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New Histories of the Pirates Owen Stanwood, Boston College

The Politics of Piracy: Crime and Civil Disobedience in Colonial America. By Douglas R. Burgess Jr. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2014. 301 pages. Cloth, ebook. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740. By Mark G. Hanna. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 464 pages. Cloth, ebook. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the IndoAtlantic World. By Kevin P. McDonald. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 224 pages. Cloth, ebook. Henry Every has rarely appeared as an important character in colonial American history. Nonetheless, according to three recent books, his adventures tell us quite a bit about how the British North American colonies fit into a wider world. In 1694 Every was first mate on a merchant ship, the Charles II. Upset by working conditions, he led a mutiny and took his former employers’ ship, now renamed the Fancy, on a pirate mission to the Indian Ocean. He captured a Mughal vessel carrying pilgrims to Mecca— including the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir’s own daughter—and pillaged the ship of its treasure. Every was perhaps the quintessential early modern pirate. Tales of his murderous exploits spread around the world, angering the emperor, almost destroying the English East India Company, and inspiring at least some Englishmen to admire and emulate buccaneers. To add to his notoriety, Every ended his career mysteriously, evading the largest manhunt in British imperial history, disappearing with his treasure into the wide expanses of the empire.1 The North American colonies constituted an important node in Every’s world. It was there that he and his fellow Red Sea pirates found markets for their treasure, from Mughal gold to the East India goods, such as fine calicoes, so prized by colonial consumers. It was also there that he found protection from prosecution. Every himself might have spent some time in the Bahamas, and several of his crewmen found refuge elsewhere in North 1 Henry Every’s story was popularized by its inclusion in Daniel Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (1722; repr., London, 1972), 49–62.

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 73, no. 3, July 2016 DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.73.3.0561

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America. One of them even married the daughter of Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, William Markham, a circumstance that caused a scandal resulting in the lieutenant governor’s removal. As each of these three new books chronicles in different ways, piracy flourished in the late seventeenth century in large part because colonial American “pirate nests” provided markets and safe retreats for famous brigands such as Every. Pirates occupy an important place in popular culture, but they have not inspired much serious scholarship. The most prominent interpretation has come from Marcus Rediker and his sometime coauthor Peter Linebaugh, who have put a Marxian gloss on early modern pirates, describing them as something of a seaborne proletariat demonstrating against merchant capitalism and imperial expansion.2 Rediker, like many other historians, has focused particularly on what scholars have labeled the “Golden Age” of piracy in the 1710s and 1720s, especially 1718–26. While the three books under review have many differences in emphasis and interpretation, they agree in their resistance to Rediker’s interpretation. The period after 1718 is anomalous, they say, a brief moment in which many pirates were egalitarian rebels fighting against the empire. This was not, however, the real golden age of piracy. For that, we must look to the late seventeenth century, the heyday of Every. This change in chronology serves to recast pirates as important actors within the empire rather than rebels against it. Their role, moreover, was to advocate for free trade and open markets in an empire oriented around trading monopolies and the restrictive trading regime of the Navigation Acts. In this detail each of these authors follows the other great modern historian of early modern piracy, Robert C. Ritchie, whose study of Captain William Kidd highlighted the same critical decade of the 1690s. Ritchie cast Kidd as a transitional figure between the patriotic privateers of the Elizabethan era and the “villains of all nations” in the eighteenth century.3 This new scholarship on piracy extends that argument beyond the one case study of Kidd. In these authors’ estimation, piracy helps to explain the empire’s transformation into a more coherent polity during the late 1600s. Of the three books under review, Mark G. Hanna’s Pirate Nests is the most wide-ranging and significant. Hanna’s well-argued and exhaustively researched book will stand as the critical work on early modern British piracy for some time, but it is also essential reading for anyone interested in the development of the empire. Unlike the other two works, Hanna devotes 2 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987), esp. 254– 87; Peter Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), esp. 143–74; Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004). 3 Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).



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much attention to the tangled origins of English piracy and privateering in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. From the beginning, piracy prospered on the peripheries. Its first theater was in England’s West Country, especially the counties of Devon and Cornwall. Pirates from those counties frequently raided ships in other parts of the Atlantic, bringing the goods home to the West Country, where they stimulated local economies. Local leaders embraced pirates largely for economic reasons—they provided a wide variety of goods at cheaper prices—but conversations about piracy also reflected contests over state building. Local worthies resisted the establishment of special commissions against piracy—such as the one headed by the aptly named Sir Julius Caesar—and demonstrated how difficult it would be for royal authorities to capture pirates when local communities protected them. The crown’s strategy, eventually, was to temporarily suspend its war on the pirates and instead use them in the service of state building. This proved especially useful as England moved into the Atlantic in the late 1500s and early 1600s. From the 1570s onward, the crown turned some of these West Country pirates into privateers by issuing letters of marque authorizing them to plunder (mostly) Spanish vessels with at least some legal cover. The most successful of these men, such as Francis Drake, “set the standard over the next century for English imperial expansion based on aggressive private initiative” (44). This pattern continued during what Hanna labels the era of “piratical colonization” (58) in the seventeenth century, when privateers/pirates (the line between the two was blurry indeed) took the lead in various colonial endeavors from America to the East Indies. Particularly important were the puritan pirates working for Robert Rich, 2d Earl of Warwick, who combined a desire for plunder with the “broader context of the imperial expansion of the Protestant Reformation” (70). Pirates and privateers remained important imperial characters after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. In Jamaica, Henry Morgan led raids on the Spanish that were reminiscent of Drake’s earlier exploits and received a lieutenant governorship for his efforts. By the end of the decade, however, things began to change. It is at this point that Hanna’s story moves to the North American colonies, where pirates set up shop from the 1670s onward. They did so in part because Jamaica’s leaders turned away from plunder to planting, making the presence of pirates inconvenient, and in part because they wanted to escape direct royal oversight, decamping instead to charter or proprietary colonies such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and later South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, there were internal reasons why these colonies became pirate nests. At this point, Hanna’s book meets up with the narratives in Kevin P. McDonald’s and Douglas R. Burgess Jr.’s books. Of the three books, McDonald’s Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves is in some ways the most constrained, as the author limits himself to examining the specific links

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between New York and Madagascar, but McDonald uses his case study to great effect, demonstrating the ways that pirates connected colonial America to a much wider world. McDonald follows Hanna in his central thesis—that “early modern colonialism cannot be fully understood without comprehending the central role of maritime plunder, including privateering and piracy” (5)—but he downplays the role of imperial officials and looks instead at trade networks, with particular attention to the one that linked New York merchants with piratical activities in the South Indian Ocean during the 1690s. In doing so McDonald introduces a new category of analysis: the “Indo-Atlantic world.” In the late 1600s, he contends, the geographic orientation of many New York merchants extended beyond the Atlantic, especially to Madagascar, where pirates set up colonies, and to the Mascarene Islands and the Red Sea, where Anglo-American pirates such as Every raided for bullion and goods destined for American markets. McDonald is careful to note that those who committed acts of piracy could also at other times become colonists or legitimate merchants—as Hanna also underscores, piracy was less an avocation than an activity. Still, many of the raids conducted by people such as Every and Thomas Tew, and supported by power brokers such as Frederick Philipse and Benjamin Fletcher, the governor of New York, were illegal by any measure and went against the larger interests of imperial leaders. McDonald’s attempts to widen Atlantic history are salutary, since they help to demonstrate connections between disparate parts of the early empire. He notes how pirate settlements were less independent places than outgrowths of the imperial economy, and in doing so he gives credence to some of the criticisms of Atlantic history by scholars such as Peter A. Coclanis and Philip J. Stern, who insist on connections between the Atlantic and the East.4 One wonders, however, if these far-flung connections applied very widely beyond the fascinating but somewhat anomalous links between New York and Madagascar. The other particularly interesting facet of McDonald’s book is his focus on slavery. While Hanna mentions the involvement of pirates in slave trading, McDonald goes much further, noting that forced bondage created and sustained the Indo-Atlantic world. The pirate settlements of Madagascar only existed because local Malagasy leaders allowed the pirates to stay, largely because they provided a market for slaves captured in raids around the island. The pirates then sold these slaves in New York, a marginal slave market poorly served by the Royal African Company, the only legal slave-trading outfit in the British Empire. McDonald includes a lengthy 4 Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Noch Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 169–82; Philip J. Stern, “British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 693–712.



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and instructive table of slave ships from Madagascar that visited the British colonies, though most of them sold their cargoes in Barbados or other island colonies rather than New York. Finally, some of these slaves ended up as crewmen on pirate ships, and while he resists following Rediker in viewing these vessels as bastions of freedom for slaves, he acknowledges that some black mariners could gain critical advantages, even in some cases freedom. Due to the lack of evidence, his argument remains speculative, but it identifies a key facet of the history of piracy that has received too little attention from previous scholars. The last of these three books, Burgess’s The Politics of Piracy, offers a very different look at the same decade. He eschews McDonald’s global perspective. Aside from a couple of chapters focusing on legal matters in England, the book is anchored in colonial America, and Burgess argues that piracy is critical to understanding the development of a colonial legal identity. In short, metropolitan strictures against piracy had little effect in North America because colonists did not view piratical activities as criminal. Essentially, they would not accept English laws against piracy, which brought on a decade-long showdown between a consolidating imperial state and recalcitrant colonial subjects, a dispute that centered on the activities of people such as Every. What was most interesting was that even some crown governors—Benjamin Fletcher is Burgess’s prime example—quickly came around to the colonists’ position once they took office in North America. Aside from New York, Burgess includes detailed analyses of political wrangling in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, showing how the issue of piracy colored politics and led to protracted struggles. While Burgess’s argument is persuasive to an extent, he does not provide enough evidence to indicate why colonists insisted on redefining piracy. Fortunately, Hanna examines the same issue much more effectively. Hanna concurs with Burgess that the crisis of the 1690s constituted the real golden age of piracy and explains it, like McDonald, by linking the pirates to the larger imperial economy. Due largely to the Navigation Acts, the colonies suffered something of an economic crisis during the late 1600s. Thanks to trade monopolies and restrictions on making their own currency, the colonies experienced major shortages of bullion and consumer goods, especially the coveted East India goods that colonial buyers so badly wanted but could not afford. Pirates brought in both gold and plundered eastern luxury goods at reasonable prices, allowing colonial markets to function. In Hanna’s estimation, therefore, the colonial embrace of pirates was an economic rather than a cultural or political stance. While Hanna does not explicitly say it, his thesis fits in well with the paradigm of anglicization advanced by John M. Murrin, T. H. Breen, and others. In Burgess’s view, the colonists’ embrace of piracy represented “an independent and even a rebellious streak” (196) that presaged later rebellions against imperial

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authority. For Hanna, however, the colonists’ love of pirates came out of their desire to be more English, to be able to trade and consume on the same terms as their brethren in England.5 Of course, every golden age must end, and Burgess and Hanna both conclude that the end came quickly and dramatically during the first decade of the eighteenth century. As Burgess put it, “piracy evolved rapidly from a legitimate business to a commercial threat” (202) in the Anglo-American imagination. The Boston trial of John Quelch in 1705 marked an important moment in this evolution. Like most of the pirates of the 1690s, Quelch bore a commission, in this case from Massachusetts governor Joseph Dudley, that permitted him to raid enemy French ships, but he exceeded it by capturing nine Portuguese vessels, bringing the gold back to New England. Instead of being received as a hero, however, Quelch faced arrest, conviction, and execution—the first pirate ever convicted by a colonial court. Soon even Rhode Island, the pirate nest par excellence, had begun to turn against its pirates. Burgess identifies several factors in this change but particularly stresses the pirates’ move from raiding in the East Indies to raiding in the Americas, where their marauding increasingly affected colonial merchants. This and other factors gradually eroded the pirates’ safe havens, and it was this change in colonial sentiment, not a war directed from the metropole, that brought an end to piracy. The two authors agree on much of the chronology but again Hanna offers a fuller explanation. He concurs that colonial attitudes on piracy changed markedly in the early 1700s, but he credits shifts in imperial policies as being the real catalyst. Advocates of imperial centralization realized, especially in the wake of the Every fiasco, that piracy could not be rooted out as long as pirate nests existed, so they actually tackled the grievances that led colonists to embrace these purported lawbreakers. The end of the Royal African Company monopoly opened up markets for slaves, while other policies fixed the colonial currency crisis and brought in more (legal) goods from the East Indies and Spanish America. In a remarkable reversal of Rediker’s vision of proletarian pirates, Hanna defines them as crusaders for free trade and open markets. Moreover, they ultimately succeeded, even if their success paved the way for their own demise. There is much to admire about these new histories of piracy, but perhaps the most important contribution is that they shine light on the neglected but critical last decades of the seventeenth century. The period 5 The anglicization thesis began with John M. Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1966); for a thorough exploration, see Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman, eds., Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic (Philadelphia, 2015), esp. 9–56. For T. H. Breen’s gloss on the subject, see esp. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1986): 467–99.



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from the 1670s through the beginning of the eighteenth century marked an era of imperial reform as leaders in Whitehall attempted to impose some order on a chaotic American, indeed global, empire.6 Pirates played a role in this larger drama, but these books (not surprisingly) imply that the crisis was fundamentally about piracy and that the controversy over the Red Sea pirates in particular threatened to tear the empire apart. Burgess makes this argument explicit when he claims that “rather than a pretext upon which to extend the Crown’s prerogative, the issue of piracy and pirate sponsorship was instead of such real gravity that it threatened to undermine all relations between Crown and colony” (97–98). This argument seems difficult to sustain. While piracy was a real threat, it also provided a language that imperial administrators could use to smear opponents and support their long-standing goal of revoking colonial charters. Advocates of royalization often intentionally blurred the lines between piracy, privateering, and illegal trade, portraying anyone who opposed them as aiders and abettors of criminals. All of this makes for fascinating history, but it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. One hopes that these books will help bring about a new golden age for the historiography not only of piracy but also of the wider imperial world that created, sustained, and destroyed it. 6 For various perspectives on this imperial moment, see Ian K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (Oxford, 1968); Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1981); Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York, 1984); Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia, 2011); Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York, 2011); William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013); Webb, Marlborough’s America (New Haven, Conn., 2013).