Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail by Marcus Rediker (review)

In many ways, Marcus Rediker’s new work, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail is, as the name suggests, a companion piece to his widely acclaimed, pathbreaking earlier works. The whole volume builds upon his original scholarship, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Chapter 4 speaks to his Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon, 2005). His book with Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2000) is referenced throughout, and the concept of the hydra explicitly mentioned several times in chapter 5: “a many-headed monster” (97), “the Hydra of rebellion” (103), “the Hydra was roused” (108). Chapter 6 returns to themes raised in Rediker’s magisterial, award-winning book The Slave Ship: a Human History (Beacon, 2007). The seventh and final chapter is a more direct reference to his last monograph, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Beacon, 2011).

Yet to describe Outlaws of the Atlantic in this way is also to sell it short, for the book is more than that. It is, as the preface suggests, a very personal work, yet one drawing in the grand themes of history, which Rediker is a master at pulling together. That he begins with a story about finding a “sentimental” painting of the first bank robbed by Jesse James, done by a “double first cousin” at his mother’s house (ix), reveals from the outset his usual storytelling flair and positions his own family history into a grand swath of Atlantic outlaws. It also signals to the reader that he or she is embarking not on some tightly drawn, much-footnoted micro examination of an era but rather on a rich rollercoaster of a ride through some of history’s more colorful episodes, woven together by the concepts of “motley crews,” rebels, and their specific forms of communication.

The opening chapter is a tour de force, a must-read for scholars and students grappling with the sources and themes of Rediker’s work as well as a type of treasure map for those of us who attempt to follow in his wake. Encompassing a consideration of the art of storytelling as displayed both by African griots and by seamen in their yarns, Rediker reiterates his intention to sail boldly into the word of the spoken, to embrace counterculture, to acknowledge “magical thinking” and fantastical elements for what they are rather than to simply discount them as untruths. He explores the purpose of seamen’s “yarns”—a word that he brilliantly “unpicks” (if you will pardon the pun)—to reveal not just its etymology but also its richness. The term’s definition includes “lies, humor, exaggeration, embellishment, and literally outlandish claims, as well as deep and necessary truths”; it is through these tall tales that truths are revealed (19). This is how many sailors understood the dangerous, regimented, exotic world in which they lived and worked. Their stories were, Rediker asserts, a type of “poetry of saltwater” produced in a style that went on to influence philosophy, drama, and literature (22–23). That many historians today would discount sailors’ yarns because they do not fit with modern, Western ideas of “truth” is not the point, he seems to be arguing. It is a compelling case and also a challenge: how do historians of the lower ranks embrace the viewpoints of their subjects in a way that reveals their richness while still meeting the stringent ideas of truths and written evidence that those from higher society, and commonly their historians today, demand?

Demonstrating his determination to live by his own understanding of the “poetry of the saltwater,” Rediker references not only Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Lord Byron, and James Fenimore Cooper...