Abstract
This chapter examines the transformation of the Caribbean pirate into a colonial agent on the one hand and an enemy for Puritan society on the other around 1700. It begins with an analysis of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678), which inspired a series of ethnographic narratives about the New World by former ‘pirates’ at the time (e.g., William Dampier, Basil Ringrose, Bartholomew Sharp, Lionel Wafer), written as evidence of their authors’ gradual transformation into scientists. They adopted the discourse of science and helped legitimize colonial plunder—material and symbolic—as beneficial to the European ‘empire of knowledge’. The second part focuses on gallows narratives and anti-piratical sermons in Puritan New England, which articulated piracy as sinful, devilish, and destructive for the community. Public executions of pirates and the sermons and broadsides produced for these events used the figure of the pirate as an Other against whom to produce and renew third-generation Puritan social cohesion. Cotton Mather’s and other ministers’ comments on piracy are read as a response to the perception of collective crisis of Puritan society.
Highlights
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the West Indies appeared as the most valuable colonial possessions of England and France1: “The sugar islands provided their metropolitan powers with enormous wealth; they offered adventurous Britons and Frenchmen places to change and make fortunes; and, by affording places to which to transport criminals and vagrants, the islands served as relief valves for urban overcrowding and other social pressures” (Krise 1999, 7)
The Buccaneers of America, 1684), Basil Ringrose’s “pot-boiler” (Munter and Grose 1986, 28) Dangerous Voyage and Bold Attempts of Captain Bartholomew Sharp (1685), William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697), or Lionel Wafer’s A Description of the Isthmus of Darien (1699),2 often set on the fringes of the Caribbean colonies, voiced the complexity of cultural contact and translatio imperii maris as well as the uncontrollability of this process in the Americas
In the last three decades of the seventeenth century, the literature of piracy related to the Caribbean coast and the isthmus of Darién illustrates the instability of traditional categories of knowing and understanding
Summary
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the West Indies appeared as the most valuable colonial possessions of England and France1: “The sugar islands provided their metropolitan powers with enormous wealth; they offered adventurous Britons and Frenchmen places to change and make fortunes; and, by affording places to which to transport criminals and vagrants, the islands served as relief valves for urban overcrowding and other social pressures” (Krise 1999, 7). It is no coincidence that these countries were the maritime powers dominating the Caribbean at the time; it is noteworthy, in the same vein, that Hazard starts his account by discussing the growing taste for travel and travel literature—he mentions English Barbary captivity narratives and Dampier’s travel-books explicitly—as the seed of the new order in the early 1700s It brought forth a change from stability to movement, paralleling a development from the ‘classical’ to the ‘modern’ mind and the influx of new ideas: “The exploration of the globe having resulted in discoveries that have destroyed many of the data on which ancient philosophy reposed, a new conception of things will inevitably be called for” (8). Located to a large extent in the coastal zones of the American isthmus, the pirate chorography can be viewed both as a result of what Neil Rennie calls the “primitive colonialism” (2013, 110) of Caribbean buccaneers and as conditioned by a critical moment in the coloniality of English and European knowledge-formation that the genre sought to overcome
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