MARITIME LITERATURE AND CULTURE

# Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy

1678–1865

Alexandra Ganser

# Maritime Literature and Culture

Series Editors Alexandra Ganser Department of English and American Studies University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

> Meg Samuelson University of Adelaide Adelaide, Australia

Charne Lavery University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

This series offers new rubrics for literary and cultural studies by focusing on maritime and coastal regions, in contrast to nation, continent and area. In doing so, it engages with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization, and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. Broadly situated in the humanities and in relation to critical theory, it invites contributions that focus particularly on cultural practices – predominantly literary scholarship, but potentially also performance studies, cultural histories and media and film studies. The geographical scope allows for enquiries into single maritime regions or coastal areas but also encourages inter-ocean perspectives.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15773 Alexandra Ganser

# Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy

1678–1865

Alexandra Ganser Department of English and American Studies University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

Published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund

Maritime Literature and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-43622-3 ISBN 978-3-030-43623-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43623-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication.

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*For Martin, Rio, and Elvira, my favorite time pirates: thank you for all the love.*

# Acknowledgments

This study, opening up the series "Maritime Literature and Culture" that my colleagues Charne Lavery and Meg Samuelson are co-editing with me at Palgrave Macmillan, has been generously supported by my family and friends as well as by a number of colleagues who have kindly shared their expertise and their suggestions with me and encouraged my work at various stages. First and foremost, I would like to thank Heike Paul for her unfailing, enthusiastic as well as critical support of this project—thank you through all the years we worked together! My heartfelt gratitude goes to all those colleagues, family, and friends who supported in so many ways, big and small, the project and the completion of this manuscript: Eugen Banauch, Ralph Bauer, Hester Blum, Michela Borzaga, Sabine Broeck, Barbara Buchenau, Daniel Cohen, Tim Conley, Tim Cresswell, Birgit Däwes, Michael Draxlbauer, the late Emory Elliott, Richard Frohock, Agnes and Josef Ganser, Bernd and Helga Ganser-Lion and my nephews Nils and Lars, Sun-Hee Geertz, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Ezra Greenspan, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Marcel Hartwig, Alexandra Hauke, April Haynes, Udo Hebel, Sean Hill, Karin Höpker, Peter Hulme, Tabea Kampf, Antje Kley, Wim Klooster, Christian Krug, Susanne Lachenicht, Klaus Lösch, Gesa Mackenthun, Thomas Massnick, Walter Mignolo, Meredith Newman, Helena Oberzaucher, Andrea Pagni, Nicole Poppenhagen, Julia Pühringer, Marcus Rediker, Stefanie Schäfer, Sonja Schillings, Eva Schörgenhuber, Monika Seidl, John David Smith, Heike Steinhoff, Michael Winship, Gretchen Woertendyke, Michael Zeuske, Cornel Zwierlein, my students at Erlangen and Vienna and my colleagues of the American Studies colloquia at the Universities of Erlangen and Regensburg, as well as Udo Hebel and Gesa Mackenthun, also for their willingness to write reviews (whose praise I can only hope this book deserves) for submitting this study as a *Habilitation* at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the two anonymous reviewers for the Austrian Research Fund (FWF), whose Elise Richter Program I am indebted to for funding much of the research necessary for this study. My project research assistant, Eléonore Tarla, deserves special praise for her unfailingly dedicated, patient, and careful editorial assistance.

A collective thank you goes to all the colleagues with whom I had the opportunity to meet and discuss my work at various conferences in Europe, the U.S., and Canada, and to all conference organizers who invited me to a number of inspiring scholarly events and cities. I am very grateful to various institutions that enabled me to present parts of my study and pursue my research in various contexts: the German Association for American Studies (DGfA) for granting me a Christoph Daniel Ebeling Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester; Paul Erickson and the staff and curators at the American Antiquarian Society, especially Elizabeth Pope and Ashley Cataldo; the New York Public Library Rare Books Division and its helpful staff; and Axel Schäfer and the Bruce Center for American Studies at Keele University, where I held the European fellowship in American Studies. The Austrian cultural association KonaK and its functionaries, Christian Cwik and Verena Muth, provided me with an opportunity to conduct research in the Caribbean: in the National Archives of Panama, Panama City; in Port-au-Prince, at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago (NATT), and among the Emberá and the Kuna islanders, to whom I am infinitely grateful for sharing their cultural memories about pirates along their coasts. Last but not least, I thank the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Rachel Jacobe, Thomas René, and Allie Troyanos for their continuous professional and friendly support throughout the various stages of this book, as well as my brilliant series co-editors Charne Lavery and Meg Samuelson.

Parts of this study have been published in earlier and different essay versions: parts of 1.1. in *Agents of Transculturation: Border Crossers, Mediators, Go-Betweens*, ed. Gesa Mackenthun and Sebastian Jobs (Munster: Waxmann, 2013); parts of 1.2. in *Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in the U.S. and Beyond*, a collection I co-edited with Heike Paul and Katharina Gerund (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012); parts of 2.3. in a German version in *Populäre Piraten: Vermessung eines Feldes* (ed. Irmtraud Hnilica and Marcel Lepper, Berlin: Kadmos, 2016); parts of 3.2 in *Contact Spaces in American Culture: Globalizing Local Phenomena*, ed. Petra Eckhard, Klaus Rieser, and Silvia Schultermandl (Vienna: LIT, 2012), and parts of 3.3. in *Atlantic Studies: Global Currents* (15.4, 2018).

# Contents

# List of Figures

# Introduction: The Pirate as a Figure of Crisis and Legitimacy

Pirates are everywhere today. Over the last decade, there have been numerous reports of Somali and new Caribbean 'piracy' in the news; data 'pirates' are persecuted by the defendants of copyright law and intellectual property; eco-activist groups on the high seas, often on the border of transgressing laws that protect global corporate business rather than oceanic ecosystems, are termed pirates in the media while they themselves have also adopted piratical symbols like the skull and crossbones. Similarly, "Pirate Parties" throughout Europe, though perhaps past their heyday, have used the label to question the future of representative democracy in favor of more direct forms of government. In popular cultural contexts, pirate symbols are used by the fashion and many other industries and, since Disney's *Pirates of the Caribbean* series and a number of piratethemed computer games, have become prominent figures on the screen again. All of these examples actively draw on the figure of the pirate and its ambiguous semiotic qualities as a symbol used for both Othering and identification.

In an Anglophone Atlantic context, it is between the colonial era and the mid-nineteenth century that pirates emerged as prominent figures. In prose writing alone, the popular cultural, sensational appeal of pirateinspired adventure stories, captivity narratives, popular histories and romances, and many other genres-in-the-making, was used in terms of the figure's potential to articulate moments of ontological instability and

© The Author(s) 2020

A. Ganser, *Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy*, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43623-0\_1

epistemological crisis through an adequate ambivalent trope.1 The present study critically examines literary renditions of the pirate from 1678, the publication year of the earliest and probably most widely known booklength pirate narrative, A. O. Exquemelin's *Buccaneers of America*, to the American Civil War, when the pirate figure was used in battling the legitimacy of Southern Secession. Prose narratives of piracy were significant for the formation and development of a number of popular genres in print culture across the Atlantic: published trial reports, gallows narratives, execution sermons, broadsides, and criminal biographies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in which condemned pirates occasionally found an opportunity to justify their actions; popular history and the historical romance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which romanticized the pirate as a revolutionary outlaw; the captivity narrative during the so-called U.S. 'Barbary Wars' against North African city-states (1801–1805, 1815), in which former American captives of Muslim 'pirates' in the Mediterranean who were sold into slavery compared these corsairs to the triangular slave-traders; or caricatures of Southern 'pirates' at the beginning of the Civil War, which were printed on Union envelopes to deplore Secession.

The etymological source of the word "piracy," the Greek verb *peiran* (to attempt, attack, from the root *per*-, which literally means "to attempt something"), refers to ventures into risky business or the unknown, activities which characterized Mediterranean marauders in classical antiquity who became known as pirates (Rennie 2013, 11). Historians often characterize pirates by their shifting, and hence unreliable, national, racial/ethnic, and at times even gender affiliations (e.g., Rediker 2004; Creighton and Norling 1996)—the main reason why they have vexed political theorists and legal scholars for centuries in their attempts to define the pirate's legal status and his/her illegitimacy. Disputes about who was to be called pirate have always articulated power relationships and struggles over authority and legitimate violence, as the famous anecdote of the pirate and the emperor, related in St. Augustine's *City of God*, illustrates: "For elegant and excellent was the pirate's answer to the great Macedonian Alexander, who had taken him: the king asking him how he durst molest the sea so, he replied with a free spirit, 'How darest thou molest the whole world? But because I do with a little ship only, I am called a thief: thou doing it with a great navy, art called an emperor'" (Book IV, quoted in Pérotin-Dumon 1991, 196).2 Taking up related questions raised by various strands of pirate scholarship (e.g., Rennie 2013; Schillings 2017), I explore the pirate's primary discursive function as that of a personified question about legitimacy in diverse critical contexts. Throughout this book, I am asking in what ways a transoceanic American cultural imaginary teased out the pirate's ambivalent potential as a figure of identification and Othering, as outlaw folk hero and deplorable criminal, to negotiate scenarios of legitimacy and crisis in Anglophone North America.3

Because of their semantic ambiguity and the elusiveness of their identity, pirates have defied normative regimes of representation; as a literary trope, piracy has allowed for a symbolic (re-)negotiation of various identity constructions (such as British colony versus independent Republic; or united versus divided, free or slaveholding States during the War of Secession). My study inquires into ways in which narratives of piracy articulate, on both the textual and the meta-textual levels, oppositional discursive positions regarding questions of legitimacy, using piracy's destabilizing potential with regard to constructions of racial, ethnic, and gender difference. I argue that narratives of piracy continuously and dynamically swerve between dominant and resistant cultural positions, between, for instance, resistance to the Atlantic slave trade and participation in it; or between the subversion and affirmation of normative gender roles. In addition, narratives of piracy frequently turned the pirate from an agent of disruption, questioning the social order, into a figure of affirmation and containment.4 This study hence casts piracy as a discursive category on a continuum between the propagation of colonial adventure and accumulation on the one hand and critical commentary on exploitation, colonial violence, and racialized, gendered, and class oppression on the other. This dismantles the mythology of piracy as either leftist, anarchic utopia (e.g., Bey; Kuhn; Wilson) or capitalist avant-garde (e.g., Leeson, Storr)—one of the main oppositions critics have relied on in various conceptualizations of the pirate. In what follows, pirates appear as repentant sinners on the verge of execution; as defiant rebels against colonial authorities; as crafty tradesmen whose aim is profit and gain, but also as fast and excessive spenders; as radical philosophers and religious dissenters; as slave-holders and as liberators of slaves; as cartographers, scientists, and picaresque traveler-adventurers on the margins of empire; as atrocious and as egalitarian masters; and as multinational proponents of an alternative order.

One of my main hypotheses is that pirate narratives articulate a Freudian return of the repressed—of colonial violence and resistance in critical moments of North American history. Defined by maritime theft and illegitimacy, the pirate figure represents the "specter of slavery" and "the phantom of luxury," as David Shields labels the two crucial hauntings of colonialism (and later imperialism) in the Americas in reference to the British *imperium pelagi* ('empire of the seas,' 1990, 18). I aim to show that textual economies of piracy, despite their narrative resistance to a race-, class- and increasingly nation-based Atlantic order, are always already undermined by the enslavement and exploitation of indigenous and African/Afrodiasporic populations as well as by the triangular trade increasingly encompassing the entire Atlantic world in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Literary and cultural studies of piracy by scholars such as Gesa Mackenthun, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, or Paul Baepler—to name but a few—have explored the narratives forming the basis of most theories of piracy, contributing significantly to the current state of piracy research and enabling us to see piracy as a complex phenomenon that cannot be contained within either a Marxist or a free-market grand narrative. Instead, the figure of the pirate is informed by both its implication in colonial political economies and its dissociation from, even scorn of, dominant colonial practice. The plethora of Anglo-American texts on piracy from the late seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries dismantles any 'either/or' preconceptions in the characterization of piracy. In any case, pirates appear as textual constructions recalling historical agents that provoked colonial authorities in a multipolar (post-)colonial Atlantic world to write back, to contain the pirate: to turn him (and to a much lesser extent her) from an agent of disruption, questioning the social order, into a figure of affirmation.

The simplistic opposition between pirates as figures either of a colonial avant-garde or of resistance will be complicated by a close analysis of a variety of pirate narratives. My study introduces pirates as figures symptomatic of intense ontological and epistemological periods of crisis, in which perpetual struggles over (cultural, legal, political, economic) categorization and meaning were more intensely debated than at other times and intermittently resolved—in one direction or another—by a plethora of cultural narratives. These texts tease out the complexity of piracy as a cultural and economic phenomenon as well as the many contradictions at the heart of the fledgling merchant empires and their slave economies. Voicing both critique and complicity, pirate narratives and images, I am arguing, functioned as seismographs for the turmoil and upheavals produced by this trans-Atlantic and increasingly trans-Pacific economy. Located at the intersections of Atlantic American and hemispheric studies, (post-)colonial studies, and a New Historicist approach that reads texts from the angle of their historical-cultural context while viewing literature itself as productive of this very context, this book sets out to explore the pirate's popular appeal in Anglophone America from a transatlantic angle, taking into account the figure's history of translation from Europe to the Americas and focusing on the function of pirate narratives and the "cultural work" (Tompkins 1985) these texts perform.

In the context of historical crisis scenarios (see below), the figure of the pirate raises questions about the stability and legitimacy of (legal, political, cultural) categorization. I ask in what ways narratives of piracy act as manifestations of a perceived crisis and analyze the pirate in popular narratives as negotiating interlocking ideas of legitimacy not only due to the figure's ambivalent discursive position but also because the term "pirate" itself evokes a categorical putting-at-risk of self and society. Reading narratives of piracy as symptomatic of categorical crisis, I explore in what ways the pirate was imbued with (de)legitimatory meaning in the context of historical crisis scenarios, both in canonical and popular literature, which each interpellated their readerships to reflect on pressing issues of legitimacy.

The oceanic element in definitions of piracy has traditionally contributed an element of wilderness (as historically opposed to civilization) that has been crucial for various political and juridical debates over piracy and its definition, in which legitimacy has always been decisive: "The binary opposition between the pirate and civilization is … manifested by an actor who represents piracy and a state which represents civilization" and "civilized order" (Schillings 2011, 297; also 2017 for a more detailed analysis). Consequently, the pirate has been imagined as lacking allegiance with any state, as "a fragment of the sea, i.e. the ungovernable wilderness" (297). Piracy's oceanic setting, defined by "exceptional legal rules" (Heller-Roazen 2009, 10), has invited the proclamation of a state of exception that legitimizes the reduction of political subjects to "bare life." Civil rights and other norms are fully suspended (though not abandoned) and exceptional measures are taken, as Giorgio Agamben explores in his work on biopolitics and Western political thinking's definition of sovereignty as power over life. The state of exception, Agamben explains, "is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other" (2005, 23). Defined in such a relation of exception, the pirate is included in the legal order only by her/his exclusion through the sovereign (1998, 18). Conceptualizing exception as a "limit figure" that embodies the "radical crisis" at the heart of legitimacy and political authority (24–25), Agamben highlights its ambiguity as a 'both/and' concept that cannot be made to denote one thing or the other (here: inside *or* outside).5 The operation of sovereignty—the inclusion of subjects that essentially defy categorical insertion into a binary order by the claim to an exception—thus produces "bare life" as its originary activity (83).

Since classical antiquity, maritime pirates have been contrasted with land-based thieves because of their greater motility (i.e., capability of movement) and the sea allowing for a more rapid escape:6 piracy negated territorial and political borders, operating from spaces which were initially beyond the claims of states and empires (Beasley-Murray 2005, 220, 222). In the mobile world of the various Atlantic migrations, from the Puritan Great Migration to the triangular slave trade and nineteenthcentury immigration, the figure of the pirate encompasses traits of all the major characters of that mobile world: the trader, the adventurer, the pilgrim, the slave, and the indentured laborer as well as the slaveholder and-trader. In historical and literary discussions of piracy, major anxieties about an increasingly mobile society were voiced. Discourses about legitimate and illegitimate mobility appear as a defining aspect in pirate narratives, as piratical mobilities have been cast as *both* a threat to *and* as supportive of European colonial expansion and the imperialist project. The menace of uncontrollable geographical and social mobility that pirates signified was therefore closely related to social mobility and discontent with one's inherited class position. In the early modern era, just as control over people's mobility was increasingly nationalized (Cresswell 2006, 12–13), pirates emerged as emblematic of another new world: "the world of Hobbes, Galileo, and Harvey, … an infinite, restless entanglement of persistent movement" in which "happiness itself was based on the freedom to move" (14).  Ships and the sea, coasts and islands are main settings of this literature, which presents them as paradoxical spaces in which the dream and the nightmare are articulated in conjunction—as conflicted imperial and resistant sites and as fluid, permeable spaces of conflict and struggle, all the more so because ships and the coasts and islands they populated signified major stages of cultural contact and encounter. Because of their central position in the colonial economy in general and for slavery in particular, pirate ships became a popular literary topos, especially for writers critiquing slavery (see Sect. 3.1). As such, the ship and the sea emerge as the main textual spaces in which hegemonic and anti-hegemonic mobilities take effect.7 The double nature of the pirate ship, mirroring colonial relations while simultaneously inverting them in critical moments, can be read as a Foucauldian (1986) heterotopia of the crisis of colonial legality and of deviation: a site outlawed by a dominant order that labels it piratical, thus placing the enslaved or otherwise colonized subject, whose economic and military actions are unsanctioned, into a realm of illegitimacy and disenfranchisement. Unlike the prison, however, the pirate ship can function as a mobile inversion of dominant social relations and hence is also a site of social experimentation and potential empowerment—arguably the reason why it represented an attractive setting for revolutionary or abolitionist writers.

Salvatore Poier summarizes that "the status of 'pirate' is not related to a specific set of activities that are, in and of themselves, 'criminal' as "this category took shape through the relationships with those who were labelled 'pirates,' the constituted power, the mob, and the future of a newly discovered territory" (2009, 39) such as America. The postclassical, modern development of the category of piracy is thus intricately tied to a liminal geography of American coloniality. Especially in the discourse of international law, the pirate emerged as a foil for the integration of European nation-states, which tried to project the law of the land, a territorial order, onto maritime spaces (Heller-Roazen 2009, 100–101). Yet what is at stake in critical discussions of piracy is clearly not just legalistic description—after all, as Anne Pérotin-Dumon reminds us, "there is not, and never has been, an authoritative definition of piracy in international law"—but also the analysis of "what authority made the laws" and "what power was at stake" (1991, 198) in definitions—and representations, as I am arguing—of maritime piracy. Jon Beasley-Murray suggests that the historical legal construction of piracy as Other obfuscates that "[p]iracy cannot be simply demarcated as a constituent exterior to the civilized state" as "[t]he pirate is not the colonial other; the pirate inhabits and crosses the permeable membrane that divides enemy from foe, civilization from its other" (2005, 224). In the aftermath of sixteenthand seventeenth-century debates over law-making, power, warfare, and violence, especially with regard to the seas and whether they were to be *mare clausum* or *mare liberum* (Pérotin-Dumon 1991, 205; Thomson 1994, ch. 4 & 5; Heller-Roazen 2009, ch. 11), early eighteenth-century images of the pirate increasingly drew on a lack of national and ethnic character and an alleged non-humanity. Pirates were at times represented as cruel, subhuman, cannibalistic Others on a continuum with the 'Indian' or 'savage'; a monstrous, uncivilized, animal-like creature and a parasite (Kempe 2010, 160, 263) that threatened the *translatio imperii et studii* once he left his assigned role of privateer or military aid in national endeavors (Kempe 2008, 397). Indeed, as Schillings remarks, the difference between pirate and privateer marks a threshold between "the inside and the outside of the law" which "renders certain forms of *reference* to sovereignty by violent actors … potentially legitimate to the sovereign, and therefore worthy of re-inclusion in the law" (2015, 31). Along similar reasoning, western states also framed non-Christian sea actions as piracy, such as in the so-called Barbary conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Pérotin-Dumon 1991, 213). When non-state, allegedly uncivilized and/or indigenous agents that cooperated with each other diverged from the course of a state-controlled imperialism (and, for instance, started building alternative social communities), legal and political theorists and decision-makers sought to delegitimize such endeavors.

Following Pérotin-Dumon and others, I interpret the pirate's primary discursive function as that of a personified question about legitimacy (304)—hence the pirate's discursive ambivalence between 'good' and 'bad,' folk-hero and criminal, Othering and identification. This ambivalence also marks the figure of the pirate as more than well suited for a leading role in narrative negotiations of various scenarios of crisis. Historically, piracy has led states to take exceptional measures from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Such measures are, in Agamben's view, always results of (what is constructed and represented as) political crisis (2005, 1). The semantic category of piracy, defined by its legal and spatial exceptionality, has indeed been mobilized most frequently in times of crisis—cultural-symbolic, political (foreign and domestic), economic, and social. Of course, crisis is not factual, but is itself a narrative construction, produced by a discursive environment that frames individual or collective perceptions of crisis (Fenske et al. 2017; Grunwald and Pfister 2007). Sociologists and political scientists have theorized crisis using various approaches, most notably Marxist (in reference to the repeated crises of capitalism discussed by Gramsci; see Jones 2006, ch. 7) and governmental ones.8 The concept of crisis, from the Greek verb *krinein* ("to select and judge, to decide, struggle," Koselleck 1978, 617), has been used in different contexts, all of them referencing a point in which an existential decision, such as that between an old order or a new one, needs to be made. The problematic of crisis as a dualistic concept (between justice and injustice, or freedom and slavery, for instance) has been countered by Goethe's notion of crisis as a process and as transformation (624) as well as by the inclusion of what Reinhart Koselleck, in his classical 1982 summary of the conceptual development of crisis, has termed "possibilities crossing dualistic conceptions of crisis" ("quer [zur dualistischen Krise] verlaufenden Möglichkeiten," 626; my translation). Crisis, in Koselleck's understanding, implies a transformation of difference categories and of loyalties (630); it entails "transdifferent" (Breinig and Lösch) moments of semantic and symbolic instability.9 In any case, the diagnosis of crisis, he argues, has always served as a "title of legitimation for political action" (625: "Legitimationstitel politischen Handelns," my translation). This makes the nexus of crisis and legitimacy a highly productive categorical point of departure and frame of inquiry for the present study.

As Ansgar Nünning and others argue, narrative is central to the construction (and resolution) of scenarios of crisis, as crises constitute "medial transformations and (re-)presentations of situations in specific stories and narratives" ("mediale Transformationen und [Re-]Präsentationen von Geschehen in bestimmten Geschichten und Erzählungen," my translation): "Thus crises are observable in literary and cultural studies only in their textual and medial manifestations, i.e. in the discursive presentation of a particular story as a narrative of crisis" ("Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlich beobachtbar sind Krisen somit erst in ihren textuellen bzw. medialen Manifestationen, d.h. in der diskursiven Präsentation dieser bestimmten Geschichte als Krisenerzählung," Nünning 2007, 61, my translation; see also Nünning 2009). Similarly, Stuart Hall suggested that in times of greatest crisis, the manufacture and manipulation of public consent is crucial to the maintenance of power: "[M]oments in which the equilibrium of consent is disturbed, or where the contending class forces are so nearly balanced that neither can achieve that sway from which a resolution to the crisis can be promulgated, are moments when the whole basis of political leadership and cultural authority becomes exposed and contested" (quoted in Davis 2004, 111). In what ways do narratives of piracy expose, and at times contest, such cultural-symbolic structures, and how do they act as manifestations and negotiations of crisis? These are the primary questions discussed in my readings.

In my study, I am not myself diagnosing historical moments from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as marked by crisis, but rather look at periods that have been perceived and analyzed as such in both contemporaneous and historical accounts. The 'discovery' of America, for instance, was characterized as a pivotal crisis for the political system of Europe (Koselleck 1978, 634, 639), resulting, in the seventeenth century, in a "foundational" (82) "crisis of legitimation, an overlapping set of political crises, involving religious and civil wars, and international conflict" (Kahn 2002, 67). The epistemological crisis concerning the establishment and maintenance of difference categories at the basis of western knowledge-production was triggered by the scientific revolution and the simultaneous contact with America: beginning with Columbus' letters, many reported wonders had to be integrated into existing symbolic orders and emergent western systems of knowledge/power (Foucault); the quantity and quality of sensational news from faraway corners of the globe provoked a crisis of the concepts of truth and authority as well as of the cultural meaning of testimony and witnessing. This crisis was answered symbolically by the transformation of the pirate into a colonial agent and scientist before and around 1700, which I examine in the opening chapter. This period was also a time of crisis in colonial relations: when colonized groups turned against their colonizers and started to collaborate, both politically and economically, with illegitimate agents such as pirates or smugglers, as was the case at the end of the seventeenth century, piracy became an important literary topos. I begin with an analysis of A. O. Exquemelin's *Buccaneers of America*, reading the text's staging of cultural encounter as reflective of these crises. The text inspired a series of ethnographic narratives about the New World by former 'pirates' at the close of the seventeenth century (e.g., William Dampier, Basil Ringrose, Bartholomew Sharp, and Lionel Wafer), written as evidence of their authors' gradual transformation into scientists (which I compare to Exquemelin's): they adopted a discourse of science and helped legitimize colonial plunder—material and symbolic—as beneficial to the European "empire of knowledge."

The second part of that chapter moves, together with historical pirates, from the Caribbean to the coasts of New England in the early eighteenth century. It focuses on Puritan anti-piratical sermons and gallows narratives which prominently articulated piracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as sinful, devilish, and destructive for the community. In fact, the condemnation of piracy served to consolidate the society of third-generation Puritans, many of whom saw the increasing secularization of a theocratic society and the colony's socioeconomic developments as a threat to their covenant with God. This crisis was not only of a religious kind; in the Puritan understanding, the concept of crisis had distinct medical connotations and related to existential questions of survival or death. Thus, 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 renew social cohesion. In this sense, I read Cotton Mather's and other Puritan comments on piracy as a second discursive moment around 1700 responding to the perception of a collective crisis.

In Chapter 2, I explore the trope of piracy as it was summoned in the context of the (post-)revolutionary Atlantic that culminated in the crisis of colonial legitimacy in the North American colonies. It is no coincidence that Thomas Paine titled his revolutionary pamphlet series *The American Crisis* (1776–1783), bolstering the morale of the American colonists in "times that try men's souls" (91). Neither is it a coincidence that at the very moment of the political declaration of independence, in which the crisis of colonial legitimacy was performatively resolved (Derrida 1986), the sign of the pirate was externalized by the claim that the British monarch was a pirate, thus lending America the natural right to independence. Historical romances in early American literature, such as James Fenimore Cooper's *The Red Rover* (1827), used romantic/Byronic piracy to narrate the legitimacy of the revolution, appropriating the pirate as a foundational figure and an ideal type of patriotic outlaw masculinity, suffering a tragic end for a just cause. Even in narrating the crisis in gender relations, as revolutionary femininities first gave way to Republican motherhood and then to the "cult of true womanhood" (Welter) in the course of the nineteenth century, revolutionary pirates were prominent figures in popular literary production geared toward a broader and increasingly female readership, as in Lieutenant Murray's (i.e., Maturin Murray Ballou's) *Fanny Campbell* (1844). Former revolutionary heroines (here in the form of a patriotic female pirate) were domesticated in such historical romances and novelettes to make palpable the ongoing transition to a more conservative nineteenth-century femininity. Nevertheless, the text at the same time betrays a discourse of nostalgia for an earlier, revolutionary version of womanhood, disturbing any smooth transition from pirate to "angel of the house." Read side by side, these historical fictions perform similar cultural work in legitimizing America's revolutionary past and imperial future for different audiences.

The first foreign policy crisis with which the young Republic was confronted was the war with the so-called Barbary pirates at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Here, again, the delegitimizing rhetoric of Othering foreign agents—in this case, an Oriental(ized) Other—by calling them pirates was prominent in popular narratives. Captivity narratives about the experience of abduction and enslavement by Muslim 'pirates'—like Royall Tyler's *Algerine Captive* (1824)—redirected piracy from North Africa to North America, thus questioning the legitimacy of slavery in the United States, taking up the conjuncture of piracy and slavery that had been voiced in the Declaration of Independence and preparing the grounds for nineteenth-century abolitionist discourses. During the crisis over slavery in the nineteenth century, piracy signified the criticality of legitimacy in the context of a Black Atlantic literature (Gilroy 1993), exemplified by Trinidadian M. Maxwell Philip's littleexplored novel *Emmanuel Appadocca* (1854) and Herman Melville's canonical novella "Benito Cereno" (1855/1856), both of which I explore in my third chapter. While Philip explores piracy as a plot of revenge, Melville reflects on the slavery crisis as fundamentally a crisis of knowing and telling, voicing ontological insecurity as masters and slaves become indistinguishable once the tale introduces the suspicion of piracy. The conjuncture of piracy and slavery is also used (in a different context) in popular anti-Southern discourses during the Civil War, the major domestic crisis of the nineteenth century. Decorated Union letter envelopes depicted Jefferson Davis and the seceded South as prototypical pirates, stealing Africans and betraying the United States by means of a Secession thus delegitimized. These envelopes also epitomize the shift toward the visual in representations of piracy beginning in post-Civil War America.

Though the focus of my readings is on the literary representation of piracy, constructions of the pirate figure in public discourse and visual culture are included in this study as images of pirates frequently interacted with the written word, especially in popular texts. The figure of the pirate as well as the symbols associated with her/him, such as the Jolly Roger flag, have, from the day of the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury broadsides, been used to market pirate texts and to evoke certain stock associations such as violence, death, and piratical nonrecognition of nation-states and their laws, even if today they have been commodified in nearly every form of material and popular culture, from coffee mugs and soccer logos to children's toys and fashion. Rather than completely separating visual and verbal discourses of piracy during the period under scrutiny, I address their interrelatedness in cultural expressions of the pirate figure across the Atlantic. My final subchapter of analysis, examining satirical cartoons, draws special attention to the importance of visual culture for the cultural articulation and negotiation of piracy. Tapping into a vast archive that still constitutes a hidden repository of cultural expression at the onset of the Civil War, this final section also highlights the increasing importance of visual representations of piracy starting in mid-nineteenth-century print culture.

The different genres and sorts of material under discussion, spanning almost two centuries, warrant comment especially in the context of a discipline like American Studies, which is often compartmentalized into special period studies. While I certainly will not be able to delve as deeply into the details of each of the crisis scenarios that contextualize my readings as many of my specialized colleagues in colonial and early American studies or Civil War studies, I hope that the diachronic scope of this book enables a broader view with regard to a trope that itself has crossed centuries and has been adapted and changed from one decade to the next. As much as these scenarios and the corresponding pirate narratives are different from each other, they share a characteristic conjunction of maritime piracy and questions of legitimacy. The narrative and visual texts under consideration all ask their readers to investigate the nature of legitimate action, even violence, and they do so according to their own needs and means. In each chapter, I have juxtaposed canonical texts with popular and/or less wellknown material that warrants closer examination: the buccaneer narratives of the late seventeenth century, which are little known except for popular versions of Exquemelin's and Dampier's writings, and Cotton Mather's well-examined sermons in chapter 1; Cooper's classic *Red Rover* (though little read today) and Ballou's popular historical romance *Fanny Campbell*, long out of print and only recently commented upon by scholarship, in chapter 2; and in chapter 3, Melville's "Benito Cereno," which has received continuous critical attention since at least the 1950s, side by side with M. M. Philip's *Emmanuel Appadocca*, a Black Atlantic novel rediscovered in the late 1990s that is still little discussed. Placing these texts next to each other, my study demonstrates not only how the pirate figure has moved across lowbrow and highbrow genres, adapting to different generic affordances, but also highlights once more the artificiality of these categorizations. Only by paying attention to such hitherto little explored archival material can we begin to understand the cultural mobility of the pirate: across oceans, genres, media, decades, and centuries, continuing with the new media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from silent film to computer games. Reading such material side by side creates a dialogue between diverse genres that often drew on the same source material but was rearticulated in distinct ways and consumed by different strata of readers.

However, the present book is necessarily also limited, analyzing mostly prose narratives (with the exception of the final section). Though in the same two-hundred-year span, various other genres also engaged with and thrived on pirates and piracy—from the early modern ballad to the antebellum popular stage—I focus on prose narratives for two reasons: first, the pirate emerged as a popular figure together with the early modern development of the travel narrative and the adventure story, which led to the creation of the novel in the eighteenth century. Hence a diachronic perspective is best possible by focusing on a genre that dealt with pirates continuously for two centuries (and more). Second, I am most interested in how cultural *narratives* about legitimacy (with regard to the law, to maritime theft, to violence, to slavery and revolution) were constructed continuously through the figure of the pirate from the colonial era to the War of Secession. How Atlantic and later American populations told, wrote, and read stories about pirates brings to the fore prevalent anxieties with regard to shifting norms and understandings of legitimacy in conjunction with categorical differences of race, class, gender, and nation, and shows us how such anxieties were resolved in literature.

In times of collectively perceived crisis, clear-cut categories of cultural difference tend to become unhinged despite increased efforts to affirm boundaries between self and Other. While the outcome of categorical crises either reaffirms and renews or redefines and changes these boundaries, the very fact that these boundaries are discussed intensely hints at cultural and/or political anxieties and insecurities that put established categories of difference into doubt. Accordingly, pirate narratives could both question or cement cultural difference; yet reading them against the grain, the texts under consideration, informed by the crisis discourses prevalent at the time of their publication, defy any kind of dichotomous difference construction as they present multiple perspectives on piracy. They are characterized by polyphony, dissonance, and textual ambiguity, terms related to the concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia (as they are etched out by Mikhail Bakhtin in his theorizations of the novel ([1929] 1984 and [1934–1935] 1984).10 The main mode of analysis I employ in this study is that of contrapuntal reading, a method of (post-)colonial discourse analysis proposed by Edward Said in *Culture and Imperialism* (1993) which brings to the fore heteroglossia, voices hidden and suppressed by the main narrative and the textual consolidation of crisis for the sake of an optimistic portrayal of colonialism or patriotism. As a practice of deconstructive reading (rather than "a statement about the actual structure of colonial texts" [Mackenthun 2006, 12]), contrapuntal analysis shows "a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (Said 1993, 59).

Said's analyses mostly refer to the canonical prose writing of the British Empire in its heyday in the nineteenth century, a fact that has often been criticized as Occidentalist or aesthetically elitist and conservative (Clark 1999, 6; Mackenthun 2004, 35). Further points of criticism relate to the notion of counterpoint itself, derived from Western classical music (Bach, Schoenberg, Glenn Gould), which assumes a basic unity in a piece of music in which point and counterpoint act together rather than against each other. Also, Said's under-theorization of the process and method of contrapuntal reading and his arguably much too schematic idea of oppositionality have been criticized (Kennedy 2000, 107, 110). While Said's reconciliatory assumption of an ultimately harmonious text is indeed problematic, also with regard to his literary analyses (Mackenthun 2004, 332 n. 2), the notion of the counterpoint nevertheless remains useful in its metaphorical quality, emphasizing the importance of submerged, dissonant voices that run counter to the main narrative within a cultural text. I retain the concept despite its problems because it enables readings of non-canonized texts whose polyphonic qualities have been rarely addressed. Following Mackenthun's arguments in her examination of Said's concept and its adaptability to the study of the oceanic context of antebellum American literature, the notion of counterpoint insinuates that aesthetic complexity in (post-) colonial texts is a result of their "'difficult mobility' between the metropolitan center and the colonial periphery" (2004, 335; 2006). Contrapuntal reading presupposes the placement of imperial/colonial texts into a framework no longer limited by imperial and national borders. As Said argues, referring to Gramsci's notion of hegemony:

Western cultural forms can be taken out of the autonomous enclosures in which they have been protected, and placed instead in the dynamic global environment created by imperialism, itself revised as an ongoing contest between north and south, metropolis and periphery, white and native. We may thus consider imperialism as a process occurring as part of the metropolitan culture, which at times acknowledges, at other times obscures the sustained business of the empire itself. The important point … is how the national … cultures maintained hegemony over the peripheries. How within them was consent gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native peoples and territories? (1993, 58)

Contrapuntal reading hence constitutes a form of "reading back" (Do Mar Castro Varela and Dhawan 2005, 52), a reading from the perspective of the colonized in order to unveil the presence of the "coloniality of power" (Walter Mignolo quoting Anibal Quijano 2000, 16), the "system that organized the distribution of epistemic, moral, and aesthetic resources in a way that both reflects and reproduces empire" (Alcoff 2007, 83) inscribed in cultural expression, both on the level of representation and epistemology.11 It allows for a point of view between imperial narrative and postcolonial perspective and constructs a counter-narrative in the act of reading, which time and again pierces through the surface of single texts: Kennedy calls Said's model a "dual approach to literary texts" (2000, 106) grounded in an epistemological critique of nationalism and Western humanism that rests on his understanding of cultural expression in the colonial context as hybrid.12 For Said, the main point is to disclose the pervasiveness of imperial power in writing on the one hand and to highlight anti-imperial resistance on the other, as these resistant energies, following a Derridean, poststructural conception of textuality, can never be brought to silence but retain a spectral presence in the text.13

The method of contrapuntal reading reverberates with similar analytical approaches to identify the fraught interrelationship between European cultures and transatlantic colonialism, including slavery and the slave trade, as they have been employed by scholars like Peter Hulme (1986) or, in the context of African American Studies, Toni Morrison (who speaks of an absent "Africanist presence" in American literature, 1992). My critical analyses draw on all of these approaches, their main point being to disclose the pervasiveness of white western/imperial power in these texts on the one hand and to make transparent anti-imperial resistance on the other (Kennedy 2000, 106). Following a poststructural conception of textuality, such resistant energies can never be brought to silence but remain a disturbing presence in the text. They evoke, indeed, a much more general crisis at the heart of language-based cultural production: the continuing crisis of the sign. Pirate narratives, emphasizing shifting identities and ambivalent characters and plotlines, can be viewed as emblematic of such a logocentric-epistemological crisis, resulting, from a postcolonial perspective, from the criticality of legitimacy (of colonialism, of struggles for independence, of slavery) produced by the 'discovery' of the New World.

My study chimes in with a number of concerns that are currently voiced in the context of American literary and cultural studies scholarship, examining the cultural work of Anglophone American-Atlantic narratives of piracy that have been discussed so far mostly in single articles and book chapters. American Studies has turned to the sea for more than two decades: taking up earlier work like Thomas Philbrick's *James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction* (1961), Paul Gilroy (*The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness*, 1993), Cesare Casarino (*Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis*, 2002), Gesa Mackenthun (*Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature*, 2004), Paul Gilje (*Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution*, 2004), Robin Miskolcze (*Women and Children First: Nineteenth*-*Century Sea Narratives and American Identity*, 2007), Margaret Cohen (*The Novel and the Sea*, 2008), or Hester Blum (*The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives*, 2008), to name but a few, have rewritten American literary history, advancing the maritime imagination as a fundamental, yet neglected aspect of American culture.14 Reverberating with Henry Nash Smith's diagnosis that the American economic and military frontier, up to the mid-nineteenth century, was primarily imagined as maritime ([1950] 2009, 12) as well as with the fact that the Middle Passage was constitutive of race relations in the Americas, these studies turn away from a predominantly territorial conception of American culture. Regarding the turn to the sea and the ubiquity of pirates in Atlantic American popular culture from the seventeenth century to the present, piracy has received renewed interest in literary and cultural studies. Since pirate narratives have often staged cultural encounters with regions inaccessible to the general reading public in the metropoles of Europe and North America, they are significant also in their repercussions for incipient inter-American and Orientalist discourses. Thus my book suggests that pirate narratives are valuable for colonial, early American, and antebellum literature and culture studies, debating, for instance, the legitimacy of the American Revolution or of the slave system in the context of Atlantic European empire-building and American expansion, and using moral and religious as well as racial and gendered discourses for this purpose.

In addition, I hope to contribute to popular culture studies that have, since the 1990s, begun to explore past popular cultural figures, forms, and texts, such as broadsides and ballads, pamphlets, and cheaply sold historical romances or dime novels.15 In the context of a genealogy of popular culture in America, the pirate has always been an important figure of mass appeal. His/Her popularity was essential for appealing to a non-elite audience to whom normative concepts of nation and empire, femininity and masculinity as well as race also needed to be brokered. These readers, of course, developed their own ways of appropriation, one of them being the pirate's heroization—whitewashing the ethnically hybrid figure along with the translation of "a revolutionary multiracial mob into storybook (white) American heroes" in early American literature, as Cathy Davidson suggests (2004, 23).

Last but not least, since the threat of piracy—its instability and unreliability as a legal category and its implications of violence and uncontrollability—has always met a need to be negotiated in popular symbolic economies, I am proposing to read pirate narratives as fictions of legitimation in the context of the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature. Historian Lauren Benton (2010) reconceptualizes early modern pirates as oceanic lawyers who knew the ropes of many legal loopholes and ruses to remain within "the precarious membrane of the law" (*qua* Burgess 2014, 5)16; she describes such piratical agency as an expression of "vectors of law thrusting into ocean space" (Benton 2010, 112), transporting legal norms across colonial spaces—not without calling these very norms into question. Pirate narratives make visible contextualized ideologies of law (McGillivray 1994, v), and their main function can be seen in creating what Martin Kayman terms "communal narratives of justice" (2002, 16). As cultural texts of "jurisgenesis," they are concerned with the creation of a normative universe, "a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void" (Cover 1992, 95), and, in the context of negotiating normativity, with race, class, and gender constructions informing this creation.

## Notes

can be seen as important forebears to the novel. Yet Bakhtin's suggestion of authorial control over multiple discursive voices is unconvincing, given the more complicated notion of text(uality) in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the role of cultural contact in the Americas in the development of the novel, see Spengemann (1994).

# Works Cited

### Primary Sources

Philip, Michel Maxwell. (1854) 1997. *Emmanuel Appadocca; or, Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers*. Edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

#### Secondary Sources

———. 2010. *Fluch der Weltmeere. Piraterie, Völkerrecht und internationale Beziehungen, 1500–1900*. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Pirate Narratives and the Colonial Atlantic

# 2.1 The Buccaneer-Pirates: Articulations of Cultural Contact and Crisis, 1678--1699

#### *2.1.1 The Caribbean Scenario in the Late Seventeenth Century*

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 significance of the West Indies as the hub of empire (*qua* Eric Williams) in these decades is evidenced culturally by the abundance of travel and exploration narratives in transatlantic literature, starting in the seventeenth century; travel as "a sign of empire" was pertinent in "representations of the Elizabethan Sea Dogs, the swashbuckling pirates, and the fortune hunters" which "all reveal an underlying expansionist and exploitative motivation—a drive to seize whatever wealth was available" (7).

Travel and exploration literature constituted the Caribbean not only as a zone of cultural contact, "the first American frontier" (Mackie 2009, 125) in which various populations and cultures—European, native, and African (American)—met, but also as a zone of crisis in political, economic, symbolic, and epistemological terms. The fact that piracy was

© The Author(s) 2020

A. Ganser, *Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy*, Maritime Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43623-0\_2

an important theme in this literature, with the pirate representing the ultimate outlaw-criminal on the one hand and a heroic model for a masculine, upwardly mobile colonial subjectivity representative of "the new moneyed economy" (Krise 1999, 13) on the other can be read as emblematic of the precariousness and criticality of colonial legitimacy. The Caribbean buccaneer-pirate, in various representations, highlighted the political and economic contest over the possession of and/or control over the West Indies, the struggle in the symbolic appropriation of these territories, and the uncontrollability of its agents, politically as well as culturally. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, narratives of piracy in the Americas such as Alexander Olivier Exquemelin's *De Americaensche Zee*-*Roovers* (1678; Engl. *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 (and further moving on to the Pacific coast via the Darién isthmus), voiced the complexity of cultural contact and *translatio imperii maris* as well as the uncontrollability of this process in the Americas.3

This chapter asks in what ways the pirate is represented as a figure of crisis in these narratives, a liminal figure between legitimate and illegitimate orders, between Europe and the Americas, wilderness and civilization, and clear-cut ethnic and national allegiances. I argue that in these texts, the pirate emerges as a critical, *coastal* figuration, a hybrid and fluid figure of contact and undecidability that, because of its liminal and paradoxical qualities, carried the potential of both questioning and affirming a burgeoning, yet highly precarious colonial system. In what follows, I thus explore to what extent pirates "were a reproach to plantocratic notions of law and order based on hereditary hierarchies of class, race, and gender" (Craton 1997, 53).

The spatial metaphor of the coast, structured by the temporalities of departure, arrival, and cultural encounter, highlights both the potentialities and limitations of contact between self and Other. It refers to a space in which semiotic systems become unstable and difference is negotiated anew as territorial orders are in suspension. Piratical narratives of this period demonstrate the increasing desire to discursively control this fluidity and to semantically incorporate the popular, transgressive figuration of the buccaneer-pirate into the imperial project. As such, the pirate book was increasingly appropriated by scientific discourses and obtained a substantial function in epistemological empire-building, the "second conquest" of the Americas (Bauer 2003, 3); by the end of the seventeenth century, pirate narratives constituted a "small but crucial niche in the publishing world" (Burgess 2014, 82).

The works under consideration are, in Ouellet's words, "marqués par cette 'crise de la conscience européenne' dont a si bien parlé Paul Hazard" (2004, 56),4 the French historian whose seminal study *La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680*–*1715* (1935; Engl. *The European Mind*, 1953) diagnosed an intellectual and moral crisis (xx) in this period of "revolution" (xv) in which "heresy" (xvii) in various forms articulated all the main ideas that would set the scene for the French Revolution. Emergent discourses of reason and right sought to replace duty and religion, the leading hermeneutic paradigms of European (especially French, English and Dutch) world-views. It is no coincidence that these countries were also 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). As perspectives changed with travel, so relativity was introduced as one of the "lessons derived from the idea of space" (11). In this "sea-change,"

… all the fundamental concepts, such as Property, Freedom, Justice and so on, were brought under discussion again as a result of the conditions in which they were seen to operate in far-off countries, in the first place because, instead of all differences being referred to one universal archetype, the emphasis was now on the particular, the irreducible, the individual; in the second, because notions hitherto taken for granted could now be checked in the light of facts ascertained by actual experience. (10)

An obsession with fact and experience, garnished with doubt (as the beginning of science) and probability, resulted in a new, Lockean empiricism that historians of science such as Barbara Shapiro and philosophers such as Edmund Husserl (in *Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie*) have seen as a response, even outcome, of this crisis, even though few have emphasized the role of imperial travel as much as Hazard has. Philip Edwards characterizes the period by a "movement from experience to the written word, and on the mutations of the written word as it moves into print" (1994, 6).

Both Shapiro and Hazard draw a parallel between this epistemological crisis, with its scientific consequences, and the increasing predilection for a plain, prose style on the literary market (Shapiro 1983, 240–41). The appropriate genre for historiography, for instance, was no longer seen in poetry; metaphor was out of vogue, while factual, experiential, testimonial discourses were the reaction to doubt and skepticism, promising the highest point of certainty possible in the realm of science (29; absolute certainty was only possible in "God's knowledge" and "compelled assent" was a prerogative of logic and mathematics). Simplicity and clarity were associated with truth (247), and new literary forms such as the travel account "readily adopted the impartial presentation of matters of fact as their standard" (261): in this way, England developed *A Culture of Fact* (Shapiro) that, however, is to a much greater extent transatlantically framed and entangled with England's imperial projects in the Caribbean than Shapiro's work suggests.

In the same period, the transatlantic pirate narrative undergoes a similar discursive transformation—from the presentation of spectacular buccaneers, mentioned by Hazard as counter-discursive, anti-rational, and speaking to the readers' appetites for pleasure and fancy (1953, 361–64), to the scientific, reasonable pirate-privateer whose works are published under the aegis of the British Royal Society. This is a gradual change, as all pirate narratives have to straddle the tension of their age between truth and pleasure, scientific and literary values (Shapiro 1983, 250). The genre of chorography, in which these texts can be located, offered a model that combined spectacular (travel) narrative and scientific observation, natural and human history, geography and ethnography (Shapiro references Dampier in her discussion of this genre, 1983, 301 n. 41). 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.

#### *2.1.2 The Buccaneer in Literature: Points and Counterpoints*

In the last three decades of the seventeenth century, the literature of piracy related to the Caribbean coast and the isthmus of Darién (in contemporary Panama) illustrates the instability of traditional categories of knowing and understanding.5 Fragmented, unstable, and unreliable voices and texts point to the epistemological crisis in the aftermath of cultural contact which resulted in a deep ambivalence between knowing and believing, intimacy and distance, authoritative gestures at consolidation and polyphonic disruption throughout the larger genre of early modern travel literature. The subgenre of expedition accounts by piratical explorers and proto-colonialists (who plundered the Americas without or with semi-official legitimation) is pervaded with a colonial violence marked by brutal subjugation and exploitation both physical and symbolical, a consequence mainly of European competition and conflict about the domination of the Americas. The pirate, who, as a legal subject, was characterized since antiquity as the enemy of all, especially of all nations, in contrast to the privateer (who was legitimized by an official letter of marque), is a liminal figure in these texts, moving between legitimacy and illegitimacy, between anti-mercantilist and proto-democratic counterculture and capitalist avant-garde.6

Narrative articulations of piracy vary significantly depending on genre; around 1700 the genres involved were mostly chorographic travel literature,7 gallows narratives, and sermons preached and printed on account of public executions of former pirates, especially in Puritan New England and London. All of them, however, no matter whether they were written by participants in semi-or illegal expeditions themselves or by local authorities trying to suppress piracy, share a characteristic polyphony and inner narrative tension as they negotiate a crisis of religious and moral authority (in the case of the sermons and gallows narratives), of political legitimacy, and of hermeneutic understanding and ordering.

Drawing on Said's method of contrapuntal reading, I argue that the polyphonic and fragmented nature of these texts presents a disruptive force in the imperial project, as polyphony is at the core of representations of cultural contact and crisis. While these narratives bear testimony of the attempt of colonizing alterity both through physical and symbolic acts of violation and appropriation, they are at the same time unable to fully mask the multiple, often resistant colonized voices.

If the method of contrapuntal reading is applied to late seventeenthcentury literature, the empire is of course a fundamentally different one than that of the nineteenth, and thus also afflicts writing in a different way: while the nineteenth-century empire is politically and economically consolidated, seventeenth-century French and English imperialism is in the very process of constructing and legitimizing its own identity vis-àvis the Spanish predecessor, which had surpassed its zenith of colonial power already at the end of the 1500s, via an articulation of difference: Protestant England was to emerge as a benevolent alternative to Catholic Spain, its mission of "terror" (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, 110) and the resulting genocidal cruelties toward the indigenous populations in the Americas, made popular through the Black Legend, *la leyenda negra*. 8 Emphasizing difference between the Spanish and the English had been a discursive practice since the reign of Elizabeth I, who, in Ted Motohashi's ironical phrasing, "contrary to the evil Catholic King of Spain, truly cared for the well-being of the native population" (1999, 91), and continued in the representation of cultural contact and cooperation with indigenous populations in piratical chorographies (Kempe 2010, 179). Exquemelin reports that

… the Indians had hidden themselves in the forest, and the Spaniards could think of no better method than to bring in dogs to track them down. When any were found, the Spaniards hacked them to pieces and fed them to the hounds. Since that time, the Indians have been so terrified they dare not show themselves, and most of them have perished … . I myself have seen caves in the mountains full of human bones … . ([1678] 1969, 48–49)

Up to today, scholarship on piracy that simply reads the anti-Spanish Caribbean pirate as a figure of liberty (of proto-democracy, of free trade [Leeson, Storr], of egalitarianism, of anarchism [Kuhn], etc.) can be read in continuity with this Anglo-centric, nationalistic representation of the pirate as "a genuine emancipator" (Motohashi 1999, 91). The celebration of the pirate is thus also related to other cultural forms of missionary Protestant rhetoric in the context of colonial struggle and nation-building, as Nina Gerassi-Navarro (1999) has argued.

The process of English expansion in the Americas fascinated the English literate classes, who were in touch with colonial markets not only through monetary investment in commercial ventures but also via the consumption of Caribbean luxury goods such as sugar, tobacco, and cocoa—and of writings about the New World. Travel accounts, as Mary Louise Pratt argues in this context, "created the imperial order for Europeans 'at home' and gave them their place in it … . [It] made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of the empire accrued mainly to the few" ([1992] 2008, 3). The literature of piracy, with its promise of economic potential, the mapping of certain American landscapes as Edenic, and an emphasis on "prizes" of gold and silver, participated in this best-selling genre (Arnold asserts that the book "quickly convinced the elites of northern Europe that the early successes of the buccaneers demonstrated that the Spanish Main was … finally ripe for plucking," 2007, 10). The dissemination of the *leyenda negra*, rendering the Spanish nation the stereotypical embodiment of repression, degradation, brutality, religious and political intolerance, and intellectual and scientific backwardness (Powell [1971] 2008), was a strategy of legitimization to spur patriotic support of the English colonial project, which also motivated piratical ventures, as narratives of piracy highlight; in early English travel writing, Motohashi explains, the Spaniards are "excluded as a third term, because they have transgressed the 'universal'—European and Indian—code of human ethics" (1999, 94). Their defeat promised "a commonwealth based on an imaginary reciprocal accord and well-being" for both autochthonous populations and the English. In addition, the *leyenda* is an effective strategy to "designate Self as pure and as remote from hybridity as possible" by producing an "alien race close to its own European origin," emphasizing difference between the two: "This is the moralised logic behind the English colonising ideology as a latecomer to the expansionist venture."9

The popularity of piratical literature might also be attributed, apart from its appeal to fantasy, colonial enthusiasm, and sensationalist appetite and credulity, to its coincidence with the burgeoning taste for the lowlife picaresque in Europe, one of the most important developments in late sixteenth-century literature.10 This form of fictional autobiography flourished first in Spain and then in many European literatures through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Beeching 2000, 20); told from a first-person perspective, the picaresque relates a series of adventures of a usually lower-class, uneducated protagonist who is witty and sly enough to move up the social ladder. The travels and adventures—some of them voluntary, some involuntary—are told in a series of episodes and find an ending in the reintegration of the *pícaro* into the social order. J. S. Bromley emphasizes that the resemblances between the *pícaro* and the pirate in their libertinism were a result of the fact that both these outcasts, lowly social misfits, had nothing to lose: "willing to lose everything on the throw of a dice, then begin all over again … . Living from day to day, at the mercy of events, the picaresque rogue is seldom his own master for long, yet living on his wits he can assert his independence and turn the table on masters no more virtuous than himself" (9–10, quoted in Latimer 2009, 76).

For these reasons, piracy narratives share many of the characteristics of the picaresque (homodiegetic first-person narration, travel and adventure, episodic structure, transgression of social and legal norms), but attribute much more space to the narrative articulation of cultural contact, nature observation, and technical information (navigation, climate, etc.) as they are fundamentally fragmented in terms of generic form. The fact that Daniel Defoe, one of the main authors to translate the genre into English fiction in the early 1700s, turned to earlier narratives of piracy for many of his adventure books, indicates that seventeenth-century transatlantic piratical narratives are important forerunners of the Anglophone picaresque.

A contrapuntal reading of late seventeenth-century accounts of piratical ventures hence needs to take heed of the fact that the imperial subjects represented by these authors and narrators were themselves fragmented and fluid, border crossers on the margins of an empire in the making. In the process of discursively solidifying these new colonial subjectivities, these publications strive to create indigenous voices as pro-English, while African-Americans emerge, if at all, as mere traces of colonial violence. The texts themselves invite a contrapuntal reading, as their narrative voices are full of doubt and mistrust in their American environments (both natural and cultural), unsteady in their alliances (e.g., with indigenous and creolized Spanish populations; with the English imperial design and a proto-Creole alternative),11 and thus often hard to grasp. In Peter Hulme's phrasing, these are instances where "the text stutters in its articulation" and offers "levers to open out the ideology of colonial discourse, to spread it out, in this text, in an act of explication. … [N]o smooth history emerges, but rather a series of fragments which, read speculatively, hint at a story that can never be fully recovered" (1986, 12). Counterdiscourses disappear behind chorographic description and re-emerge as disturbances to a linear patriotic narration. I propose to characterize the multiplicity of these voices as piratical and coastal in order to emphasize their transgressiveness, instability and fluidity, but also their criticality in terms of legitimate authorship and coloniality.

In the following, I compare Exquemelin's 1678 *Zee*-*Roovers*, the earliest model of such piratical chorographies, with those of his English successors in order to highlight the shift taking place before the turn to the eighteenth century, as piracy was appropriated in writing and instrumentalized for a scientific imperialism in the context of a symbolic and factual empire-building that rested on gaining the authority of knowledge over the Americas.12 As Sarah Irving has argued in the context of the epistemological shift from allegorical, pre-modern, to taxonomic, modern science (proclaimed by Michel Foucault), "America was *conceptually* significant, as it gave shape to a tradition of empire as dominion over knowledge" (2007, 28).13 Similarly, Payton records a shift from "the enchanted worldview of romance to the disenchanted worldview of scientific modernity" (2013, 240) in his discussion of Exquemelin. Yet despite the efforts by Ringrose, Wafer, and most notably Wafer's friend William Dampier ("the best know sailor-narrator of the seventeenth century" [Munter and Grose 1986, 423] who became a member of the Royal Society due to the publication of his travel narrative) to legitimize the (semi- or illegal) piratical expedition by framing their narratives as science books, their texts also demonstrate the problematic of authority in this imperial endeavor. From a contrapuntal perspective, these narratives thus both hide and reveal the discomfort and fragility of colonial (symbolical and political) economies as "the material and discursive construction of imperialism becomes its own critique and the process of its development becomes its own overturning" (Payton 2013, 342 in reference to Hardt and Negri).

#### *2.1.3 The Caribbean Buccaneer-Pirate as an Embodiment of Crisis*

The term buccaneer, though it became conflated with pirate in the seventeenth century—also via popular accounts of piracy among the buccaneers since the 1640s—referred to Caribbean hunting communities that resisted subjugation by the French crown. Originally French Huguenots (a presence in the West Indies since the 1520s) and later joined by remnants of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army and other radical Protestants of various European nations (Hill 1984, 20; Latimer 2009, 11), the buccaneers can be viewed as showing an early form of creole consciousness; Exquemelin reports that they "strongly resented the attempt to bring them under subjection, in a land which belonged neither to the King nor the [French West India] Company, and resolved not to work rather than be dominated" ([1678] 1969, 62). In addition, the buccaneers were often welcomed and supported by colonist groups against official policies, as they often supplied them with cheap slaves and commodities (Latimer 2009, 235; English and French smugglers had even sold firearms to the Caribs, which they used in their fights against the Spanish colonizers, 62). Buccaneer leaders' names like the Dutchborn "Rock the Brazilian" (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, 80–82) are also indicative of creole rather than imperial identification.

The name for these "masterless men" (Rediker 2004, 286), sailors and indentured servants, unemployed workers and artisans, who took refuge as hunters in the forests of Hispaniola, Tortuga, and other fringe zones of the colonial empires, points to the cultural and linguistic hybridity of this group specifically and to the Caribbean contact zone in particular, placing the buccaneer on a continuum with the "Indian" and the Maroon/*cimarron* (runaway slave): "boucan" has been traced etymologically to the Taíno Arawak word for the place and wooden grating used to smoke-dry meat, a method the European refugees had learnt from these natives (who, by the late seventeenth century, had mostly died through diseases or been enslaved) and shared as a practice with the maroons (see Bev Carey's "Jerk Pork Connection," 1997, 66; De Lourdes Edwards 2007, 627; other sources call it a Carib word, e.g., Beeching 2000, 9). Buccaneer communities had their own code of social conduct and organization (the "custom of the coast" / Fr. "coutume de la côte," later also called "Jamaica discipline" in reference to the Jamaican pirates; Latimer 2009, 239), including the homosocial bonds of matelotage.14 They turned into pirates and mercenaries when the Spaniards, seeking to dissolve these outlaw communes, destroyed the wild herds of cattle on which their hunting society subsisted. Although the buccaneers were eventually eliminated by the English when they had made peace with Spain, both English and French agents in the Caribbean made frequent use of these men's excellent marksmanship and raiding skills in their wars against the Spanish trade monopoly. Thus, they were both resistant to and complicit in the colonial wars between the three major European empires, which instrumentalized yet never fully controlled their Caribbean "task force."15 Rennie calls them "Europeans who had become American savages [sic] … colonists in reverse, colonized by savagery, tribalized and culturally reinvented" similar to the later frontiersman (2013, 16).

As pirates, the buccaneers were defined *ex negativo* by their lack of any official, national backing. Their implicit political heterogeneity and indefinability represented a general threat to political categorization and order—the buccaneers have been described as unfathomable, unreliable, uncivilized, 'barbarous' and cruel, even monstrous, in contemporaneous accounts such as Exquemelin's, prone to gluttony and squander, defiant to industry and labor: a threat to the *translatio imperii* particularly in times of peace, when they could no longer be contained legitimately as privateers within the imperial project and endangered international colonial agreements: "Where previously a weak or tolerant state had tolerated smugglers," for instance, "now their resistance made them pirates" (Pérotin-Dumon 1991, 199). Economically, they stood for the opposite of the accumulative ethics that marked mercantilism and proto-capitalism, defying labor, frugality, and rational economic behavior—instead, the buccaneer-pirate was idle and profligate, an almost Bataillean figure of excess. As a figuration of alterity, he thus ranks in close relationship with the 'cannibal,' the 'savage,' and a number of outlawed subjectivities who tried to retain agency in the colonial theatre such as the maroon (but in opposition to the slave, who is defined by a denial of subjectivity and agency). In the foreword to his 1926 German translation of Exquemelin's *Zee*-*Roovers*, for example, Hans Kauders describes the buccaneers as "men of prey" (originally "Raubmenschen," my translation), drawing on the distinction between the raw and the cooked as a mark of civilization explored by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straus four decades later: they "plunged upon the culled bull and sucked the marrow, still warm from his bones, … devoured the meat, their only food, even raw if necessary, … [and] tortured their human victims most cruelly" (1926, 13).16

Yet even the representation of "monstrous pirates" in Exquemelin (or in Puritan anti-piracy sermons, for that matter) cannot hide that this alterity offered a way of life beyond official control, which for many was the only alternative to indenture, enslavement, and lethal exploitation. Captain John Smith explained the attractiveness of piracy for the English also in political-economic terms, writing that "King James who from his infancie had reigned in peace … had no imployment for those men of warre so that those that … were poore and had nothing but from hand to mouth, turned Pirats" (quoted in Latimer 2009, 30). Others had been left out of work and in debt in the course of the transformation of the plantation system into a slave economy (95); the phenomenon of Caribbean piracy and buccaneering can be understood as a symptomatic consequence of unemployment and of the uncontrollability of colonialists who developed an agency of their own. The moment of 'turning pirate' meant that sailors appropriated a mobility they had so far known only as a result of (usually economically motivated) coercion.

Out of a mass of sailors, plantation workers, indentured servants, and to some extent even slaves, all of whom became part and parcel for the stabilization of a fledgling Atlantic economy of accumulation in the seventeenth century (geared toward profit for its European centers), an Atlantic proto-proletariat was formed, as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker argue, formulating the concept of a "Red Atlantic" of expropriation and capitalism, proletarization and resistance—parallel to Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (Armitage 2001, 479; Linebaugh and Rediker 2000, 61). This early modern working class, essential as it was for the economic development of both land and sea, seems to have been informed by word of mouth about the fact that pirates organized themselves according to proto-democratic principles (one man, one vote), that they offered social security to some extent (such as injury compensation and pensions),17 that their only master was the crew and its chosen captain, and that this life promised more freedom, if not less hardship. The fact of communal solidarity, sharing, deliberation, and consensual problem-solving is often emphasized in the contemporary literature of piracy: the buccaneers are "extremely loyal" (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, 72); they "resolve by common vote where they shall cruise" (71); "the men decide whether the captain should keep [a captured ship] or not"; and they "helped one another all they could, those who had money sharing with those who had none" (232; see also Ringrose 1685, 150, 159, 162; Dampier 1697, 12: "none should live better than others, or pay dearer for any thing that it was worth").

Harking back to Christopher Hill's classic essay "Radical Pirates?" (1984) and Eric Hobsbawm's theorizations of *Primitive Rebels* (1959) and *Bandits* (1969), Linebaugh and Rediker's interpretation seems somewhat overdrawn if read against the texts under discussion in this chapter. While the narratives by Exquemelin, Ringrose, Dampier, and Wafer all mention collaboration with autochthonous peoples and the presence of Africans, they also make clear that members of these groups were hardly equal participants in the buccaneer-pirate communities. Quite to the contrary, *both* the buccaneers and their enemies used these groups as slaves, servants, and military personnel.18 A passage from the third part of Exquemelin's *Buccaneers* sets forth the ambivalent terms on which their ventures are based—the exploitation of women, African-Americans, and indigenous subjects:

The rovers are on such friendly terms with the native people they can stay and live among them without risk of harm, and without a care in the world. The Indians give them all they need, in exchange for which they give the Indians nothing but old knives, axes and tools … . When a rover comes there, he buys a woman from the Indians for an old axe or knife, and for this fee she must stay with him till he leaves … . A man who has taken an Indian wife has nothing to worry about: she brings him his daily food, as is customary among the Indians. The man need do nothing but a little hunting or fishing. A white man need not even do this, but may order an Indian to do it for him. … These Indians are a great asset to the rovers, as they are very good harpoonists [and] extremely skilful. … In fact, an Indian is capable of keeping a whole ship's company of 100 men supplied with food. … ([1678] 1969, 219–20)

The buccaneer-pirate crew is located in a colonial land of Cockaigne structured by an economy of color in Exquemelin's terms, as the "Indians" are constructed as stationary and at the service of the mobile rovers, and autochthonous women are sold for a fee, an act that virtually enslaves and immobilizes them as long as their (white) masters wish. At the same time, the relations between the buccaneers and "Indians" are described as harmonious; the text here does not paint the natives as cannibalistic, savage enemies, but as welcoming the buccaneers and as being happy to serve and labor for them. The superiority of whites—however "motley" their crews—is clearly upheld by such passages. Yet if, according to Hanna, many reports of "black or multiracial crews were fabricated" and related to fears of slave revolts rather than actual black pirates (2015, 384; see also my reading of Melville's "Benito Cereno"), this conception of pirates as "motley" testifies to their radical potential as subjects of resistance.

Pirates and buccaneers knew captivity and robbery, disenfranchisement, rape, and enslavement more often as agents than as victims. Quoting W. Jeffrey Bolster's seminal monograph about African-American seamen,

[b]uccaneering tempted black seamen with visions of invincibility, with dreams of easy money and the idleness such freedom promised, and with the promise of a life unfettered by the racial and social ideology central to the plantation system. Unattached black men operating in the virtually allmale world of the 'brotherhood of the Coast' realized those yearnings to a degree, but also found abuse and exploitation, as well as mortal combat and pursuit. (1997, 13)

To romanticize the buccaneer-pirate communities as either formations of resistance against or as complicit with an eventually benevolent, liberatory colonial project is thus a gross simplification; as liminal figures they did not find themselves beyond dominant relations and discourses, especially with regard to race and gender. In addition, the very fact that a wide range of piratical texts entailed proto-ethnographic, geographic, and nautical descriptions is evidence of the close relationship between the pirate and the explorer, who, in the case of William Dampier, was actually one and the same. Scholarship of Caribbean piracy, then, has to "resist the reduction of cross-cultural encounter to simple relations of domination and subordination" and "must acknowledge not only its complicity, but also its power of re-figuration and aspiration towards a more benign ethics of alterity" (Clark 1999, 3–4). The pirate at the end of the seventeenth century oscillates between a figure of alterity, defined by aberration from legal, social, religious, and cultural norms, and a figure of identification, who produced a fantastic imaginarium in which the armchair colonialists "whose lives have never taken them far from their mother's kitchen" (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, 188) back in Europe could imagine the New World as a place of abundance, liberty, and adventure; the designation of a new world itself suggested limitless possibilities for European economic, political, religious, and social renewal (Frohock 2004, 21).

In sum, the pirate-buccaneers can be understood as an embodiment of political, economic, and cultural-epistemological crisis. Pirates mark the erratic return of the repressed in the burgeoning colonial order due to the unpredictability of their actions and alliances; the defiance of an accumulative economy; and the threat they posed to categories of cultural categorization in the context of their 'going-savage' and their 'going-native,' collaborating with autochthonous groups and appropriating indigenous ways of life.

#### *2.1.4 Exquemelin's* **Zee-Roovers/Buccaneers of America**

The first book-length narrative to afford its readers "an inside look at Caribbean buccaneers" (Arnold 2007, 10) was *De Americaensche Zee*-*Roovers* of 1678 by Alexander Olivier Exquemelin, originally published in Dutch and in the course of only a few years (rather loosely) translated into German (Nuremberg 1679), Spanish (1681), English (1684), and French (1686) in numerous editions,19 which made it a transnational best-seller by seventeenth-century measures. The book presented European readers, often of "the wealthy Calvinist merchant class" (Arnold 2007, 13) with "a novel and shockingly candid portrait" (Frohock 2010b, 56) of the buccaneers, catering to the contemporary taste for the sensational and the spectacular, which was tightly intertwined with the imperial project of discovery, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued for the Renaissance context in *Marvellous Possessions*. The book became a standard source for subsequent piracy literature and fiction (e.g., by Captain Charles Johnson and Daniel Defoe). Published under the name of a (probably French) indentured laborer who became barber-surgeon for pirate captains François L'Olonnais and Henry Morgan,20 its author was actually not sufficiently fluent in Dutch to have written the book by himself (Beeching 2000, 19); it was most likely his Amsterdam publisher, Jan ten Hoorn, who brought Exquemelin's oral account (or perhaps French manuscript) into the form in which it was eventually published (Ouellet 2004, 53).

In the text, which is persistently marked by its collective authorship, by traces of orality, the process of translation, and linguistic, narrative, and formal hybridity,21 the implied author-narrator recounts his service in the French West India Company in Tortuga until the company's expedition is dissolved for bankruptcy and he is sold to a cruel master. Sick and on the verge of dying, he is bought by a philanthropic surgeon who lends him the money to buy back his freedom after his recovery. Wanting to return the money he owes and lacking other means of its acquisition, Exquemelin enlists with the buccaneers for five years before returning to Europe (he would return to the Caribbean in 1697, participating in the attack on one of the most important Spanish ports, Cartagena de Indias, in present-day Colombia).

Exquemelin's book is the most genuinely transnational, compared to Ringrose's, Wafer's, or Dampier's (whose cultural function can only be understood in the context of British empire-building); in her influential essay "Traveling Genres," Margaret Cohen cites the *Buccaneers* as a prime example of sea voyage narratives "whose national location is often hard to pinpoint due to the itinerant quality of their authors and publication histories" (481). Traditional concepts of authorship, of Dutch (or French) literature, of original and translation are difficult to apply here:

… on revient … à une période antérieure où la notion d'auteur original avait beaucoup moins d'importance … . Quant aux éditeurs, ils ne nient pas la réalité de l'auteur: ils s'en servent plutôt pour cautionner la véracité du livre qu'ils publient. Lors même qu'ils utilisent le texte de l'auteur comme un simple canevas, ils affirment avec emphase sa qualité de témoin pour donner de la crédibilité à une entreprise littéraire fort éloignée, thématiquement et idéologiquement, de ce qu'on imagine être l'original. (Ouellet 2004, 36)22

Falling between the cracks of any national literary historiography, Exquemelin's text has received little scholarly attention so far—despite the fact that transatlantic and transnational studies are by now a wellestablished perspective in literary and cultural studies.23 It presents a rare testimony of the Red Atlantic, written from the perspective of an indentured servant who underwent severe hardship under the command of various abusive masters—both outside and inside the buccaneer communities. As literature from *below* in terms of class and from *between* in terms of national tradition, it exposes colonial labor relations and systematic abuse that official histories glossed over for good reason:

[o]fficial histories provide no platform for exposing [colonial] abuses; the point of critique can come only from the perspective of the humble, solitary eye-witness, who has intimate knowledge, but also a moral distance, and who consequently can see that the horror of piracy, which consists of atrocities concealed and advanced through discursive manipulation, is also the horror of imperialism generally. (Frohock 2010b, 68–69)

All this happens under the pretense that the book is merely a description of horrific sea-rovers, when in fact it uses 'the horror of piracy' as *pars pro toto* for 'the horror of imperialism.'

The first seven chapters recount the author-narrator's travels to Tortuga and Hispaniola, accompanied by a detailed description of the islands' nature as marvelous and Edenic (spurred perhaps by his medical interest in plants, de Lourdes Edwards 2007, 626), explanations of the political relations between various European colonizing agents, the plantation economy and its harsh treatment of indentured servants and slaves, and an in-depth account of the buccaneers. Exquemelin's plea for better treatment of indentured servants by plantation owners of all nationalities articulates an Atlantic proto-proletarian consciousness across national borders that is quite stunning for the time:

[The planters] trade in human beings just like the Turks, selling bondsmen among themselves as people in Europe deal horses. … They make big promises [recruiting them among European peasants], but when the lads get to the island they are sold and have to work like horses, harder in fact than the Negroes.  They treat their bond-servants as cruelly as the [buccaneer] hunters do, showing them no pity at all. ([1678] 1969, 64)

The narrator goes on to describe the harsh working conditions, the bad diet, various illnesses (bodily and psychological) among them, and brutal torture such as smearing their wounds with lemon juice, salt, and red pepper after a beating. "They are forced to work with blows, often until they drop down dead.  I have often seen such cases, to my great sorrow" (64). Exquemelin also relates various examples of their attempts at resistance: of indentured young men who run away and starve to death, who kill their master and are hanged. He differentiates between various national practices on the Caribbean islands, but emphasizes that "[a]trocious cruelties" are common to the plantations regardless of the nationality of their owners. His charges mention tyrants like the planter Belteste on St. Kitts (65), who "dared to say it made no difference to him whether he should be damned or saved, so long as he could leave enough wealth behind him for his children" (66) or English planters who "treat their servants no better, but with greater cunning," continuously lengthening the period of indenture so that many men "have been enslaved in this manner for fifteen, twenty and twenty-eight years" and following "a strict law that when anyone owes the sum of twenty-five shillings … he may be sold as a slave for a certain period."

The subtitle promises "a pertinent and truthful description of the principal acts of depredation and inhuman cruelty committed by the English and French buccaneers against the Spaniards in America," countering the myth of the *leyenda negra* as it locates inhuman cruelty among English and French Protestants as well; in his report of buccaneer society, Exquemelin describes them as the worst masters of slaves and indentured servants, for example, "cruel and merciless to their bondsmen: there is more comfort in three years on a galley than one in the service of a boucanier" (55). Yet the book does not take sides with Spain either; "depredation and inhuman cruelty" are committed by all kinds of Caribbean agents in the book. The buccaneers themselves are represented as far from an egalitarian alternative for the Caribbean subalterns; the figure of the buccaneer is coastal in Exquemelin not just in terms of his localization on Caribbean (as well as Pacific) coasts, but also with regard to cultural contact, as the narration devises a colonial continuum between 'savage' autochthonous populations, Spanish colonizers, and Protestant newcomers through the representation of violence in all of these. The pirates are located somewhere between these identities. The buccaneers, Richard Frohock explains, "are not an anomaly in the colonial experience but rather an exemplar of the violence and exploitation perpetrated by imperialist centers" (2010b, 66). Exquemelin's text relativizes the construction of the pirate as Other, contesting the dominant construction of a binary opposition between legitimate and illegitimate Caribbean agents.

Numerous illustrative engravings (possibly by Jan Luykens, Arnold 2007, 13) emphasize this intermedially (e.g., Fig. 2.1): killings, subjugation, and methods of torture used by the buccaneers are described and depicted in gory and excessive detail (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, e.g., 11, 39, 106; also Payton 2013, 339), reminiscent of contemporary horror films, but are not limited to any one of these groups. To the contrary: the narrator authenticates his descriptions of torture methods, for instance, by naming an "Indian who had often treated his enemies in this manner, and it has also been seen by Christians living among these tribes" (39). The littoral space of the Caribbean itself, as the center of colonial struggles in the seventeenth century, rather than any specific group there, is constructed as violent.

The etchings articulate another paradoxical colonial continuum, representing the buccaneers both as 'uncivilized' brutes and as European gentlemen—emigrants who have successfully claimed agency in the Americas, despite their often gruesome deaths (which are represented in a manner of poetical justice).

**Fig. 2.1** Engraving in Exquemelin's *Buccaneers of America*, used in both the Dutch original and the English translations (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

The portrait gallery of the most notorious buccaneers indeed turns them into heroic "gentlemen of fortune," as they often insist to be called in Exquemelin's book. In this way, the text negotiates social mobility, highlighting the coastality of class difference: reaching the Caribbean coast entails the opening-up of a rigid European social system governed by both class inheritance and the beginning of the myth of American freedom and a classless society. In contrast to the legitimate colonizer, the pirate's ascent seems to be predicated on exploitation and criminal transgression, but Exquemelin's colonial continuum disturbs this binary vision.

The violent continuum is extended beyond the Caribbean coast toward the Pacific via Panama but also reaches back to Europe. Emphasizing violence, deviance, and difference in the West Indies in terms of both nature and cultures, Exquemelin presents an exotic, transgressive, and spectacular Caribbean Other and a space of marvel and awe to the metropolitan reader (a hermeneutic strategy that primarily creates satisfaction among colonial audiences that expect this topos of the ethnographic narrative, Hartog 1988, 230–37). But because he has to bridge the hermeneutic gap of the Atlantic, the text relies on comparisons, analogies, and similes, yet another of the major hermeneutic strategies to render the 'exotic' and the unknown believable and comprehensible (225–30). With Europe as a reference point, for instance, Exquemelin compares "the coming of the hunters and the privateers" to Caribbean coastal towns with that of "the East India ships and men-of-war" to Amsterdam ([1678] 1969, 54), which are both accompanied by wild feasts and wastefulness; more frequently, foreign plants and animals are set into relation with European flora and fauna. As ordering and structuring instruments, these similes aim at pacifying the colonial chaos of the Caribbean, but read contrapuntally, they construct the dark side of coloniality as not beyond, but at the very heart of Europe: without the *absent center* in constant reference, America cannot 'mean' anything. Taking into account these ambiguities of narrative identification and distancing, the piratebuccaneers are hard to pin down conceptually; they appear as mobile subjects in a colonial continuum of economic exploitation, violent practices of oppression, and resistance, a continuum that begins in Europe and stretches across and beyond the Atlantic. They are neither mere outlaw disturbers of imperial maritime undertakings, nor, conversely, straightforward supporters of these ventures. Exquemelin articulates, with the figure of the buccaneer at the center, a culturally hybrid population on the fringes of metropolitan control and comprehension.

The subtitle also indicates an authorial attempt of dissociation from the pirates, necessary first in order not to endanger Exquemelin's legal position as their servant rather than fellow buccaneer, and second not to undermine his authority by associating him with these outlaws. The tension between familiarity and distance is pertinent throughout the book; as Richard Frohock has argued, Exquemelin "must show himself to have been close enough to have observed events firsthand, but sufficiently removed that the disrepute of piracy does not tarnish his character" (2010b, 57). This is apparent already on the title page, billing the narrative as written by one "who himself, *of necessity*, was present at all these acts of plunder" (my emphasis).

Narrative dissociation works on another level as well: although the Spaniards are made responsible by the book for the mistreatment and destruction of the indigenous populations, in accordance with the *leyenda negra*, the narrator does not side with any national-colonial project as his voice remains at a distance from any sort of national loyalty as well as from the buccaneers themselves (see also Payton 2013, 340). Only when Exquemelin thematizes his personal history autobiographically, authorial distance is briefly interrupted; these sections establish a firm narrative "I": "As a servant of the [French West India] Company myself, I was among those sold, and had just the ill luck to fall into the hands of the wickedest rogue in the whole island" ([1678] 1969, 34; the "wickedest rogue" here does not refer to a slave-holding buccaneer master, but Tortuga's deputy governor). When he is resold to his savior, he recounts: "When I was free once more, I was like Adam when he was first created. I had nothing at all, and therefore resolved to join the privateers or buccaneers." Evoking biblical innocence also in terms of knowing—Adam when he was first created instead of Adam after having eaten from the tree of knowledge—in this representation of his agency's rebirth, the narrator implies that freedom also means the necessity to take care of one's subsistence. Legitimizing the buccaneers by calling them "privateers" here, the narrator strives to present himself as indigent and socially detached, an outsider rather than a voluntary associate (Frohock 2010b, 58). This disassociation is also strengthened at the beginning of chapter six, when he refers back to how he "was driven to join the pirates"—now using the term to delegitimize them as he does not "know what other name they deserve, as they were not backed by any prince" (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, 67). It is significant that the various denominations—buccaneer, privateer, pirate—are often used interchangeably in the book, demonstrating the narrator's great ambiguity in terms of the(ir) linguistic and legal categorization—his coastal vision of the pirate as a figure suspends clear categorization. His cautiously careful dis-identification of course also owes to his own ambiguous legal position as (quasi-indentured) servant of the buccaneers—he refers to "my own master" among them, for instance (82)—while being treated with respect for his skills as barbersurgeon.24 Yet a third aspect is the preservation of narrative authority by distancing himself from the pirates. The narrative voice remains liminal, at the crossroads of identification, as familiar categories seem out of joint.

The establishment of narrative authority and authenticity is indeed crucial in Exquemelin's and similar chorographical-piratical texts. One of the major questions about the genre of the seventeenth-century pirate narrative thus relates to the strategies necessary to lend authority and credibility to sensational stories about pirate-buccaneers. As Richard Frohock argues, the historian's interest in Exquemelin and the question of truth versus fiction is less fruitful than considering how Exquemelin "continually engages with issues concerning language and authority," as he "was fascinated with the challenges of producing credible accounts of experience and with the techniques and politics of manipulating narrative for empowerment" (2010b, 56). The nature of crisis in Exquemelin, as I argue, is one of authority and the word, a crisis of narrative form and of identification with the coloniality of power in terms of its dichotomous categories of rational and irrational, civilized and savage, good and bad.

Frohock has identified mainly two narrative modes in Exquemelin: the first-person authorial voice that is presented as credible and independent, and the critical dialogic voices inserted through the frequent use of reported speech, including that of the "linguistic rebel[]" (2010b, 57) of the buccaneer. Arguably, there is a third mode that helps him not to undermine this delicately constructed authority (e.g., by being identified as a criminal pirate), that is when the narrator completely obliterates his own voice (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, 58); becoming heterodiegetic, he thus hides behind factual observation (but reappears whenever further authorization is needed). Consequently, the relationship between narrator and narrative becomes fraught and unclear—especially when cruelty and excess, sumptuousness and wasteful squandering are reported and Exquemelin veils his own role in the events. Here the buccaneers are clearly "they":

They squander in a month all the money which has taken them a year … to earn. They drink brandy like water, and will buy a whole cask of wine, broach it, and drink until there's not a drop left. Day and night they roam the town, keeping the feast of Bacchus so long as they can get drink for money. The service of Venus is not forgotten, either. (54)

For that is the way with these buccaneers—whenever they have got hold of something, they don't keep it for long. They are busy dicing, whoring and drinking so long as they have anything to spend. Some of them will get through a good two or three thousand pieces of eight in a day—and next day not have a shirt to their back … . Yes, and many other impieties. (81–82)

Women, again, are the providers of service, while men are mobile, consuming subjects, roaming the towns; other providers of military and labor service, unsurprisingly, are "Negroes" and "Indians" (as they are termed throughout the book). The narrator, although to some degree part of the piratical crew himself, obliterates his presence and role in these events completely (rather than addressing a moral dilemma as witness of these scenes or as immoral participant), creating the impression of passive and objective observation, concomitant with the seventeenthcentury "invention" of the concepts of truth, objectivity, and rationality (Shapiro 1983). The use of the first-person narrative "I," although it creates involvement and presence rather than distance, can also be read as a strategy of individual dissociation from the collective "buccaneers." Nevertheless, on 38 of about 200 pages, the first-person plural narrative "we" appears mostly vis-à-vis autochthonous groups (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, e.g., 211) or regarding collective decision-making processes; occasionally, Exquemelin also uses an authorial plural developing into a "we" that includes the reader ("Having … described these ceremonies of the sailors, we will now continue our journey," 27; "While our rovers are engaged in this work, I will briefly describe," 115), thus constructing a colonial collective that includes the European armchair adventurer. The entire narrative appears extremely fragmented by the frequent changes in narrative mode, leaving much space for the reader's imagination, but also creating disorder and chaos in the reader's mind—despite all efforts in the construction of narrative authority.25

Exquemelin needs help in this narrative construction work: as the narrator repeatedly emphasizes, he derives his authority first from a discourse of witnessing and testimonial. Second, he emphasizes knowledge of informants of various cultural backgrounds and their trust in him: "trustworthy persons" (45) like the above-mentioned "Indian" whom he lends his voice—not in order to render subaltern voices audible for his European readers, but for his own advantage, catering to the enhancement of his credibility and reputation as an informant. In a contrapuntal reading, however, the fact that he uses "savages" as voices of authority also shows the dependence of metropolitan publications and their credibility on the native informant.

In contrast to Dampier's, Ringrose's, and Wafer's narrators, Exquemelin's voice is much more insecure and frail, certainly also because he is exiled from official colonialism through the experience of indenture, the economic failure of the colonial endeavor, and a lack of opportunity for re-integration into any national 'home' society.26 The coastal subject of the contact zone is unable to discursively control chaotic colonial identities-in-transculturation, buccaneers as well as "Indians" and Spaniards, swerving between admiration and indignation, collaboration and resistance. In the case of the pirates, their portrayal ranges from respect for their fraternity and mutual loyalty to contempt of their way of life and sheer horror of their "barbarous" (200) ways, for example when he reports that they almost exclusively live on meat, "even eat apes" (106), literally lick the blood of their enemies (106) and in times of starvation "determined to eat the Indians" (118) and "had been found picking the corpses of the fallen Spaniards" (206).27 In this way, Exquemelin's book demonstrates that the Caribbean, as a space of all kinds of imperial and colonial struggles, turns everyone into "savages" even "cannibals"—effectively de-ethnicizing and de-essentializing these terms, central to colonial epistemology.

This paradoxical attitude is perhaps most explicit in Exquemelin's report of Henry Morgan and his raid on Panama, in the second part of *The Buccaneers of America*. The narrator is fascinated by Morgan's popularity and his leadership skills, which, despite his cruelty, earned him the solidarity of up to a thousand buccaneers, plundering the Spanish riches in his command. The episode starts with an avowal of belief in the glorious fate of the Protestants in their battle against the Spanish Catholics: in a providentialist vein typical of all of the texts under consideration in this chapter, the "curious reader shall see how God permitted the unrighteousness of the buccaneers to flourish, for the chastisement of the Spaniards" (167): the legitimacy of the buccaneer-pirates, however monstrous, is that they are needed to combat enemies of equal monstrosity, in reference to the *leyenda negra*; "God allows the cruelty of the buccaneers in order to exact vengeance on the Spaniards for their deplorable history of cruelties in the Americas" (Frohock 2010b, 66). The violence and success of the monstrous buccaneers is expressive of a higher power, which not only explains Morgan's ruthlessness, but is presented as necessary in order to save the New World for Protestantism and England (Arnold 2007, 12).28 Ironically, this providentialism constitutes an English reproduction of Spanish colonial discourse, which also fashioned itself as God's plan (Frohock 2004, 33).

After reports of great starvation among the troops and Spanish and indigenous resistance (Exquemelin [1678] 1969, 189–92), the text continues to describe Morgan's methods of torture in detail. The women of Panama City are not spared, though they are depicted as susceptible to the gallantry of the buccaneers. Again, the narrator distances himself from the violence of the pirates and reports that he secretly helps the Spanish victims of the buccaneers. Eventually, he appears similar to the Spanish women themselves, who had been warned that they would not be able to bear the sight of the "buccaneers' deformity" (202) since they were more like animals than Spaniards (metonymically used for humans); when they first encounter the pirates, however, they shout, according to Exquemelin: "Jesus, the robbers are just like us Spaniards, … as courteous as if they were Spanish!" Again, a colonial continuum (rather than an opposition) of behaviors is affirmed—here, the difference between 'bad' Catholic Spaniards and 'good' Protestants, between buccaneer savagery and humanity is held in suspension by the dissonant, contrapuntal voices of female colonists, which no official history would record. This polyphony likens the women of the town to the narrator: they both appear indecisive in their view of the pirates, expressing both disgust and admiration.

Morgan, who had risen from an indentured servant to a plantocrat partly backed by the Jamaican governor Modyford, felt misrepresented. As he was trying to rehabilitate himself and make a political career (he had become a nobleman and vice-governor of Jamaica in 1674 and had turned against the buccaneer-pirates, now fearing for his position when the Catholic King James II succeeded to the throne), he sued the two English publishers that had sold "Esquemeling's" book in two different translations in a premiere in the history of English law, since it was the first case of libel: "He was not a pirate, he said; he was a privateer, and therefore respectable. He … insisted that 'there are such thieves and pirates called buccaneers who subsist by piracy, depredations and evil deeds of all kinds without lawful authority, that of these people Henry Morgan always had and still has hatred'" (Latimer 2009, 256; also Arnold 2007). Morgan won and received compensation money, and the publisher Crooke subsequently issued an apology for the association of Morgan with piracy.29

In sum, by alternately stressing similarity and difference between the Caribbean and Europe, Exquemelin's text is testimony to a transatlantic population-in-transculturation on the fringes of metropolitan control, inhabiting, in the words of Eric Wolf, "the margins of constituted society and liv[ing] off the flotsam and jetsam of its resources" (1982, 154–55). These multiethnic populations, a "great mingling of races" according to Exquemelin ([1678] 1969, 36)—Europeans, autochthones, *cimarrones*, and slaves—are met with both sympathy (even identification) and distance, rendering the narrative heterogeneous and full of inner tension, emblematic of a crisis in epistemology, a crisis of knowing and telling that accompanied the colonial project in the Americas.

#### *2.1.5 Attempts at Consolidation: Pirate-Scientists' Texts*

Exquemelin's chorographic adventure book achieves no narrative closure, but "the acceleration of a public dialogue about buccaneers and others who fabricated discourse to conceal imperial plundering" (Frohock 2010b, 69). Anglophone pirate narrative published in the two decades following Exquemelin's book partook in this discourse.30 In these later works, the narrative voices representing Protestant pirates in the Caribbean are stabilized and consolidated as the pirate disappears and is displaced by the privateer as a sign of legitimacy. Buccaneer authors and their editors used new strategies of legitimation—they discontinued the use of the word pirate, dedicated their writings to officials in England, published their accounts as part of collections of travel writing, and presented their actions as an increasingly benign Protestant reconquest in the service of English (and a failing Scottish) imperialism.31 Former pirates like Morgan contested representations of themselves as brutal outlaws, legitimizing themselves (and thus also saving themselves from the gallows) as important agents in the context also of a symbolic empirebuilding that rested on gaining the authority of knowledge over the Americas.

In the 1680s and 1690s, a pentalogy of pirate narratives was published in the context of Captain Bartholomew Sharp's plunders, the most successful one by William Dampier. In chronologic progression, they develop into travel narratives that hide their piratical context, as their titles demonstrate: Basil Ringrose's *The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharp and Others, in the South Sea: Being a Journal of the Same* (1684)32 and *The Dangerous Voyage and Bold Attempts of Captain Bartholomew Sharp* (1685), published as the second volume of Crooke's 1684 English edition of Exquemelin's *Bucaniers* [sic] *of America*; Dampier's *A New Voyage Round the World* (1697, published in five editions within less than a decade and reprinted many times in collected editions [Edwards 1994, 17]), Lionel Wafer's *A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America* (1699), and Captain Sharp's *Journal of His Expedition; Written by Himself of the Same Year*. In England, the seventeenth century "saw an ever more successful attempt to bring the pirate into the fold of … imperial aspirations," which also holds true for the textual strategies to represent the figure (Sherman 2002, 28); Crooke's 1684 English edition of Exquemelin, now dedicated to the rehabilitated Henry Morgan, had prepared the ground for this development. Yet while Exquemelin's transnational narrative voices ambivalence and ambiguity in terms of the narrator's positioning and the articulation of the Caribbean buccaneerpirate, the historical context of an increasing anti-piracy sentiment (and according to laws such as the 1698 *Act for the more effectual Suppression of Piracy*)33 made English privateer-pirates such as Ringrose,34 Dampier, or Wafer largely obliterate cruelty and savagery, whitewashing their expeditions into heroic acts of patriotism and exploration and attempting to consolidate the crisis of authority and knowing (Edwards 1994, 22–28). Accordingly, the use of the word "pirate" and even "buccaneer" decreases continuously in these books, and the plundering recedes "behind increasingly inflated characterizations of the conqueror's generosity and benevolent intent" (Frohock 2004, 25); but despite these imperial efforts, even these texts cannot entirely subjugate the dissonant voices of piracy as a coastal phenomenon of the Caribbean contact zone. Read contrapuntally, such efforts at consolidation of a coastal figuration are always already haunted by the voices they try to suppress; the ghost of the Other, *pace* Derrida, can be found as traces in the text if we read it against the grain. The dissonant voice of piracy as a coastal phenomenon of the Caribbean contact zone does not disappear.

The general historical context for these narratives is fundamentally that of British empire-building and the tradition of British semi-legal piracy since the reign of Elizabeth I, *The Pirate Queen* (Ronald 2007). After the successful destruction of Spanish hegemony in the Caribbean achieved by the destruction of the Spanish Armada under the leadership of "gentleman pirate" Sir Francis Drake in 1588, English plans to increase its powers in the Americas were not always successful in the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Oliver Cromwell's Western Design (1654) had marked another epochal moment in English expansion that David Armitage defined as "the imperial moment of the English republic," forsaking the more peaceful approach of the Stuarts (quoted in Latimer 2009, 118).