New Histories of the Pirates

Henry Every has rarely appeared as an important character in colonial American history. Nonetheless, according to three recent books, his adventures tell us quite a bit about how the British North American colonies fit into a wider world. In 1694 Every was first mate on a merchant ship, the Charles II. Upset by working conditions, he led a mutiny and took his former employers’ ship, now renamed the Fancy, on a pirate mission to the Indian Ocean. He captured a Mughal vessel carrying pilgrims to Mecca—including the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir’s own daughter—and pillaged the ship of its treasure. Every was perhaps the quintessential early modern pirate. Tales of his murderous exploits spread around the world, angering the emperor, almost destroying the English East India Company, and inspiring at least some Englishmen to admire and emulate buccaneers. To add to his notoriety, Every ended his career mysteriously, evading the largest manhunt in British imperial history, disappearing with his treasure into the wide expanses of the empire.¹

The North American colonies constituted an important node in Every’s world. It was there that he and his fellow Red Sea pirates found markets for their treasure, from Mughal gold to the East India goods, such as fine calicoes, so prized by colonial consumers. It was also there that he found protection from prosecution. Every himself might have spent some time in the Bahamas, and several of his crewmen found refuge elsewhere in North America. One of them even married the daughter of Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, William Markham, a circumstance that caused a scandal resulting in the lieutenant governor’s removal. As each of these three new books chronicles in different ways, piracy flourished in the late seventeenth century in large part because colonial American “pirate nests” provided markets and safe retreats for famous brigands such as Every.

Pirates occupy an important place in popular culture, but they have not inspired much serious scholarship. The most prominent interpretation has come from Marcus Rediker and his sometime coauthor Peter Linebaugh, who have put a Marxian gloss on early modern pirates, describing them as something of a seaborne proletariat demonstrating against merchant capitalism and imperial expansion.² Rediker, like many other historians, has focused particularly on what scholars have labeled the “Golden Age” of piracy in the 1710s and 1720s, especially 1718–26. While the three books under review have many differences in emphasis and interpretation, they agree in their resistance to Rediker’s interpretation. The period after 1718 is anomalous, they say, a brief moment in which many pirates were egalitarian rebels fighting against the empire. This was not, however, the real golden age of piracy. For that, we must look to the late seventeenth century, the heyday of Every.

This change in chronology serves to recast pirates as important actors within the empire rather than rebels against it. Their role, moreover, was to advocate for free trade and open markets in an empire oriented around trading monopolies and the restrictive trading regime of the Navigation Acts. In this detail each of these authors follows the other great modern historian of early modern piracy, Robert C. Ritchie, whose study of Captain William Kidd highlighted the same critical decade of the 1690s. Ritchie cast Kidd as a transitional figure between the patriotic privateers of the Elizabethan era and the “villains of all nations” in the eighteenth century.³ This new scholarship on piracy extends that argument beyond the one case study of Kidd. In these authors...