Richard Blakemore - Enemies of All

25:51But there's a sort of there's a precarity. Some of these colonies are destroyed. Some of these colonies collapse. None of them, with hindsight, we know that many of them go on to continue, but it's not necessarily clear at the time. There also seems to be a reluctance to invest because they're such risky prospects. And the role of plunderers is therefore really crucial in a number of ways, particularly in the Caribbean, where you are attacking the Spanish Empire. Plunder and the trade that arises from it is one of the biggest economic incentives. And since people from England are reluctant to invest, that's where merchants are getting their profits through this trade.

26:28And then that's being invested in the colonies, supplying colonies with provisions and also with defence, which is very important. So often they also are relying, there are no military resources sent by the state to these colonies. So they are relying upon privateers or private forces to defend themselves, militia, things like this. And this relationship continues through those first decades, leading to increased investment, particularly in the Caribbean. and everything really orientates around the Caribbean, especially once you introduce sugar. Sugar had been introduced to Brazil by Portuguese and Dutch colonists, and then was shifted to the Caribbean by Dutch colonists.

27:08And it becomes enormously profitable very, very quickly in the 1650s and onwards. And so investment from plunder is part of what's driving the rapid growth of the sugar economy. And then Northern American colonies like New England become involved in shipping what they are growing, foodstuffs, to the Caribbean to feed Caribbean populations. And so this kind of intricate network of exchanges around the Atlantic and with Europe kind of grows. But plunder has a key role as an early kind of spark to that by providing quick returns, which you don't get from the investment in tobacco or sugar because it takes a long time for those returns to come back.

27:49And of course, there are two kind of dimensions that come out of this. One, which I haven't mentioned yet, is slavery. All of sugar is based on slavery. And the investment from plundering is clearly going into the growth of the slave economy in the Caribbean. Many plunderers, Henry Morgan, who you may know from Captain Morgan's Rum, he becomes a slaveholder himself. Many other plunderers also invest in slavery. And that, ironically, then actually shifts attitudes because as you get the growth of this enormous majority in every Caribbean island, enslaved people are the majority. That leads to real concerns about security and stability.

28:30And so piracy becomes to look a lot less appealing when it looks like it might destabilize this brutal slavery regime. So although plundering plays this really key role in the early investment that leads into the growth of these transatlantic economies, as they become more secure, as they become more stable, but also as they become more dependent on slavery, then you have these sorts of shift that drives the government response against piracy more intensely in the late 1600s, the early 1700s. So let me ask you, I want to come back to the slavery because I have a particular question with that. But just to come back again, and I think this is a very, you know, you're a language person.

29:08I like winning spelling bees. I really like this part of your book. Where does the term pirate come from? And then also, can you teach us how we got the word buccaneer? Yeah. So as you said, I'm obsessed with language. I'm upfront about that in the book. And my students have dealt with that for many years, all these different terms. Pirate comes from Latin and Greek pirata, and it's clearly been used in Roman times. And even in Roman times, it has a kind of derogatory connotation. So, again, a pirate is an enemy of Rome. It's been used by Roman speakers like Cicero, but explicitly to mean enemies of Rome.

29:49It then seems to require more specific legal meaning through the medieval period and into the period we're talking about, the 1600s. I think this kind of has a double life. It has this legal definition, which as we've talked about earlier, is trying to distinguish whether plunder is authorized or not. In that case, I think it has quite a specific meaning. But it also clearly has this broader cultural life, which starts in the Roman period and carries on where, you know, accusing someone of being a pirate is a really strong accusation. It has all of these associations. It becomes more sensationalized, which is maybe something we might talk about a bit later as well.

30:26Well, I was going to say also, I think you comment in the book, and I hope I get extra credit for remembering this, but outside my notes, you discuss St. Augustine's comments about a pirate talking to Alexander the Great, where it's, and I don't remember the exact quote, but he pretty much says like, this is the life I live, this is who I am, and kind of gets to that kind of cultural trope, if you will. Yeah, exactly. So Augustine, one of the church fathers in the medieval period, writes this story about Alexander capturing a pirate and saying, how dare you infest the sea? And the pirate says, well, how dare you infest the world?

31:00But you've got a big army, you're called an emperor, I've got one ship I'm called, although I'm not sure if the original Latin actually uses pirata, I think you might use thief in the original Latin. Sure. Not that this ever happened because obviously Augustine came many, many centuries later after I was in the Great. But the story gets recycled, right? Even in the 20th century, I think it's Noam Tromsky uses it as a book title, right? So the story gets translated as pirates in the period we're talking about. So it shows that I'm also interested in how kind of words develop and change and also interaction between different languages because pirate exists in a lot of European languages.

31:36It doesn't exist in the same way in other languages. And so again, we talked about different concepts of plundering. I was talking about European international law, but Indian Ocean empires also are using plundering and they don't have a word pirate. And when you translate their words with pirate, you're kind of layering on a load of assumptions that we have in European culture that might not be there in the original languages. So this kind of cultural meaning, which, again, I think becomes really developed in this period through some of the publications and the theater and the songs that I think might come up a bit later in this podcast.

32:12You mentioned buccaneer as well. And again, that's a really curious example because it comes from probably a Taino or Arawaka, an indigenous Caribbean word, bukan or mukan, which means to grill meat. It's a way of cooking meat. and the first people to use the word boucan are french writers talking about boucanier which means people who are cooking meat who are hunting in the caribbean so you have these kind of hunters who are living outside of colonial settlements who are basically roaming wild in less heavily populated regions and who are famous for hunting cooking the meat trading the meet. And that word buccaneer means hunters for several decades.

32:57And it still means that in French, buccania is not a word French people use for pirates. But it becomes in English, the word for raiders, probably in the 1670s, when you start, again, you get books published. There's a pretty famous book called Buccaneers of America, which is a Dutch book. And in Dutch, it's called Zee Rovers, which means sea robbers. But when it's translated into English, it uses the word buccaneers. And so that seems to be the point at which the word shifts to meaning sea plundering. But again, it has this very interesting dynamic because it's used in a pejorative way by some writers, but some buccaneers who are themselves writing use the term.

33:39And some people seem to use it in a positive way. And I think it still has that ambiguity, Right. It kind of when I talk to my students about it, we're talking specifically about the Caribbean, also some voyages into the Pacific. We're talking specifically about a phase in the 1660s, 70s, 80s, that group of people who are called buccaneers. But it seems to have this flamboyance to it. It seems to have this kind of. Swashbuckling is the term that also comes to mind. Like, in other words, if you look and say, gosh, you're having to break the law for a living, well, that would that would be unenjoyable.

34:14Now, then again, you have quite a bit of autonomy and freedom. Well, that's a very positive thing in comparison. Definitely. And I mean, there are British politicians who not long ago suggested that this country ought to recover its buccaneering spirit. I'm not sure that's necessarily where we want to go. But again, I think the fact that this book, this word appears in exactly this period in the 1650s and 60s and 70s, like privateer, which appears at the same time. These are new concepts. These are new issues. Piracy has existed for a long time, the idea of piracy. But the emergence of these words tells us quite a lot about how people are thinking about it, how people are trying to pin it down.

34:54And I think that really then comes to a head in the early 1700s with that most famous moment in the aftermath of the war of the Spanish succession. That's the moment when you get people like Blackbeard, Anne Bonny and Mary Reed, Calico Jack, Steve Monnet. All the really famous pirates are happening at that time. And they are also then being immortalized in popular culture at that time as well. And I think that's such a big part of why this moment has come to signify pirate. Because when you think of the word pirate, that's who you think of, right? Yeah, those are the tales. I was going to also, you know, you did a really good job explaining, who's king or queen can really decide who's a pirate or not.

35:36And you kept mentioning the Jacobite pirates, for example. Explain how the changes at the monarchy seat would affect who was a privateer versus a pirate from that view. So because there is a lot of political turmoil in this period, you have it in the late 1500s with the wars of religion in France, the Dutch Revolt, changing the political landscape of Europe. You have civil wars in Britain in the 1640s and 50s, and civil conflict in France in the 1650s as well. Then you have this change of government in the 1680s and 90s when William III, who is the ruler of the Netherlands, becomes ruler of England as well.

36:19The old Stuart Line are trying to reclaim their throne and are authorizing privateers. What that does is it destabilizes the system based on sovereigns authorizing violence. Because if you don't know who your sovereign is, or if you have multiple people claiming to be sovereign, so for example, the Dutch are provinces belonging to the Spanish crown, but when they declare independence, they authorize raiders that are called the Vartafusen or sea beggars. The Spanish do not recognize this as legitimate, right? Because they don't recognize the legitimate existence for something like 80 years. So it's that turmoil, I think, is a key element.

37:01It raises these questions about who actually has the authority to decide what is piracy and what is not piracy. And then the other dimension of that, as well as the political turmoil, is this question of imperial expansion. Because as European regimes come into contact with other rulers, other empires, people like the Mughal Empire or the Maratha Confederacy in India, China. Well, you talk about the Ming and then the Qing empires and like the trade-off of Taiwan. I was sitting there thinking, gosh, man, you just taught me that Taiwan has always been a trouble spot for whatever seat of power in China.

37:38Yeah, absolutely. So you have these rival dynasties fighting in China. You have indigenous communities in the Americas. apparently some buccaneers claim that they are serving the ruler or guna ruler in the islamis of darian although some of them admit that they're basically just saying that because they want to go and get lots of plunder you also have uh plundering in the car in plundering in the mediterranean where um you have the kind of conflict between islam and christianity which has been going on from the medieval period and in theory you have this big raiding conflict along religious lines although in practice everyone is capturing everybody else and the religious justification seems to be just a veneer.

38:20You get these debates both internally and externally about who has the authority to declare piracy because who is a sovereign? Who is a legitimate sovereign? So places like Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, which are authorizing raiders, European monarchs don't recognize them because they're regencies under the Ottoman Sultan. There's an interesting relationship where the Ottoman Empire is sort of allowing them to kind of act or they are acting autonomously because the Ottomans can't necessarily control or find it beneficial to let them do all this raiding. But the Europeans think of them as pirates. So that question of who is a legal sovereign, who has the right to authorize piracy, what plundering is legitimate is a debate that goes on.

39:07I mean, it goes on from the Roman era, but it really intensifies with all of these circumstances in the 17th and 18th centuries. Various writers say, oh well, if you're plundered because a sovereign has authorised you and you're doing that to defend the rights of your state, then you're not a pirate. If you're a robber band who's just plundering for the sake of it, then you're pirates. But then some of them say, but if you're a robber band who exists for a while, maybe you can acquire legitimacy and actually become a sovereign state. So there's a very blurred categories that are really causing a lot of complexity and trouble at this time.

39:43You mentioned Tripoli and Tunis for the hotspots in the Mediterranean. We mentioned Madagascar earlier as kind of a hotspot in the Indian Ocean to Mediterranean route. In the Caribbean at the time, in the 17th century, what would be like your top three, top four ports that would be really where the pirates were? Well, it shifts over time in accordance with who the dominant raiding group is. So in the early 1600s, the Dutch West Indies Compagnie are the main raiders, and they're based out of places like Curaçao. Later though, Jamaica and Tortuga off the coast of Hispaniola, or the French colony of Saint-Amand, as the western part of the island becomes, those really become the key centres of raiding in the 1650s, 60s, and 70s.

40:34Also Petit Guave in Saint-Amand. And that's linked to those economic issues we were talking about earlier. these are places where merchants are interested in acquiring plunder. Port Royal in Jamaica goes from a tiny fort to one of the largest towns in the English colonies in the space of a couple of decades because of the influx through plunder. Tortuga and Petit Goa as well become these centres. But as we've been talking about, these imperial governments start to try to crack down on that as the economic situation changes, as the political situation changes. Jamaica introduces stricter laws from 1680.

41:16The French government is trying to stop Saint-Domingue and Pédiguerre again around the same time. Then it shifts further to the Bahamas, and also to Florida and the North American colonies, Rhode Island, Charleston, New York. Again, it's some of those general circumstances we talked about earlier. The Bahamas is hard to police because there are so many islands. Tons of islands. Impossible. As you explain that in your book, I thought it's tough to figure out where you want to vacation on the Bahamas, let alone where you'd hide out as a pirate. There are probably still some pirates hiding out, right?

41:48They're probably from isolated islands. And there's not that big a settler population there. You're also with the Bahamas and Charleston, you're very close to San Agustin in Florida, which is a Spanish base at this time. So the proximity of enemies, again, that kind of risk of attack. San Augustine and Charleston just seem to keep attacking each other over and over and over again in a sort of, you did it first, so we'll come and attack you kind of way. Sure. So the kind of locust changes and the Bahamas, I think, are the last main center and then even they are captured by, again, a private fleet authorized by the British government to go out and deal with these pirates.

42:28But it's not the Navy. It's a private expedition that actually recaptures the Bahamas from a group of pirates. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance. If you're an investor who fears stock market failure like I do, and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

43:02Investing involves risks including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by UMB Distribution Services, LLC, not affiliated. So you mentioned Port Royal as an example. This town grew up pretty quickly. What was entertainment like in the town? You know, was there gambling? What was the bar scene like? You know, also, So, you know, what this is a very uninhabited part of the world, as you mentioned a few minutes ago.

43:39Were there a lot of ladies around? Were those ladies choice? Were they just needed? How did all that go? So it depends a little bit how much you believe the reputation that Port Royal acquired, because it acquires reputation as the worst place, as Sodom and Gomorrah, as a den of sin and iniquity, gambling, whoring. Like Las Vegas today. Yeah, you know, it's got that sense of kind of, you know, illegal things become legal there. There's various stories about the kind of drunken routes and fighting and prostitution on the street and all sorts of flamboyant behaviours. And there is probably some truth in that, you know, there are records of punishment and some people are being punished for some of these things.

44:24It certainly rapidly grows. I think it's the second biggest town after Boston in the English Atlantic Empire or the Atlantic Seaboard in the space of a few decades. It also, interestingly, has a much more balanced population of men and women than you find in many other colonies where you have many more young male settlers, which again suggests the sort of influx of people traveling there. But I think it's also a bit more complicated. I mean, there is some truth in that image, and it's certainly a well-known image at the time. It's destroyed by an earthquake in 1692. And everyone sees that as a providential punishment, right?

44:57Everyone says, well, of course, this was - Wrath of God. Yeah, absolutely. But it's also, like I said, more complicated. It's definitely very heavily involved in maritime trade. You've got a lot of craftsmen working for maritime trade provisions, surgeons, things like that. Silversmiths, interestingly, even though they don't produce any silver in Port Royal or Jamaica, so we can probably guess where the silver is coming from, that they are working with silversmiths in the town. I think you mentioned like cockfighting would have been a normal practice at that time. Yeah. And then there were five or six well-known taverns in town.

45:30Yeah. Although, I mean, East London at the time is probably fairly similar in many regards. Cockfighting is a big thing everywhere in English culture at that time. And you also have, you know, other kinds of artisans who are making things. you have more children in that town actually than you have in many other uh regions of the british empire at that time you have a synagogue and you know different churches of different denominations which is quite unusual quite a lot of these colonies in north america are settled by specific religious groups and are quite specifically focused whereas port royal seems to be much more open in that regard um you have a bookseller you have a teacher you have quite a complexity so i I think, you know, downtown on a Saturday night would probably have looked pretty much like it's being described in some of these accounts.

46:20But I don't think that's the entire story of life in Port Royal. Also, the fact that there were so many women there would say that it had to be more settled than just roving men. In other words, there was a reason why those ladies would go there and not other places. Yeah, I think there are definitely there's families, you know, there's settling of some kind. It's worth adding that some of these people, men and women, are convicts who are being transported. This is the origin of the transportation of people who are convicted in England. Some of them are also that the word kidnapping comes from this period and a kidnapper was someone who tricked someone or captured someone in London or wherever and transported them forcibly to the Caribbean.

47:00So there are people there who don't want to be there, who've been forced to be there. I don't want to make it a cute or cuddly image, but I also think it's very easy, particularly with the history of piracy, to fall into these images and these reputations that are very alluring. And we find some evidence for that, definitely, but I think it's not the whole story. Sure. And piracy changes over time because, to your point, the goods, the commerce, etc. I think you note in your book that slavery was different under what I'll call Spanish or Dutch rule of the seas versus what came later under a more dominant British rule of the high seas.

47:43Can you explain how those were different? Yeah. So there are different legal traditions at play in these different empires. And so Spanish and French colonies and indeed Spanish and French law more broadly are kind of more drawn on Roman legal models, whereas the English law is more based on the common law. So the kind of major, all of them, I mean, all of these empires have extremely brutal slave codes by middle of or the end of the 17th century. And indentured servants on top of that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's really important that we distinguish. So indentured servants are where people enter a contract which pays for their passage to the Americas, but then they have to work off usually for seven years that passage.

48:27And they are treated very, very badly as well, but they are not legally slaved, right? If you kill an indentured servant, it is still murder, whereas enslaved people do not have those legal rights according to the legal codes. And that is true in the Spanish Empire, it's true in the French Empire, it's true in the Dutch Empire. But you do see distinctions in the Spanish and French empires. The church is much more involved. The Catholic Church is a presence in those empires and seems to influence thinking on some principles around slavery. there are much larger free communities of color in these Caribbean and American colonies in the French and the Spanish empire far fewer than in the English empire and so that seems to be related to kind of roots of manumission that exist for enslaved people which which really don't exist very much at all there are free people of color in the English empire but in much much smaller numbers.

49:24And one dynamic of how this kind of relates with piracy is when people like Henry Morgan are plundering Spanish colonies, any person of color who is captured is going to be enslaved and taken back to Jamaica, even if they were actually free in the Spanish colonies, right? So you get this increasing racialization of slavery, which is not initially defined on those terms. You also have in slavery of indigenous people. So it's sort of racialized in some ways, but the concept of race is also developing at this time, right? The way people think about these concepts is changing at this time. One of the things that slavery and the slave laws do in the British empire, but also in the other empires is increasingly develop this equation between the color of someone's skin and their legal status.

50:10And that becomes really heavily embedded by the end of the, well, going into the 18th century. Well, I think the other thing that comes with that too is the flow of commerce is also evolving. because obviously the slave trade greatly changes trade from east to west because obviously goods are, you know, goods at least in the form of cargo of slaves is also moving heavily east to west going from obviously Africa. So it's where you start to see it wasn't just Sir Francis Drake, you know, going around the world. It's now you have pirates going around South America, going to the Pacific and doing like a circumvented loop on these trade routes to effectively arbitrage these markets and slaves being part of the market that moves from, you know, obviously Africa to the Caribbean.

50:56Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's really, Francis Drake, he curiously was also involved in slave voyages early in his career. Like some of the first voyages to the Caribbean by Francis Drake and others were to try to sell enslaved people to the Spanish market because it was seen as a really lucrative market. And then because the Spanish empire closes them out, they kind of turn to piracy. So actually slavery is part of this story from the very beginning. But it becomes a much bigger part, as you said, with the growth of these economies, with the growth of the sugar economy, especially although also tobacco in the North American colonies, rice in the Carolinas, which is introduced as a crop by enslaved people as a food crop, but then becomes a really profitable crop.

51:38And like you said, it kind of reorientates the connections between different parts of the world. So connections between Africa and the Americas. A lot of the wealth in the Americas, particularly from the Spanish Empire, is also traveling across the Pacific to China, to Indian Ocean markets. So about half of what's being mined in the Spanish Americas, which is also using slavery for the mining operations in South America and in Mexico, right? So slavery is part of that extraction of mineral wealth as well. And that's being shipped to the Pacific. So the interconnection of different regions, I think, is the big story of these economic developments.

52:14The profits in that from slavery are just enormous. Saint-Domingue becomes the most valuable colony in the world, I think, by the 18th century. Jamaica is one of Britain's most valuable colonies. The North American colonies are nowhere near as valuable economically as the Caribbean colonies in this period. They are supplying the Caribbean colonies. And that's also why they become involved in plundering in the sort of 1690s, where they're trying to break into Indian Ocean markets, because merchants in the North American colonies are then looking for those sorts of opportunities as well. Sure. I want to hit a couple names because there's also some great stories with these.

52:52Can you mention to our listeners who was William Dampier? I have a great line that I'm going to pull up from William Dampier, but I'd love just to kind of use him as a picture of, you know, what's his pirate story? So William Dampier is a fascinating individual who starts out trying various kinds of legitimate trades as a sailor. He seems to have been a very skilled navigator. And he becomes involved in his own account by accident in a voyage, the first voyage for a long time from the Caribbean into the Pacific Ocean in the 1680s, the first major raid of a wave of raids through the 1680s down the South American Pacific coast.

53:30And these are sort of a moment when buccaneers have been raiding in the Caribbean for a couple of decades. And as I said, Jamaica is changing its policy. Other places are sort of trying to prevent it. So they seem to be expanding their horizons. And one place that goes across the islamis of Panama and into the Pacific Ocean. Dan Pierre spends, I think it's 12 or 13 years at sea without going back to England where he has a wife. I mean, it must have been quite a shock when he comes back. And they wrote letters back and forth too. Yeah, they were in communication as many of these sailors were. We think of them as distinctly distant and isolated.

54:01And obviously, in some ways they were. It would take months for your letters to get around the world, but they were in communication. So he sort of cruises up and down the Pacific American coast. He then goes across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. He wanders through the Indian Ocean, seeming to just pick up opportunities for trade or whatever he can, wherever he goes. Eventually, he ends up back in England, and he writes this bestselling book, Voyage Around the World, which is an account of his travels, of his long voyage. He is very reticent about the amount of plundering that he was involved in.

54:34He actually spends a lot of time describing flora and fauna. He's been described as an almost early scientist, or at least that's how he is trying to fashion himself as a respectable gentleman, a man with interest in what would then be called natural philosophy. And I think one of the really curious aspects about that moment of the 1680s of these voyages is we have many accounts written by people involved in those voyages themselves, which I think tells us two things. One is that there's this real appetite for these stories of traveling around the world. And a lot of them say a lot more about plunder than Dampier does, but also the people involved are trying to tell their own stories, right?

55:15They are trying to shape their own. And so they always justify themselves. None of them ever call themselves a pirate. That's a key point. And some of them do get tried for piracy. And actually those who get tried in that episode are often acquitted or pardoned or let off, partially perhaps because they're spinning this reputation, partially also because they're bringing back valuable knowledge. Some of them steal Spanish chart books, which are very, very valuable for navigating in the Pacific. Sure, and gives them to the king or queen at the time, I think was an example. Also, I think, I mean, in some respects, these are epitaph exercises, right?

55:52You know, we think of this nowadays, like, you know, billionaire comes out, you know, we, you might look and say, I don't know if I totally agree with how they made their money, but they gave the billionaire pledge. And, you know, so it reshapes this story later in life and how benevolent they were to society. And again, to your point, the goods they were bringing to all, you know, in comparison, that was the older Dampier. The two things that came to mind with him was the old term is that I married you for life, but not for lunch. And that's what I think about his relationship with his wife. He didn't see her for years, obviously.

56:23Yeah. Henry Avery, again, is a really interesting figure. And in some ways resembles Dampier in that he had legitimate service in the Navy and seems to become involved by accident, although we don't have many accounts from himself like we do with Ampere. But Henry Avery, he's on a legitimate plundering voyage that stalls before it's even begun. The men are waiting on ships. They're not being paid any wages because the voyage doesn't seem to have started yet. They're getting increasingly frustrated. So he is encouraged by his shipmates to lead a mutiny and they sail off and they go to the Indian Ocean, attack a massively wealthy Mughal ship, which really unsurprisingly angers the Mughal Emperor, who then threatens to wipe out the East India Company, which at this time only really has a precarious foothold on trade in India.

57:15It's well within his power to destroy the East India Company. They'd actually been at war. The company and the Mughal Emperor had been at war only a few years earlier, and the company had to admit defeat and negotiate a peace treaty because they couldn't fight against the enormous armies of the Mughal Emperor. But that creates this incredible pressure on the government back home to do something because the Mughal Emperor is saying, these are English pirates, you're English, this is your problem. I'm not going to trade with you. I'm not going to allow you to trade here in India. And so that leads to Avery and then William Kidd, who sort of comes a couple of years later, and is actually sent out to capture pirates, but seems to turn pirate himself.

57:53Although again, he denies it at his own trial. but they caused this crisis with the Mughal emperor. And that creates this enormous, again, that's one of the turning points where new legislation comes in not long afterwards, public opinion seems to change, these really high profile trials of some of Avery's crew, Kidd. And so I think it's really interesting how Avery himself, that quote of, I'm a man of fortune, I must seek my fortune. I think that sums up for many of these people. I think it could apply to Dampier easily as well. These are people in this very unpredictable labor market, as we've been talking about.

58:30They are going to take opportunities. They are going to try to keep those opportunities legal if they can. But I think it's also worth noting that sometimes news travels slowly. You could be attacking a ship and peace has actually been declared three months earlier, but the peace treaty hasn't reached you, right? Yeah. So it's people tend to see these guys as really disingenuous, as knowingly breaking the rules. But I think more now historians are kind of saying, well, actually, it may not have been clear at the moment when they attacked the ship. Hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on the show.

59:09You know, we recently hit the top 10 investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smeet Capital Management. Smeet Capital Management understands how frustrating and illogical the stock market can be. If you are searching for funds with a proven track record, give the Smeet funds a look, or better yet, reach out at SmeetCap.com. And don't forget to mention that you're a fan of the podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principal.

59:42Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by UMB Distribution Services, LLC, not affiliated. The other thing about Kidd that I want to ask you, because I think you put some breadcrumbs out there that I want to see if I was following your hint in the book. Is William Kidd the reason why we actually think about treasure maps and kind of hidden treasure. I also think of, if you've ever seen the movie, The Goonies, which is kind of a cult classic, it has this whole idea of like, there's a hidden treasure on the Oregon coast.

1:00:26Would he be really the origin of that while he's sitting there about to die? And he says, you know, he kind of has this cryptogrammic plunder out there and they end up finding later that there wasn't as much, you know, money sitting out there. But the question is, did someone already get it? Yeah, I think Kidd is certainly one of the big ones to associate with that myth. Henry Avery is also reported to have got, well, he did capture a fabulously wealthy ship, so he must have got fabulous wealth. And Avery, the difference is that Avery himself disappears. Some of his crew are captured and arrested, executed, but he escapes and presumably takes plunder with him.

1:01:01Kidd is interesting because there are all these points in the story. He captures ships, he's in Madagascar, he leaves one ship in Madagascar, although it probably doesn't leave any treasure on it. But people have looked in Madagascar to see if there was any treasure left behind. He gets to the Caribbean, there's some time before he then is arrested in the North American colonies later. He goes on up to New York and Boston later. But he's in the Caribbean, he's trading with people illegally, he puts out feelers, he has contacts in the Caribbean, and he sort of sets up shop and people come to him.

1:01:32He seems to be trying to, what he's captured in the Indian Ocean are commodities like silks and things like that. And he seems to be trying to transmit it into movable wealth. So he's getting bills of exchange for merchants. He's getting gold and silver. He may be sending quite a lot of this to his wife in New York, who he's arrested herself for a while, but then released and may have got her hands on the fortune. We don't know. But the really crucial moment, by the time he comes to England for trial, there are already these stories in the newspapers going around about his massive haul. And then after he is condemned, but before he's executed, he starts making promises saying, if you let me off, I will go and get all the treasure that I have stashed somewhere.

1:02:15So he's one of the few people to actually explicitly say, I have stashed some treasure and if you let me off, I will give it to you. There are other pirates who are rumored to have buried their treasure, but those rumors don't tend to appear until much, much later. So we have no actual proof. I think he was probably lying. I think he was probably, you know, just saying anything he could to get out of jail. Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's definitely generated a lot of stories, as you say, about the East Coast in the U.S., around New York and places elsewhere about Madagascar. There are people in the last 10, 20 years who claim to have found silver in Madagascar and then it turned out to be lead, which must have been a huge disappointment for them.

1:02:56Sure, because the other person that kind of falls into this story is Olivier Levasseur, who obviously, you know, he was very kind of throughout this, like, I have this treasure that you can find. And he kind of plays on that as well. I was also the other name we have to mention, obviously, Blackbeard, Edward Teach, you know, was he just a political refugee who was misunderstood? understood um i don't think we know enough about his political views he does name his ship queen anne's revenge yeah which is a way of taking a shot at obviously the monarch in power at the time exactly and there are um apparently even possible schemes by the jacobites this is the stewards trying to retake the throne in england as we talked about um to to kind of recruit some of these pirates um although they never came to anything and other pirate ships actually also seem to have had Jacobite names, but whether that means that the pirates were committed political figures or whether they were just choosing names that they knew would annoy the authority.

1:03:58It was a renegade name. It could just be a gesture. In fact, it suggests they're pretty well politically informed because some of these names are like leading lords in England or leading Jacobite lords. So it kind of suggests that they know who these figures are. But I don't think we have any real evidence of Blackbeard's. He's almost certainly served as a privateer in the War of the Spanish Succession, which would suggest that he's not that anti-monarchy if he's willing to serve them, even if he's doing it for his own profit, right? He doesn't seem to be fighting. Was it true that the Queen Anne's Revenge, like when they ate, they really were eating off silver platters?

1:04:33So that's one of the stories that when the archaeologists dug the Queen Anne's Revenge, they found lots of silver tableware in the ship. So I think that is one of the stories that I'm really willing to believe. And that would have been what they already stolen from, say, a Spanish fleet or something like that. Exactly. And maybe they were holding onto it as loot, but I am drawn to the idea that they had this kind of extravagant lifestyle. Again, there are a lot of these myths that we have to be quite careful with. And I think I probably spend too long in the book saying, I'm not sure I believe this because the evidence is dubious.

1:05:03But the fact that that material is found on the archaeological, on the wreck by the archaeologists, I think is very interesting. I think you also you'll point out there's you know there's really a change between 17th century and 18th century pirating in other words the the claims of the pirate get more fantastical to your point the silver platters are a big departure from prior it even gets down to how they treat their fellow you know pirates becomes much more harsh as the laws harden around them is that a fair statement. Yes, yes, I think it is. I think everything becomes much more extreme in that period of the 1710s, 1720s, principally because earlier generations had connections ashore, which in some cases were with English society or the colonial society.

1:05:54But for example, in Madagascar, you have this interesting dynamic where pirates are often allying and even marrying local elites in Madagascar. And that happens elsewhere as well. And so you have these sort of connections. You have a base. You have a society with whom you can trade and have these sorts of interactions. And that does happen in the Bahamas to a degree in the late 1710s, but it's quite short before the Bahamas are recaptured. There is some smuggling. I mean, Blackbeard takes a pardon from a colonial governor and other pirates also take pardons from colonial governors. So these connections don't disappear entirely, but it becomes much harder, I think, to operate in that way.

1:06:36It becomes much harder for pirates to operate or plunderers to operate in the way that they had previously. It becomes much harder to argue that you're acting in a legitimate fashion. fashion. For example, Dampier and others who plundered in the Pacific Ocean, they did so without any legal authorisation from England, but they were attacking Spanish ships, which were the traditional enemy. There was some doubt as to which law applied in different places. It wasn't even clear if peace treaties agreed in Europe, stopped the war in the Americas, so they can at least make a case. They might not get away with it, but they can make a case.

1:07:10And so not having those connections, not having the political opportunities, I think you do get this more extreme, more desperate characteristic, particularly in the early 1720s. So I would divide that episode of roughly 1716 to 1726 into two halves, the first half being around the Bahamas, which looks a lot like previous episodes of piracy. And some of these people like Calico Jack at his trial even claims that he's sailing against the Spanish because there is a war with Spain going on at this time. Right. So it doesn't change entirely. But then after the Bahamas is recaptured by Woods Rogers, who had himself served as a privateer with William Dampier.

1:07:53after that they haven't got a base it becomes more rootless it becomes more roaming and i think the best example of this is bartholomew roberts who's at sea for several years just going around around the atlantic like we said earlier seizing a new ship moving on to that attacking capturing and not really seeming to be doing it in order to then retire i mean some people are doing that like henry avery had done you know big score go and disappear into the colony somewhere that still happens to some pirates. But people like Bartholomew Roberts and possibly Blackbeard seem to just be kind of in it to be in it and to just keep going.

1:08:28Well, that made desolate places like the Bahamas more valuable because there's more places to hide, as we talked about earlier. A couple of things I want to mention on your book. You obviously explain in the late 17th century, the East India Company, as well as like Lloyd's of London developing. So there's also a very commercialized maritime system picking up not only for the companies that are being chartered, but also, hey, great, you're going to take this investment risk on your cargo, on your pirate, and Lloyd's will insure it, which is still the largest reinsurance market in the world today.

1:09:00So those institutions have their backbone at that time because of these activities. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the things I really want to draw out in the book is that we think of piracy in these sort of stories that we've been It has a huge impact on the political formation of empires, as we've been talking about. The law that's imposed on piracy is a big part of the process of the British Empire trying to exert control over colonies in a way that it hadn't before, but also economically. Marine insurance is, I think, the first major insurance market to develop in a major commercialized way.

1:09:40It originates in the medieval period in the Mediterranean, but from the beginning, piracy is one of the things that you are insuring against. Although also people like the Sinja Company finance their own privateers in wars in the Indian Ocean. So many of these merchants are involved in both sides. They may be taking investments and insurance against piracy, but they might also be investing in plunder in other ways. But the growth of London as an insurance market is a direct consequence of the trade coming into London. And that's not just piracy. I am a maritime historian more generally, so I have to make a bid for the broader context of maritime trade and smuggling and all of these other dimensions.

1:10:21What's going on with piracy is also playing out in other aspects as well. And piracy, as we've said, is sort of symbiotic with the rise of trade. Well, and the other thing of maritime too is, I mean, you talk a lot about the flags. The flag you flew determined who you were. Pirates got more interesting than that. they started flying Spanish flags to come up close to the Spanish ships. And obviously, we're not Spanish at all. And then you end up all the way out to kind of questioning, is the Jolly Roger flag real? Or was it just a black flag? Or was it fantasized? So I guess using the Jolly Roger, was it real?

1:10:58And then how cryptic do you think flags ended up becoming? So I didn't think the Jolly Roger was real. And then there is actually an account from a pirates trial of a skull and crossbones flag. Whether the pirates themselves called it the Jolly Roger is a different question, but at least some of these pirates were flying it. What we do know, as you said, that again, legitimate plunderers, privateers, the Navy sometimes are also using flag ruses, right? And merchant ships will carry multiple sets of papers and multiple sets of flags. Because if you're stopped by a Dutch ship, you send up the sailor who speaks Dutch.

1:11:35You give him your Dutch papers, you carry on sailing, you stop by a French ship, you run up your French flag. And that can be a way of navigating these international conflicts we've been talking about. Although also it can kind of be a trap because if you get caught carrying the wrong papers, then you can get into trouble and be prosecuted. But these are very common dimensions. Everyone is using these techniques. Pirates do seem to have used different flags, but simply not flying a national flag is itself threatening. Because by flying a national flag, you're declaring who you are, you're declaring you're legitimate.

1:12:11So simply not flying a flag would be sort of a telltale sign. It seems that for much of the period we're talking about, red flags were actually more common, certainly into the 1690s and possibly even into the 1700s. Red was also a flag that legitimate plunderers would fly when going into battle to try and intimidate their enemies, but you'd fly your red pennants alongside your national flags. Whereas if you've just got red, then that's a warning sign. And we have accounts of William Kidd, one of the accusations against him made by some of the sailors who were in the Indian Ocean was that he flew a red flag and no national flag.

1:12:48In the 70s and 20s, we talk about this more extreme phase. We get a lot of accounts of pirates flying black flags, which again would have been certainly a deliberate move. Some pirates seem to have flown specific flags. This is mentioned in pirate trials, but the evidence is very unclear. The idea that each pirate had their own design is something that really comes along a bit later and is generated more in the popular culture and is not really mentioned in a lot of the trials of these pirates or specific details or newspaper reports which are going around. So I think there are clearly least some pirates using signals like the skull and crossbones.

1:13:27There are also some pirates who are flying black flags as a deliberate message that they are a pirate. I thought Bartholomew Roberts is recorded doing that. But the idea that there's this sort of iconography of piracy, that individuals will have their own flag that you'd recognize, I am not quite convinced by that. I think it's a really ironic flip because nowadays, if you see a gravestone, everyone thinks, oh, it's a pirate gravestone. But actually, pirates were taking these symbols because they were on all the gravestones, right? A skull and crossbones is a sign of death. So these skull symbols were everywhere as a sign of mortality.

1:14:03They're very common on all sorts of art and gravestones at the time. If you saw a skull and crossbones, you'd probably think death, not pirate in the 18th century. And now we are so deeply associated piracy with these symbols that, In fact, when I was on holiday recently, my son saw a gravestone with a skull and crossbones. I was like, ah, it must have been a pirate. I didn't want to break it to him. It actually probably wasn't. Nice. Well, on that, now that you've disclosed, you haven't taken him to Pirates of the Caribbean. I think I have a punch list for you there. Let's see. I was going to go over some of the things we didn't talk about today.

1:14:38We didn't talk about cross-dressing pirates and Calico Jack's possible relationships with these ladies that were sexualized in much of the writing on the subject with Bonnie and Reed. There were a lot of other things I had here in my notes. We didn't talk about, to your point about the plays, The Fair Maid of the West was one of the fantastic plays of the day. Also, Fortune by Land and Sea. So this kind of mythical buildup in popular culture and the legend that grew with it. We also didn't talk about Parliament in 1683 and tightening the laws and how long that would take to kind of roll through society.

1:15:14So of kind of the subjects that we didn't touch, didn't really go at, including talking more specifically about the book that you reference a lot later in the book, which is A General History of the Pirates, which was a very popular book. What do you think should be mentioned to our listeners to kind of either bring this together or point out something that we haven't addressed yet? I think the general history of the pirates is the most important. I think I deserve a medal for getting this far through without mentioning the phrase general history of the pirates, because I think that's never in my life happened before.

1:15:45Right. Okay. And this book was published in, in May 1724. So it was extremely satisfying that the UK edition of the book came out in May, 2024, 300 year adversaries don't, don't come around all that often. Sure. And it's a publishing sensation. It's enormously successful. It goes through multiple editions in the first couple of years. It's translated into lots of languages. It's one of the big books of the time. and this book more than anything else fixes the image of piracy and so a big part of what i'm trying to tell in my book is is not just kind of what happened but where does the image of piracy come from that we have in our heads today and that obviously relates to all the things we've been talking about the growth of piracy the economic influence the the actual phenomenon of piracy as it happens but it's equally about the stories people are telling we've talked about you know william dampier we've talked about other books where people are writing stories about piracy.

1:16:36This is something like you've said, the plays, the stories developing, it's continuous throughout this period. But it really, along with the extreme nature of piracy in the 1710s and 20s, you get extreme media coverage of piracy in that moment. And the general history sort of seems to epitomize that. It brings the stories together from trials, from newspaper records. It tells the story of all of the most famous pirates, Blackbeard, Bonnie and Reed, Calico Jack, Steve Bonnet, Bartholomew Roberts. And then it kind of expands, includes Henry Avery, adds in other pirates as these versions go on. And the key message I kind of want to get across is that that book has defined how we've seen piracy ever since.

1:17:17Historians are still using it today. It inspires Treasure Island. And actually, there's probably more films, plays, and games about Treasure Island than there have been about any historical pirate. So that too is a really key landmark. But the general history has just kind of set that image. It's where a lot of the illustrations come from the pictures, the stories, and yet it's totally unreliable. It's anonymous. There's been lots of debates about authorship. They're clearly getting information from somewhere, but for example, with Bonnie and Reed especially, it seems to me that they're fabricating a lot of it.

1:17:48It's written with a satirical purpose. It's written about contemporary politics, contemporary religion, and that seems to have got lost in the way people think about the book outside of particularly literary scholars in recent years. These stories have been recycled, but the reasons behind the story seem to have been forgotten. So things like pirates being democratic, the author is writing about that not to make pirates to look good, but to make democracy look bad. So we kind of need to take all of these stories very critically, very skeptically, while understanding that this just has such a huge impact in the kind of culture around piracy.

1:18:27So where can our listeners follow you going forward? You mentioned, you know, obviously you're, you're teaching courses. Are you active on social media? Do you have any courses out there that they can check out? Uh, I'm on Twitter, sorry, X, I suppose they call it these X marks the spot, right? Um, uh, you can find information at the university of Reading websites about me and the teaching that I do. There's TV show that was on national geographic in the U S recently, which is coming out in the UK scene about pirates. And I am alongside many other scholars was involved in, in that, uh, there are some other podcasts and things coming out.

1:18:59So the University of Reading website and Twitter, which I persist in calling it, are probably the places that you can find out most. Also, of course, the publisher's websites as well. Awesome. Well, this was a lot of fun. Richard, your book reminds me that throughout time, people and capital, like we talked about, will flow to where it is treated best, which was true of even the regulations pirates had to deal with. If you want to go from fantasy Pricyland to the reality of plunder, politics, and piracy, go buy a copy of Enemies of All. You may find out that your favorite pirate wasn't much more than his most closely aligned politician, like we were mentioning a second ago.

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