Channeling Indiana Jones in the Mariners' Museum archives

Catherine and I have returned from a riotously absurd trip to the Mariners' Museum Library in Newport News, Virgina, safe, sound, and bursting with exciting findings on matters piratical. I'll leave the eccentricities of the good hamlet, its residents, and its public transportation to Catherine to recount and concentrate on what I spent most of my time reading while there: Six editions of what is today known as The Buccaneers of America by Alexander O. Exquemelin (though the title and the author's name have undergone several shifts since the book was first written in Dutch in 1678). I had the distinct pleasure and privilege of reading English translations from 1684, 1699, 1741, 1856, 1891, and 1924 (in addition to the 2000 Dover publication I had already read from the AU library).

While I did not have time to compare the various translations themselves, I spent an extensive amount of time reading and taking notes on the different introductions and prefaces to each edition. The manner in which the exact same work was presented varied incredibly dramatically and provided a better means of tracking changes in the pirate discourse than we had expected to find (though not necessarily how those changes happened). Here are some of my excerpts from, and notes on, each edition:

1684: Exquemelin's account was presented as an exhortation to the bold and adventurous English national spirit in the face of the devious Spanish. From the Translator's Note to the Reader:

The present Volume, both for it's [sic] Curiosity, and Ingenuity, I dare recommend unto the perusal of our English Nation, whose glorious Actions it containeth ... and besides, it informeth us (with huge novelty) of as great and bold attempts, in point of Military conduct and valour, as ever were performed by mankind; without excepting, here, either Alexander the Great, or Julius Ceasar, or the rest of the Nine Worthy's of Fame ... We having here more than half the Book filled with the unparallel'd, if not unimitable, adventures and Heroick exploits of our own Countrey-men, and Relations; whose undaunted and exemplary Courage, when called upon by our King and Country, we ought to emulate.

To be clear, the "Countrey-men" in question include, most notably, Captain Henry Morgan, perhaps best known for his brutal attacks on Maracaibo and Panama that left hundreds of men dead and entire towns burned. In the preface to the second volume (Containing The Dangerous Voyage and Bold Attempts of Captain Bartholomew Sharp, and others; performed upon the Coasts of the South Se, for the space of two years, &c. From the Original Journal of the said Voyage. Written by Mr. Basil Ringrose, Gent. Who was all along present at those Transactions.) the anonymous publisher addresses apparent inaccuracies in Exquemelin's account of Morgan's burning of Panama thusly:

And what disgrace were it, to that worthy person, if he had set fire unto it, for those reasons he knew best himself? Certainly no greater dishonour than to take and plunder the said City. Thus are these persons so far transported with passion towards Sir Henry Morgan, as to bereave him of the glory of his greatest Actions, whether true or false ... Thus both the English Nation, and the Spanish having agreed, to give the honour of this Action either truely or falsely, unto Sir Henry Morgan, I cannot but admire those who pretend to be the greatest admirers of his merits, should endeavour to devest him of it.

1699: The preface to the 1699 edition echoes the 1684 admiration of Morgan and the buccaneers, but it is more qualified than the earlier praise, providing a glimpse of the characterization of pirate as immoral savages that will later become dominant in the pirate narrative:

It would be superfluous to say much by way of Preface to the following Work, since a great part of it has some Years ago been Exposed to Publick view with a general Applause; and indeed the wonderous Actions and daring Adventures therein related, are such as could not but transport the most stupid minds into an Admiration of them, tho many times they were not attended with that Justness and Regularity that became Christians, or even men of any Tolerable Morals.

However, the passage from the 1699 edition that caught my attention most acutely (which is a professional way of saying that I lept up from the table and shouted in excitement) was as follows:

I will not take upon me to Apologize for many of the Actions done, and here related, since even in the most regular Troops and best disciplined Armies, daily Enormities are committed which the strictest vigilance cannot prevent; However it is very remarkable, that in such a lawless Body as these Bucaniers seemed to be, in respect to all others; that yet there should be such an Oeconomy (if I may so say) kept and regularity practiced among themselves, so that every one seemed to have his property as much secured, as if he had been a member of the most Civilized Community in the World; tho at the same time when I consider of some of their Laws, such as those against Drunkenness and the like immoralities, I believe I have a great deal of reason to remain suspicious of their Sincerity. But be these things as they will; a bolder Race of Men, both as to personal Valor and Conduct certainly never yet appeared on the liquid Element, or dry Land; and I hope it will be taken neither for an Affront nor a Complement, to say the English were always the leading and prevailing party amongst them.

This passage represents an elegant distillation of so many pirate tropes (some abandoned, others still very much around) that I could hardly sit still. In it we have not only the distinction between pirates and the "civilized world" that later became so dominant, but also an appeal to the greatness of the English identity, and, perhaps most remarkably, a 17th century nod to the political economy of piracy that so fascinates Peter Leeson today. Incredible!

1741: But the plot thickens! The next edition the library had was one from 1741. It appeared to have the identical preface to that of the 1699 edition but on closer examination I noticed that the phrase that read "tho at the same time when I consider of some of their Laws, such as those against Drunkenness and the like immoralities, I believe I have a great deal of reason to remain suspicious of their Sincerity" was entirely gone from this edition, thereby significantly strengthening the preface's (non) apology for piratical atrocities. It's worth noting too that the earlier appeals to English nationalism were well intact, and that the 1741 publication date occurred not insignificantly right in the middle of the English War of Jenkins' Ear against their old enemies the Spanish and which had included, in 1739 a state-based capture of Porto Bello, Panama by the British navy.

1856: The 1856 American edition of Buccaneers is most notable for its distancing of the contemporary world from the piracy of old. Piracy here is presented as an historical phenomenon. The 1856 edition kept the 1699 preface (and the line about being suspicious about the sincerity of pirate codes has made a miraculous return), but added an introduction lauding the civilized age in which its readers lived:

Read the following pages, and compare the state and transactions of the world at the times on which it treats with those of the present. If, when they have done this, they are not satisfied that the general character of mankind has been greatly ameliorated within the last three centuries, nothing, it is thought, would satisfy them of the fact... there has been a complete revolution of the seas. Sea-kings are no longer known or acknowledged ... it is only necessary to survey our own American coast within the space of two hundred years after its settlement by Europeans, to learn what terrors awaited all those who attempted voyages by sea.

By now, the perception of pirates as dangerous and acting well outside the bounds of acceptable behavior is well in place -- a startling contrast with the hero-worship of the same actions from a century before. We've gone from references to "the valour of our famous Bucaniers" (1684 translator's note) to stating that "the records of our admiralty courts are full of trials of pirates, with the most revolting accounts of their cruelties and their executions."

1891: This edition was the second one which led me to jump up and exclaim aloud, so incredible a find was its introduction by editor Howard Pyle. Listen to how it begins:

Why is it that a little spice of deviltry lends not an unpleasantly titillating twang to the great mass of respectable flour that goes to make up the pudding of our modern civilization? And pertinent to this question another -- Why is it that the pirate has, and always has had, a certain lurid glamour of the heroical enveloping him round about?

As early as 1891, Pyle was asking (in unfortunately purple prose) some of the same questions we were about the romanticization of piracy! And he goes on:

Is there, deep under the accumulated debris of culture, a hidden ground-work of the old-time savage? Is there even in these well-regulated times an unsubdued nature in the respectable metnal household of every one of us that still kicks against the pricks of law and order? To make my meaning more clear, would not every boy, for instance -- that is every boy of any account -- rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament? And we ourselves; would we not rather read such a story as that of Captain Avery's capture of the East Indian treasure-ship, with its beautiful princess and load of jewels ... than -- say one of Bishop Atterbury's sermons or the goodly Master Robert Boyle's religious romance of "Theodora and Didymus? It is to be apprehended that to the unregenerate nature of most of us, there can be but one answer to such a query.

Courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a redundancy of vim and life to recommend them to the nether man that lies within us, and no doubt his desperate courage, his battle against tremendous odds of all the civilized world of law and order have had much to do in making a popular hero of our friend of the black flag. But it is not altogether courage and daring that endears him to our hearts. There is another and perhaps a greater kinship in that lust for wealth that makes one's fancy revel more pleasantly in the story of the division of treasure in the pirate's island retreat, the hiding of his godless gains somewhere in the sandy stretch of tropic beach, there to remain hidden until the time should come to rake the dubloons up again and to spend them like a lord in polite society, than in the most thrilling tales of his wondrous escapes from commissioned cruisers through tortuous channels between the coral reefs. And what a life of adventure is his to be sure! A life of constant alertness, constant danger, constant escape! An ocean Ishmaelite, he wanders for ever aimlessly, homelessly; now unheard of for months, now careening his boat on some lonely uninhabited shore, now appearing suddenly to swoop down on some merchant-vessel with rattle of musketry, shouting, yells, and a hell of unbridled passions let loose to rend and rant. What a Carlislean hero! What a setting blood and lust and flame and rapine for such a hero!

It's not that Pyle's answers to these questions are convincing or even entirely helpful to our research program, but the fact that he thought to ask them indicates a fascinating degree of self-awareness -- even 100 years ago -- of the grip piracy held on the popular imagination. Too, Pyle provides a wonderfully clear and detailed articulation of what "pirate" meant at the end of the 19th century:

During the early eighteenth century the Spanish main and adjacent waters swarmed with pirate crafts, and the fame of their deeds forms a chapter of popular history that may almost take rank with that which tells of Robin Rood, Friar Rush, Schinderhammes, and other worthies of the like kidney of a more or less apocryphal nature. Who has not heard tell of Blackbeard? Who does not know of the name of the renowned Captain Kid? Who has not heard the famous ballad which tells of his deeds of wickedness?

The introduction is quite lengthy and dominated by the twin themes of "savagery" ("Among the buccaneers were to be found the off-scourings of all the french and English West Indies -- a mad, savage, unkempt phase of humanity, wilder than the wildest Western cow-boys -- fierce, savage, lawless, ungoverned, ungovernable") and "blood" ("In ten or twelve years Spain had lost millions upon millions of dollars, which vast treasure was poured in a golden flood into those hot fever-holes of towns, where Jews and merchants and prostitutes battened on the burning lusts of the wild hunters whose blood was already set aflame with plunder and rapine"), repeated over and over again. Finally, Pyle's explanation of why he has kept the original translation of Buccaneers largely intact bears repeating:

One touch of the modern brush would destroy the whole tone of dim local colours of the past made misty by the lapse of time. It needs the quaint old archaic language of the seventeenth century to tell of those deeds of blood and rapine and cruelty, and the stiff, formal style of the author-translator seems in some way to remove those deeds out of the realms of actuality into the hazy light of romance. So told the adventures of those old buccaneers still remain a part of humbler history, but they do not sound so cruel, so revolting as they would be told in our nineteenth-century vernacular.

Incredible! The temporal distancing that is evident beginning with the 1741 edition, but most notably in the 1856 one is self-consciously and deliberately articulated here.

1924: The 1924 edition includes a remarkably awful introductory essay by Andrew Lang, noteworthy first of all for its Cordingly-like approach to the putative gap between the "romance" and "reality" of piracy:

Most of us, as boys, have envied the buccaneers ... The buccaneers is 'a gallant sailor,' according to Kingsley's poem [Canon Kingsley, "The Last Buccaneer"] -- a Robin Hood of the waters, who preys only on the wicked rich, or the cruel and Popish Spaniard, and the extortionate shipowner. For his own part, when he is not rescuing poor Indians, the buccaneer lives mainly 'for climate and the affections'... Yet the vocation [!] was not really so touchingly chivalrous as the poet would have us deem ... The buccaneers were certainly models of diligence and conscientiousness in their own industry, which was to torture people till they gave up their goods, and then to run them through the body, and spend the spoils over drink and dice ... they were the most hideously ruthless miscreants that ever disgraced the earth and the sea.

The second element of note in Lang's essay is the unremittingly negative light in which the buccaneers are portrayed and his efforts to warn youth that "pieces of eight do not grow on trees." This compulsion to warn youth against the temptations of piracy is something that Catherine noted in much of the reading she did, especially in sensationalist 19th century accounts of the lives and trials of some famous pirates, but I'll let her tell about that.

The various editions of Buccaneers of America were not the only readings I did at the Mariners' Museum -- Catherine and I read and took notes through a fairly impressive collection of piracy-related documents -- but this post has gone on for far too long, so I think I'll wax enthusiastic over such masterpieces as The Life, Trial, Confession and Execution of Albert W. Hicks, The Pirate and Murderer, Executed on Bedloe's Island, New York Bay, On the 13th of July 1860, For the Murder of Capt. Burr, Smith and Oliver Watts, on Board the Oyster Sloop E.A. Johnson. Containing the History of his Life (Written by himself) from childhood up to the time of his arrest. With a full account of his piracies, murders, mutinies, high-way robberies, etc., comprising the Particulars of nearly One Hundred Murders another time.

To conclude, here is a picture of Catherine and I with our trusty pirate-themed pedal boat (ahem, hijacked sloop) at the lake outside the Mariners' Museum after a long day in the archives:

Real pirates always wear their life jackets. For further photo documentation of our trip (and an unwarranted number of pictures of trains and Leifr Eiriksson) click here.