirates didn't want to
play that game, so they say we'll give shares.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Every crew member received at least one share.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Skilled workers like gunners, carpenters, or navigators earn slightly more
due to the crucial roles they played on the ship.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
A specialist might get one in a quarter or one
and a half shares, but that was about the limit.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Look at the wage hierarchy, and look how the pirates
have radically compressed it so that the distance between the
top and the bottom is really minimal. And this, of
course also appealed to the common sailor. They loved this idea.
They loved the idea that the captain was not getting
one hundred times as much as anybody else. So this
(26:48):
democratic social order was really crucial. The authorities were very
well aware of it, and they wanted to eradicate it
because it was a very subversive example, this way of
running a ship in which the rank and file were
in control.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
That radical rejection of class hierarchy wasn't just about wages.
It showed up in how pirates carried themselves too.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Take Walter Kennedy for example. He came from a poor
family in London, got by through burglary and pickpocketing, and
eventually found his way to the Royal Navy. When he
turned pirate, he made a name for himself by sharing
loot equitably and refusing to follow the rigid social order
of the time. People even called him the robin Hood
of the Sea.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
But Kennedy's class defiance didn't stop there. When he was
captured and put on trial, he showed up wearing a
powdered wig, a symbol of the elite he had spent
his life fighting against. It was a final act of mockery,
a pirate's way of thumbing his nose at the system,
even in the face of death.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
That defiance wasn't just personal, it was collective, and nothing
symbolized that more than the flag they flew, the Jolly Roger.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Let's start with a name.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
Jolly Roger had a specific meaning that came from the underworld,
as it was often called in the port cities where
people would speak a particular kind of language. It was
called can't thieves can't. It was a very specialized vocabulary.
(28:21):
And jolly is sort of well known, but Roger meant
to copulate. Okay, to Roger, someone was to fuck them.
So basically the Jolly Roger. The basic message of the
Jolly Roger was fuck you. And I think this is
(28:41):
kind of what they were trying to convey.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
But beyond giving anyone who looked at it the middle finger,
the symbolism of the Jolly Roger conveyed the pirate's ideals,
especially in contrast to the world they had left behind.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Flags represent group identification with an idea or a set
of principles. So you have flags of empires, for example,
the Union Jack. What pirates began to do in the
seventeen teens was to create their own flags. And this
(29:16):
is you know, you've got to remember too, how important
flags were to life at sea. This is how you
signal from ship to ship, what you're doing, where you're going,
who you are. Right there are all these banners and
flags flying on every vessel.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
And the significance of flags as symbols of empire and
hegemony make the iconography of the jolly Roger that much
more subversive.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Some people say that the origin of the pirate flag
name jolly Roger comes from the French joles rouge.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Which means pretty red in French.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
A lot of the early pirate flags were red, but
it turns out black became the dominant color, and by
the time we get into this third generation, almost all
the pirate flags are black.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And against that black flag.
Speaker 4 (30:06):
They choose the image of death, the death's head that
could be a skull and crossbones, as it is now
very commonly depicted, but in many cases, probably in most cases,
it was an entire skeleton, as they called it, an anatomy,
(30:26):
with a skull, and you could see all the bones
of the body. And the skull was usually holding two things.
It was holding in one hand an hourglass and in
the other hand a sword or a spear or a dart.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Marcus says that on one level, these images are pretty straightforward.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
Prize ship sees a pirate ship bearing down on them,
up goes the jolly Roger, and you look at this
image of death, and you see the weapon, and you
see the hourglass, and what are you going to conclude?
Would surrender or you will die, right, That's what they're
That's what they're saying. They it's the black pirate flag
(31:08):
is an instrument of terror. It's meant to terrify their
prey so they won't fight back.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
In contrary to popular belief, a pirate would almost always
prefer the outcome.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
Pirates would just always much prefer that people give up,
And most most merchant ships did give up. They didn't
want to fight these guys because they were very skillful.
There were a lot more of them on a pirate ship,
and you were going to lose. And if you piss
them off by shooting at them, it's going to be
worse for you when they capture you, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
But beyond just surrender or die. Marcus also says there's
a second layer of symbolism to the Jolly Roger.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
And he says it speaks directly to the social order
that all these pirates came from. Aboard naval and merchant ships.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
Captains who kept logs of their voyages would frequently draw
in their log a skull and a crossbone to indicate
the death of a sailor. It's a fairly common practice.
So what sailors did when they became pirates, they seized
that symbolism of the skull and crossbones and put it
(32:18):
on their flag. Right, we're inverting the meaning of this, Right,
we are trapped in this world of death. And it
is absolutely true that the conordinary common sailor couldn't expect
to live very long, right, and this fueled their decision
to become pirates, the idea being, let us live well
(32:40):
as long as we can.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
A symbol of the death of a common sailor holds
an hourglass and a sword.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
There you go, death, violence, limited time. These are things
that were really crucial to the lives of common sailors,
and they put that on their banner, and then they
fought back against those conditions under that manner. And so
I think this is very revealing of their consciousness as workers,
(33:09):
that these are the conditions we're in, and we're going
to put this on the flag. We're going to have
our own flag. You know, to hell with all those
nation states. You know, we are free people and we
will do what we want. And we, as they put it,
declare war on the whole world, but of course not
against common sailors. Right, those are the people that you
(33:31):
defend you take vengeance against their class enemies. So there
is a very strong anti national quality to this black flag,
and everybody recognized it as such at the time.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Alamatina a penal sata oh very lagi, very largile, very Largiuou.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
That's all we've got time for in this episode. Join
us in Part two, where we talk more about everyday
life aboard a pirate chip, the rules pirates lived, by,
the alliances they built, and how their fight for freedom
ultimately led to their downfall.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Part two is available now for early listening for our
supporters on Patreon.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
It's only support from you, our listeners, which allows us
to make these podcasts, So if you appreciate our work,
please do think about joining us at patreon dot com
slash working Class History link in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
In return for your support, you can get early access
to content, as well as ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content,
discounted merch and more. If you can't spare the cash,
absolutely no problem. Please just tell your friends about this
podcast and give us a five star review on your
favorite podcast app.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
If you'd like to learn more about the Golden Age
of piracy, check out the web page for this episode,
where you'll find further reading and more. You can also
get Marcus's book Fill of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates and
the Golden Age, and.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
His graphic novel under the Banner of King Death, Pirates
of the Atlantic, a graphic novel with David Lester, and
the links in the show note.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible.
Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusamano,
Nick Williams, and Old Norm.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Our theme tune is Bella Chow. Thanks for permission to
use it from Disky dol Sole. You can buy it
or stream it on the links in the show notes.
This episode was written by me Audrey Kemp.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And me Tyler Hill, produced by me Tyler Hill. Anyway,
that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode
and thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Moon
The year is seventeen twenty five. You're a sailor chopped
on a merchant ship, and during backbreaking work and brutal conditions,
your quarters, cramped and crawling with disease, are shared with
enslaved people, Your wages paltry if they ever come, and
the whip is never far from reach.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Then over the horizon a ship emerges, It's black flag
billowing in the wind. As it closes in, you see them,
a crew of outlaws, men and women of every race,
clad and stolen finery and ragged silks. They shout, laugh
and rifle through cargo. There's no fear in their faces,
only defiance, only freedom.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
One of them calls to you, why break your back
for a captain who sees you as nothing? Take your share,
take your life.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
You have a choice, stay and die defending the profits
of your employers, or leap into a life of rebellion
on the high seas.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
This is working class history.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Ala Martina ha Oh, bela child, bela child, bela child,
Chochio Lamatino.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Before we get started, you may have noticed there's a
new voice with me today who also doesn't have a
British accent. My friend and colleague Audrey is here and
I want to let her introduce herself.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Hi. I'm Audre Kemp. I'm a journalist and community organizer.
I've spent years covering labor and power, and I'm excited
to dive into this story with you all.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
And as always, our podcast is brought to you by
our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and in
return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads,
bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise, and other For example,
our patreons of orders can listen to both parts of
this double episode without ads. Now join us or find
out more at patreon dot com slash working Class history
(02:10):
link in the show notes.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Yes, greetings, my name is Marcus Reddicker, and I am
the author of a book called Villains of All Nations.
Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, published by Beacon Press
in two thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Marcus describes in his book that to the authorities of
their time, pirates were seen as dangerous outlaws. The term
pirate comes from a Greek word meaning one who attacks ships,
and Roman law labeled them quote enemies of all mankind.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
By the early eighteenth century, piracy had become a crisis
for European empires. During this time, an estimated five thousand
to ten thousand pirates prowled the seas, seizing hundreds of
merchant ships, looting cargo and disrupting trades so severely that
insurance rates skyrocketed and navy scrambled to hunt them down.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And they didn't just take ships, they took riches that
rivaled the fortunes of entire colonies.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
One of the most legendary pirate raids took place in
seventeen twenty one, when John Taylor and Olivier le Vassel
seized the Portuguese treasure ship Nosus Sonora Dicabo off the
coast of Yennom Island. The hall diamonds, gold, and other
treasures worth around two hundred million US dollars in today's currency,
making it one of the richest pirate captures in history.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
But piracy wasn't just about plunder. It was a response
to the brutal conditions of early capitalism.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Global trade enriched merchants and shipowners, but sailors were left behind.
They were underpaid, overworked, and eventually disposable.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Many turned to piracy not just to survive, but to
escape a system that had abandoned them.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
The pirates strived to build something new, a society where
they elected their own leaders, shared their plunder equally, and
lived on their own terms.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And their rebellion would define what we now call the
Golden Age of Piracy, spanning from the sixteen fifties to
the seventeen thirties. During this era, figures like Blackbeard, Bartholomew Blackbart, Roberts,
and Anne Bonnie made their names. Roberts, who's one of
the most successful pirates ever, captured over four hundred ships
throughout his career.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid, both women fought alongside their crewmates,
disguising themselves in men's clothing to claim their place in
battle and defy the gender norms of their time.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And then there was Blackbeard, who set his own beard
on fire to terrify his enemies.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
The Golden Age of Piracy looms very large in the
global imagination, but in fact it's not actually a single
unitary thing. There were three distinct generations of pirates within
the Golden Age. The first was in the sixteen sixties
and sixteen seventies. An emblematic figure here is Sir Henry Morgan,
(04:56):
and in fact he stole so much silver from the
Spanish and took it to Jamaica that he was knighted.
He became Sir Henry Morgan and became Lieutenant governor of
this incipient slave colony.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Over time, piracy evolved, the motivations, targets, and even the
way pirates operated changed from one generation to the next.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
The first generation of pirates were called buccaneers, which operated
primarily in the Caribbean during the mid seventeenth century.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
And that word comes from a style of capturing, cooking,
and eating wild game on the various Caribbean islands on
something that the French called a bucan, and so they
became buccaneers because many of the early buccaneers lived this
kind of roving life from one island to another.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
The buccaneers mainly targeted the Spanish Empire, stealing enormous wealth
from the Spanish crown and weakening Spain's grip on the
New World. England saw an opportunity, granting privateers legal cover
to attack Spanish vessels.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
The second generation is where you see a change in
the attitude from above. This is the generation of the
sixteen nineties. There are two emblematic figures for this generation.
One is Henry Avery, who captured a part of the
treasure fleet of one of the rulers of India and
(06:24):
got away with a massive heist of jewels and wealth,
and he was never caught, so Henry Avery became kind
of a folk hero.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Another key figure of this era was William Kidd, born
in Dundee, Scotland in sixteen fifty four. Kid made a
name for himself as a privateer in New York. In
sixteen ninety five, he got a royal commission to hunt
down pirates and enemy ships in the Indian Ocean as
part of England's plan to protect its trade routes.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
But when he got there, far beyond the reach of
royal authority, he actually turned pirate himself, and this was
a very big embarrassment for some of his wealthy English
merchant backers. So he eventually was brought back to London
and in an act that symbolized the changing attitude of
(07:16):
the English government towards piracy, William Kidd was hanged. So
from now on, piracy is not going to be acceptable.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
The reason for these changing attitudes about piracy, like most
things in history, was money.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
In the late seventeenth century, one of the things that's
happening is that the Caribbean colonies of England and other
countries are producing massive amounts of sugar. The sugar is
emerging as a very important commodity in the economy of
Atlantic capitalism.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
By seventeen hundred, piracy had become a massive thorn in
the side of colonial powers like England, France, and Spain.
Pirate's targeted show the backbone of the colonial economy, driving
up security and insurance costs and causing disruptions so severe
that the losses outweighed the cost of competing with one another.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Faced with a shured threat, these powers found less incentive
to fight each other with privateers and instead unite it
against the common enemy, ushering in a new era of piracy.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
So the third generation of pirates are active in the
seventeen teens and seventeen twenties, and what's especially important about
them is that there are no longer any wealthy people involved.
This is the proletariant phase. This is the phase in
which common sailors get control of an entire generation of plundering,
(08:46):
and this, of course fuels all of the imperial governments
to catch as many of these people as they can
and to hang them up in gibbets at the entrance
of every harbor as a deliberate act of terror, meant
to send a message to common sailors. If you turn pirate,
(09:07):
we will hunt you down and we will kill you.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
It was during this new proletarian, working class era of
piracy when pirates started to see their very existence as
a rebellion against the hierarchies of capital and began building
their own, more egalitarian system. Their ships became spaces of democracy, fairness,
and unity, directly challenging the systems they had escaped, and.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
This is one of the things that they were known for,
and they were known for this in their own day.
In other words, the elites who are hunting them down
to kill them are going after them not only because
they disrupted the commerce which was so valuable to these
European imperial powers, but also because they posed a challenge
(09:52):
to the standard way of running a ship.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Life aboard a pirate ship existed in stark contrast to
other more common jobs at sea, like being in the
navy or sailing aboard a merchant vessel.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
So that the Royal Navy, for example, was very far
from democratic. It was a violent, brutal, disciplinary regime. Similarly,
the merchant shipping industry captains had tremendously concentrated powers, and pirates,
in their democratic and egalitarian ways, posed real challenges to
(10:24):
those other ways of organizing maritime labor.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
And the pirate's ability to not only imagine a better
world for themselves, but to actually try and build one
captured the imagination of the public as well.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So this is the last generation of the Golden Age.
It's dramatic. It was something that everybody wanted to read about.
Whenever the authorities captured a group of pirates, they would
be hangings that were public spectacles, but vast numbers of
people would turn out, many of them to cheer the
(10:58):
pirates because they were working class heroes.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
But in order to understand what makes the piracy of
the eighteenth century so radical, first we have to understand
transatlantic trade and the burgeoning capitalism of the sixteenth century.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
This is the period in which England is leading the
way and moving out into the world, actually following Spain,
who had a great deal of success in extracting gold
and silver from the indigenous peoples and their lands in
the Americas. But along come the Dutch and the English.
(11:33):
They didn't find gold and silver, but they found something
even better. They found things like sugar and tobacco and
rice and these commodities that are going to be the
lifeblood of the Atlantic economy.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
A lot of historians say the most important machine to
the rise of capitalism is a steam engine, but Marcus
has a different theory.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
It's the tall ship, which is actually a piece of
technology that permitted Europe to conquer the rest of the
world and to create these vast bluewater empires. You know,
the maritime powers in the sixteenth seventeenth, eighteenth century occupy
(12:15):
only a tiny part of the Eurasian land mass on
the western end. But think about where those languages are
spoken today, English, French, Dutch, Spanish. These are global languages
and this reflects the power of those ships as instruments
of conquest.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
And those ships can't sail around the world without the
labor of highly skilled and trained sailors who could handle
everything from navigation and rigging to carpentry. Their expertise kept
the ships running and the trade routes alive.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
The ships don't sail by themselves. There's a labor issue here.
So in this context, the growth of these empires and
the growth of capitalism as a system has several crucial components.
One of these is what Marks called primitive accumulation of capital,
(13:08):
by that meaning the separation of workers from their means
of subsistence. This happens through the enclosure movement in England.
It happens through the slave trade in West Africa, where
many millions of Africans, through war and other forms of dispossession,
are going to be separated from the land, loaded onto
(13:29):
slave ships, and carried to the Americas to build this
nascent plantation system.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Marcus explains that the plantation system central to global trade
networks was responsible for the largest plant accumulation of wealth
the world had ever seen. The system depended on the
exploitation of millions of enslaved Africans, funneling immense wealth into
the hands of a few. That wealth in turn financed
further colonial expansion and the growth of European industries.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
So we're talking talking about massive amounts of money to
be taken back to Europe plunder, but also the regular
profits of production for the world market the plantation system
produces for the world market. That's just the way it works.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
By seventeen hundred. European empires had built vast wealth through
plundered resources and slave labor, but they were constantly at
war with each other, competing for control.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
There are a series of Anglo Dutch wars in the
seventeenth century, and in seventeen oh two there breaks out
was called the War of Spanish Succession, and a fair
amount of this war is about who will control the
slave trade.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
This war, which lasted from seventeen oh two to seventeen thirteen,
pulled in major European powers like France, Britain, and the
Dutch Republic, all vying for dominance.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
And during that time, one of the ways that European
powers waged war against each other is through something called privateering,
and by that is meant a private merchant ship is
geared out as a vessel of war and then given
a bill of mark by a king or his minions
(15:11):
to wage war on behalf of the king against the
king's enemies, so to attack Spanish ships if you're English,
or even French ships. That is essentially legal piracy.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
These privateers made a lot of money, but.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
When the war comes to an end, two things happen
that are really important to understanding the rise of piracy. First,
all those privateers are demobilized. In other words, once there's peacetime,
the king can't give out these letters of mark there's
no legal piracy going on. And secondly, the big navies
(15:50):
of these European empires also demobilized, so thousands of sailors
are basically paid off. Sometimes actually they're builked of their wages,
but they leave the ships and the navies move from
much higher level of mobilization to a much lower level.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
That left the port cities of the Atlantic. Teaming was
skilled unemployed sailors, and.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
The ruling class responded to this labor surplus the way
it always does.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
This army of the unemployed has very palpable impact on
the way sailors who do have jobs are treated. They
are treated much worse. They are treated more violently by
the captains. Their wages go down. Wartime wages for sailors
are pretty decent, but once there's this massive glut of labor,
(16:38):
the wages come way down to a third of the
level of wartime. The quality of food declines, the use
of the lash increases.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Thousands of seasoned sailors, many of them former privateers, were broke,
angry and out of options, so they did what they
knew best. They took to the sea. But this time
they weren't sailing under a king's banner. They were sailing
under the black flag.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Pirates in the third generation of the Golden Age were
just ordinary working sailors. They were not aristocrats who had
lost their honor and go out to sea to marry
the colonial governor's daughter. You know, it's nothing like that.
It's just ordinary working people whose lives are really difficult,
(17:28):
especially in this period after the War of Spanish.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Succession, there were two primary ways a sailor could become
a pirate around this time.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
The way that most people think that you become a
pirate is through mutiny. That you basically organize an opposition
within a ship a merchant ship almost always, and you
rise up and you capture the ship, you create your
own black flag, and you sail off toward the horizon
(17:59):
as a new pirate crew. But that's probably a relatively
small percentage of the people who become pirates.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
More often, however, pirates didn't have to take over a ship.
They just had to capture one, and for mistreated navy
or merchant sailors this could be an opportunity, and.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
When pirates captured a prize vessel, they would perform a
very interesting ritual. They would come on board, and they
wouldn't start plundering right away. They would call all the
sailors up on deck, the sailors of the captured ship.
They would bring the captain up on deck to face
those sailors.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
And then the pirates, all of whom used to be
common sailors like the ones aboard the captured ship, and
all of whom had been whipped, starved, and cheated out
of their wages by merchant or navy. Captains would ask
a question that would change the fate of everyone on board.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
How does your captain treat you?
Speaker 4 (18:57):
And if they say, our captain treats us very badly.
He doesn't pay us our proper wages, he doesn't give
us the food we're supposed to get, and worst of all,
he beats us all the time. If sailors step forward
and say that in that moment, when the pirates have
(19:20):
just captured their ship, that captain is in a lot
of trouble. Because pirates will act as avengers for their
seafaring brothers, and they will give that captain a whipping,
usually in the very place where he would tie up
sailors to whip them. That tie him up in the
(19:42):
same place and give him the beating of his life,
and in some instances they killed him. In some instances
they gave the captain a whipping and then threw him
overboard and especially bad cases.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
But the pirates weren't just out for vengeance. They had
a system, a rough kind of justice.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
If a sailor should step forward and said, our captain
is a decent man. He treats us well, he pays
us our wages. In that case, the pirates would not
only not punish the captain, they might give him money.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
One famous example of this was William Snellgrave, a merchant
captain captured by pirates in seventeen nineteen off the coast
of Sierra Leone. Despite being severely injured in the attack,
he was spared, likely because his crew respected.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
Him, and the pirates gave him money and said, go
home to London and show the merchants what happens when
a captain treats his sailors well. So they would reward
the decent captains, and they would punish the much more
numerous violent captains.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And once the captain's fate was decided, the Pirates turned
to the rest of the crew with another offer.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
The pirates when they're getting ready to depart the prize ship,
they said, okay, boys, who's with us? Do you want
to come on board and join the pirate ship? And
believe me, if you spoke out a bit against your captain,
you had better go with the pirates because there was
going to be trouble if you didn't. So this is
(21:16):
the way they recruited people by doing things in defense
of the common sailor, and also in telling them, look,
you're going to join a ship where we vote on everything.
We're going to elect our captain, We're going to elect
a quartermaster to keep an eye on the captain to
make sure he treats everybody fairly, and we're going to
(21:36):
divide up everything we get very equally. It's not going
to be the way it is on these naval and
merchant ships.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
From that moment on, the pirates and whoever chose to
join them would sail off into the sunset and the
open sea out there.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
No captains or merchants had any power over them. They
were miles away, not only from the authority of their
former employers, but also from the institutions that reproduce the
has seen social order churches, governments, families, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
They were free to create a new order, one that
worked on their own terms.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
They just get to decide for themselves how they want
to run the ship, what do they do, how do
they do it. Do they do it in the same
way as the Royal Navy and the merchant shipping industry,
And the answer resoundingly is no, they didn't do it
(22:29):
that way. They created a very different kind of social order.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Of course, some things had to say the same.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
As ship still needed someone who could read charts, navigate
the seas, and keep them on course.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
You've got to have that. If you don't have that,
the ship doesn't work properly. So you've got to choose
someone who has those skills. But even so, the pirates
would elect the person they wanted to lead them. Okay,
so now this is at a time Bear in mind,
this is at a time when poor people like sailors
(23:04):
had no democratic rights anywhere in the world. Okay, nowhere
did they have this kind of power. Because in most
every country, if there is some voting. It's for people
of property, and these pirates didn't have property, so they
couldn't vote. So they vote, so they vot. They vote
(23:25):
for a captain.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
But even the best captains could abuse their power, so
the pirates built in a safeguard.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
They created a new position called the quartermaster, who would
basically do two things. One keep an eye on the captain,
make sure he doesn't abuse his power, and two divide
up everything equally that they take when they capture prize vessels.
And what's fascinating about this is that for that job,
(23:53):
you're going to elect the most trustworthy person on the ship.
It's the person you would trust to be fair to
everybody and the person that you would trust to be
suspicious of captains. So they voted on that. So it's
like a dual executive in which there's this balance of
(24:14):
power so that people are not abused.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
And they didn't stop there. Pirates elected officers for all
sorts of roles.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
In fact, they voted on just about everything.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
One ship captain said, it's who was totally unaccustomed to this.
He says, they're just constantly voting on everything. Where do
we want to sail the ship, where's the best place
to capture vessels? Who do we want to do this?
Who do we want to do that? And the sovereign
power was the crew as a collective. They had something
(24:46):
called the Common Council, in which everybody had to vote.
Everybody came out, they had debates. You know, some said
let's go here, or they said let's go there, and
then they would have a vote. This is all very
unusual for the times.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Democratic way of running the ship was crucial to pirate culture,
and so was equality among the sailors.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
And here you'd have to look at this in comparative perspective.
A captain on a royal naval vessel would probably make
sixty to eighty to one hundred times as much in
pay as the lowest common sailor. For the captain of
a merchant ship, it might be ten, twenty, thirty, forty
(25:29):
times as much, depending on how much of the cargo
the captain owned, and they frequently did own quite a
bit of it. But pirates didn't operate that way. First
of all, they abolished the wage. They said, we're not
wage laborers. We're partners in this enterprise. So it's like
a cooperative we're partners, and so we're going to pay
(25:51):
everybody according to shares, not the money wage. And this
too is kind of fascinating because this is the period
when wage labor is a sndant, this is part of
the rise of capitalism. But the pirates didn't want to
play that game, so they say we'll give shares.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Every crew member received at least one share.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Skilled workers like gunners, carpenters, or navigators earn slightly more
due to the crucial roles they played on the ship.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
A specialist might get one in a quarter or one
and a half shares, but that was about the limit.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Look at the wage hierarchy, and look how the pirates
have radically compressed it so that the distance between the
top and the bottom is really minimal. And this, of
course also appealed to the common sailor. They loved this idea.
They loved the idea that the captain was not getting
one hundred times as much as anybody else. So this
(26:48):
democratic social order was really crucial. The authorities were very
well aware of it, and they wanted to eradicate it
because it was a very subversive example, this way of
running a ship in which the rank and file were
in control.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
That radical rejection of class hierarchy wasn't just about wages.
It showed up in how pirates carried themselves too.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Take Walter Kennedy for example. He came from a poor
family in London, got by through burglary and pickpocketing, and
eventually found his way to the Royal Navy. When he
turned pirate, he made a name for himself by sharing
loot equitably and refusing to follow the rigid social order
of the time. People even called him the robin Hood
of the Sea.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
But Kennedy's class defiance didn't stop there. When he was
captured and put on trial, he showed up wearing a
powdered wig, a symbol of the elite he had spent
his life fighting against. It was a final act of mockery,
a pirate's way of thumbing his nose at the system,
even in the face of death.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
That defiance wasn't just personal, it was collective, and nothing
symbolized that more than the flag they flew, the Jolly Roger.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Let's start with a name.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
Jolly Roger had a specific meaning that came from the underworld,
as it was often called in the port cities where
people would speak a particular kind of language. It was
called can't thieves can't. It was a very specialized vocabulary.
(28:21):
And jolly is sort of well known, but Roger meant
to copulate. Okay, to Roger, someone was to fuck them.
So basically the Jolly Roger. The basic message of the
Jolly Roger was fuck you. And I think this is
(28:41):
kind of what they were trying to convey.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
But beyond giving anyone who looked at it the middle finger,
the symbolism of the Jolly Roger conveyed the pirate's ideals,
especially in contrast to the world they had left behind.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Flags represent group identification with an idea or a set
of principles. So you have flags of empires, for example,
the Union Jack. What pirates began to do in the
seventeen teens was to create their own flags. And this
(29:16):
is you know, you've got to remember too, how important
flags were to life at sea. This is how you
signal from ship to ship, what you're doing, where you're going,
who you are. Right there are all these banners and
flags flying on every vessel.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
And the significance of flags as symbols of empire and
hegemony make the iconography of the jolly Roger that much
more subversive.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Some people say that the origin of the pirate flag
name jolly Roger comes from the French joles rouge.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Which means pretty red in French.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
A lot of the early pirate flags were red, but
it turns out black became the dominant color, and by
the time we get into this third generation, almost all
the pirate flags are black.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And against that black flag.
Speaker 4 (30:06):
They choose the image of death, the death's head that
could be a skull and crossbones, as it is now
very commonly depicted, but in many cases, probably in most cases,
it was an entire skeleton, as they called it, an anatomy,
(30:26):
with a skull, and you could see all the bones
of the body. And the skull was usually holding two things.
It was holding in one hand an hourglass and in
the other hand a sword or a spear or a dart.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Marcus says that on one level, these images are pretty straightforward.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
Prize ship sees a pirate ship bearing down on them,
up goes the jolly Roger, and you look at this
image of death, and you see the weapon, and you
see the hourglass, and what are you going to conclude?
Would surrender or you will die, right, That's what they're
That's what they're saying. They it's the black pirate flag
(31:08):
is an instrument of terror. It's meant to terrify their
prey so they won't fight back.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
In contrary to popular belief, a pirate would almost always
prefer the outcome.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
Pirates would just always much prefer that people give up,
And most most merchant ships did give up. They didn't
want to fight these guys because they were very skillful.
There were a lot more of them on a pirate ship,
and you were going to lose. And if you piss
them off by shooting at them, it's going to be
worse for you when they capture you, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
But beyond just surrender or die. Marcus also says there's
a second layer of symbolism to the Jolly Roger.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
And he says it speaks directly to the social order
that all these pirates came from. Aboard naval and merchant ships.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
Captains who kept logs of their voyages would frequently draw
in their log a skull and a crossbone to indicate
the death of a sailor. It's a fairly common practice.
So what sailors did when they became pirates, they seized
that symbolism of the skull and crossbones and put it
(32:18):
on their flag. Right, we're inverting the meaning of this, Right,
we are trapped in this world of death. And it
is absolutely true that the conordinary common sailor couldn't expect
to live very long, right, and this fueled their decision
to become pirates, the idea being, let us live well
(32:40):
as long as we can.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
A symbol of the death of a common sailor holds
an hourglass and a sword.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
There you go, death, violence, limited time. These are things
that were really crucial to the lives of common sailors,
and they put that on their banner, and then they
fought back against those conditions under that manner. And so
I think this is very revealing of their consciousness as workers,
(33:09):
that these are the conditions we're in, and we're going
to put this on the flag. We're going to have
our own flag. You know, to hell with all those
nation states. You know, we are free people and we
will do what we want. And we, as they put it,
declare war on the whole world, but of course not
against common sailors. Right, those are the people that you
(33:31):
defend you take vengeance against their class enemies. So there
is a very strong anti national quality to this black flag,
and everybody recognized it as such at the time.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Alamatina a penal sata oh very lagi, very largile, very Largiuou.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
That's all we've got time for in this episode. Join
us in Part two, where we talk more about everyday
life aboard a pirate chip, the rules pirates lived, by,
the alliances they built, and how their fight for freedom
ultimately led to their downfall.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Part two is available now for early listening for our
supporters on Patreon.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
It's only support from you, our listeners, which allows us
to make these podcasts, So if you appreciate our work,
please do think about joining us at patreon dot com
slash working Class History link in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
In return for your support, you can get early access
to content, as well as ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content,
discounted merch and more. If you can't spare the cash,
absolutely no problem. Please just tell your friends about this
podcast and give us a five star review on your
favorite podcast app.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
If you'd like to learn more about the Golden Age
of piracy, check out the web page for this episode,
where you'll find further reading and more. You can also
get Marcus's book Fill of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates and
the Golden Age, and.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
His graphic novel under the Banner of King Death, Pirates
of the Atlantic, a graphic novel with David Lester, and
the links in the show note.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible.
Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusamano,
Nick Williams, and Old Norm.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Our theme tune is Bella Chow. Thanks for permission to
use it from Disky dol Sole. You can buy it
or stream it on the links in the show notes.
This episode was written by me Audrey Kemp.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And me Tyler Hill, produced by me Tyler Hill. Anyway,
that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode
and thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Moon
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