Pirate Oaths, Mutinous Murmurings and British Counter-civilities at Sea in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

If life aboard ship in the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century was characterised by sonic affirmations of the extensive and sometimes punitive powers granted to captains by the Articles of War, what status did that typically verbal of virtues, civility, possess? Historians have begun the task of using sound, noise and the other senses to reevaluate the meaning of civility in the eighteenth century through studies of conversation, urban life, domesticity and colonization. Comparatively less studied has been the sonic profile of civility at sea. This context, I argue, highlights a dialogical confrontation between different forms of civility. Often mistaken for uncivil, or impolite speech, pirate oaths, disaffected murmurings, and even mutinous rhetoric could voice a different order of civil conduct and be recognized as such by elite interlocutors. I argue here that by attending to the textual traces of stereotypically impolite speech in shipboard life, historians can listen to an enormously variable acoustic field of civility that suggests considerable conceptual elasticity. The frequently caustic and often uneasy dialogue between what might be termed plebeian ‘counter-civilities’ and more ‘polite’ forms of elite civility in the eighteenth century provides a largely uncharted sonic context of civility at sea.