Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Christopher Minster. Professor of History and Literature. Christopher Minster, Ph. Updated February 28, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Minster, Christopher.
The 10 Best Pirate Attacks in History. The Fascinating History of Female Pirates. Biography of Mary Read, English Pirate. Your Privacy Rights. Moses Butterworth, however, did none of these things. The true rebels were leaders like Samuel Willet, establishment figures on land who led riots against crown authority. It was the higher reaches of colonial society, from governors to merchants, who supported global piracy, not some underclass or proto proletariat. Popular culture has invested heavily in the image of pirates as anarchists who speak in colorful language and dress in attire recognizable to any five-year-old.
In fact, what we imagine pirates to look and sound like matches only one decade of history: to Before that, piracy consisted of a spectrum of activities from the heroic to the maniacal.
Many historians, like many pirate fans, write about piracy as a static phenomenon. But most sought one large prize and hoped to use their plunder to join the middling to upper echelons of colonial society.
One reason piracy was often an act or a phase, and not a way of life, was simply because humans have not evolved to live on the sea. The sea is a hostile place, offering few of the pleasures of terrestrial society. Pirates needed to clean and repair their ships, collect wood and water, gather crews, obtain paperwork, fence their goods, or obtain sexual gratification.
Simply put, what is the value of silver and gold in the middle of the ocean? Why would someone risk his life in a hostile maritime world if there was no chance he could actually spend his booty? Until the s, English pirates almost always had somewhere to go to spend their money, either for a few days or to settle down for good. The British National Archives holds a petition from 48 wives of known pirates, begging the crown to pardon their husbands so they could return home to care for their families.
Returning to London was not an option for most sea rovers, but a life in the American colonies offered the closest proxy. Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, who was instrumental to the development of the American colonies and commanded a fleet of privateers, was painted by Anthony van Dyck around Support of piracy on the peripheries of the British Empire dates to the first forays of English sea captains overseas.
Pirate Nests begins in Elizabethan England with the active protection of piracy by port communities in Devon and Cornwall. The ascension of James I coincided with the migration of a plunder economy from England to farther shores. Puritan communities in Ireland, and soon the fledgling colonies of Jamestown, Bermuda, New Plymouth, and Boston all supported illicit sea marauders.
In the s, men like Moses Butterworth joined crews heading out of colonial ports to the Indian Ocean, basing themselves on the island of Madagascar. Initial attempts to better regulate the colonies faced heated resistance like the riot that sprang Moses Butterworth in Royal officials battled with colonial elites over control of their court system, choice of governors, economic policies, and other issues. But the transformation of law, politics, economics, and even popular culture in a relatively brief period of time soon persuaded landed colonists of the long-term benefits of legal trade over the short-term boom of the pirate market.
After being sprung from jail, Moses Butterworth eventually headed to Newport, where, in , he captained a sloop that sailed alongside a man-of-war in pursuit of runaway English sailors. The former pirate had turned pirate-hunter. In fact, you point out that to be bloodthirsty would undercut the desired result, because it would signal to potential targets that they might as well resist. The reason that cruelty was effective is because it constituted a cost of a behavior that pirates wanted to deter.
If you're a merchant crew and you know that pirates, no matter what you do, are going to try and slaughter you once they board you, well then of course there's no cost to you resisting them. You might as well try; you'll probably lose, but you're no worse off than if you had just surrendered to them peacefully in the first place.
So it was critical for pirates that they only applied heinous tortures when, in fact, they were using it to penalize behavior. And this is part of this idea of what I call the "invisible hook. And this is a case where we can see that.
Is that how you're able to separate cause from correlation? What's to say that these pirates weren't just, say, bands of bloodthirsty marauders that lucked into this strategy? One of the things we can do is look at testable implications of the rational-choice theory. If in fact pirates were truly madmen, we would not expect them to only display that madness in particular cases. Especially, it would be a great coincidence if it happened to be those cases in which it stood to make them money.
And that's pretty much precisely what we observe. Notice the sort of piratical paradox, if you will, that we confront. You've got these depraved and feral sea bandits living somehow by a strict pirate's code, holding judicial sessions, and regulating alcohol use and gambling.
The two things just don't seem to match up. First of all, that undermines the claim that pirates were simply crazy, because when it was in their interest, they seemed to be able to behave perfectly rationally.
And the rational-choice framework can really allow us to resolve that piratical paradox, in that you can take one basic core assumption about human behavior and explain two things that seemingly are at odds with each other, as opposed to positing ad hoc pirate motives as we go from practice to practice. One example that you point to in demonstrating the efficiency of pirate behavior is that, according to at least one pirate historian, Blackbeard didn't kill a single man. That's a perfect illustration of what we're talking about here and another actual prediction that comes out of the rational-choice theory to a certain extent.
The actual instances that we have of pirate brutality—and there are a number of them—an economist would characterize as out-of-equilibrium play, not the norm. Those cases are recorded precisely because something really nasty happened. And the fact that Blackbeard didn't have to actually kill anybody is an indication of what we would call equilibrium play.
The reputation that he'd created was so effective that he didn't have to actually ever carry through on the threat that lay behind that image. One thing that I thought was interesting is the fact that some of these pirate ships had institutionalized a form of worker's compensation. They did, and I talk about that in-depth in a different paper I wrote.
But that's exactly what they had. Any money that was captured was shared equally amongst the crew. Pirate crews tended to be less divided by national, religious and racial differences than communities were on land. There was however also tough discipline on board.
If you failed to follow the rules, you could be flogged, killed, or marooned. There were also long periods without food or medical supplies, and the only option was to go hungry. Although more British pirates were born in London than other seaports, there is no doubt that the most famous pirates were born elsewhere:. The most precious prizes were chests of gold, silver and jewels. Coins were especially popular because pirate crews could share them out easily. Emeralds and pearls were the commonest gems from America, providing rich plunder.
However, pirates did not only seize precious cargoes like these. They also wanted things they could use, such as food, barrels of wine and brandy, sails, anchors and other spare equipment for their ships. Things as simple as flour and medicine were treasured steals. Often pirates were just trying to find the necessities of life. Pirate ships usually carried far more crew than ordinary ships of a similar size.
This meant they could easily outnumber their victims. Pirates altered their ships so that they could carry far more cannon than merchant ships of the same size. Stories about pirate brutality meant that many of the most famous pirates had a terrifying reputation, and they advertised this by flying various gruesome flags including the 'Jolly Roger' with its picture of skull and crossbones.
0コメント