Refuge Upon the Sea: Captivity and Liberty in The Florida Pirate

In the final scene of The Florida Pirate, the escaped slave Manuel languished in a Charleston prison, awaiting execution for piracy. When his one remaining friend in either race visited him shortly before his death, he exclaimed: "Ah, is it you, sir? . . . you are the person I most wished to see. How kind it is in you to visit a poor negro! for I am no more now. I am glad to be treated as a rational creature by at least one white man."¹ Here, in a jail cell a few hours before his death, Manuel lamented that he was nothing more than "a poor negro." Like the walls around him, the racist conventions that reduced him to being nothing more than an irrational creature awaiting ignoble execution held him captive. A prisoner of both criminal and linguistic codes, he was forced to become what his captors perceived him to be. Yet at his death Manuel also alluded to his having been something greater in life. While declaring his readiness to die, he stated: "I had a weary life of it. I was chased from the land, and took refuge upon the sea; but notwithstanding that, I could not escape the blood-hounds of the Southern States of America."

Manuel's "refuge upon the sea" was a pirate ship. After suffering extreme abuse and even mutilation on land, he escaped into piracy, where—according to his narrative—he discovered an alternative social order that allowed him to exist as a free, rational creature. Once able to determine his own fate, he displayed his natural talents, ultimately becoming the captain of a pirate ship. Ironically, his downfall resulted not from southern bloodhounds but from his own rationality. As a rational creature, as a man of reason over passion, he refused to allow his crew to murder the survivors of their last pirate attack, but his compassion directly resulted in his destruction when three of the survivors led an American warship back to his ship's location. Thus, in the movement from slavery to piracy the narrative tracks Manuel's journey of self-realization from subjugation to liberation. Yet the pirate's rational self-governance made him ill suited for either extreme and inexorably led him back to the ultimate negation of self in the ritual of execution. For English and American readers during the 1820s, the story offered a sensational tale of violence, love, and revenge while featuring two of the period's most dramatic subjects, slavery and piracy. Beneath its textual surface, however, the narrative carried turbulent currents concerning the limits of rationality and the near limitless capacity for human cruelty, mitigated only by momentary acts of charity. Strangely, by juxtaposing their cruel excesses, the narrative linked slavery and piracy. Although representing opposite polarities of human liberty, the two displayed similar levels of ruthless brutality and vicious self-interest.

Manuel's fictional tale, The Florida Pirate, was first presented to Anglo-American readers in the August 1821 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The story was engaging enough that within a year Sylvester T. Goss, a New Hampshire printer in Haverhill, advertised his own edition of the story as the Life and Adventures of Manuel, the Florida Pirate. The following year W. Borradaile, a New York printer, thought the story was marketable enough to invest his own time and energy in producing three separate editions, all of which were printed in 1823 under the title The Florida Pirate, or An Account of the a Cruise in the Schooner Esparanza. Five years later another New York printer, S. King, still considered the story a marketable commodity and produced two separate editions in 1828. Six years later, in 1834, two Pittsburgh printers, Felt and Cook, published the final American edition of The Florida Pirate. Thus, in a little more than a decade, and at a time when few texts were reprinted in multiple editions, Manuel's story of slavery and piracy was printed a total of nine times on both sides of the Atlantic. Such relative frequency of publication clearly indicates that several American...