Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern English Writing by Laurie Ellinghausen

Author:Laurie Ellinghausen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Purser admits that his “sinne deserv’d” his ill luck, but that Fortune nonetheless arbitrarily “gan to trippe” and hasten his demise. Moreover, it seems that Fortune “dash[ed]” the men despite the good they claim to have done for others. For example, grim irony pervades their comrade Arnold’s own account of helping some French mariners repair their boat and then receiving “a tunne of coales” for his effort. Arnold puns on the ultimate result: “These coales by law the jury did convart / To such a case cooles me at the hart” (A4). Fortune punishes bad deeds, as Purser relates; yet, as Arnold counters, Fortune (in the form of a jury) punishes good deeds as well, a fact that suggests mystifying randomness in the distribution of divine and earthly justice. By helping the French mariners, Arnold attempted to enact an ideal of neighbourly behaviour on the seas; the ill fortune he sustains, which he connects in ironic fashion to his willingness to help, suggests a betrayal of the trust – in God, and in one’s fellows – meant to hold such a system together.

This unlucky state becomes the basis for an appeal to the spectators’ emotions. The condemned men describe themselves as pawns of fate and, therefore, as victims who seek “some compassion” from the spectators gathered at the scaffold. Purser concludes his speech:

Onely the manner of my losse of breath

is cause that I for some compassion cry:

my soule is sav’d where ere my body lie.

This makes me sigh, that faith unto my frend

Hath brought me thus to this untimely end. (A2v)

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