Life on the Ocean Wave

With the last film in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy being yet another swashbuckling success, this vogue for all things maritime led me to wonder what precisely was the distinction between a pirate ship and a privateer? There is a veritable treasure trove of books on this romantic subject, but the sheer wealth of writing is less astonishing given the importance in history of these buccaneers, whose exploits changed the course of wars and the fates of kingdoms and their economies.

As HA Ormerod demonstrated in Piracy in the Ancient World: An Essay in Mediterranean History (1924), piracy had been endemic in the Mediterranean since ancient times. The growth of trade and the constant warfare between classical city-states honed the skills that were the very stuff of piracy – looting, plundering, and taking prisoners for ransom or slavery.

One man’s privateer is another man’s pirate, that much is clear. The legal definition of a privateer is a privately owned armed vessel whose Captain holds a commission, known as ‘Letters of Marque’, to engage in armed naval warfare against enemy ships and especially to prey on their merchant fleets. The same acts, without such a commission, are deemed to be piracy. In practice, such distinctions were often blurred. Many a famous naval admiral or explorer, including Drake and Raleigh in England, the Frenchman Jean Bart, and De Ruyter and Dampier of the Netherlands, were essentially pirates at some stage of their illustrious careers. Such buccaneering was not always a matter of choice. The fledgling American navy was forced during the Revolution to rely on freelancers to disrupt British shipping. Indeed, privateering was not expressly renounced by the United States until the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Our prevailing Treasure Island image of the pirate is based however on the corsair (or buccaneer, or filibuster) active in the West Indies in the late 17th century. This is unsurprising since the earliest first-hand account from which all others seem to spring was written by just such a one of these reluctant desperados. The story of Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, a descendent of Huguenot apothecaries born in 1646, exemplifies just how easy it was for those who found themselves on the margins of society to fall into such a role.

Exquemelin spent six years studying surgery in Rouen and Paris but his lifelong ambition to be a naval surgeon was thwarted when Louis XIV issued a decree in 1666 forbidding Huguenots from practicing. Therefore he signed on as an engagé (or ‘indentured servant’, possibly a surgeon’s mate) to the Compagnie des Isles d’Amerique, setting sail for Tortuga in the Saint Jean. Upon his arrival a year later, the Compagnie went bankrupt; so Exquemelin – or rather his contract – was sold to the ‘filibusters’. He joined them as a ship’s surgeon, although as-yet still unqualified, and took part in the infamous raids on Maracaibo in 1669 and Panama 1670-71 under the command of Captain Henry Morgan, one of the most famous names in the annals of piracy.

Disgusted with Morgan’s cut-throat methods, Exquemelin jumped ship. Eventually he was transferred to a Dutch ship that took him to Amsterdam in January 1672. Still unable to take his Amsterdam Ship’s Surgeon’s exam (a necessary qualification for service in the fleets of the East India Company and of the Amsterdam Admiralty), Exquemelin once more set sail in search of a future, this time arriving in the Yucatan by way of Spain in 1673. With his surgical career stalling yet again, he joined the buccaneer flotilla of ‘Rock the Brazilian’  (in reality a Dutchman from Gröningen) in their retreat from a failed raid on the city of Merida. They sailed north to Jamaica, now a British colony, whose Governor was by now our old friend Henry Morgan. No doubt discomforted by this circumstance, Exquemelin found his way back to Amsterdam and by 1674 had joined the Dutch Navy. In 1767 he tried to join the British navy as Surgeon’s Mate for the second time; but after an interdict on foreign surgeons being made in Parliament that year, he again returned to Amsterdam; where at last he stayed long enough to be granted citizenship and to gain his qualification in October 1679.

During the previous two years he completed the manuscript of his experiences that were published by the Amsterdam printer and bookseller, Jan ten Hoorn. This First 1678 Edition of De Americaensche Zee-Roovers is of the utmost rarity – the Dutch 19th century librarian and bibliophile F. Mulder knew of only three copies. Published in three parts, the author tells his own life story, and then describes in some detail the places he has visited. Part II contains the vivid accounts of the pirates’ life, rules and customs that have provided the basis of our knowledge of their dangerous world ever since. The third part recounts Morgan’s raid on Panama and its disastrous consequences. The appendices are probably not the author’s own work.

The book quickly took on a life of its own, with numerous editions appearing throughout Europe in the following years, many of them fittingly ‘pirated’. It is known that Daniel Defoe had an English edition, and he was long credited as the author of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates ascribed to a ‘Captain Charles Johnson’, first brought out in 1724 by Charles Rivington of London. This attribution is now discounted, although Defoe did write of piracy in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, and prompted by this success followed with The King of Pirates, being an Account of the famous Enterprises of Captain Avery… and The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the famous Captain Singleton, both in 1719.

The elusive Captain Johnson’s book published in 1728 and 1728 combined historic fact with romanticised fiction, such luminaries of pirate folklore as Captains Avery, Kidd and Tew, Black Sam Bellamy, and the female filibusters Mary Read and Anne Bonny, rubbing shoulders with imaginary villains like Mission and Cornelius. Once more the work captured the imagination of a new public, and spawned offspring that have themselves become classics. Foremost among these is the American illustrator Howard Pyle’s The Buccaneers and Marooners of America. Being an Account of the Famous Adventures and Daring Deeds of Certain Freebooters of the Spanish Main, a combination of Exquemelin and Johnson, with Pyle’s illustrations for the First 1890 Edition fixing our images of these cut-throats forever in our imagination