As it’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day, here are some things you didn’t know* about pirates.
(*unless you already did)
1. Pirate ships were democracies with a pretty flat management structure
According to economist Peter Leeson in The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, captains on other ships could be tyrants, but under the skull and crossbones, it was a case of “one pirate, one vote”.
To constrain their captains democratically, pirates required the unrestricted right to depose any captain for any reason. Without this, the threat of popular removal wouldn’t be credible, eliminating captains’ incentive to abstain from preying on crew members. Thus, pirates indulged their democratic impulse with more enthusiasm than senior citizens in an election year. One crew went through thirteen captains in the space of a single voyage. Captain Benjamin Hornigold’s crew, for example, deposed him from command because he “refused to take and plunder English Vessels. Pirates wanted to ensure captainship “falls on one superior for Knowledge and Boldness, Pistol Proof, (as they call it),” so they also removed captains who showed cowardice.
In the legitimate merchant navy and national navies, a captain could expect to earn four or five times what others in the crew ‘took home’, but pirate captains got no extra rations, no special lodgings, and only slightly higher pay.
2. Pirates got disability benefits
(although they did still deal in human beings as chattels, so their ‘progressiveness’ wasn’t what you might call universal)
Then came the agreed awards for the wounded, who might have lost a limb or suffered injuries. They would be compensated as follows: for the loss of a right arm, 600 pieces of eight or six slaves; for a left arm 500 pieces of eight or five slaves. The loss of a right leg also brought 500 pieces of eight or five slaves in compensation; a left leg 400 or four slaves; an eye, 100 or one slave, and the same award was made for the loss of a finger. If a man lost the use of an arm, he would get as much as if it had been cut off, and a severe internal injury which meant the victim had to have a pipe inserted in his body would receive 500 pieces of eight or five slaves in recompense.
3. Even so, pirate ships were multi-racial
Leeson again:
Some pirate crews granted black sailors the same perquisites and privileges … as white sailors in the early 1700s.
Historian Kenneth Kinkor worked out that pirate crews were anything from 13 to 98% black — although another historian, David Cordingly, says most of them were slaves — “pirates shared the same prejudices as other white men in the Western world”, but Leeson says “a significant number … were ‘regular’ pirate crew members”.
4. Some pirates might *gasp* not have been heterosexual
Stede Bonnet was described in Captain Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates in 1724 as having chosen his “wicked Undertaking … occasioned by some Discomforts he found in a married State”.
Not much in itself, perhaps, but at his trial (after which he was hanged), he was only charged with two acts of piracy, and the judge seemed to spend quite a bit of time focusing on Bonnet’s abandonment of his wife. I think we’re allowed a raised eyebrow at that, at least.
Bartholomew Roberts was “particularly intimate” with ship’s surgeon George Wilson (according to the General History), although George may have been a woman in disguise, according to some sources. On which subject… there’s also Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
Whether they were lovers, as one edition of the General History suggests, they were certainly women dressed as chaps — which was, to put it mildly, frowned upon at the time.
Seeing evidence that suggested “female cross-dressing was quite widespread in his army” in 1643, Charles I had written:
Whatever their story was, homosexuality on ships was sufficiently common that it was outlawed and severely punished on merchant and navy ships, but David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag says no recorded pirate code so much as mentions it.
So… either men were having sex with men on every other ship, but not on pirate ships, or pirates were at the very least turning a blind eye. Mind you, this is applying contemporary terms and ideas to history, and:
Overall, pirates were not exactly progressive, as we might think of the term, but — because they existed outside the mainstream of society — pirate ships might have been a haven for people who did not conform, or at least have been safer places to be different than their lawless, violent reputation suggests (not that that reputation wasn’t deserved).
ps: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
