The bodies of executed pirates were often tarred to preserve them to be hung from a gibbet. The corpse would be chained into an iron cage to prevent relatives from burying the body.
A condemned man was measured for his iron cage before his execution, and many pirates feared this more than the hanging.
The notable pirate, William Kidd, received this fate and his body hung for three years at Tilbury Point in the Thames estuary as a warning to seamen and pirates. After Blackbeard was killed in battle, his head was cut off and tied as a trophy to the yardarm of HMS Pearl. Organised piracy and privateering was finally ended in the nineteenth century. However, lawful privateers still flourished until when the majority of maritime nations signed the Declaration of Paris.
This banned letters of marque and therefore outlawed privateering. Navies of each country were used to enforce this law. The age of steam also helped to end piracy as anti-slavery operations as steam ships could sail without wind and at great speed, while pirates still relied upon more cumbersome sailing ships. By there were only a small number of pirates remaining.
In the s songs, plays, operas and novels were written about buccaneers, and during the nineteenth century storybook pirates were more famous than the real ones. Many writers turned pirates into heroes. Piracy has not completely disappeared although it has never returned to the level it was in previous centuries. In the s, political groups hijacked ships, threatening crews and passengers with death if their demands were not met.
Pirates in South East Asia have attacked merchant shipping and in the Caribbean ships have been attacked and robbed. Modern day pirates still rely on speed and surprise in their attacks using fast dinghies and arming themselves with assault rifles to overpower ships. Many ships today have smaller crews, relying on technology and so can be easily overpowered in this way.
There are many publications and sources on pirates. This list is not exclusive nor exhaustive; some titles are held with Museum collections and others can be referenced online or in other library and archive collections. Legal definitions of piracy are in legal statutes, texts, parliamentary papers and government reports such as:. A new law-dictionary: containing the interpretation and definition of words and terms used in the law London, Life among the pirates: the romance and the reality.
HEBB, D. Jump to Navigation. Search form Search. Sources and references There are many publications and sources on pirates. How pirates slipped into popular legend is easy to trace.
Just as the Golden Age was coming to an end, a certain Captain Charles Johnson a pseudonym that no one has cracked published a famous compendium of the biographies of these desperados, called A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates It was full of bloodthirsty detail, breathlessly narrated, and secured the legends of Blackbeard, Black Bart and a host of others.
Pamphlets and broadsides detailing the terrible crimes and suitable punishments of legendary criminals have been bestsellers since printing began, and pirates were popular subjects in the early 18th Century. The author Daniel Defoe wrote several pamphlets about pirates around the time he completed his famous story of shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe It is easy to see why, from passages like this:.
The beard was black, which he had suffered to grow of an extravagant length; as to breadth it came up to his eyes. He was accustomed to twist it with ribbons, in small tails. Superstar Byron, too, fused his image with the legal renegade of the pirate and that persona has suffused our conception of the Romantic poet ever since. Robert Louis Stevenson, another scandalous bohemian writer, wrote Treasure Island a chapter a day on the hoof to entertain his children.
By this point, the thrilling throwback of the Golden Age pirate seems inextricably linked to mass culture in Europe and the US. This association was only reinforced by early Hollywood. These swashbucklers and subversive dandies were less earnest than many of the heroes in Hollywood films of the time — and thus more appealing. Fortresses were built across the Caribbean to keep out pirate invaders, such as these in the Dominican Republic Credit: Alamy.
The allure of the pirate is more than just as a romantic figure on the margins of the law. The Golden Age pirates appear just as the legal forms of modern nationhood and international trade agreements were developing, with increasing statutory, social and moral restrictions on the expression of the self. Many pirates — including numerous women — refused to return to the unrelenting and brutal hierarchy of the Royal Navy, merchant shipping or even civilian life on land, and lived instead by a wholly other code of honour.
They were not anarchistic, antisocial maniacs. At least not in the seventeenth century. Like Moses Butterworth, many were welcome in colonial communities. They married local women, and bought land and livestock. Pirate James Brown even married the daughter of the governor of Pennsylvania and was appointed to the Pennsylvania House of Assembly.
Pirates, it seemed, could be civil, neighborly, and law-abiding. I chalk it up to specialization. By focusing so closely on their own areas of expertise, historians had overlooked how piracy permeated colonial life. Piracy has not achieved its rightful place in the narrative of American history precisely because it was so familiar to the people of the English-speaking world of the seventeenth century.
In the early days of the colonies, pirate attacks were considered a commonplace, inevitable feature of the maritime world, and noted only as entertaining asides. This was where my childhood disinterest in piracy paid off. I embarked on my research as a historian rather than as a fan. Historians and fiction writers alike have portrayed pirates as inherently removed from civilized society. Contemporary historians have tended to use pirates for their own ends, depicting them as rebels against convention.
Their pirates critique early modern capitalism and challenge oppressive sexual norms. They are cast as proto-feminists or supporters of homosocial utopias.
They challenge oppressive social hierarchies by flaunting social graces or wearing flamboyant clothing above their social stations. They subvert oppressive notions of race, citing the presence of black crew members as evidence of race blindness. Moses Butterworth, however, did none of these things. The true rebels were leaders like Samuel Willet, establishment figures on land who led riots against crown authority.
It was the higher reaches of colonial society, from governors to merchants, who supported global piracy, not some underclass or proto proletariat. Popular culture has invested heavily in the image of pirates as anarchists who speak in colorful language and dress in attire recognizable to any five-year-old.
In fact, what we imagine pirates to look and sound like matches only one decade of history: to Before that, piracy consisted of a spectrum of activities from the heroic to the maniacal. Many historians, like many pirate fans, write about piracy as a static phenomenon. But most sought one large prize and hoped to use their plunder to join the middling to upper echelons of colonial society. One reason piracy was often an act or a phase, and not a way of life, was simply because humans have not evolved to live on the sea.
The sea is a hostile place, offering few of the pleasures of terrestrial society. Pirates needed to clean and repair their ships, collect wood and water, gather crews, obtain paperwork, fence their goods, or obtain sexual gratification. Simply put, what is the value of silver and gold in the middle of the ocean? Why would someone risk his life in a hostile maritime world if there was no chance he could actually spend his booty? Until the s, English pirates almost always had somewhere to go to spend their money, either for a few days or to settle down for good.
The British National Archives holds a petition from 48 wives of known pirates, begging the crown to pardon their husbands so they could return home to care for their families. Returning to London was not an option for most sea rovers, but a life in the American colonies offered the closest proxy. Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, who was instrumental to the development of the American colonies and commanded a fleet of privateers, was painted by Anthony van Dyck around Support of piracy on the peripheries of the British Empire dates to the first forays of English sea captains overseas.
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