Pirates are associated with
the pleasures of the tropics – sunshine, palm trees, ocean breezes and rum. With
their distinctive clothing and their isolation in the Caribbean, it’s hard to
place them in history. The average reader, after all, doesn’t have a firm idea
of when Queen Ann’s War (The War of Spanish Succession) took place. And who
cares, right? The Golden Age of Piracy is just kind of hanging out there,
history-wise.
What could be relevant about
the history AROUND pirates, anyway?
You might be surprised.
Let’s start with Witches. The Golden Age of Piracy is generally considered to
have started in 1690. And guess what happened from 1692-1693? The Salem Witch
Trails.
Salem is only 25 miles
from Boston Massachusetts, a major trading port for pirates. For those who aren’t
up on the details of the Witch Trials, they are the last major witch hysteria i
Western civilization.
The drama of the Trials
unfolded when, in a region battered by war and threatened by Native uprisings,
a group of schoolgirls claimed to be possessed by evil spirits. The girls
accused first their family’s Caribbean slave, and then various unpopular
members of their community, of witchcraft.
By the time the hysteria
had died down, 57 people had been arrested for witchcraft, 3 people had been
executed, one man died by torture, and several others died in jail. In all, over
200 people were accused of witchcraft.
Cotton Mather, the fire-and-brimstone
minister, was the man who persuaded the Salem court to accept “special evidence”…
That is to say, the claims of the schoolgirls that they were being attacked by invisible
demons and ghosts while on the witness stand. Mather went on to write books
defending the use of Special Evidence in the trials and describing the
Invisible Forces of wickedness that beset Christians.
Mather made good money
off his writing and in later years harbored the notion of writing another
tell-all book, this time about pirates.
After the hurricane that
sunk the flagship of pirate prince Black Sam Bellamy in 1717, the survivors
were jailed in Boston. Cotton Mather fancied writing a best-seller about
pirates. He visited the remainder of Bellamy’s crew in prison, wrote down their
stories, and attempted to create his own “happy ending” by persuading the
pirates to confess.
He didn’t get his
confession. But he did leave a set of notes that led modern day historians to
the wreck of Bellamy’s ship, the only certified pirate ship ever discovered and
excavated.
Cotton Mather |
The Golden Age of Piracy
also took place only 25 years after the last serious outbreak of the Black
Death. The Great Plague of London killed roughly 100,000 people, a quarter of
the population of London, in 18 months. It strained the infrastructure of the
city alomost to the breaking point, and left a lasting scar on the psyche of
the British.
Plague had changed the
psyche of Europe. All in all, from 1350 to 1665, the Black Death wiped out half
of the world’s population. The massive number of deaths created the image of
the Grim Reaper and planted thoughts of death firmly in the mind of the
population.
It was the Black Plague
that gave Death a personification. Usually a skeleton or skeletal figure, Death
carried a scythe to reap the lives of the living. Or a bow-and-arrow to strike
from a distance. Death might also bear a shovel, the better to bury his
victims.
Plague struck at random,
killing young and old rich and poor alike. It had broken society completely
down. During the worst of the plague years, in the 1300’s, bands of criminals
wandered the stricken countryside, taking what they wanted, in much the same
way that pirates would later wander the seas.
Immediately after the
worst of the plague the world was beset by its first ever labor shortage. Serfs discovered that their skills at growing
food and raising livestock were suddenly in demand. They bartered the demand
for their skills into improved working conditions and status. Years later, when
the population again grew, the memory that peasants could bargain with lords
and come out ahead.
This notion lived in in
pirates.
What also live on was the
understanding that life could be short and it was wise to make the most of it. “A
short life and a merry one!” was the motto of the pirates. And it was a wise
one in the time. And it’s a wise idea now. Life is not sure, so eat, drink and
be merry! (And be kind to your fellow travelers, please.)
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