"to strike the sails"

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"to strike the sails"

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 31, 2014 11:13 am

“at war with all the world”




1726: William Fly, unrepentant pirate

July 12th, 2008 Headsman
On this date in 1726, an obscure boatswain who had mutinied for the liberty of piracy succumbed but did not submit on the gallows in Boston.

Fly overthrew (figuratively and literally — they both ended up in the drink) a tyrannous captain and first mate on a British slave ship in May, reconstituting it Fame’s Revenge, and in a northward journey from North Carolina to New England captured a few less-than-lucrative ships in a month and change.
A minor character in the annals of seaborne pillage. So why should historian Marcus Rediker devote the opening chapter to his Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (review) to this man?
[T]he early-eighteenth-century pirate ship was a world turned upside down, made so by the articles of agreement that established the rules and customs of the pirates’ alternative social order. Pirates “distributed justice,” elected their officers, divided their loot equally, and established a different discipline. They limited the authority of the captain, resisted many of the practices of capitalist merchant shipping industry, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, and multinational social order. They demonstrated quite clearly — and subversively — that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy.

Rediker’s sympathetic but unromantic work treats the radical, doomed sphere of resistance pirates offered to the enormous cruelty of the developing Atlantic economy: grinding exploitation of white sailors in the service of the black slave trade under the iron hand of the empire (British, in this case, but hardly exclusive to Old Blighty.)
It bears the trace of Hakim Bey‘s treatment of Temporary Autonomous Zones:
Fleeing from hideous “benefits” of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the tortures of impressment and the living death of the plantations, the Buccaneers adopted Indian ways, intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as equals, rejected all nationality, elected their captains democratically, and reverted to the “state of Nature.” Having declared themselves “at war with all the world,” they sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called “Articles” which were so egalitarian that every member received a full share and the Captain usually only 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 shares. Flogging and punishments were forbidden — quarrels were settled by vote or by the code duello.

Certainly many men (and women) turned to piracy for many different reasons. Rediker’s work on the systematic brutality in the guts of the imperial economy and the pressures of resistance and coercion they spawned finds an outstanding individual exponent in this day’s victim.
Fly walked indifferently to the gallows; to the astonishment of the spectators, he upbraided the hangman’s poor knot and remade with his own hands the instrument for his own neck — one last use of his seaman’s proficiency with ropes.
On Fly’s turn upon that fatal stage, he would not read from the classics — not cower before his executioners, not salute the majesty of the crown that hung him, not enjoin the mob to straighten up and sail right, and certainly not be cowed on the cusp of the eternal by officious colonial holy roller Cotton Mather’s vain personal bid to convert the corsair:
When the time came for last words on that awful occasion, Mather wanted Fly and his fellow pirates to act as preachers — that is, he wanted them to provide examples and warnings to those who were assembled to watch the execution. They all complied. Samuel Cole, Henry Greenville, and George Condick [three of Fly's crew], perhaps hoping for a last-minute pardon, stood penitently before the crowd and warned all to obey their parents and superiors and not to curse, drink, whore, or profane the Lord’s day. These three pirates acknowledged the justice of the proceedings against them, and they thanked the ministers for their assistance. Fly, however, did not ask for forgiveness, did not praise the authorities, and did not affirm the values of Christianity, as he was supposed to do, but he did issue a warning. Addressing the port-city crowd thick with ship captains and sailors, he proclaimed his final, fondest wish: that “all Masters of Vessels might take Warning by the Fate of the Captain (meaning Captain Green) that he had murder’d, and to pay Sailors their Wages when due, and to treat them better; saying, that their Barbarity to them made so many turn Pyrates.” Fly thus used his last breath to protest the conditions of work at sea, what he called “Bad Usage.” He would be launched into eternity with the brash threat of mutiny on his lips.

“Bad Usage.” Rediker later defines it as “the violent disciplinary regime of the eighteenth-century deep-sea sailing ship, the ordinary and pervasive violence of labor discipline as practiced by the ship captain as he moved the commodities that were the lifeblood of the capitalist world economy.”
The resistance to a pattern of savage floggings, cheated wages, and the whole spectrum of rough and arbitrary authority on a shipboard dictatorship might be spontaneous and individual in the instant … but it was thick with the stuff of solidarity, and the fraternity of outlawry could make people equal across the boundaries of national rivalry and institutional racism — “Villains of all Nations,” as the title goes.
And the obdurate, like Fly, could every now and then move the pastors who were sent to thunder hellfire at them rather than the other way around.
As it happened, the “stupid” and “impenitent” pirate [Mather uses these words to describe Fly elsewhere] was able to convince the self-righteous minister of at least one primary cause of piracy. During his execution sermon, Mather made it a point to address the ship captains in the crowd, telling them in no uncertain terms that they must hereafter avoid being “too like the Devil in their Barbarous Usage of the Men that are under them and lay them under Tempations to do Desperate Things.”

After the hanging, William Fly’s body was gibbeted as a warning on Nixes Mate, a barely-there speck of an island at the mouth of Boston Harbor. For Rediker, this date marks the end of the Golden Age of Piracy.

Image

Q&A: Were Modern Ideas—and the American Revolution—Born on Ships at Sea?
Unsung heroes of the seas—how pirates, slaves, and motley crews shaped the modern world.
A photo of Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom in the movie "The Pirates of the Caribbean"
The Hollywood stereotypes of pirates, like Johnny Depp (at left) in Pirates of the Caribbean, don't reflect the rich history of who these outlaws really were, says author Marcus Rediker.

Simon Worrall
for National Geographic
PUBLISHED AUGUST 31, 2014

We're used to thinking that big ideas are dreamed up on land by philosophers and writers anchored to their desks

In his new book, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail, Marcus Rediker, distinguished professor of Atlantic history at the University of Pittsburgh, turns that assumption upside down, showing that many of the ideas that shaped the modern world were, in fact, born on the ocean waves among sailors, pirates, and slaves.

Here he explains how Johnny Depp got it wrong, why Horatio Nelson can be regarded as a "maritime criminal," and how a motley crew in Boston inspired Samuel Adams to coin one of the defining phrases of the Declaration of Independence.

You say that we've been looking at history "through the wrong end of the spyglass." What do you mean by that?

I mean that we have concentrated on the glories of the great national heroes and neglected the people whose labor made them possible. If we want to understand how the world was connected, how the continents became part of the planet in an interactive way, we must understand the ships and the sailors who made those links.

Concentrating on Captain Cook and Nelson can get us only so far. We need to understand the ordinary people who made history at sea. Hugely important modern ideas about race and class were born at sea. But we tend to think that history happens on land and regard the sea as a kind of historical void. This blinds us to important aspects of the world historical process. It's what I call the "terracentric" vision.

You call the European man-of-war a laboratory of radical social ideas.

Large northern European seagoing vessels, which emerge in the 16th and 17th centuries, become by the 18th century the most important technology in the world. They can be seen as a precursor of the factory, in the sense that they required large numbers of wage workers to come together and operate machinery to make the vessel go.

That's a work process that creates value, tremendous value, for the world economy. But when workers are organized to sail these ships for merchants, or kings and queens, their organized cooperation also led them to imagine new projects of their own.

They start to think about their own lives and cooperate for ends other than the ones they were brought together to serve. One of the best examples of this is in the origins of the term "to strike." Most people don't know that the strike originates at sea, in the port of London, in 1768, amidst a wage cut. So sailors went from ship to ship and took down the sails—which is called "to strike the sails."

You go so far as to suggest that the seeds of the American Revolution were sown not on land but at sea. How so?

One of the origins of the American Revolution lies among sailors and their resistance to impressment. The [British] Royal Navy was chronically undermanned; wages were poor, so the navy resorted to impressment in order to find labor.

Sailors, especially in North America and the West Indies, began fairly early in the 18th century to fight back against this practice. And by the 1760s the battles between sailors—in ports like Boston, New York, or Philadelphia—and the Royal Navy had reached a kind of fever pitch. They say they're fighting against tyranny, because ship captains were often tyrants, in the name of their liberty. That's a literal definition of liberty, because when sailors were on shore they were "on liberty."

Sailors essentially take direct action. They form mobs. They try to capture men back from the press-gang. Or seize the ship's boat, carry it to a public place, and set it on fire to dramatize their resistance.

So, sailors are providing an example of the way in which American colonists should all fight back on behalf of their liberty against tyranny. These sailors' riots then influence important figures like Sam Adams in Boston, who watches a motley crew battling the press-gang and articulates an idea which will become the basis of the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal.

One of your favorite characters is an escaped slave called Caesar. Tell us about him.

Caesar represents a perfect example of the will to be free. One of the themes in this book is that even when placed in extremely oppressive circumstances, people will find creative ways to resist.

Caesar was an enslaved African. That's the only name we have for him. He first shows up in the historical record in 1759. He had been working as a slave on the waterfront and escaped by sea. He appears again in the record ten years later, where he has once again taken off. Apparently, he was recaptured the first time and probably sold by his owner. He ends up again working on the waterfront. He has the skills and knowledge of a sailor and he has connections. So, he manages to get away again.

And for a second time an owner runs an advertisement in the paper to try and track him down. This reveals a singular fact about Caesar: He had no legs. So here was a man, who was a runaway, who actually had no legs but still managed to use his intelligence and the will to be free to find a way to escape slavery twice.

Say the word "pirates," and most people think of Johnny Depp and Keith Richards hamming it up in Pirates of the Caribbean. It wasn't quite like that, was it?

[Laughs] The Hollywood stereotypes of pirates have been very successful. But they don't really recover the rich history of who these outlaws were. If you go back to the original sources, thousands of pages of court cases and depositions and newspaper articles, you find that there was a much more complex story to be told about the origins of the golden age of piracy, in the 18th century.

The traditional story is that pirates were brutes and criminals driven solely by greed. These things have an element of truth, as all stereotypes do. But what I found is that most pirates were just common sailors, many of whom had been brutalized in the merchant and naval ships of the day. So they started capturing vessels and setting up their own ships so they could live a better life, even if for a short while, because a pirate couldn't be expected to live very long.

What was fascinating to me was the extraordinarily different way in which they organized their ships. They were coming from utter autocracy, where the captain had complete power over the crew, even the power to whip someone to death.

But when the mutineers took over a ship, the first thing they did was to elect their own captain. They practiced democracy. They also divided up the loot, the booty, in an egalitarian way. Pirates even created a kind of social security system, to provide for their fellow pirates who were injured in battles.

So what I've attempted to do is take that standard stereotype of the pirate—a man with a patch over one eye, a hook for a hand, and a peg leg—and relate that back to the original conditions of the sailors' life.

A lot of people will be upset, particularly in Britain, to see Horatio Nelson, a captain adored by his crews, branded as a "maritime criminal."

[Sighs] I knew this would upset people. But I felt like it was a point that was useful. It's actually a quotation from Jamaica Kincaid, the novelist, who said that in her native Antigua, a lot of the streets are named for what she calls "maritime criminals" like Nelson.

What I wanted to show in quoting her is that those people we regard as heroes and those people we regard as criminals is relative to your point of view. In my book, the outlaws loom large. This is, in a sense, the maritime world turned upside down. I've not done research on Nelson, so I don't have anything specific to say about him. But insofar as he represents an older-fashioned kind of maritime history, I'm posing an alternative.

There's a new piracy problem today, in Somalia, which was the subject of another Hollywood movie, Captain Phillips. Are there parallels with the pirates you portray?

I try to understand the circumstances of sailors in the 18th century and the choices they made. I emphasize that they were trapped in an extremely violent system, and that their own violence as pirates was a response to that.

I think a similar approach would help us to understand piracy in Somalia. Piracy dates back to ancient Greece. Anytime vessels with lucrative cargo passed through areas of poor people who also had vessels, they frequently attack the larger ships and try to capture them.

What strikes me as important about Somalia is that many of the pirates come from destroyed fishing communities. European and Japanese fishing fleets had overfished the waters around Somalia and destroyed the livelihoods of a lot of the fishermen. So they turned to piracy in response.

In that sense, I think there are some similarities between the old piracy and the new. These are the responses of poor people, who don't have a lot of other choices. There are political and economic issues. And global inequality is certainly one of them.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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