Gabriel Kuhn - Life Under the Jolly Roger

PRAISE FOR LIFE UNDER THE JOLLY ROGER

In addition to history, Gabriel Kuhns radical piratology brings philosophy, ethnography, and cultural studies to the stark question of the time: which were the criminalsbankers and brokers or sailors and slaves? By so doing he supplies us with another case where the history isnt dead, its not even past!

Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged and coauthor of The Many-Headed Hydra

Kuhn has written a tract pointing the way for tomorrows revolutionaries.

B.R. Burg, author of Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition

Even if you think youd never be interested in the history of pirates, take a look at this book and you will be.

Nora Rthzel, Institute for Migration and Racism Studies, Hamburg

Stripping the veneers of reactionary denigration and revolutionary romanticism alike from the realities of golden age piracy, Gabriel Kuhn reveals the sociopolitical potentials bound up in the pirates legacy better than anyone who has dealt with the topic to date.

Ward Churchill, author of Acts of Rebellion

Life Under the Jolly Roger is an absorbing mixture fulfilling both the needs of the theorist and the curiosity of the pirate-story lover. This book will be enjoyed by anyone who sees no contradiction between adventure and scholarly care.

Katharina Lacina, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna

Life Under the Jolly Roger is a carefully researched account of golden age piracy that departs from the usual ideological banter. Its fresh perspective on the cultural and political implications of pirates breathes new life into dusty historical accounts, connecting them to contemporary social issues with insight and clarity.

Emily Gaarder, author of Women and the Animal Rights Movement

Im astounded by how clearly the book cuts into the mythos of the golden age pirates and immediately shows you what is fucked up and what is interesting.

Margaret Killjoy, author of The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

If youre someone whose knowledge of pirates stops with Errol Flynn and Jack Sparrow but you want to learn more, Life Under the Jolly Roger will be just the grog youre thirsting for.

J.M. Hielkema, The Tiger Manifesto

Win/win, really.

Deric Shannon, editor of The End of the World as We Know It?

Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy, Second Edition

Copyright 2020 Gabriel Kuhn

This edition copyright 2020 PM Press

All Rights Reserved

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-62963-793-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-62963-803-4

LCCN: 2019946101

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Cover art by John Yates

Printed in the USA

I T ALWAYS FEELS REWARDING if a book youve authored sees a second edition. With regard to Life Under the Jolly Roger, it is also a testimony to the ongoing interest in golden age piracy. Like everything, this goes in wavesanything from a new Hollywood flick to a new wave of modern-day piracy can cause an upsurgebut the overall fascination with pirate life in the Western world is very steady. The so-called golden age receives particular attention since it has given us all of the popular images we are familiar with, from the peg leg to the pirate flag, the Jolly Roger.

While there is always some new material unearthed by scholars, the basic sources that researchers on golden age piracy are working with havent changed in a couple of hundred years. What has been changing are the interpretations of them. This book was an attempt to contribute to these debates, mainly by trying to find a way out of the stalemate between the demonization of pirates on the one hand and their idolization on the other.

The original text has been corrected, and the notes and the index have been updated and improved. Most significantly, an appendix has been added with a number of interviews I was invited to do after the first edition was released. There was a surge of piracy along the coast of Somalia at the time, and many people were wondering about the relationship between the golden age pirates and contemporary forms of piracy. The questions I was asked also revealed what political readers seemed to be most interested in concerning the golden age pirates themselves: race, social organization, and revolutionary consciousness were recurring themes. The interviews that originally appeared in German were translated for this edition.

Repetitions are inevitable in such a collection of conversations, but each interview includes questions not discussed in othersor, for that matter, in the original book. Some interviews have been slightly abbreviated to avoid redundancy. The conversations can be treated as a supplement, summary, or introduction to the book, depending on the readers preference. The last conversation stands out, as it is not an interview but rather the documentation of a 2018 email exchange I had with a person who attended the very first launch of Life Under the Jolly Roger in Sydney, Australia, 2009.

Gabriel Kuhn, Stockholm, October 2019

I N A PRIL 2010, TEN Somali pirates were arrested by Dutch soldiers after boarding the German-registered freighter Taipan near the Somali coast. They were handed over to German authorities, which led to the first piracy trial in Germany in four hundred years. The trial was held at the district court of Hamburg, the countrys most famous port, where the legendary pirate Klaus Strtebeker and seventy-two of his men were executed in 1401.

The Somali pirates escaped this fate. In October 2012, they were sentenced to prison terms between two and seven years. During the trial, a support campaign for them was organized, which included public talks and discussions, demonstrations outside the courthouse, legal advice, and a solidarity fund. The campaign was primarily run by political radicals. This was no coincidence.

The piracy witnessed along the coast of Somalia in recent years is, in many ways, very different from the piracy of the so-called golden age, which is the subject of this book. Modern-day pirates use speedboats, machine guns, and satellite navigation systems, not sailing vessels, grappling hooks, and magnetic compasses. Modern-day pirates also have a limited interest in the cargo that merchant ships carry; they are more interested in getting hold of the ship itself, including its crew, in order to demand a ransom. Finally, modern-day pirates dont constitute a society of seaborne outlaws, uprooted, and with its own laws and regulations; instead, they live in coastal towns as regular members of the community and engage in piracy as an illegal profession. Still, their lives and actions, too, contain elements that attract radical activists: they challenge the law and international powers; they interfere with capitalist trade; they risk their lives for riches rather than working underpaid jobs; and they retain elements of the noble robber: they take from the rich to give to the poor, and they defend the waters of their ancestors against overfishing and toxic waste. In short, the myth of the outlaw pirate as a political rebel is alive.

It is this myth that is explored in Life Under the Jolly Roger, which looks back at the time in which it was born. In the late seventeenth century, a motley crew of ex-mercenaries, runaway slaves, adventurers, and mutineers decided to set sail from the colonies in the Caribbean to wage war on the whole world, which meant, primarily, the political authorities of the day by whom these people felt betrayed and oppressed. For about thirty-five years, these people spread fear among the powerful in the Caribbean, the Americas, the Indian Ocean, and along the west coast of Africa, before being hunted down and exterminated. Their exploits became legendary and made the pirate life famous worldwide: colonial rulers and businessmen saw them as their fiercest enemies; in Europe, large audiences were treated to theater plays about the wild life in the autonomous pirate republics of Madagascar; and the moguls of India lost some of their most precious possessions when the pirates advanced all the way into the Red Sea. It is this era, the golden age of piracy, that has given us all of the popular pirate images we know: extravagant clothing, earrings, peg legs, cutlasses, and parrots resting on scar-faced mens shoulders. It is also the era that has given us the ultimate pirate symbol of them all: the Jolly Roger, the menacing pirate flag, usually featuring a simple image of skull and bones against a black background. The Jolly Roger conveyed a simple message: We defy your authority, we stand our ground, and we do so with joy and pride. Few symbols have become so closely attached to an unrepentant commitment to freedom and independence.