ABSTRACT

On a blustery night in 1603, John Ward sat in a seaside tavern and bought a round of ale for his fellow naval ofcers. According to the report of mariner Andrew Barker, Ward opened with complaints about the current “scurvy world,” and then followed with a series of colorful rhetorical questions pointing to the supposed glories of the privateering past:

On blood what would you have me say, where are the daies that have beene, and the seasons that wee have seene, when we might sing, sweare, drinke, drab, and kill men as freely, as your Cake-makers doe ies? when we might doe what we list, and the Law would beare us out int, nay when we might lawfully doe that, we shall bee hangd for and we doe now, when the whole Sea was our Empire, where we robb at will, and the whole Sea but our garden where we walked for sport … Tis certaine, quoth Ward, but if true resolution were not banckroupt in England, if we had not womens hearts to bearded faces, nay, and wee were not all cowards, but of my minde, manhood should not be thus subd as it hath beene, I know a redresse, I know a meanes.2