Villains of All Nations by Marcus Rediker

Author:Marcus Rediker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2011-02-21T21:00:00+00:00

In 1718, in his opening remarks in the trial of Stede Bonnet and crew in Charleston, Richard Allen, attorney general of South Carolina, explained that piracy “is a Crime so odious and horrid in all its Circumstances, that those who have treated on that Subject have been at a loss for Words and Terms to stamp a sufficient Ignominy upon it.” He outlined the task that would occupy men of his station for years to come. Which “Words and Terms” would be used to make the pirate ignominious and therefore hangable? How would the process of vilification work?7

Many writers, referring to pirates, agreed that “the name of Men they do not deserve.” So they re-created the outlaws as subhuman beings—monsters, demons, and animals. Mather called them “Sea-Monsters, who have been the Terror of them that haunt the Sea.” Others called them blood-lusting monsters, merciless monsters, cruel sea monsters, sea wolves, and hellhounds. They were feral and carnivorous, “full of Malice, Rage, and Blood.” They were wild and savage beasts, like a menacing mountain lion, which everyone should destroy in the public interest. When the authorities were confident of success against the pirates, as they were after the Winchelsea, a man-of-war, had taken a pirate ship and several of its crew had been hanged in Curaçao in 1723, the sea robbers were merely “Vermin” to be cleared from the seas. The language of demonization predicted the violence of naval battle and hangings.8

These demons created vast disorder, in their own lives and through their depredations against others. “Oh! the Folly. Oh! the Madness of wicked men!” wailed Mather to a crowd that soon would observe a multiple hanging of pirates in 1723. As fools and madmen, pirates betrayed disorders of the mind. Philip Ashton, captured by a “mad, roaring, and mischevious Crew” of pirates in 1722, had to endure “a perpetual Din of Madness,” much rage and dementia, while among them. Indeed, Ashton thought himself aboard a ship of fools. Others insisted that pirates were “mad fellows,” that they had madness in their hearts, that they swore like madmen, and that each died “as a Fool dieth.”9

Pirates were as disordered in their hearts as in their minds, their natural temperament being rage and fury. Ashton closed the account of his providential escape from Edward Low’s pirates by thanking God for “saving me from the Rage of the Pirates.” Frequently, a pirate’s “too aspiring Temper” was behind his derangement. Indeed, such savage, villainous, fierce, and depraved tempers possessed by pirates were “often mistaken for a degree of madness.” In 1720 the Boston News-Letter printed a lengthy account of the wanton ruination of a ship’s cargo by pirates, who used cutlasses, axes, and any other tools at hand as they “cut, tore, and broke open Trunks, Boxes, Cases and Bales.”10 Such insane destructiveness was clearly incompatible with reason. Pirates “declared themselves to live in opposition to the rule of Equity and Reason”; they had “no rational prospect”; they were “unreasonable Men.” The wickedness of their crimes was “evident to the Reason of all Men,” as Judge Trott explained.

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