Madagascar: IV
Piracy is a trade virtually as ancient as maritime trade itself. The earliest extant records are the Amarna letters of ancient Egypt, circa 1400 BCE, which contain references to blockading pirates as annotated within the map below.
In the Odyssey, some seven hundred years later, readers hear the accusation of Polyphemus the Cyclops in his cave:
In the Odyssey, some seven hundred years later, readers hear the accusation of Polyphemus the Cyclops in his cave:
Strangers! he thundered out, now who are you?
Where did you sail from, over the running sea-lanes?
Out on a trading spree or roving the waves like pirates,
sea-wolves raiding at will, who risk their lives
to plunder other men?" (Transl. Fagles, Bk 9. 284-9)
A few hundred years after the creation of that epic poem, Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates; the historian Plutarch tells us that he cheerfully gambled and drank with them during captivity, but also "often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth." True to his word, once ransomed the young patrician soldier gathered forces, returned to the area (where he rejected the local governor's suggestion they simply take bribes from the pirates) and chose to viciously crucify those same captors.
There exists a virtually unbroken global lineage of piracy from the ancient world to the modern day. As always, the term 'pirate' is a problematic one, as one nation's pirate might be another's legally-sanctioned privateer. (This hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by sailors, and was often used as a defense both on the seas and in court; Captain Misson's very command in the General History is founded on this exact principle.)
There is a particularly interesting subculture among the early modern, western pirates in the age before the discovery of a reliable system of longitude (early 1600s-early 1700s). Options for routes across the Atlantic were quite limited—and impossible to vary in any significant way, without severely damaging the voyage’s likelihood of success. With only latitude to guide a ship along its way, all journeys (with the obvious exception of exploratory vessels) would progress along some permutation of known links on the chain of ports that ringed the sea.
For a British sailor, until the mid-eighteenth century the sea was what David Trotter calls a “formatted space.” Visualizing a grid featuring a detailed map of Europe amidst a few known coastlines and ports throughout the rest of the world, England operated under a system not radically different from that practiced by Odysseus when the Cyclops bellowed about the "running sea-lanes." Any experienced sailor (or merchant) would be familiar with this system, and Trotter explains that piracy:
both defines and complicates the formatted space of global
correspondence. In the days of fixed trade routes, all a pirate
had to do was sit across the appropriate degree of latitude and
wait for the merchantmen to arrive. By infecting the grid
[. . . they demonstrate] both its necessity and its precariousness.
They also double it. They follow the routes it has charted, they
appropriate the contents of its exchanges. They become
its dark shadow. (16)
This notion of a shadow on the grid of legitimate enterprise is an extraordinarily useful one, as pirates (both in practice and in fiction) shadowed and subverted the increasingly regimented and exploitative tendencies of early modern economies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European nations increasingly sought to explore the world and establish new trade routes and boundaries, and pirates took full advantage of the ensuing movement of goods, men and ideas. They also subverted land-based social norms, inverted traditional power structures, and allowed far more permeable boundaries around definitions of gender, religion and power.
sea-wolves raiding at will, who risk their lives
to plunder other men?" (Transl. Fagles, Bk 9. 284-9)
A few hundred years after the creation of that epic poem, Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates; the historian Plutarch tells us that he cheerfully gambled and drank with them during captivity, but also "often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth." True to his word, once ransomed the young patrician soldier gathered forces, returned to the area (where he rejected the local governor's suggestion they simply take bribes from the pirates) and chose to viciously crucify those same captors.
There exists a virtually unbroken global lineage of piracy from the ancient world to the modern day. As always, the term 'pirate' is a problematic one, as one nation's pirate might be another's legally-sanctioned privateer. (This hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by sailors, and was often used as a defense both on the seas and in court; Captain Misson's very command in the General History is founded on this exact principle.)
There is a particularly interesting subculture among the early modern, western pirates in the age before the discovery of a reliable system of longitude (early 1600s-early 1700s). Options for routes across the Atlantic were quite limited—and impossible to vary in any significant way, without severely damaging the voyage’s likelihood of success. With only latitude to guide a ship along its way, all journeys (with the obvious exception of exploratory vessels) would progress along some permutation of known links on the chain of ports that ringed the sea.
For a British sailor, until the mid-eighteenth century the sea was what David Trotter calls a “formatted space.” Visualizing a grid featuring a detailed map of Europe amidst a few known coastlines and ports throughout the rest of the world, England operated under a system not radically different from that practiced by Odysseus when the Cyclops bellowed about the "running sea-lanes." Any experienced sailor (or merchant) would be familiar with this system, and Trotter explains that piracy:
both defines and complicates the formatted space of global
correspondence. In the days of fixed trade routes, all a pirate
had to do was sit across the appropriate degree of latitude and
wait for the merchantmen to arrive. By infecting the grid
[. . . they demonstrate] both its necessity and its precariousness.
They also double it. They follow the routes it has charted, they
appropriate the contents of its exchanges. They become
its dark shadow. (16)
This notion of a shadow on the grid of legitimate enterprise is an extraordinarily useful one, as pirates (both in practice and in fiction) shadowed and subverted the increasingly regimented and exploitative tendencies of early modern economies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European nations increasingly sought to explore the world and establish new trade routes and boundaries, and pirates took full advantage of the ensuing movement of goods, men and ideas. They also subverted land-based social norms, inverted traditional power structures, and allowed far more permeable boundaries around definitions of gender, religion and power.
Piracy was also well-known throughout Indian Ocean. Bands of pirates were recorded across the Indian Ocean littoral, particularly in the South China and Arabian seas. One of the most notorious was a group known as the Malabar pirates, active for over a thousand years, given the historian Pliny's references to ancient Roman vessels finding that region's waters "greatly infested with pirates" (qtd in Prange 1272). These pirates preyed on that coastline for the same reason pirates elsewhere prowled around the islands of the Caribbean -- a topography that ensured many small, shallow harbors to hide small, fast ships from nearby, heavily-trafficked shipping lanes. Malabar held its "immense importance in oceanic commerce on account of its near-monopoly on the production of black pepper and its role as a central transshipment hub" among the limited paths dictated by the monsoons; however, these and other pirates were generally ignored by western historians as they held "differing indigenous modes of political organization" that meant they lacked the papers and precedents that "conform to the European model of statehood" (Prange 1271).
Piracy was thus a well-honed and ancient craft in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Oceans alike. The pirates who would use Madagascar as their base were hardly innovators in the region, but they did have the foresight to conceptualize European trade shifting from an Atlantic-based economy to a more global one. As discussed in Part III, the English East India Company and Dutch East India Company entered the fray at the start of the seventeenth century on behalf of their respective states, so North African corsairs, Atlantic pirates and an increasing stream of private merchant vessels would only further complicated the mix.
The pirates who landed on the island were doing some more radical than simply seeking a place to resupply provisions, hide or even settle. As Jonathan Lamb points out, a beach is "a liminal space," a boundary between worlds, "in which two social orders intersect and neither is sovereign" and "if the [intrusive] social order of the newly-arrived sailor is represented not by a group such as a ship's crew but rather by just one man, the gestures and ritualized interactions that sustain his symbolic world desert him, and he is suddenly in a space in which all action is provisional" (xix). Lamb here sees, quite reasonably, an either/or situation wherein a larger population (such as a crew) retains its original identity, or a single castaway is forced to compromise on a more fluid sense of identity. The European visualization of Madagascar, in the first three centuries of their visitation and attempts at colonization, was essentially as a series of ports and beaches that allow these provisional acts to abound.
With the pirates, however, we find ourselves in a third category: that of the radical pirate crew, already redefined as hostis humani generis, the "enemies of all mankind." Their re-christened ships (with official names tossed in favor of more realistic ones, such as in the case of the Charles the Second being renamed the Fancy) would be organized from below decks, in a far more democratic system than European naval or merchant systems would allow. Pirates would find great success in raiding vessels of the region's major powers; one such example, Captain Avery's raid on the Grand Mogul Aurangzeb's fleet on pilgrimage to Mecca, is one of the semi-fictionalized chapters of the General History included in this project and likely one of the most valuable treasures ever stolen in world history. Even more powerfully, however, Madagascar would provide something new and unique for the European pirates: a land base, far from any centralized, maritime power, with a small local population generally willing to trade and near to the incredibly lucrative new shipping lanes straddling both hemispheres and burgeoning empires.
Madagascar thus became a ghostly otherworld, especially to the English. An island, like their own, but far more massive in size, seemingly waiting to awaken, linked to forces (economic, political, racial and religious) beyond their control. As a contemporary essayist fretted, "'Britain was by the Ancients accounted the greatest Island of the known World, and for aught [...] may be so still, notwithstanding the later Discoveries of Madagascar'" (qtd in Lincoln, 126). At the close of the seventeenth century, it was seemingly settled by pirates who might create an entirely inverted kingdom of their own, where the wild principles of their ships --such as elections, based on competence rather bloodlines, alongside relative multiculturalism and religious tolerance-- could take hold. Piracy as a parasite on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean 'grid' was enough of a nuisance to the status quo of the time; for pirates to now have access to land, with room for population growth and shipyards, and a fortified base from which to prey on the all-important new trade with India, was simply unimaginable.
