Pirates!

The Pirate Life For Me

The joke goes, you can spend your money on wine, women, or song, or you can waste it. By those markings, the least wasteful people in history are pirates, whether vilified as blood-thirsty killers or romanticized as Deppish cads.

         The truth is that no infamy perpetuated by pirates in their dedicated pursuit of happiness compares to the wholesale depravations committed in the name of government. In the golden age of piracy, from the late 15^th century up through the early 19^th, pirates ransacked the Caribbean and the eastern shores of America. They pillaged and plundered just like in the movies. But their crimes pale compared to the legalized enslaving of millions of Africans and the outright stealing of the entire western hemisphere from the various Indian people. Let’s not even start with the religious mumbo jumbo that kept most of the population either victimized or terrorized, or the institutionalized racism that kept people who had much in common, such as black slaves and exploited white factory workers, apart.

         None of these polarizing, “us versus them,” factions existed on pirate ships. Pirates didn’t care what God you whispered sweet nothings to or what percentage of melatonin you carried on your skin. Pirates didn’t even care about making money, only spending it on the aforementioned wine, women, and song. As such, they were uncontrollable by the Power Elite and therefore dangerous.

         Yet, for all the piratical heads hanging from the yardarms, governments fell over themselves to enlist pirates in their quasi-military acts of state-sponsored terrorism. Sir Walter Raleigh, an idealist and poet, was basically a privateer (a private pirate) instrumental in harassing Spain, Britain’s main rival for super-powerism. Blackbeard, the poster boy for pirate clichés, was employed by the British Governor of Carolina to steal from rival French, Spanish, and Dutch ships. Simon Bolivar gave Jean LaFitte carte blanche to attack British and Spanish ships. Without the help of LaFitte and his brothers, Andrew Jackson would have lost the Battle of New Orleans to the British during the War of 1812, and we would be speaking English today!

         If pirates made great mercenaries, they made better revolutionaries.

         Democracy, for all the fancy words of lawyers in Boston and Amsterdam, started on a pirate ship. All the men participated in every major decision (who to attack, where to hide out, etc). They practiced a form of communism that Karl Marx would have drooled over. Despite their reputation as lawless barbarians, pirates obeyed strict and fairly universally applied rules. Every manjack aboard shared equally in all the booty they took. A double share was reserved for the Captain and the Quartermaster (in charge of all supplies) owing to their greater responsibilities. Every pirate had life-time life insurance. If a man was permanently injured beyond your basic gouged out eye or loped off hand, he was taken care of, retired to a sweet little acreage in Bermuda or Carolina. If he was killed, the pirates anted up enough money to take care of his wife (or wives) and children for life.

         Did any Navy or merchant fleet offer the same compensation? No, and wouldn’t for centuries. If a British sailor became disabled on the job—and it happened with alarming frequency, hence the need to continuously kidnap new recruits—he was given a tin cup and told to beg the streets of Bristol.

         Pirates took care of their own.

         It went deeper than that. The values of pirates—wine, women, and song—may seem trivial at first glance, but think it out. They enjoyed life to the fullest. Do we? They actually lived out all the New Age t-shirts and bumper stickers we’re so fond of decorating ourselves with. Pirates followed their bliss. Pirates lived every day as if it was their last. Pirates never postponed joy. They lived for the moment.

And women? It’s easy to accuse pirates of absconding with innocent girls. But that discounts the choices those women made to be around pirates in the first place. If you were a woman living in 1555, what choices did you have? There’s nun. There’s housewife. That’s it. In both cases, you were in for a life of drudgery and non-existence. Women who ran off to live the pirate life found a third choice; themselves. Like the men, they basked in all the freedom and indulgent joy they could muster out of lives that were usually existentially bleak, disease-ridden, and short. We often think of women as victims, when the truth is that many women lived the pirate life, too, both aboard ships and in the ports of call.

         It’s that choice to live a life free from the regulations of Church and State, not to mention Family, that we today take for granted, but way back when, it took considerable guts to break away and live by your own lights.       

Pirates were an alternative to the lock step mass consumerist, aggressively capitalistic, racist, exclusionist, and imperialistic patriarchy that was just getting its game face on in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

         Look at the world we live in now. The only thing different is that the government does a better job pirating for itself and using money and fame to co-opt any potential pirates (rock stars, mobsters, graffiti artists, anyone with a flash on individuality). The real pirates were never in tall ships, swigging rum. They were on Fleet Street in London then, now on Wall Street in New York and on Capitol Hill in Washington. These pirates in yellow ties and thousand dollar suits don’t steal baubles and trinkets. They take people’s homes, their life savings, their futures. They take entire nations (Hello, Goodbye, Europe). They don’t lust after women. They confine men and women to very narrow, tightly policed roles and, by the hocus pocus of Madison Avenue, tell people who they are, what they like, and, more to the point (of the sword), what to buy.

         As for me, shiver me timbers, matey, but before they get me to trade in my blunderbuss for an iPhone, I’ll take my chances on the high seas. Weigh anchor and shove off. Yo ho ho.