Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash
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Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash

Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity

Hans Turley

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Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash

Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity

Hans Turley

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About This Book

Despite, or perhaps because of, our lack of actual knowledge about pirates, an immense architecture of cultural mythology has arisen around them. Three hundred years of novels, plays, painting, and movies have etched into the popular imagination contradictory images of the pirate as both arch-criminal and anti-hero par excellence. How did the pirate-a real threat to mercantilism and trade in early-modern Britain-become the hypermasculine anti-hero familiar to us through a variety of pop culture outlets? How did the pirate's world, marked as it was by sexual and economic transgression, come to capture our collective imagination?

In Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, Hans Turley delves deep into the archives to examine the homoerotic and other culturally transgressive aspects of the pirate's world and our prurient fascination with it. Turley fastens his eye on historical documents, trial records, and the confessions of pirates, as well as literary works such as Robinson Crusoe, to track the birth and development of the pirate image and to show its implications for changing notions of self, masculinity, and sexuality in the modern era.

Turley's wide-ranging analysis provides a new kind of history of both piracy and desire, articulating the meaning of the pirate's contradictory image to literary, cultural, and historical studies.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
1999
ISBN
9780814738429

1
Life on Board an Early-Eighteenth-Century Ship

I could not forbear Reflecting on the Prudence of those Persons who send their Unlucky Children to Sea to Tame and Reform ’em, which, I am well satisfied, is like sending a Knave into Scotland to learn Honesty; a Fool into Ireland to learn Wit; or a Clown into Holland to learn Breeding; by any of which Measures they that send ’em may be sure that instead of mending the ill Habits they have contracted, the first will return more Wild, the second more Knavish, the third more Foolish, and the fourth a greater Booby.
—Edward Ward, The London-Spy Compleat
In an infamous case of a captain’s brutality, published as Unparallel’d Cruelty; or the Tryal of Captain Jeane (1726), an eighteen-year-old cabin boy had the misfortune to sign on Captain Jeane’s ship. At his trial for the young man’s murder, the captain said that his cabin boy was “very naughty.” He had stolen a dram of rum from the captain’s quarters.1 To the horror of the trial’s spectators—and the lurid delight of the trial’s transcribers and readers—Jeane showed no remorse for the way “That the barbarous Villain, for no better he ought to be call’d had whipped this poor Boy several Times in a very cruel Manner.” The captain’s “punishment” did not stop with the lash:
after whipping [the boy], [he] pickled him in Brine; that for nine Days and Nights he tied him to the main Mast, his Arms and Legs being all the Time extended at full Length; that not content with this, he had him unty’d, and laid along upon the Gangway, where he trod upon him, and would have had the Men done the same, which they refus’d; by which being exasperated as thinking, which indeed he might very well do, that they pitied him, he kick’d him about as he lay, unable to get up, and stamp’d upon his breast so violently, that his Excrement came up involuntarily from him; which he took up, and with his own Hands forc’d it several Times down his Throat; that the poor miserable Creature was eighteen Days a dying, being cruelly allowed Food enough to sustain Life, and keep him in Torture all that Time; that he was severely whipp’d every Day, and particularly the Day he died; that when he was in the Agonies of Death, and speechless, his inexorable Master gave him eighteen Lashes; that when he was just expiring, he put his Finger to his Mouth, which was took for a Signal of desiring something to drink, when the Brute, to continue his Inhumanity to the last, went into the Cabbin for a Glass, which he pissed in, and then gave it him for a Cordial; that a little, ’twas believed, went down his Throat; upon which pushing the Glass from him, he that Instant breathed his last; and God in Mercy put an End to his Sufferings, which seemed to cause an Uneasiness to the Captain for not continuing longer. (4–6)
Asked why he punished the cabin boy so severely for stealing a dram of rum, Jeane explained to the court that “he thought himself oblig’d as a Master, to correct a Servant for such an enormous Fault” (25), that is, breaking into his rum cabinet.
Jeane showed no remorse after he was condemned, nor could he see what the fuss was about: “He insisted to the last, that he could not apprehend it criminal in him to punish the Boy; and that his dying under Correction, was the Lad’s Misfortune, but not a Crime chargeable upon him” (22). Indeed, before he was executed Jeane blamed his crew for being “rogues” because they turned him in to the authorities.
The captain was punished by a final irony at his execution. He dangled from the end of the rope for eighteen minutes before he died. “This might have mov’d the Compassion of the populace upon other Occasions,” the narrator tells us, “but now it only serv’d to put them upon recollecting the disproportion between the time he suffer’d, and the eighteen Days in which he had kept the poor Creature in Torment for whom he suffer’d” (33–34). Indeed, the spectators did nothing to hasten Jeane’s death: “He was left to die, as might happen, without that Assistance, from either the People or the Executioner, which is usual; none gave him one friendly Blow to help him out of his Pain, or even so much as pull’d him by his Legs, to hasten his end” (33).
Although sensational and lurid, Unparallel’d Cruelty is germane for a couple of reasons. First, in its over-the-top way, the description of the cabin boy’s “discipline” shows how a captain could abuse his power on board ship. Even though the pamphlet might be an exaggeration (and Captain Jeane was obviously mentally unbalanced), it still demonstrates the remarkable discipline a crew was forced to put up with.2 The lash was the usual punishment for sailors. “Pickling”—or rubbing salt in the wounds after the whipping to promote healing—provided an extra layer of discipline. Both whipping and pickling were accepted by crews as part of life on board a ship. But obviously Captain Jeane’s punishment of his cabin boy goes beyond mere discipline and the use of the lash. And what did the cabin boy do? Steal a dram of rum.
The anonymous narrator depicts a sadistic captain who derives pleasure from torturing young boys. Furthermore, the description of Jeane’s usage of the boy is pornographic in its attention to sadistic details. Traces of homoeroticism intrude into this narrative, albeit a displaced homoeroticism that substitutes violence for sex. Indeed, sodomitical rape seems to be the only violent act that the captain did not perform on the lad. This luridness demonstrates the difference between life at sea for a sailor and life on land for the landlubber. It is doubtful that the landlubber equivalent of a cabin boy—an apprentice—would have the same kind of punishment if he stole a dram of rum from his master. Or at the least, if the apprentice were punished in such a drawn-out, grisly way, someone would have put a stop to the “punishment.” Captain Jeane, the final authority on board the ship, went to horrific extremes to “punish” the boy. Captain Jeane’s cabin boy underwent his own “tryal”—for eighteen days—and the crew did nothing to stop the boy’s torture.
In its hierarchies and its maintenance of discipline, the merchant ship or naval ship represented a microcosm of English society. However, if the restraints of social custom were unfastened, as they were here by a psychotic sea captain, there was little the crew could do. That the crew stood by and watched Jeane torture his cabin boy shows the reality of life at sea. The ship was in fact a microcosm of English society. The crew, taught to obey authority, was forced to watch and wait. They did nothing—nor could they, since doing so would go against the status quo—until they reached England and notified the proper authorities.
Captain Jeane’s actions demonstrate the power a ship’s captain wielded, and the lengths he could go before his crew might begin to think about mutiny. Why did Captain Jeane’s men wait until they returned to England before they did anything about the cabin boy’s torture and murder? For one thing, their inaction demonstrates the sailors’ respect for or fear of power and their acceptance of their status as maritime laborers. More significantly, Unparallel’d Cruelty is a volume for nonsailors. Its shock value highlights the landlubber fascination with maritime life, a fascination exemplified by the glorification of the pirate figure over the next three centuries.
In the guise of a moral tale—Captain Jeane was, after all, punished for his crimes—the story conveys details of the cabin boy’s torture with gruesome relish. As we shall see, the descriptions of pirate cruelty are recounted in equally delicious ways in the ephemeral literature of the era and by Johnson’s General History. Captain Jeane’s brutality is a microscopic albeit sensational look at the power held by a ship’s captain, one aspect of maritime life hinted at but rarely addressed directly in travelogues by privateers like Woodes Rogers, William Dampier, and others. In its appalling, sensational way, Unparallel’d Cruelty probably confirmed for the reader the brutal life of the ordinary seaman.
Of course, the pirate’s life was even more brutal. Moreover, the pirate’s violence is part of his mystique. He lives in a society against the state, to use Clastres’s phrase, an anarchic world to outsiders that actually has its own rules and customs.3 For example, Blackbeard—perhaps the most famous early-eighteenth-century pirate—shoots his first mate Israel Hands in the knee and lames him for life. “Being asked the meaning of this, he only answered, by damning them, that if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was” (Johnson, 1:99). Readers are not surprised at Blackbeard’s unprovoked stunt because Blackbeard acts the way a pirate is supposed to act: with capricious violence.
In another famous anecdote, Blackbeard says to some fellow pirates, “Come . . . let us make a Hell of our own, and try how long we can bear it” (Johnson, 1:100). The “Fury from Hell” (1:100) and “two or three others, went down into the Hold, and closing up all the Hatches, fill’d several Pots full of Brimstone, and other combustible Matter” (1:100). Blackbeard sets the pots on fire, and the men stay below to see who can hold out longest in their “Hell”: Blackbeard does, of course. Again readers are not surprised because Blackbeard is merely acting out appalling behavior in a piratical way.
When Captain Jeane insanely tortures his cabin boy, his violence repels the readers. Blackbeard the pirate forces his men to stay below, but he stays in the hold with them. He is, to use Captain Johnson’s description, a “couragious Brute” (1:88). His violence—or brutality—repels readers but at the same time confirms his courage because he shares his crew’s discomfort. Readers expect Blackbeard to be violent. Captain Jeane, on the other hand, is the captain of a legitimate merchant ship. He showed “Barbarity in the most perfect Degree . . . and all without so much as the Shadow of a reason for it” (1). And “reason” would seem to define the difference between the legitimate world of the merchant ships and the brutal, unreasonable world of piracy. If Captain Jeane were a pirate who tortured his cabin boy in such a loathsome way, readers would not be surprised. However, the early-eighteenth-century maritime world was not a society against the state. Indeed, its entire purpose was to support the state economically. It took a sadist like Jeane to expose the possibility for unwarranted violence in the legitimate maritime world.
Most sea captains, of course, were not insane and did not mete out the kind of sadistic punishment that Jeane did. And they were not selfconsciously violent criminals like Blackbeard. Besides, harsh discipline was only one aspect of the trying conditions seamen faced on their long voyages. Travelogues—the published journals kept by explorers and privateers—were an enormously popular genre in eighteenth-century England. These books focus on travel and exploration and the novelty of the flora and fauna of the New World. But the books also recount the deprivations suffered by the privateers and their crews during their long voyages, and show that captains sometimes held only a tenuous grip on their crews’ loyalties.
William Funnel was a mate on one of Captain Dampier’s voyages around the world. The last line of Funnel’s account of the trip sums up the perils sailors could face on such a cruise: “And on the 26th of August, 1706. after many Dangers both by Sea and Land, we happily arrived in England; being but eighteen out of one hundred eighty-three which went out with us. Finis.”4 One-tenth of the crew returned home. The rest died from shipboard accidents and drowning, disease and starvation, and violence. The numbers are horrifying.
Massive loss of life—whether by disease caused by bad food and worse sanitation or calamities such as hurricanes and storms—was not at all unusual on these long voyages, as eighteenth-century readers knew. In 1720 Mist’s Weekly-Journal announced the recent arrival at Cork of a ship from Borneo:
most of the Men that were on board her are dead, which was occasioned by the Scarcity of Provisions; their Allowance for some Time being less than a whole Biskit a Day a Man; of the rest that lived to come to Ireland, several died by the other Extream, so that there were scarce Hands left to bring her Home.5
This story is only one of many like it in the Weekly-Journal. On 7 December 1723, the newspaper printed “A list of Vessels thrown on Shore at Antegoa in a Hurricane on the 19th and 20th of Sept. 1723.” It is a huge list of ships that were destroyed and the people who were saved. About thirty craft—snows, brigantines, schooners, and sloops—were lost in that hurricane. More than any other newspaper of the 1710s and 1720s, the Weekly-Journal focused much of its news on disasters at sea and the hard lot of the sailor. Readers of this popular newspaper were fully aware of the trials suffered by the ordinary mariner.
In A Cruising Voyage round the World (1712), the famous privateer Woodes Rogers describes the hardships faced in a voyage that circled the globe.6 The book is perhaps best remembered because Rogers discovered the marooned Alexander Selkirk, generally accepted as a model for Robinson Crusoe.7 But Rogers also brings alive the daily threat of accidental death that was matter-of-fact on long cruising voyages.
For example, early in the voyage, a sailor “fell suddenly without any noise from the Main-Top overboard” (24). Another sailor “fell out of the Mizen-Top on the Quarter-Deck, and broke his Skull . . . so that he died, and was buried the next day” (102). Later, the men are at work on shore “but having sultry hot, wet and unhealthful Weather, our Men being fatigued, they became so weak that they could not work very well at this new Imployment” (177). Although death could be sudden for the seaman, it could also be slow and painful, caused by shortages of food and water and the onset of diseases such as scurvy and the “bloody flux,” an intestinal illness that caused severe diarrhea and great loss of blood. Rogers’s crew is struck by the flux. After he and his two ships have been seven months at sea, Rogers writes, “if we don’t get ashore, and a small refreshment, we doubt we shall both lose several Men” (122).
Rogers himself loses his brother to disease (159–60), and many more of his crew die on the long voyage:
Finding that Punch did preserve my own Health, I prescribed it freely among such of the Ships Company as were well, to preserve theirs. Our Surgeons make heavy Complaints for want of sufficient Medicines, with which till now I thought we abounded, having a regular Physician, an Apothecary, and Surgeons enough, with all sorts of Medicines on board . . . but now we found it otherwise, and had not sufficient Medicines to administer for the Recovery of our sick Men, which so many being sick in both Ships, makes it a melancholy Time with us. (209)
Even Rogers, a seasoned sea captain, is not prepared for the illness that afflicts his crew. In his understated way—the sick men make him “melancholy”—Rogers acknowledges the perils that a long sea voyage entails. Over the next week, at least seven more men died (210–11). He eventually made it back to England, but not before his crew suffered massive losses, despite generous prescriptions of rum “punch.” However, he got some reward for his perseverance: his books made him famous, and he was made governor of Jamaica, where he finally subdued the pirates.
Captain George Shelvocke, in a privateering venture a decade later, was not so lucky. In 1719 Shelvocke began a four-year journey that he later described in A Voyage round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea (1726).8 Like Rogers’s venture, Shelvocke’s was plagued by lack of food and water and the accompanying illnesses and deaths of his men. Out of fresh water, “we constantly drank our urine,” Shelvocke writes, “which, though it moisten’d our mouths for a time, excited our thirst the more” (351). Shortly thereafter, the whole crew began to sicken and die, “which was undoubtedly in the greatest measure owing to the quantities of sweetmeats they were continually devouring, and also to our common food, which was puddings made of very coarse flour and sweetmeats, and salt water instead of fresh to moisten them, and dry’d beef, which was partly destroy’d by ants, cockroaches, and other vermin” (434–35). Captain Jeane forced his cabin boy to swallow “excrement” and “piss.” Captain Shelvocke and his crew were forced by circumstance to drink urine and eat “vermin.” Indeed, drinking urine was not at all unusual when thirst got to be too much for the sailors. When the marooned sailor John Dean and his comrades were trying to reach some kind of civilization on Madagascar, they too had problems finding water and went to startling extremes to quench their thirst. They were forced “to piss in their Mouths . . . which accordingly they did, and then took Leave and set out on their Travel.”9 It is unclear, though, who pissed in whose mouth.
In the most vivid of all the descriptions of a sailor’s hard lot, a Dutch seaman—marooned on the Island of Ascension for buggery—describes in a “journal” his pain as he slowly dies of thirst: “At three in the Morning, went out to catch a Turtle, and found one, which I kill’d with my Hatchet, and fill’d a Bucket with his Blood: he had likewise a great deal of Water in his Bladder, which I drank all out, and was much better than his blood” (25). This seaman, in one of the very few early-eighteenth-century maritime texts that actually talk about sodomy, begins to hear the voice of his partner in crime (and lust), who had apparently died. At the same time, he runs ...

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