Arr Pirates Speculative Fiction?
On November 14, 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson published The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys. You’ve probably never heard of it.
Or rather you have, because it is now better known as Treasure Island, the name under which it was initially serialized in a magazine called Young Folks. Stevenson wrote it under a pen name, Captain George North, to add a layer of authenticity to what pretended to be a real history.
Treasure Island wasn’t the first pirate (or buccaneer, per Stevenson himself) book, of course. The genre can really be traced back to Robinson Crusoe (1719). And there were many other pirate books in the 19th entury, including one by Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate. Scott is, of course, better known for his Robin Hood novel Ivanhoe.
None of these books were serious historical fiction, although Stevenson did draw material from A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, a 1724 book of biographies of contemporary pirates…but that book too used considerable artistic license.
The truth is that the pirates of Treasure Island and, later, The Pirates of the Caribbean bear little resemblance to any historical reality.
And pirates appear consistently in speculative fiction.
Misconceptions, Tropes, and Hollywood
Most pirate literature does indeed go back to A General History of the Pyrates, as it is sometimes known. It was that book, for example, that introduced the jolly roger…the black flag pirates use to identify themselves and encourage merchantmen to surrender. We don’t even know who wrote the book…they used the name Captain Charles Johnson, with the lead contenders being Daniel Defoe and a publisher named Nathaniel Mist. Most likely the book was ghostwritten.
The second volume, in particular, contains figures that may have been entirely fictional. And certainly stories were embellished. It’s from this book that we get Anne Bonny, Blackbeard/Edward Teach, Charles Vane, etc. Some of these figures show up in Black Sails, including Anne Bonny, Charles Vane, and Edward Teach, and characters from Treasure Island.
Of these figures, Blackbeard is perhaps the most notorious, so named for his black beard and fearsome demeanor. His real name was something like Teach or Thatch and he may have been from Bristol…my dad’s home town. (My dad also had a full beard, although it was brown, not black, and he could be kind of fearsome).
From these sources also comes the idea of the pirate code and the fact that they ran their ships as democracies, the idea of walking the plank, buried treasure, and drunken debauchery. All of this was cemented by Treasure Island.
What We Know Was Reality
Piracy isn’t limited to the Caribbean. If you want a fictionalized account of piracy in a different part of the world, I recommend Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.
In the Caribbean specifically, peak mayhem was all of 32 ships and crews, around half were English…many of them from Bristol, Liverpool, Plymouth, and London. Given my family’s strong ties to Bristol, I probably had pirate relatives!
There were also quite a few American pirates. And some, yes, were former slaves.
But the majority of pirates were disgruntled sailors who had had a bad time of it in either the Royal Navy or on British merchantmen. The core of these crews were mutineers, but the majority of pirates came from a different source.
When pirates captured a merchant vessel, they offered the crew a chance to join them…that part is accurate. And incentives or even coercion might be used to gain a surgeon or a carpenter.
And their goal wasn’t freedom or equality. It was money. Some were prudent and had a goal of leaving the sea and retiring. Others did indeed waste their money on booze and sex workers.
And while pirates did indeed sign articles to join a crew, these were often strict rules to keep everything “ship shape and Bristol fashion.” Sexual relationships between crewmates were banned. Yeah, the lesbian co-captains are cool, but not authentic.
And yes, they did dethrone abusive or incompetent or dishonest captains.
Most pirates wanted that Big Prize so they could return to society. And most sailed under the black flag for only a year or two.
Women on Pirate Ships
In the Caribbean, there were very few female pirates. Most western sailors considered women at sea to be bad luck. Anne Bonny was a famous exception, assuming she existed. On the tight confines of a sailing ship, it is unlikely that there were many women disguised as men…or trans men. There’s no record of a trans masculine pirate, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one.
If you want a proper pirate queen, you have to go to the South China Sea…and meet the most successful pirate in history.
Her name was Zheng Yi Sao, but you might have heard of her under the more common transliteration of Ching Shih. When she was 26 she married the pirate Zheng Yi and was known only as his wife…but six years later, he died.
And she and his adopted son took over. She also married his adopted son, Zhang Bao. Pseudo-incest happens! Of course, he was likely closer to her age than her original husband…and that marriage was likely arranged.
She may have been a sex worker before her first marriage, but this is unclear. What we do know is that she united the pirates in the South China Sea into a powerful confederation with six fleets. Her own fleet was 200 ships that sailed under a red flag. At first, she did this as her husband’s right hand…she was the one who handled the organizational side of things.
She was the true pirate queen, and likely there were many more women in her fleet than was typical.
She eventually surrendered and was essentially forced into retirement with her husband and sons. Sort of.
She bought a casino…
Caribbean Pirates and Slavery
Given the habit pirates had of recruiting men from the crews of ships they captured, there’s a decent chance that they also freed and recruited cargo. I.e., slaves. Of course, pirates also captured slaves in many parts of the world, such as the Mediterranean.
But pirate ships would raid slavers and plantations and able-bodied men faced an easy choice; stay in slavery or join the pirate crew, make money, and potentially go ashore as rich and free men. Blackbeard had a particular reputation for freeing slaves and adding them to his crew.
Did pirates who were low on warm bodies intentionally go after slave ships? Not exactly. Some pirates did intentionally hunt slavers, but it wasn’t because they were abolitionists or needed more crew. It was because they wanted the ships. Slave ships could carry more cargo, more crew, and more supplies than most merchantmen. They also commonly had quite a few guns, especially illegal slave ships who had to worry about pirates and the navy. Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, may have originally a slave ship called La Concorde. But when they did take one, they got the added bonus of desperate men. In some cases this included the slavers’ crew, who might decide they would rather steal than trade in human misery.
In fact, one historian estimated that as many as a third of all pirates were freedmen. Some captains treated them poorly not so much because they were Black but because they were untrained and thus got all the worst jobs.
Unfortunately, the fate of slaves not absorbed into the crew was dark…in most cases it’s likely the pirates sold the women, children, and men who turned their offer down at the next slave port. Remember that the motivation of these men was money.
Abolitionist pirates make for a good story but probably weren’t particularly common. At the same time, the pirates definitely interfered with the trade.
Pirates are Speculative
So, back to my original statement. Pirates are speculative. We have air pirates and space pirates and alien pirates and fantasy pirates.
But even when we write about historical pirates our main sources are an adventure novel written for teenaged boys (Treasure Island) and a suspicious history that was likely sensationalized and fictionalized.
Captain Jack Sparrow didn’t exist. Captain Edward Teach may have existed, and may even have been known as Blackbeard, but, like all folk figures, he’s acquired trappings.
Any “pirate novel” based on those sources is speculative. At the same time, if you actually tried to write something accurate…it would most likely be dismissed as “inauthentic.”
Just as with the Wild West, Robin Hood, and King Arthur, the Caribbean Pirate has become part of our modern folklore…and reality is far less authentic than the stories themselves.