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| 95 5 “Blood and Lust” Masculinity and Sexuality in Illustrated Print Portrayals of Early Pirates of the Caribbean Carolyn Eastman “Why is it that the pirate has, and always has had, a certain lurid glamour of the heroical enveloping him round about?” asked Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, a large-scale, richly illustrated book for children published in 1921. “Would not every boy . . . rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament?” To answer his own question, Pyle waxed lyrical: “What a life of adventure is his, to be sure! A life of constant alertness, constant danger, constant escape! . . . What a setting of blood and lust and flames and rapine for such a hero!”1 Pyle went out of his way to avoid detailed discussions of “lust” and “rapine ” for his young readers, but the fact that he invoked them at all is telling— and representative of pirate tales over the decades. Gender and sexuality play primary roles in popular portrayals of piracy and seafaring in such wideranging performances as Johnny Depp’s gender-bending Jack Sparrow, the courtship antics of The Pirates of Penzance, Errol Flynn’s portrayal of Captain Blood as a “devil-may-care philanderer,” and John Belushi’s 1979 Saturday Night Live skit about “manly” life among seafarers aboard the Raging Queen.2 Neither are these emphases unique to the modern era. Ubiquitous as they are now, conventions for depicting pirates as dangerous, lusty, gendered heroes have a long history, one that is rooted as much in the book trade as in the “man’s life at sea.” These representations were born during the “golden age of piracy” (from roughly 1670 to 1730) and were reworked and codified in numerous illustrated books published in Europe and circulated throughout the Atlantic world. These volumes developed, reiterated, and augmented stereotypes about pirates to attract and titillate European and American readers who could afford illustrated books and whose lives adhered to far more conventional standards of behavior than the ones exhibited by the fictional pirates. Early modern readers encountered pirates as a series of literary and 96 | Carolyn Eastman pictorial conventions that emerged in the late seventeenth century—drawn swords, eccentric clothing, and glaring scowls at the viewer—that strongly enhanced the books’ emphases on masculinity and sexuality. Books like Alexandre Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America (1678) and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724) earned their immense popularity at least in part by combining mesmerizing narration with vivid, fullpage illustrations of pirates. Examining these texts and images in tandem— particularly for the innovations developed from one edition or engraver to the next—allows us to see the vital intersections between manliness and sexuality , the transnational history of book publishing, and the role of images in the imaginative construction of bourgeois European identity. To date, this is the first scholarly treatment of the subject of manliness in pirate literature; the only prior studies that incorporate gender have dealt either exclusively with female pirates or the subject of same-sex sexuality on ship.3 The creation of what became stereotypical images of pirates—images that would continue to inform artists like Howard Pyle and filmmakers in the twentieth century and beyond—was sealed early on with a complex interplay between text and image in early print culture. Looking closely at the recurrence and reiteration of gendered representations of pirates—how texts and images were copied and enhanced over many decades—allows us to see how writers and engravers played with sexualized masculinities to make their books increasingly appealing to readers. Gender and sexuality were at the heart of these portrayals, granting pirates an outsider masculinity all the more striking for the ways it permitted middling and elite readers to imagine manliness without constraint—a social world in which men did not need to exercise self-control. Imagining the Hypermasculine Pirate: Bucaniers of America In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the pirates who disrupted trade in the Caribbean, West Africa, North America, and all points in between seemed to exemplify the dynamism and extra-national energy made possible by maritime movement across the Atlantic Ocean. These men (and, famously, some women) formed international crews so fearsome that they proved to be major impediments to orderly European economic exchange. Just as European powers sought to create orderly means of drawing goods from the New World to enrich the Old, pirate ships became more numerous and audacious in their attacks, looting 2,500 merchant vessels...

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