[Exploited sailors escaped to form egalitarian outlaw societies
under the Jolly Roger. ]
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WHY WE NEED PIRATES  
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Paul Buhle, Marcus Rediker, David Lester
January 26, 2023
Yes!
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_ Exploited sailors escaped to form egalitarian outlaw societies
under the Jolly Roger. _

Painted portrait of an unidentified pirate, 20th century.,
Buyenlarge/Getty Images

 

Imagine a pirate. The image that comes immediately to mind is a man,
disabled in various ways, with a peg leg, a hook for a hand, a patch
over one eye, and a parrot on his shoulder. He is rough, coarse,
sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying. From Robert Louis
Stevenson’s _Treasure Island_ to Hollywood films, such as _Pirates
of the Caribbean_, this image of the pirate has for centuries now
suffused an American, and increasingly global, popular culture.

The image is a myth, but it is no less powerful for that. Like all
myths, it contains a small but essential element of truth. Pirates of
the “Golden Age,” who marauded on the high seas from 1660 to 1730,
were almost all common working sailors, poor men from the lowest
social class, who crossed the line into illegal activity, most of them
bearing the scars of a dangerous line of work. Naval warfare of the
era featured cannonballs blowing up wooden ships, sending an explosion
of splinters and chunks of wood that blinded and severed the arms and
legs of mariners. Sailors fell from the rigging, suffered hernias
while lifting heavy cargo, caught malaria and other debilitating
diseases, and lost fingers to rolling casks. Many died, their bodies
dumped into that vast gray-green graveyard called the Atlantic Ocean.
Crippled mariners made up the majority of beggars to be found in the
port cities of the Atlantic world.

The ravaged body of the pirate is a key to understanding the real
history of those who sailed “under the banner of King Death,” the
infamous black flag, the pirates’ Jolly Roger. Trapped in a deadly
machine called the deep-sea sailing ship, sailors who turned pirate
fought a furious battle for survival. Routinely maimed in the course
of their work, bilked of their wages, fed rotten provisions, and
beaten around the deck by captains with tyrannical powers, these
seafaring men (and a few women) built a radically different life on a
pirate ship.

A favorite phrase among pirates was “A merry life and a short
one,” or, as one man put it, “Let us live while we can,” with
freedom, dignity, and abundance, all of which had been denied to the
common sailor. The merry life invented on the pirate ship enabled
sailors to elect their captain and other officers, and this at a time
when poor people had no democratic rights anywhere in the world. The
merry life also involved a redistribution of resources—and life
chances—that was stunningly egalitarian compared to the hierarchical
practices of the merchant shipping industry or the royal navy. Pirates
even created a rudimentary social welfare system by giving shares of
booty to those unable to work because of poor health or injury.

The alternative social order of the pirate ship was all the more
impressive because it had been created by the “villains of all
nations,” workers of many races and ethnicities who, according to
conventional wisdom, in their own day and in ours, were not supposed
to cooperate. Any given pirate ship might have English, Irish, Greek,
Dutch, French, or Native American crew members. African and African
American seamen played an especially prominent role as they freely and
subversively sailed Caribbean and North American waters near the
coastal slave plantations from which many of them had escaped. The
Atlantic maritime labor market and the experience of sailors had long
been transnational. The social composition of the pirate ship proved
the point, as did the parrot on the pirate’s shoulder. He had sailed
with the motley crew to the exotic ends of the earth.

These outlaws knew that the gallows awaited them, but they were
already risking their necks and dying young in their daily work. They
made this clear through the Jolly Roger, which used the “death’s
head,” a symbol of mortality, to strike fear into the captains of
prize vessels and to encourage their quick surrender. (Most captains
got the message and complied.) Yet the flag also bespoke the
pirates’ own fear of being preyed upon in turn. They took the symbol
of death from the captain, who drew it in his logbook when a sailor
died. They frequently added to their flag a weapon piercing a human
heart and an hourglass, emblems of violence and limited time, terrible
truths about their own lives. They also sent a coded message to the
rich, who knew that the verb “to roger” meant to copulate. The
pirate flag said “Fuck you.” Rage and humor were key elements that
characterized these outlaws of the seas: burning anger against the
powerful, and the humor of men who chose freedom over servitude at any
cost. 

Some will be disappointed that the pages of _Under the Banner of King
Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel_ contain no hunts for
buried treasure, no ghost ships, no wronged aristocrats driven to sea,
and no pirates in love with the governor’s beautiful daughter. But
as it happens, the actual history of piracy is much more profound than
the Hollywood myth. This is a story about the real common sailors who
raised the black flag and created a system of democracy in action on
the high seas, a traveling brotherhood of men doomed to a violent end,
who wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In adapting my book _Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the
Golden Age_, David Lester has depicted the pirates’ “history from
below” with great subtlety and visual power, illuminating in human
terms the real reasons—the working conditions, the lash, the
premature death—why people chose to become outlaws and what kind of
society they built for themselves beyond the reach of the law. David
brings these pirates to life, not only as workers who powered and then
challenged global capitalism, but as thinkers and doers who saw that
another world was possible. Perhaps most importantly, David shows us
why we will always love pirates, as long as there are powerful people
to be resisted and causes of social justice to be fought for.

_This excerpt from _Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the
Atlantic, a Graphic Novel_ (Beacon Press, 2023) by David Lester
(author and illustrator), Marcus Rediker (author), and Paul Buhle
(editor) appears with permission of the publisher._

 

Paul Buhle [[link removed]] is the
authorized biographer of C. L. R. James and has edited more than a
dozen nonfiction graphic novels. He is a retired senior lecturer at
Brown University.
 

Marcus Rediker [[link removed]] is
Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of
Pittsburgh. He is the author of many "histories from below," including
“Villains of All Nations,” on which this book is based.
 

David Lester [[link removed]]
illustrated the award-winning “1919: A Graphic History of the
Winnipeg General Strike.” His poster of anti-war protester Malachi
Ritscher was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is
the guitarist in the rock duo Mecca Normal.

* Pirates of the Atlantic; Pirate Ships;
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