Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century

Swashbucklers and Swindlers

Grace Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351911054
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first volume devoted to literary pirates in the nineteenth century, this collection examines changes in the representation of the pirate from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the late Victorian period. Gone were the dangerous ruffians of the eighteenth-century novel and in their place emerged a set of brooding and lovable rogues, as exemplified by Byron's Corsair. As the contributors engage with acts of piracy by men and women in the literary marketplace as well as on the high seas, they show that both forms were foundational in the promotion and execution of Britain's imperial ambitions. Linking the pirate's development as a literary figure with the history of piracy and the making of the modern state tells us much about race, class, and evolving gender relationships. While individual chapters examine key texts like Treasure Island, Dickens's 1857 'mutiny' story in Household Words, and Peter Pan, the collection as a whole interrogates the growth of pirate myths and folklore throughout the nineteenth century and the depiction of their nautical heirs in contemporary literature and culture.

Chapter 1
Pirate Chic: Tracing the Aesthetics of Literary Piracy

Mel Campbell

When we imagine pirates, more often than not we conjure up fashion plates: dashing rogues waving Jolly Rogers and sporting puffy shirts, parrots, rakish bandannas, gold earrings, wooden legs, eye-patches and velvet coats. This image would seem at odds with the economic, political and legal realities of piracy in eighteenth-century Europe (Turley 37–42), and the unsentimental brutality that has been documented among real-life pirates. It also ignores privateering, the state-sanctioned looting of enemy ships in wartime, and elides the breadth of historical piracy, which ranged from China to Yugoslavia and from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean. From an historical perspective, C.R. Pennell points out that ‘the behaviour of pirates is so dramatic in its context, apparently romantic in its action, and so photogenic in its possibilities that the temptation to ignore the one-two-three for the yo-ho-ho is very attractive’ (3). In popular culture – and, Pennell contends, sometimes in scholarly endeavour as well – piracy is apparently 1 per cent crime and 99 per cent swashbuckling.

The origins of what I shall term ‘pirate chic’ are both intriguing and subject to debate. Hans Turley argues that it is ‘impossible to separate the “real” pirate who preyed on legitimate traders from the romanticized version accepted as the “reality” in the twentieth century’ (36), but that ‘the way this fabric is woven can be examined’ (7, original emphasis). Turley describes how historical and fictional representations of the pirate merged the legally defined ‘pirate as criminal’ with the popular ‘pirate as hypermasculine transgressor’, creating what Turley calls the ‘piratical subject’ (41). He goes on to describe the production of this subject in the early eighteenth-century fiction of Daniel Defoe, including Robinson Crusoe and its sequels (1719–20) and Captain Singleton (1720). However, I shall argue that what twenty-first-century audiences understand as ‘pirate chic’ was more decisively shaped by a Romantic literary tradition in the early nineteenth century. Importantly, I want to depart from Turley’s thesis that the key marker of the piratical subject is a transgressive sexuality. Instead, I will consider the aestheticization of the piratical subject in Captain Charles Johnson’s hugely influential General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724) and the impact that this text had on two of the most significant Romantic works on piracy to follow it, Lord Byron’s The Corsair (1814) and Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1821).

The Romantic piratical subject is particularly interesting because it is a hybrid: it represents a hypermasculine figure using an aesthetic vocabulary that at the time was decidedly feminized. A detached and intellectual mode of aesthetic appreciation, known as ‘disinterested’, was defined as ‘good taste’ (R. Jarvis 174), and it was seen as the prerogative of gentlemen, who were not distracted from their appreciation by having to work for a living. Byron dismissed his cycle of Oriental tales, including The Corsair, as worthless, citing their popularity among women (Watkins 15); while the tendency of Scott’s reviewers to focus on his novels’ historical context rather than their plots ‘reflects the general lack of esteem in which contemporaries held the loosely structured romance form’ in which Scott worked, which was often dismissed as a ‘women’s genre’ (Robertson 35). Specifically, I want to argue here that the nineteenth-century piratical subject operates in the hybrid aesthetic mode of the picturesque, which has its origins in an Italian word ‘denoting a bold and vigorous technique drawing attention to the medium of representation’ (R. Jarvis 181). In romantic aesthetics, the picturesque was situated somewhere between the feminized mode of ideal beauty and the masculinized mode of the sublime. Further, I contend that the nineteenth-century piratical subject was shaped by two discourses of Romantic aesthetic hybridity: heroism and historicism. The Corsair epitomizes the trope of the pirate as antihero that is first evident in Johnson. Neither hero nor villain, he is a morally ambiguous personality to be admired but never understood. Scott depicts this anti-hero somewhat more ironically; but in manufacturing an historical background for its fictional protagonist, The Pirate combines fact with fiction, in a sense taking up where Johnson left off.

The Pirate as Anti-Hero

The piratical subject has its origins in two bestselling ‘true-crime’ novels. In 1678, Alexander Exquemelin (called John Esquemeling in early English editions) wrote The Bucaniers of America, a True Account, which told of seventeenth-century European pirates of the Caribbean.¹ First published in Dutch, it was translated into German, Spanish, English, French, Russian and Italian. It remains a curiously partisan text, because each translation played up the pirates of its respective country and criticized the others. Then, in 1724, Captain Charles Johnson published A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. This was a bloodthirsty, lavishly illustrated account of the British pirates whose exploits had recently made news headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. It was so popular that it ran to four editions and two volumes within two years.

The General History deliberately pandered to the British public’s taste for the exotic, revelling in graphic stories of murder, rape, pillage and torture on the high seas. One of its most powerful accounts is that of Edward Teach, the notorious Blackbeard. Johnson reports that Blackbeard shot his first mate through the knee, laming him for life, to ensure his crew would not ‘forget who he was’ (84). He also forced his wife ‘to prostitute herself’ to his crew members, ‘one after another, before his face’ (76). Blackbeard is one of Johnson’s more unambiguous sadists, along with Captain England, whose crew tortured a man by lashing him to a mast and throwing glass bottles at him (115), and Captain Low, who cut off a sailor’s ears and forced him to eat them, seasoned with salt and pepper (334). Yet in recounting Blackbeard’s death, Johnson writes: ‘Here was an end of that courageous brute, who might have passed in the world for a hero had he been employed in a good cause’ (82). Blackbeard is granted an anti-heroic status as a piratical subject despite and even because of his brutality.

Johnson is able to produce Blackbeard – and other pirates – as piratical subjects through a process of aesthetic fetishization. This process is best introduced in the case of the pirate flag, the Jolly Roger. Today, the skull and crossbones on a black background is seen as the ‘quintessential’ pirate motif; it would be easy to suppose it was flown by every historical pirate ship. Certainly, ‘Old Roger’ was an eighteenth-century name for the Devil, and seventeenth-century French buccaneers flew a red flag known as ‘Jolie Rougere’, which showed they took no prisoners. But the Jolly Roger we know today is an amalgam of various black pirate flags. Captain Spriggs’s flag in Johnson’s History had ‘a white skeleton in the middle of it, with a dart in one hand striking a bleeding heart, and in the other, an hour-glass’ (352). ‘Calico Jack’ Rackam, whose nickname came from his striped pantaloons, had two crossed cutlasses below the skull on his flag. The notorious Bartholomew ‘Black Bart’ Roberts ordered a new flag made after being insulted by the governors of Barbados and Martinique. It portrayed Roberts, a flaming sword in hand, standing on two skulls labelled ‘A Barbadian’s Head' and ‘A Martinican’s Head’. It was so terrifying, says Johnson, that other ships ‘immediately struck their colours and surrendered to his mercy’ (234).

Why does Johnson describe these flags in such detail? First, they provide a mode of representing pirates that refers to their actual atrocities in an indirect, aesthetically pleasurable way. Second, and more importantly, Johnson wants the reader to realize that these flags are not arbitrarily terrifying: there is a logic to their manufacture and display. Likewise, Johnson builds a detailed picture of how pirates look and act that initially suggests an unnerving but alluring spectacle:

This beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant length; as to breadth it came up to his eyes. He was accustomed to twist it with ribbons, in small tails, after the manner of our ramilies wigs, and turn them about his ears. In time of action, he wore a sling over his shoulders with three brace of pistols hanging in holsters like bandaliers, and stuck lighted matches under his hat, which, appearing on each side of his face, his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a figure, that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury, from hell, to look more frightful. (84–5)

While Blackbeard is described as ready for ‘action’, Johnson implies that it is the way he looks that enables him to perform his criminal acts (carrying pistols, cowing onlookers). And this appearance, rather than any crimes as such, marks Blackbeard as ‘piratical’. In the General History, these ‘pirate aesthetics’ form a universal visual code for piracy that is instantly identifiable by readers – and by the textual pirates themselves. In one tale, two pirate ships try to rob each other and hoist their respective flags, but when they realize their ‘happy mistake’, ‘the satisfaction was great on all sides, at this junction of confederates and brethren in iniquity’ (Johnson 174).

This idea of a visually signified pirate brotherhood is elaborated in Johnson’s discussion of pirate clothing. The real-life pirate was likely to go without washing for months, his skin turning so black with grime that he occasionally needed to be dunked into the sea to recover its colour (Turley 18). Pirates wore whatever they could: ‘Put together from the clothes of dead or captured sailors, booty, and what they can scrounge up, their clothing was patched and falling apart’ (Turley 90). Yet in Johnson’s account, pirates are connoisseurs of menacing display, combining signifiers of danger with their sartorial choices: ‘they were extravagantly nice, endeavouring to outdo one another, in the beauty and richness of their arms … These were slung in time of service, with different coloured ribbands, over their shoulders, in a way peculiar to these fellows, in which they took great delight' (180). According to Johnson, Roberts’ crew ‘appeared gay and brisk, most of them with white shirts, watches, and a deal of silk vests’ (241). Roberts himself is ‘a gallant figure’ in:

a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain around his neck, with a diamond cross hanging to it, a sword in his hand, and two pairs of pistols hanging at the end of a silk sling slung over his shoulders (according to the fashion of the pirates). (Johnson 243)

As Turley notes, the word ‘fashion’ in the early eighteenth century bore all sorts of contemptible, emasculating connotations (90–91), but the idea of a ‘pirate fashion’ ‘suggests that their world was in fact a society, with its own standards of fashion’ (91). In this way, aesthetic markers move beyond mere exotic spectacle, instead becoming signifiers of this alternative society. Just as the black flag acted as a universal sign of ‘brethren in iniquity’, a particular semiotic repertoire rhetorically ‘flags’ for the reader that pirates are not inexplicably evil villains: they are anti-heroes who operate under a different moral code.

Conrad, the protagonist of Byron’s poem The Corsair (1814) is just this sort of anti-hero and in many respects Byron owes a considerable debt to Johnson. He is a corsair, a pirate who raids ships and cities on the Mediterranean Sea. Bidding farewell to his beloved Medora, Conrad and his crew raid the palace of the Muslim Pacha, Seyd, but Conrad is captured. He is freed by Seyd’s queen and concubine Gulnare, whom Conrad had chivalrously saved from the burning palace; but when Conrad arrives home, he discovers that Medora, thinking him killed, is herself dead (whether of a broken heart or by suicide, Byron leaves to the reader). Devastated, Conrad disappears, never to be seen alive again. Thanks to Johnson and the writers who followed him, the anti-heroic piratical subject had become a truism; and for Byron, pirates were attractive figures because they operated outside the legal and moral constraints of mercantile bourgeois society.²

The opening pirates’ song in Johnson establishes piracy as an alternative society that is appealing because of its ‘freedom’ from conventional hypocrisies. The trade-off of a short criminal life for ‘freedom’ is widespread in the General History, which presents it as a positive and noble personal choice. ‘Black Bart’ Roberts’ motto is given as ‘A merry life and a short one’, and his favourite toast as ‘Damn to him who ever lived to wear a halter’ (Johnson 244).³ Before his execution, Calico Jack Rackam is allowed to see his lover, fellow pirate Anne Bonny; but instead of comforting him, she tersely informs him that, ‘if he had fought like a man, he need not have been hanged like a dog’ (Johnson 165). However, Byron presents the pirates’ freedom in purely aesthetic terms by likening it to the sea: ‘Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free’ (1.2). The pirates are kings, their domain the Mediterranean: ‘Our flag the sceptre all who meet obey’ (1.2). Byron dramatizes Conrad as ‘Man as himself – the secret spirit free’ (1.248), and Conrad shares the tendency of Johnson’s pirates to find shame in capture. At first, he rejects Gulnare’s offer to help him escape: ‘Unfit to vanquish – shall I meanly fly/ The one of all my band that would not die?’ (2.472–3).

In the character of Conrad, Johnson’s piratical subject becomes a classic Byronic hero: defiant, alienated and misanthropic (and misogynist), yet also sensitive, honourable and faithful. For Byron, Conrad is heroic because he realizes and accepts his own worst nature:

He knew himself a villain – but he deemed
The rest no better than the thing he seemed;
And scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid
Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did. (1.265–8)

Importantly, Conrad’s anti-heroic qualifications also manifest in aesthetic terms, and Byron spends considerable time detailing Conrad’s appearance. ‘Unlike the heroes of each ancient race’ (1.194), Conrad is not particularly tall or good-looking, but ‘his dark eyebrow shades a glance of fire’ (1.196) and he has ‘sable curls in wild profusion’ (1.204). When he reveals himself to Seyd, he makes a Blackbeard-style apparition:

His close but glittering casque, and sable plume,
More glittering eye, and black brow’s sabler gloom,
Glared on the Moslems’ eyes some Afrit sprite,
Whose demon death-blow left no hope for fight. (2.148–51)

Byron’s description of Conrad is strangely hybrid. The poem’s perspective shifts between modes of representation that, at the time, were gendered ‘male’ and ‘female’: ‘disinterested’ observation of Conrad’s appearance and empathetic description of his emotions and values. Byron describes Conrad as a ‘closed book’, difficult for the ‘disinterested’ observer to understand; yet he evokes Conrad’s temperament and emotions by presenting Conrad as mysterious:

Love shows all changes – Hate, Ambition, Guile,
Betray no further than the bitter smile;
The lip’s least curl, the lightest paleness thrown
Along the govern’d aspect, speak alone
Of deeper passions (1.229–33)

Curiosity, R. Jarvis notes, ‘is the chief mental effect of the picturesque’ (183). Perversely, Conrad’s ability to repel observation – ‘He had the skill … At once the observer’s purpose to espy/ And on himself roll back his scrutiny’ (1.219– 20) – simply stimulates the reader’s curiosity. So, Byron presents Conrad as an aesthetically constructed anti-hero, but also gives him a complex and compelling interior world of the sort that fascinated Romantic readers.

In several memorable moments, Byron highlights the tension of the piratical subject between violent acts and gallant appearances. As Conrad commands his ship, he leans ‘o’er the fretting flood,/ And calmly talked – and yet he talked of blood!’ (1.605–6) As he rescues Gulnare from her burning harem, she wonders: ‘T’was strange – that robber thus with gore bedew’d,/ Seem’d gentler then than Seyd in fondest mood’ (2. 263–4). These are distinctly picturesque images, by which the early nineteenth-century reader would understand that they have a striking balance which is neither soothing nor terrifying, but vigorous and intriguing (R. Jarvis 182–3). The poem’s other Romantic conceits further transfigure the piratical subject. Conrad’s voyage to Seyd’s palace is set up as a fateful trip before it even happens: he tells his men that ‘many a peril have I past,/ Nor know I why this next appears the last’ (1.311–12). The voyage is fateful, of course, because it will have grave repercussions for the one exception to Conrad’s ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Pirate Chic: Tracing the Aesthetics of Literary Piracy
• 2 The Pirate Poet in the Nineteenth Century: Trollope and Byron
• 3 Playing Pirate: Real and Imaginary Angrias in Branwell Brontë's Writing
• 4 Ho! For China: Piratical Incursions, Free Trade Imperialism and Modern Chinese History, c. 1832-1834
• 5 The Wreck of the Corsair: Piracy, Political Economy and American Publishing
• 6 Female Pirates and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Fiction
• 7 Mutiny on the Orion: The Legacy of the Hermione Mutiny and the Politics of Nonviolent Protest in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South
• 8 Acts of Piracy: Black Ey'd Susan, Theatrical Publishing and the Victorian Stage
• 9 The Perils of Empire: Dickens, Collins and the Indian Mutiny
• 10 Pirates for Boys: Masculinity and Degeneracy in R.M. Ballantyne's Adventure Novels
• 11 Piracy, Race and Domestic Peril in Hard Cash
• 12 The Pirates of Penzance: The Slaves of Duty in an Age of Piracy
• 13 'Dooty is Dooty': Pirates and Sea-Lawyers in Treasure Island
• 14 Staging the Pirate: The Ambiguities of Representation and the Significance of Convention
• 15 Bram Stoker's The Mystery of the Sea: Law and Lawlessness, Piracy and Protectionism
• 16 Piracy and the Ends of Romantic Commercialism: Victorian Businessmen Meet Malay Pirates
• Bibliography
• Index