The ocean kills Lord Byron's Childe Harold. Not our hero Harold (who suddenly and simply is no more), but the poem that only barely celebrates him. In its penultimate stanza, after a prolonged apostrophe to the ocean, Childe Harold 's narrator simply gives up:

In the ‘protracted dream’ of the apostrophe, the sea is all about endings. It is the place where people die, sinking into the ocean ‘like a drop of rain’ and ‘with a bubbling groan’. And it is, above all, the limit at which man's control ends – a site, the narrator says, whose ‘fields are not a spoil for him’. This is an idealised sea which resists colonising, a space in which such boundaries do not hold. And so it is ‘fit’ that the poem's power is diminished in relation to the ocean: just as colonial control collapses under the weight of the water, the narrator can't go beyond his dream of the sea. Both narrative and political control ‘stop with the shore’, as the epigraph suggests: the ocean eludes you.

By the time of Byron's pirate poems, the state's control no longer stopped with the shore, if ever it had; nations were legally entitled to mark the sea with ruin. The Golden Age of piracy had long since been ended by Britain's targeted military campaign; the sudden and efficient eradication of pirates made it clear that the arm of the British government reached far into the ocean. And so Byron's pirate poems are not about the ocean, nor are they about the pirates we know from history.