ABSTRACT
When we imagine pirates, more often than not we conjure up fashion plates: dashing rogues waving Jolly Rogers and sporting puffy shirts, parrots, rakish bandannas, gold earrings, wooden legs, eye-patches and velvet coats. This image would seem at odds with the economic, political and legal realities of piracy in eighteenth-century Europe (Turley 37-42), and the unsentimental brutality that has been documented among real-life pirates. It also ignores privateering, the state-sanctioned looting of enemy ships in wartime, and elides the breadth of historical piracy, which ranged from China to Yugoslavia and from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean. From an historical perspective, C.R. Pennell points out that ‘the behaviour of pirates is so dramatic in its context, apparently romantic in its action, and so photogenic in its possibilities that the temptation to ignore the onetwo-three for the yo-ho-ho is very attractive’ (3). In popular culture – and, Pennell contends, sometimes in scholarly endeavour as well – piracy is apparently 1 per cent crime and 99 per cent swashbuckling.
