Socialism and Pirates

This semester I plan to journal on my classes. This journal entry reflects my readings in my Early American Literature class. In case you cannot tell, we are focuses on Pirates and Dialogism.

I'm taking this opportunity to use Depp's picture--wouldn't you?

Lawrence Osborne’s article “A Pirates Progress: How the Maritime Rogue Became a Multicultural Hero,” chronicles “new studies,” if we consider 1998 “new,” in pirate lore. Osborne posits the question on whether pirates are thieving, mass murderers in need of repentance as the 1704 account, “The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch, And Others of his Company,” implies or are they the floating democratic socialists with biker, rock star-like lifestyles such as recent studies suggests. It seems hard to believe, yet it is true, that pirating was once considered a favorable and patriotic occupation. Both Drake and Morgan pillaged and plundered Spanish towns and shipping vessels; Drake alone netted Queen Elizabeth “a cool $100 million” in modern-day currency (Osborne 36). As a result of the 1713 Treaties of Utrecht, pirating ceased plundering under the protection of a national flag and created what some scholars describe as an anarchistic, socialist, floating utopia employed in “social banditry” (Osborne 37).

The impetus of these new ideas stem from archeological findings of sunken pirate ships like the Whydah, which sunk in 1717 and belonged to the pirate Sam Bellamy (of course, he has a rock star name). Deducing that pirates were democratic socialists based on a few silver plates with Masonic image engravings seems a little flimsy. Although, I do accept Kenneth Kinkor’s argument, based on contemporary eye-witness accounts, that black pirates were socially accepted as equals by white pirates. Curious enough, Kinkor stated that pirating “manifests itself as criminality, but it is in fact the expression of social discontent” (37).

This idea of the subversive interests me in that I am considering Bakhtin’s idea of carnival and how it influences social protest and counterculture as an area of study for my doctoral degree. I am both amused and intrigued by Hobsbawm’s and Christopher Hill’s Marxists analyses of “social banditry.” I’m only amused because the idea of socialist pirates sounds so peculiar and extreme. But Hobsbawm’s explanation that pirating evolved from the transition from “peasant economies to capitalism” and reflected a “desperate response to upheaval,” posits a new take on pirates for me, and if we consider the 1960s message music movement in conjunction with the civil rights and anti-war protests, we can definitely view pirates as 17th century versions of counter-culture rock stars. If we accept this argument, then the pillaging and plundering of property would represent a dialogic response to the upper stratum of society, the bourgeois and aristocratic society. In essence, the pirates, who Marcus Rediker describes as “proletarian outcasts and miscreants,” pillage and plunder not only for their own survival, but they also, through violence and invasion, demand that their voice be heard. Through economic loss, the bourgeois capitalist society “hears” the counterculture protests of the pirates. My interests are still further intrigued by the suggestion that the pirates’ “alternative society” influenced the culture that comprised Colonial America and the antiauthoritarianism that lead to the revolution. (But, I pause here to interject that we must remember that America was founded partly by a large criminal element that arrived on our shores as indentured servants.)

The idea that pirates endorsed a dialogic scheme where all stratums of society come together on a level playing field for discourse seems to be supported by Captain Johnson’s 1724 History. Johnson’s listing of the “Ten Articles,” a type of pirate code, reveals the welcoming of a dialogic voice in several of the articles: “Every man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment” and “Equal title to the fresh Provisions” (41). Finally, I’m interested in Rediker’s forthcoming narrative “The Many-Headed Hydra.” I’m curious to see if his analogy of the hydra to pirate unity can be connected to Bakhtin’s critique on vitalism in which he examines, under the influence of Kanaev, the hydra’s propensity to reform after being divided in half (how does this affect the soul?). He frames his theory in the context of modern dialectical materialism, a Marxist philosophy that would further support the socialist tendencies of those social bandits.

Certainly these images of pirates differ from our other class readings. Cotton Mather’s “An Account of the Pirates with Divers of Their Speeches and Letters,” and “An Account of the Behaviour and last Dying Speeches of the Six Pirates, that were Executed on Charles River, Boston Side, on Fryday June 30th 1704,” reveal an overwhelming pressure to conform to religious submission. We can tell little about the pirates in these accounts. For the most part, they confess their sins and beg that messages be sent to their brothers and wives instructing them to raise their children in strict religious instruction. These requests make sense to me for two reasons. First, a comment in the trail transcript of the pirate John Quelch renders the repentant confessions suspect. On page six, the writer states that before any judgment of death, the offender should be given a chance to “plainly confess their Offences, (which they will never do with-out Torture)” (parenthesis in original). This little parenthetical aside is what Bakhtin would call “double-voiced discourse.” In other words, they torture pirates until they confess, so why would they not torture them to confess to Christ? Second, it is overwhelmingly noticeable that these pirates entreat their readers and family to instruct children in the ways of Christ. If the dominate authority were directing their confession, again, assuming they were tortured, then the subject of children proves vital specifically because they represent the future. Other religious concerns of these contemporary writings include: Do not break the Sabbath, drink, or blaspheme, do not succumb to temptation as “I” have, and remember that it is not too late to repent. These contemporary readings definitely de-romanticize pirate culture, which, I suppose, is the purpose.