In conclusion I offer four brief readings, gestures towards places one might venture. The subjects are neither prophets nor pirates, but they are prophetic and piratic, practising a collective resistance both on land and at sea. This resistance is produced by and productive of mobility; it is a resistance that comes out of necessity and – by necessity – imagines a new system of power.

The first is Haitian maroon François Mackandal, who was referred to as a prophet by his followers. He pillaged and plundered and killed; he and his gang threatened the plantation system in Haiti as surely as pirates threatened the slave trade, and they paved the way for the Haitian Revolution. Next is ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, who took to the sea, after having been taken to the sea, to use the space where his oppression began in order to resist and undermine that very system. As an abolitionist he trod fairly gently, allowing his Narrative to speak for itself and appealing to his audience's investment in trade as much as to any absolute ideal of freedom or the rights of man. But what Equiano did was more complex; it was a material resistance as much as a rhetorical one. Following Equiano's Narrative are two British accounts of two (very different) alternative black societies. Anna Maria Falconbridge was the wife of a Sierra Leone agent whose epistolary Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone told of her time in the Colony between 1791 and 1792. The colony her husband managed was a mistake, but it was nevertheless one test of what an alternate society might look like. Though it was not a happy experiment, the mistakes of Sierra Leone pointed to what it might have been at its best: a site of common resistance to the oppression of the slave trade. William Earle's novel Obi: Or the History of Three-Fingered Jack was, likewise, a British treatment of a black society that might have gone otherwise, a society that failed and yet gestured towards revolution. Three-Fingered Jack, inspired by the violent death of his father on board a slave ship, was a ‘daring freebooter’, as a Jamaican newspaper put it, committing land piracy against those whose property was humans.