Primitive terrorists

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier—Explorer, Naturalist and Buccaneer
By Diana and Michael Preston
Walker & Company; 368 pages; $27. Doubleday; £16.99

Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
By Marcus Rediker

Beacon Press; 256 pages; $24. Verso; 240 pages; £18.99

From

The Economist


THE business of piracy changed utterly between 1680, when William Dampier set out in pursuit of Spanish barques, and the 1720s, when rascals such as Blackbeard terrorised the Atlantic. Dampier and his fellow privateers were amateurish, eclectic in their interests, and mostly inoffensive. The outlaw pirates of the early 18th century, by contrast, were single-minded and lethally effective. These two books take after their subjects.

Diana and Michael Preston concluded that, in order to understand Dampier, they should retrace some of his steps. They cannot have got far. Dampier was an adventurer in the Walter Ralegh mould—at one point, he set sail from Mexico to Guam, not knowing whether it was 5,500 or 7,000 miles away. As a raider of Spanish gold, Dampier was inept, seizing his first true treasure ship at the age of 60. That does not seem to have discouraged him, however. The buccaneer's first love was natural history, a subject to which he devoted much time and colourful prose. Having wowed the British public with tales of exotic lands, he retired and died, apparently safe in his own bed.
Such a quiet end was not the fate of the men (and two women) who ran up the Jolly Roger in the early 18th century. By that point, the Atlantic trade in tobacco, sugar and slaves had become so obscenely profitable that the governments of Europe avoided antagonising each other. State-sanctioned piracy of the sort that Dampier had conducted came to an end, although pirates did not disappear. Instead, they turned on their creators, making, in the words of the pirate Howell Davis, “a Declaration of War against the whole World”. Between the 1710s and 1726, when the forces of law and order finally triumphed, anything with a sail was a target.

Piracy in the early 18th century combined brute force with careful marketing of the lawless lifestyle. In one of the practical details with which Marcus Rediker's book is studded, he points out that a standard merchant ship contained just 15 to 18 exhausted, brutalised workers. Pirate ships were crammed with as many as 90—enough to overpower any crew that offered resistance, which few did. Many sailors gladly joined their assailants: for them, a short life as a pirate sounded better than ill-paying drudgery.

Mr Rediker's boldest claim is that piracy was as much about liberty as plunder. Isolated from the forces of law and order on their floating worlds, pirates created a new, more egalitarian society. Communal harmony was upheld by statutes: all booty to be carefully parcelled out, with the captain receiving no more than twice the ordinary share; all officers to be elected by acclaim; all members of crew to “stand by” one another in danger. There were rules for captives, too. Captains with reputations for brutality, or even those from cities that had recently executed pirates, were routinely killed, while others were cautioned and set free.

If all this sounds a bit too good to be true, it probably is. Pirates, who were not only primitive communists but also holders of enlightened views on blacks and transvestites, seem to be taking over from E.P. Thompson's peasants as the folk heroes of left-wing historians. Over-simplification is inevitable: Mr Rediker mostly overlooks the possibility that his sources are tainted by romanticism, for example. But his is nonetheless a much better book than the Prestons'. The author spies a rich target, runs up his flag, and goes straight after it