Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (review)

First things first. The lurid title is misleading. Although the book contains a fair amount about sodomy, it has little, too little, about the lash, and, alas, nothing at all about the kill-devil rum. Moreover, the book is not about the traditions of the British navy, which Churchill’s phrase meant so sneeringly to summarize. The subtitle gives a better sense of the book’s contents.

Turley’s declared purpose “is twofold: to analyze how eighteenth-century writers perceived the pirate and to show how the pirate came to be portrayed as both the criminal and the romanticized antihero par excellence in the following centuries” (3). He argues that pirates built an autonomous homosocial order at sea, one that transgressed the economic, social, political, cultural, and sexual values of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Turley is less interested in the practice of sodomy among pirates (for which there is little evidence in any case) than in the homoeroticism of their way of life and its subsequent representation in history and literature. He poses for himself a big question: how did the pirate become the “outrageously hypermasculine antihero” of modern popular culture?

The research is solidly based in published primary sources: books, pamphlets, and trial records. Turley consults a few archival sources, though it is an overstatement to say, as the dust jacket does, that he “delves deep into the archives.” The book does not reach the scholarly standards set by Robert C. Ritchie and Joel Baer in their writings on the golden age of piracy, but it is, in its range of research, superior to most other works on the subject. On the other hand, several of Turley’s observations about the scholarship on pirates are wrong, a few of them ridiculously so. It is simply not true, for example, that “there are few records that allow us to reconstruct pirate life” (6), nor is it accurate to say that “the literary artifacts of piracy remain little explored” (44). Turley seems to think it necessary to underestimate the long and rich historiography of piracy in order to make his own contribution to it.

The first chapter describes life at sea among merchant seamen, naval sailors, and privateersmen during the heyday of piracy in order to explain why seafaring men went “upon the account.” Chapter two opens by making essential distinctions among buccaneers, privateers, and pirates, then sketches what the author calls “the piratical subject,” the blend of fact and fiction that has become such a powerful cultural trope. Chapters three and four discuss the image of the pirate as constructed in trials and the press, showing how late seventeenth-century sea-rovers William Kidd and Henry Avery were heroized. Chapters five and six are devoted to Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the...Pyrates (two volumes, published in 1724 and 1728), which Turley aptly calls “the most influential pirate book ever written”—influential upon almost all subsequent writing on pirates and upon the evolution of the novel (7). The seventh and eighth chapters analyze novels by Daniel Defoe (Captain Singleton and the Robinson Crusoe trilogy) in light of earlier themes. An especially intriguing suggestion is that in the early eighteenth century the pirate replaced the libertine as a cultural icon.

Turley is more successful in accomplishing his first aim than his second—that is to say, he is better on the literary representations of pirates than in rewriting their broader history. Indeed, the last four chapters are the strongest part of the book, not least because they closely interrogate and interpret specific literary texts. In treating Johnson’s General History of the...Pyrates as a work of genuine literary significance, Turley makes the important point that herein lie the historic origins of the pirate as cultural hero. And Turley does in the end succeed in placing Defoe and the even the novel itself in a new light, emphasizing with Christopher Hill that the cultural form...