Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Romanticism Off the Map
- 1 It is Not Amiss to Speak of His Beard
- 2 A Pirate or Anything
- 3 Coming Up From the Midst of the Sea
- 4 Jerusalem is Scattered Abroad
- 5 From Here to Timbuktu
- Conclusion: Land Pirates and Republican Ragamuffins
- Index
1 - It is Not Amiss to Speak of His Beard
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Romanticism Off the Map
- 1 It is Not Amiss to Speak of His Beard
- 2 A Pirate or Anything
- 3 Coming Up From the Midst of the Sea
- 4 Jerusalem is Scattered Abroad
- 5 From Here to Timbuktu
- Conclusion: Land Pirates and Republican Ragamuffins
- Index
Summary
For a pirate is not included in the list of lawful enemies, but is the common enemy of all; among pirates and other men there ought to be neither mutual faith nor binding oath.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, De OfficiisIt was a pertinent and true answer which was made to Alexander the Great by a pirate whom he had seized. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.’
St Augustine, City of GodThe figure of the pirate as we know him can be attributed almost entirely to A General History of the Pyrates, written by someone calling himself Captain Charles Johnson and published in two volumes in 1724 and 1728 respectively. Late eighteenth-century accounts of the pirate, in newspapers and fiction alike, echo or duplicate outright this widely published text, and it is from A General History that we get our mostly factual accounts of Blackbeard, Bartholomew (Black Bart) Roberts, Captains Avery and Kidd, and the famous female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. David Cordingly writes baldly that ‘Captain Johnson created the modern conception of pirates’.
This modern conception of pirates is easy to romanticise, and indeed much contemporary criticism celebrates the radicalism of pirate communities, but it is possible to consider the effects of pirates’ ostracisation without idealising their intentions. Eighteenth-century pirates were not on a mission to revolutionise spatial conception, to be sure; their mission was to survive in extraordinarily dire circumstances. But their legal status as hostis humani generis, the common enemy of mankind, led them to establish new social structures in response to their exclusion from national identities. If pirates can be thought of as citizens at all, theirs is a citizenship that is non-territorial, or else theirs is a territory that is non-national. Either way, the legal status of pirates had radicalising effects, and it is that radicalism, in part, that led not only to Europe's war against Atlantic piracy, but also to the romanticisation of piracy in the decades (and centuries) to come.
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- Information
- Radical RomanticsProphets, Pirates, and the Space Beyond Nation, pp. 19 - 40Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016