ABSTRACT
This paper follows some late-seventeenth and early eighteenth century pirate ships, focusing upon the moments when these most enigmatic and elusive of ocean-going vessels were appropriated and inhabited by mutinous mariners who literally risked their necks to take charge of them. The most expensive and technologically advanced objects in existence (Adams 2001), the ships seized by pirates were their homes, where their founding moment of rebellion and subsequent life as pirates unfolded, where they lived in contempt of international efforts towards their extirpation (Earle 2004). However, one theorises pirates, whether as opportunistic thieves (Earle 2004), rational choice-making entrepreneurs (Leeson 2009), savvy lawyers at the edges of order (Benton 2010) or politically radical rebels (Rediker 2004), in each and every case, the practices of the pirate were inescapably entangled with the geographies of the ship. Thus far, in accounts of the pirate ship, neither spatiality nor
mobility has been particularly prominent or well-developed analytical levers. The potential for picking through histories of piracy and the ship more generally are therefore significant, since, as Merriman et al. (2012, 7) insist, thinking with space (and mobility, it might well be added) is a sure means of unlocking narratives too quickly closed down otherwise: ‘spatiality can disrupt theories that have not taken it seriously’.
