Double podcast episode about the Golden Age of Piracy, with historian Marcus Rediker. The legendary pirates of this era weren’t just thieves—they were daring rebels challenging the very systems of power and authority of their time. Fighting every colonial empire, and creating their own ways of living free from authority, pirates became symbols of liberty and resistance to working-class and poor people everywhere.
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Episodes
E103: Pirates, part 1 – Working Class History
- Part 1: The historical and economic background, the different eras of piracy in the golden age, about life at sea, how people became pirates. Available without ads on Patreon.
E104: Pirates, part 2 – Working Class History
- Part 2: The extent of piracy, how pirates organise themselves, how colonial powers fought them, the decline of pirates, and their legacy today. Available without ads on Patreon.
More information
- Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
- Marcus Rediker and David Lester, Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel
Acknowledgements
- Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
- Written by Audrey Kemp and Tyler Hill
- Produced by Tyler Hill
- Episode graphic: Painting depicting the capture of Blackbeard, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1920. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
- Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.
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Transcript
Part 1
[Ocean sounds]
Audrey: The year is 1725. You’re a sailor trapped on a merchant ship, enduring backbreaking work and brutal conditions. Your quarters, cramped and crawling with disease, are shared with enslaved people. Your wages? Paltry—if they ever come. And the whip is never far from reach.
Tyler: Then, over the horizon, a ship emerges, its black flag billowing in the wind. As it closes in, you see them—a crew of outlaws, men and women of every race, clad in stolen finery and ragged silks. They shout, laugh and rifle through cargo. There’s no fear in their faces—only defiance. Only freedom.
Audrey: One of them calls to you: “Why break your back for a captain who sees you as nothing? Take your share. Take your life.”
Tyler: You have a choice: stay and die defending the profits of your employers or leap into a life of rebellion on the high seas.
Audrey: This is Working Class History.
[Music]
Tyler: Before we get started, you may have noticed there’s a new voice with me today who also doesn’t have a British accent. My friend and colleague, Audrey, is here and I want to let her introduce herself.
Audrey: I’m Audrey Kemp. I’m a journalist and community organiser. I’ve spent years covering labour and power, and I’m excited to dive into this story with you all.
Tyler: And as always, our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and, in return, get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our Patreon supporters can listen to both parts of this double episode without ads now. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.
Marcus: Greetings. My name is Marcus Rediker and I am the author of a book called Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, published by Beacon Press in 2004.
Tyler: Marcus describes in his book that, to the authorities of their time, pirates were seen as dangerous outlaws. The term pirate comes from a Greek word meaning “one who attacks ships,” and Roman law labelled them “enemies of all mankind.”
Audrey: By the early 18th century, piracy had become a crisis for European empires. During this time, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pirates prowled the seas, seizing hundreds of merchant ships, looting cargo, and disrupting trade so severely that insurance rates skyrocketed and navies scrambled to hunt them down.
Tyler: And they didn’t just take ships—they took riches that rivalled the fortunes of entire colonies.
Audrey: One of the most legendary pirate raids took place in 1721, when John Taylor and Olivier Levasseur seized the Portuguese treasure ship Nossa Senhora do Cabo off the coast of Réunion Island. The haul? Diamonds, gold, and other treasures worth around 200 million US dollars in today’s currency, making it one of the richest pirate captures in history.
Tyler: But piracy wasn’t just about plunder. It was a response to the brutal conditions of early capitalism.
Audrey: Global trade enriched merchants and shipowners, but sailors were left behind. They were underpaid, overworked and, eventually, disposable.
Tyler: Many turned to piracy not just to survive but to escape a system that had abandoned them.
Audrey: The pirates strived to build something new – a society where they elected their own leaders, shared their plunder equally and lived on their own terms.
Tyler: And their rebellion would define what we now call the Golden Age of Piracy, spanning from the 1650s to the 1730s. During this era, figures like Blackbeard, Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts and Bonney made their names. Roberts, who’s one of the most successful pirates ever, captured over 400 ships throughout his career.
Audrey: Anne Bonny and Mary Read, both women, fought alongside their crewmates, disguising themselves in men’s clothing to claim their place in battle—and defy the gender norms of their time.
Tyler: And then there was Blackbeard—who set his own beard on fire to terrify his enemies.
Marcus: The golden age of piracy looms very large in the global imagination but, in fact, it’s not actually a single unitary thing. There were three distinct generations of pirates within the golden age. The first was in the 1660s and 1670s. An emblematic figure here is Sir Henry Morgan and, in fact, he stole so much silver from the Spanish and took it to Jamaica that he was knighted. He became Sir Henry Morgan and became Lieutenant Governor of this incipient slave colony.
Tyler: Over time, piracy evolved. The motivations, targets and even the way pirates operated changed from one generation to the next.
Audrey: This first generation of pirates was called ‘Buccaneers’ which operated primarily in the Caribbean during the mid-17th century.
Marcus: And that word comes from a style of capturing, cooking and eating wild game on the various Caribbean islands, on something that the French called a buchan. And so they became Buccaneers because many of the early Buccaneers lived this kind of roving life from one island to another.
Audrey: The Buccaneers mainly targeted the Spanish Empire, stealing enormous wealth from the Spanish Crown and weakening Spain’s grip on the New World. England saw an opportunity – granting privateers legal cover to attack Spanish vessels.
Marcus: The second generation is where you see a change in the attitude from above. This is the generation of the 1690s. There are two emblematic figures for this generation. One is Henry Avery, who captured a part of the treasure fleet of one of the rulers of India and got away with a massive heist of jewels and wealth. He was never caught, so Henry Avery became kind of a folk hero.
Tyler: Another key figure of this era was William Kidd. Born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1654, Kidd made a name for himself as a privateer in New York. In 1695, he got a royal commission to hunt down pirates and enemy ships in the Indian Ocean as part of England’s plan to protect its trade routes.
Marcus: But when he got there, far beyond the reach of royal authority, he actually turned pirate himself and this was a very big embarrassment for some of his wealthy English merchant backers. So, he was eventually brought back to London, and in an act that symbolised the changing attitude of the English Government towards piracy, William Kidd was hanged. So, from now on, piracy is not going to be acceptable.
Tyler: The reason for these changing attitudes about piracy, like most things in history, was money.
Marcus: In the late 17th century, one of the things that’s happening is that the Caribbean colonies of England and other countries are producing massive amounts of sugar. The sugar is emerging as a very important commodity in the economy of Atlantic capitalism.
Audrey: By 1700, piracy had become a massive thorn in the side of colonial powers like England, France and Spain. Pirates targeted sugar —the backbone of the colonial economy—driving up security and insurance costs and causing disruptions so severe that the losses outweighed the cost of competing with one another.
Tyler: Faced with a shared threat, these powers found less incentive to fight each other with privateers and, instead, united against a common enemy, ushering in a new era of piracy.
Marcus: So, the third generation of pirates is active in the 17-teens and 1720s and what’s especially important about them is that there are no longer any wealthy people involved. This is the proletarian phase. This is the phase in which common sailors get control of an entire generation of plundering. This, of course, fuels all of the imperial governments to catch as many of these people as they can and to hang them up in gibbets at the entrance of every harbour as a deliberate act of terror that was meant to send a message to common sailors. If you turn pirate, we will hunt you down and we will kill you.
Audrey: It was during this new, proletarian, working-class era of piracy when pirates started to see their very existence as a rebellion against the hierarchies of capital and began building their own more egalitarian system. Their ships became spaces of democracy, fairness and unity—directly challenging the systems they had escaped.
Marcus: And this is one of the things that they were known for and they were known for this in their own day. In other words, the elites who are hunting them down to kill them are going after them not only because they disrupted the commerce, which was so valuable to these European imperial powers, but also because they posed a challenge to the standard way of running a ship.
Tyler: Life aboard a pirate ship existed in stark contrast to other, more common jobs at sea, like being in the Navy or sailing aboard a merchant vessel.
Marcus: The Royal Navy, for example, was very far from democratic. It was a violent, brutal, disciplinary regime. Similarly, in the merchant shipping industry, captains had tremendously concentrated powers and pirates, in their democratic and egalitarian ways, posed real challenges to those other ways of organising maritime labour.
Audrey: And the pirates’ ability to not only imagine a better world for themselves but to actually try and build one captured the imagination of the public as well.
Marcus: So, this is the last generation of the Golden Age. It’s dramatic. It was something that everybody wanted to read about. Whenever the authorities captured a group of pirates, there would be hangings that were public spectacles but vast numbers of people would turn out, many of them to cheer the pirates because they were working-class heroes.
Tyler: But in order to understand what makes the piracy of the 18th century so radical, first, we have to understand trans-Atlantic trade and the burgeoning capitalism of the 16th century.
Marcus: This is the period in which England is leading the way and moving out into the world, actually following Spain, which had a great deal of success in extracting gold and silver from the indigenous peoples and their lands in the Americas. Along came the Dutch and the English. They didn’t find gold and silver but they found something even better. They found things like sugar, tobacco, rice and these commodities that are going to be the lifeblood of the Atlantic economy.
Audrey: A lot of historians say the most important machine to the rise of capitalism is the steam engine. But Marcus has a different theory.
Marcus: It’s the tall ship, which is actually a piece of technology that permitted Europe to conquer the rest of the world and to create these vast blue-water empires. The maritime powers in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries occupy only a tiny part of the Eurasian landmass on the Western end. But think about where those languages are spoken today, like English, French, Dutch and Spanish. These are global languages and this reflects the power of those ships as instruments of conquest.
Tyler: And those ships can’t sail around the world without the labour of highly skilled and trained sailors who could handle everything from navigation and rigging to carpentry. Their expertise kept the ships running and the trade routes alive.
Marcus: The ships don’t sail by themselves. There’s a labour issue here. So, in this context, the growth of these empires and the growth of capitalism as a system have several crucial components. One of these is what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, meaning the separation of workers from their means of subsistence. This happens through the Enclosure movement in England. It happens through the slave trade in West Africa, where many millions of Africans, through war and other forms of dispossession, are going to be separated from the land, loaded onto slave ships and carried to the Americas to build this nascent plantation system.
Audrey: Marcus explains that the plantation system, central to global trade networks, was responsible for the largest planned accumulation of wealth the world had ever seen. This system depended on the exploitation of millions of enslaved Africans, funnelling immense wealth into the hands of a few. That wealth, in turn, financed further colonial expansion and the growth of European industries.
Marcus: So, we’re talking about massive amounts of money to be taken back to Europe – plunder – but also the regular profits of production for the world market. The plantation system produces for the world market. That’s just the way it works.
Tyler: By 1700, European empires had built vast wealth through plundered resources and slave labour. But they were constantly at war, competing for control.
Marcus: There are a series of Anglo-Dutch wars in the 17th century and, in 1702, there breaks out what’s called the War of Spanish Succession. A fair amount of this war is about who will control the slave trade.
Audrey: This war, which lasted from 1702 to 1713, pulled in major European powers like France, Britain, and the Dutch Republic—all vying for dominance.
Marcus: During that time, one of the ways that European powers wage war against each other is through something called privateering, which means a private merchant ship is geared out as a vessel of war and then given a bill of mark by the king, or his minions, to wage war on behalf of the king against the king’s enemies. So, to attack Spanish ships, if you’re English, or even French ships, is essentially legal piracy.
Tyler: These privateers made A LOT of money.
Marcus: But when the war comes to an end, two things happen that are really important to understanding the rise of piracy. Firstly, all those privateers are demobilised. In other words, once there’s peace time, the king can’t give out these letters of marque. There’s no legal piracy going on. Secondly, the big navies of these European empires also demobilise, so thousands of sailors are basically paid off. Sometimes, actually, they’re built of their wages but they leave the ships and the navies move from a much higher level of mobilisation to a much lower level.
Audrey: That left the port cities of the Atlantic teeming with skilled, unemployed sailors.
Tyler: And the ruling class responded to this labour surplus the way it always does.
Marcus: This army of the unemployed has a very palpable impact on the way sailors, who do have jobs, are treated. They are treated much worse. They are treated more violently by the captains. Their wages go down. Wartime wages for sailors are pretty decent, but once there’s this massive glut of labour, the wages come way down to a third of the level of wartime. The quality of food declines and the use of the lash increases.
Audrey: Thousands of seasoned sailors—many of them former privateers—were broke, angry and out of options. So, they did what they knew best: they took to the seas. But this time, they weren’t sailing under a king’s banner. They were sailing under the black flag.
Marcus: Pirates in the third generation of the Golden Age were just ordinary working sailors. They were not aristocrats who had lost their honour and went out to sea to marry the colonial governor’s daughter. It’s nothing like that. It’s just ordinary working people whose lives are really difficult, especially in this period after the War of Spanish Succession.
Tyler: There were two primary ways a sailor could become a pirate around this time.
Marcus: The way that most people think that you become a pirate is through mutiny; that you, basically, organise an opposition within a merchant ship, almost always, and you rise up and capture the ship. You create your own black flag and you sail off toward the horizon as a new pirate crew. But that’s probably a relatively small percentage of the people who become pirates.
Audrey: More often, however, pirates didn’t have to take over a ship—they just had to capture one and for mistreated navy or merchant sailors, this could be an opportunity.
Marcus: When pirates captured a prize vessel, they would perform a very interesting ritual. They would come on board and they wouldn’t start plundering right away. They would call all the sailors of the captured ship up on deck and bring the captain up on deck to face those sailors.
Tyler: And then the pirates, all of whom used to be common sailors like the ones aboard the captured ship, and all of whom had been whipped, starved, and cheated out of their wages by merchant or navy captains, would ask a question that would change the fate of everyone on board.
Audrey: How does your captain treat you?
Marcus: And if they say, “Our captain treats us very badly. He doesn’t pay us our proper wages. He doesn’t give us the food we’re supposed to get and, worst of all, he beats us all the time.” If sailors step forward and say that, in that moment when the pirates have just captured their ship, the captain is in a lot of trouble because pirates will act as avengers for their seafaring brothers. They will give that captain a whipping, usually, in the very place where he would tie up sailors to whip them. They’d tie him up in the same place and give him the beating of his life and, in some instances, they killed him. In some instances, they gave the captain a whipping and then threw him overboard in especially bad cases.
Tyler: But the pirates weren’t just out for vengeance. They had a system—a rough kind of justice.
Marcus: If a sailor should step forward and say, “Our captain is a decent man. He treats us well and he pays us our wages,” in that case, the pirates would not only not punish the captain but they might give him money.
Audrey: One famous example of this was William Snelgrave, a merchant captain captured by pirates in 1719 off the coast of Sierra Leone. Despite being severely injured in the attack, he was spared—likely because his crew respected him.
Marcus: The pirates gave him money and said, “Go home to London and show the merchants what happens when a captain treats his sailors well.” So, they would reward the decent captains and they would punish the much more numerous violent captains.
Tyler: And once the captain’s fate was decided, the pirates turned to the rest of the crew with another offer.
Marcus: The pirates, when they’re getting ready to depart the prize ship, they say, “Okay, boys, who’s with us? Do you want to come on board and join the pirate ship?” And believe me, if you spoke out against your captain, you had better go with the pirates because there was going to be trouble if you didn’t. So, this is the way they recruited people by doing things in defence of the common sailor and also in telling them, “Look, you’re going to join a ship where we vote on everything. We are going to elect our captain. We’re going to elect a quartermaster to keep an eye on the captain and to make sure he treats everybody fairly. We’re going to divide up everything we get very equally. It’s not going to be the way it is on these naval and merchant ships.
Audrey: From that moment on, the pirates and whoever chose to join them would sail off into the sunset and the open sea.
Tyler: Out there, no captains or merchants had any power over them. They were miles away not only from the authority of their former employers but also from the institutions that reproduce the existing social order: churches, governments, and families.
Audrey: They were free to create a new order—one that worked on their own terms.
Marcus: They just get to decide for themselves how they want to run the ship. What do they do? How do they do it? Do they do it in the same way as the Royal Navy and the merchant shipping industry? And the answer, resoundingly, is no. They didn’t do it that way. They created a very different kind of social order.
Tyler: Of course, some things had to stay the same.
Audrey: A ship still needed someone who could read charts, navigate the seas and keep them on course.
Marcus: You’ve got to have that. If you don’t have that, the ship doesn’t work properly. So, you’ve got to choose someone who has those skills. But even so, the pirates would elect the person they wanted to lead them. Bear in mind, this is at a time when poor people, like sailors, had no democratic rights anywhere in the world. Nowhere did they have this kind of power because, in almost every country, if there is any voting, it’s for people of property. These pirates didn’t have property, so they couldn’t vote. So, they vote for a captain.
Tyler: But even the best captains could abuse their power. So, the pirates built in a safeguard.
Marcus: They created a new position called the quartermaster who would, basically, do two things: 1) keep an eye on the captain and make sure he doesn’t abuse his power; 2) divide up everything equally that they take when they capture prize vessels. What’s fascinating about this is that, for that job, you’re going to elect the most trustworthy person on the ship. It is the person that you would trust to be fair to everybody and the person that you would trust to be suspicious of captains. So, they voted on that. It’s like a dual executive in which there’s this balance of power so that people are not abused.
Audrey: And they didn’t stop there. Pirates elected officers for all sorts of roles.
Tyler: In fact, they voted on just about everything.
Marcus: One ship’s captain, who was totally unaccustomed to this, said, “They’re just constantly voting on everything. Where do we want to sail the ship? Where’s the best place to capture vessels? Who do we want to do this? Who do we want to do that?” The sovereign power was the crew as a collective. They had something called the Common Council in which everybody had a vote. Everybody came out and they had debates. Some said, “Let’s go here,” or others said, “Let’s go there,” and then they would have a vote. This is all very unusual for the times.
Audrey: This democratic way of running the ship was crucial to pirate culture and so was equality among the sailors.
Marcus: Here, you’d have to look at this in comparative perspective. A captain on a royal naval vessel would probably make 60 to 80 to a hundred times as much in pay as the lowest common sailor. For the captain of a merchant ship, it might be 10, 20, 30 or 40 times as much, depending on how much of the cargo the captain owned and they frequently did own quite a bit of it. But pirates didn’t operate that way. First of all, they abolished the wage. They said, “We’re not wage labourers. We’re partners in this enterprise, so it’s like a cooperative. We’re partners and so we’re going to pay everybody according to shares, not the money wage.” This, too, is kind of fascinating because this is the period when wage labour is ascendant. This is part of the rise of capitalism. But the pirates didn’t want to play that game, so they said, “We’ll give shares.”
Tyler: Every crew member received at least one share.
Audrey: Skilled workers – like gunners, carpenters or navigators – earned slightly more due to the crucial roles they played on the ship.
Tyler: A specialist might get one and a quarter or one and a half shares but that was about the limit.
Marcus: Look at the wage hierarchy and look how the pirates have radically compressed it so that the distance between the top and the bottom is really minimal. This, of course, also appealed to the common sailor. They loved this idea. They loved the idea that the captain was not getting a hundred times as much as anybody else. The authorities were very well aware of this democratic social order and they wanted to eradicate it because it was a very subversive example of running a ship in which the rank and file were in control.
Tyler: That radical rejection of class hierarchy wasn’t just about wages. It showed up in how pirates carried themselves, too.
Audrey: Take Walter Kennedy, for example. He came from a poor family in London, got by through burglary and pickpocketing and, eventually, found his way to the Royal Navy. When he turned a pirate, he made a name for himself by sharing loot equitably and refusing to follow the rigid social order of the time. People even called him the ‘Robin Hood of the Sea.’
Tyler: But Kennedy’s class defiance didn’t stop there. When he was captured and put on trial, he showed up wearing a powdered wig—a symbol of the elite he had spent his life fighting against. It was a final act of mockery, a pirate’s way of thumbing his nose at the system, even in the face of death.
Audrey: That defiance wasn’t just personal—it was collective. And nothing symbolised that more than the flag they flew: The Jolly Roger.
Tyler: Let’s start with the name.
Marcus: Jolly Roger had a specific meaning that came from the ‘underworld’ as it was often called in the port cities where people would speak a particular kind of language. It was called thieves’ cant. It was a very specialised vocabulary and jolly is sort of well known, but roger meant to copulate. To roger someone was to fuck them. So, basically, the basic message of the Jolly Roger was ‘fuck you’. I think this is kind of what they were trying to convey.
Tyler: But beyond giving anyone who looked at it the middle finger, the symbolism of the Jolly Roger conveyed the pirates’ ideals, especially in contrast to the world they had left behind.
Marcus: Flags represent group identification with an idea or a set of principles. So, you have flags of empires; for example, the Union Jack. What pirates began to do in the 17-teens was to create their own flags. You’ve got to remember, too, how important flags were to life at sea. This is how you signal, from ship to ship, what you’re doing, where you’re going and who you are. There are all these banners and flags flying on every vessel.
Tyler: And the significance of flags as symbols of empire and hegemony makes the iconography of the Jolly Roger that much more subversive.
Marcus: Some people say that the origin of the pirate flag name Jolly Roger comes from the French ‘joli rouge’.
Audrey: Which means ‘pretty red’ in French.
Marcus: A lot of the early pirate flags were red but it turns out black became the dominant colour. By the time we get into this third generation, almost all the pirate flags are black.
Audrey: And against that black flag…
Marcus: They choose the image of death; death’s head. That could be a skull and crossbones as it is now very commonly depicted but, in many cases – probably in most cases – it was an entire skeleton or, as they called it, an ‘anatomy’ with a skull and you could see all the bones of the body. The skull was usually holding two things. It was holding, in one hand, an hourglass and, in the other hand, a sword, a spear or a dart.
Tyler: Marcus says that, on one level, these images are pretty straightforward.
Marcus: A prize ship sees a pirate ship bearing down on them and up goes the Jolly Roger. You look at this image of death and you see the weapon and the hourglass. What are you going to conclude? Surrender or you will die. That’s what they’re saying. The black pirate flag is an instrument of terror. It’s meant to terrify their prey so they won’t fight back.
Audrey: And contrary to popular belief, a pirate would almost always prefer that outcome.
Marcus: Pirates would just always much prefer that people give up and most merchant ships did give up. They didn’t want to fight these guys because they were very skilful. There were a lot more of them on a pirate ship and you were going to lose. If you piss them off by shooting at them, it’s going to be worse for you when they capture you. That’s for sure.
Tyler: But beyond just ‘Surrender or Die’, Marcus also says that there’s a second layer of symbolism to the Jolly Roger.
Audrey: And he says it speaks directly to the social order that all of these pirates came from aboard naval and merchant ships.
Marcus: Captains, who kept logs of their voyages, would frequently draw in their log a skull and crossbones to indicate the death of a sailor. It’s a fairly common practice. So, what sailors did when they became pirates is they seized that symbolism of the skull and crossbones and put it on their flag. They’re inverting the meaning of this. They are trapped in this world of death and it is absolutely true that the ordinary common sailor couldn’t expect to live very long, which fueled their decision to become pirates. The idea being – Let us live well as long as we can.
Tyler: A symbol of the death of a common sailor holds an hourglass and a sword.
Marcus: There you go. Death, violence and limited time: these are things that were really crucial to the lives of common sailors and they put that on their banner and then they fought back against those conditions under that banner. I think this is very revealing of their consciousness as workers that – These are the conditions we are in and we’re going to put this on the flag. We’re going to have our own flag; to hell with all those nation-states. We are free people and we will do what we want. We declare war on the whole world, as they put it – but, of course, not against common sailors. Those are the people that you defend. You take vengeance against the class enemies. So, there is a very strong anti-national quality to this black flag and everybody recognised it as such at the time.
[Theme music]
Tyler: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. Join us in Part 2, where we talk more about everyday life aboard a pirate ship—the rules pirates lived by, the alliances they built and how their fight for freedom ultimately led to their downfall.
Audrey: Part 2 is available now for early listening for our supporters on Patreon.
Tyler: It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.
Audrey: In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. If you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.
Tyler: If you’d like to learn more about the Golden Age of Piracy, check out the webpage for this episode, where you’ll find further reading and more. You can also get Marcus’ book, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age.
Audrey: And his graphic novel, Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel with David Lester, in the links in the show notes.
Tyler: Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
Audrey: Our theme tune is Bella Ciao. Thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. This episode was written by me, Audrey Kemp.
Tyler: And me, Tyler Hill. Produced by me, Tyler Hill. Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.
Part 2
Tyler: Welcome back to Part 2 of our double-episode on The Golden Age of Piracy. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, then I recommend you go back and listen to that first.
[Intro music]
Audrey: Before we get started, just a reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters.
Tyler: Our supporters fund our work and, in return, get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content.
Audrey: Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.
Tyler: Last episode, we looked at the world that gave rise to the Golden Age of Piracy: brutal working conditions, exploitation, and the sailors who chose to fight back by creating a new social order at sea.
Audrey: They took to the open seas, far away from authority of any kind, declaring war on the world they came from.
Marcus: Pirates depended on the great expanses of waters and seas or oceans because they were very hard for the navies of the world to police.
Tyler: But when the whole world is against you, where do you go?
Marcus: You can’t stay at sea forever. You have to go ashore. You have to get food. You have to get the barnacles scraped off the side of the vessel. You need to have a place you can go.
Audrey: Though the imperial powers of the day had their grip on much of the world, there were some places where they were weak and where their resources were stretched thin.
Marcus: For example, on some of the smaller Caribbean islands, lesser ports in Cuba or Puerto Rico, or Saint-Domingue and some of the bigger islands of the Caribbean. There were small ports and the reason these ports were attractive was that there were usually petty merchants who were not the wealthy people attached to the British Government. Petty merchants would be very glad to get the pirates’ prizes and they would let them have them for a very cheap price.
Tyler: Pirates established bases all along the Atlantic–on the coast of North America, parts of West Africa, and especially the Indian Ocean. Madagascar, in particular, was one of the more notorious pirate haunts.
Audrey: In the Bahamas, a pirate stronghold called ‘The Republic of Pirates’ was established from roughly 1706 to 1718. It was a self-governed, anarchistic pirate utopia where famous pirates like Blackbeard and Anne Bonny operated outside of imperial rule and traditional hierarchies.
Tyler: The Republic was a base from which pirates could raid merchant ships and disrupt trade.
Audrey: In places like these, pirates established trading networks with merchants who had no loyalty to any empire—just a willingness to do business.
Marcus: And, of course, pirates also had popular followings in these smaller ports because they would come ashore flush with money and they were going to spend it and give it away. They would sometimes free enslaved people and free indentured servants and they would come back to the ship with them.
Audrey: Most people loved to see a pirate ship roll into town. For many, it meant a payday, a party, or even a shot at a new life.
Marcus: I’ve argued that these pirate ships are like floating Maroon communities made up of people who escaped the plantation system and moved, for example, into the Blue Mountains of Jamaica or some other inaccessible place where they could build these very different social worlds separate from the plantation.
Tyler: Marcus describes pirate ships as a kind of autonomous zone—outside the reach of kings and empires, operating on their own rules.
Marcus: It’s a place where the people, who are essentially refugees of the capitalist shipping industry, can build their own world in ways like Maroons could do on land, in forests, on mountains, and the sea is a very similar kind of place.
Audrey: Not to mention the kinds of sailors who ended up becoming pirates were often the most skilled ones.
Marcus: Once they’re in control of those ships, they can sail them better than anybody else. It’s very hard to capture them. So, their skill is also related to their issue of freedom. Slowly, the authorities do kind of cut off their contacts in different landed societies, which makes it easier to capture them.
Tyler: The reasons the authorities of the day put so much effort into trying to capture pirates were that, in building a more egalitarian society for themselves, they posed a legitimate threat to the status quo.
Marcus: The pirates of the third generation, in the 17-teens and 1720s, captured thousands of merchant ships. This created a massive crisis in this very lucrative world of global trade.
Audrey: Marcus says that in the 17-teens and 1720s, maritime insurance rates skyrocketed.
Tyler: In some cases, insurance rates doubled or even tripled.
Audrey: And in places like the Caribbean and West Africa, insurance rates could be as high as 15 to 30 per cent of a ship’s total value.
Marcus: And that reflected the power of pirates directly. They were capturing so many ships and it was so dangerous that these insurance houses in the metropolis in London and Paris, or wherever they were, were very keenly aware of it and they were very worried about all the risks. So, there is a major disruption of the capitalist trading system.
Tyler: And unlike financial crises caused by capitalism’s own contradictions, this was something else entirely.
Marcus: This is a human creation. In other words, this is not one of those crises of overproduction or the things that are irrational in the way that capitalism works. This is poor people banding together, fighting back and creating massive problems for the architects of the world economy. As you would expect, they come down with great violence on the heads of these people who are disrupting their sources of income and profits.
Audrey: Pirates not only threatened the global economy but a way of living that was the exact opposite of their formerly oppressive existence on navy and merchant vessels.
Tyler: And they defied the social hierarchies of the day, fully aware that their decision to turn pirate would come with consequences.
Audrey: But they didn’t care. Freedom was more important to them.
Marcus: These common sailors, most of whom we’ll never know, make this decision to cross the line to become pirates. They live very well for as long as they live. They feast all the time and they drink. They elect their own leaders. They divide up everything equally. Many of them know that they’re going to die. This is another thing, like with the Jolly Roger; there’s a sense of humour among the pirates, which is really gallows humour. They know they’re going to die as long as they stick with it and most of them stick with it till the end.
Tyler: In Marcus’ book, he talks at length about the sense of humour pirates had in light of this awareness that their freedom would likely be short-lived.
Marcus: A group of pirates captured a ship that was carrying proclamations of the king; these big bundles of broadsides. Oddly enough, the broadside was offering a forgiveness of crimes to pirates who would come in and accept the king’s pardon, go straight and join the Royal Navy, or do something like that. So, the pirates have plundered the ship and they say, “Give us all those proclamations,” and the merchant captain says, “Why do you want those?” They say, “We’re in need of toilet paper.” They can’t think of any better way than to use the king’s proclamation for that purpose. So, there is that sense of humour but, again, this is an instance where ordinary working people create a crisis in the world economy.
Audrey: That rebellious spirit shaped everything about life aboard a pirate ship, including their infamous love of merriment. Music, dancing, sex and storytelling weren’t just ways to pass time—they were essential to morale. Rum flowed freely and the crew lived by their own rules.
Tyler: And those rules extended beyond partying. Pirate ships had their own systems for survival—ones that prioritised fairness and collective care. As we covered in Part 1, unlike merchant or navy ships where captains held unchecked power, pirate crews elected their leaders democratically. The loot captured during raids was also divided equitably among the crew, regardless of their rank or role on the ship.
Audrey: A captain could be voted out at any time and the quartermaster made sure no one abused their authority. And, when pirates got injured, they weren’t left behind.
Tyler: There’s even an argument to be made that pirates established the first social security system.
Audrey: In the popular imagination, pirates are often depicted with things like eye patches, peg legs and hooks for hands and that may not be entirely accurate, BUT Marcus says it does get to an essential truth.
Tyler: Being a sailor, on any kind of vessel, was a dangerous line of work and it often resulted in getting maimed or killed.
Audrey: Pirates accommodated for this. Many of their charters contained rules that required the sailors to put a portion of all plunder toward a common fund.
Tyler: That fund was used to provide for injured or disabled crewmates.
Audrey: Even more than that, those who became disabled on the job weren’t discriminated against and, on a couple of occasions, even rose to the rank of captain.
Tyler: Maimed pirates were guaranteed food and drink, among other things, as part of this makeshift welfare system and a strong sense of solidarity and mutual support.
Audrey: One notable example of the determination pirates had to care for one another comes in April 1717, when Blackbeard and his crew blockaded the city of Charleston until they were able to buy the medical supplies necessary to treat their sick and wounded.
Tyler: One South Carolinian wrote of the blockade, “The trade of this place was totally interrupted”, and added that the entire province was in “a great terror.”
Audrey: In this way, the pirates’ disruption of trade in the global economy went beyond their desire to buck the system and declare war on the whole world.
Tyler: Their disruption was often for the express purpose of what people might now call ‘mutual aid’.
Audrey: This culture of autonomous, democratic control over their own ships, as well as their organisation of their social hierarchy, arose out of a long-fought battle during the 1640s and 50s BEFORE the so-called Golden Age of Piracy.
Tyler: You may remember from our first episode that prior to this era of piracy, privateers and Buccaneers laid the groundwork for the more proletarian crews that made up the Golden Age.
Audrey: As these mercenaries waged war against Spain on behalf of the upper classes of England, France, and the Netherlands, they were also building their more egalitarian tradition.
Tyler: At the time, it was known as the Jamaica Discipline, or the Law of Privateers. It was considered the antithesis of discipline and law and was rooted in what Marcus calls, ‘a distinctive conception of justice and a class hostility to shipmasters, owners, and gentleman adventurers’.
Audrey: It was based on the democratic control of authority, as well as provision for the injured. It was modelled after a fictional peasant utopia called the Land of Cockaigne where work had been abolished and property redistributed.
Tyler: The Jamaica discipline was shaped by the harsh working conditions of the time and had a few basic tenets:
Audrey: One – a sense of justice that re-imagined the brutal and hierarchical systems of merchant and navy ships. Pirates wanted to establish a more egalitarian and democratic order of things, as evidenced by the way they voted on just about everything.
Tyler: Two – class hostility. Pirates were former sailors – working people from the lower classes who had been exploited and mistreated all their lives. Their code was explicitly antagonistic toward the ruling classes.
Audrey: Three – as we’ve discussed, provisions for the injured and a common fund to take care of pirates who became disabled on the job.
Tyler: Four – Democratic controls on authority. As we mentioned in episode one, captains and officers were elected by the crew; their power was limited, there were methods of removing captains who abused their power, and most major decisions were put to a vote outside of times of battle when quick thinking was essential.
Audrey: Marcus says these ordinary, working people came from all sorts of different backgrounds.
Marcus: Pirate ships were motley crews. This is a phrase that I’ve used quite a bit in my work because it captures both the multi-ethnic and multinational nature of a lot of ships and not only pirate ships, merchant ships and naval ships. I mean, the maritime labour market is international from the 15th and 16th centuries. You look at the people who accompanied Columbus and Magellan and there are Africans, Italians, Greeks and all kinds of people.
Tyler: This multinational coalition of sailors also comprised people of African descent.
Marcus: One major reason why that would be is that pirates did not have racial criteria for joining their band. In other words, what they wanted to know was basically two things. Are you committed to the pirate enterprise, and can you fight? And if you answer yes to both of those, believe me, a person who was an escapee from plantation society would be a very committed member of your pirate crew, given what they would have to go back to.
Audrey: And many pirates of African descent played leading roles aboard their ships.
Marcus: And that’s because quite a few of them, we now know, had military training back in Africa. This is very important. So, when you know how to fight, when you know how to use a gun and when you have military discipline, this is a very attractive thing for allowing people to come on board the ships. So, that’s also a levelling sort of thing.
Tyler: Pirate ships were one of the only places in the Western Hemisphere at the time that Black men could attain power and money. Many Black pirates were escaped slaves. One of the most famous of these was a man known as Black Caesar. Legend has it that he was an African chieftain who evaded capture by slavers multiple times through his strength and cunning but he was eventually kidnapped. The slave ship that was transporting him to the Americas encountered a hurricane and he and a friend escaped in a rowboat during the chaos. Black Caesar went on to raid ships in the Florida Keys for almost a decade before joining Blackbeard’s crew.
Marcus: There are also women pirates and this is crucial. Now, there aren’t a lot of them. There are probably quite a few more than we know because there were a lot of women in this period who dressed as men and went to sea or went to war. That was very common. Two women who were very famous in their own day, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, were as tough and as good a fighter as any male sailor.
Audrey: Marcus says, at one point, Bonny and Read actually ended up on the same ship.
Marcus: The story of how they were captured is interesting because, as often happened, a lot of the pirates seized their freedom to get drunk. So when a naval vessel comes near, it turns out a lot of Ann and Mary’s shipmates are drunk and so they run down into the hold of the vessel to hide, as if that’s going to help them. So, Ann and Mary and one other pirate stay on the main deck. They’re firing the cannon and trying to keep the naval vessel away from them. They don’t succeed. They’re captured and they’re all taken into Jamaica to be hanged. Anne and Mary are not hanged because they’re both pregnant.
Tyler: Or at least they claimed to be.
Marcus: British law, at that time, did not permit the hanging of pregnant women. This will give you a pretty good idea of Anne Bonny’s spirit. At the gallows, Jack Rackham, her lover, who was the captain of the vessel and who had gone down in the hole to hide, is standing there with a rope around his neck. He looks at Anne and she’s not giving him a sympathetic look and Calico Jack says, “Anne, don’t look at me that way,” and Anne was reported to have said, “Jack, if you had fought like a man, you wouldn’t now be hanged like a dog.” So, this was Ann Bonny’s toughness. Mary Reed was every bit as tough.
Tyler: And though it was less common than their forward-thinking gender and racial attitudes, the pirate ship even allowed for the kinds of sexual relationships that were prohibited amongst polite society.
Marcus: It was just a freer place and I find it fascinating that even though, in all other maritime enterprises, sexual contact between men is criminalised and ruthlessly punished, none of the articles for pirate ships mentioned this as an issue at all. So, we don’t have a lot of evidence about what happened on pirate ships but we do know that they were freer places in that regard, as in almost all others.
Audrey: But that freedom came with a price. The authorities of the day did everything they could to not only capture and execute pirates but to make examples out of them.
Marcus: The government of England has long been, as my friend Peter Linebaugh calls it, a thanatocracy where you rule people by killing them. You rule people by public executions. So, in every port city, anytime a group of pirates were captured, there would be a show trial and there would be a highly public spectacle of execution because, again, they wanted to send a message to common sailors who were joining these pirate ships.
Tyler: Around one in ten pirates met their fate at the gallows. The dead bodies of executed pirates were often left hanging outside ports, rotting in the sun—a brutal warning to anyone tempted to follow their path.
Audrey: It sends the message: this is what happens if you defy the existing order.
Tyler: Or if you get in the way of the ruling class accumulating more wealth.
Marcus: But sometimes, it didn’t work out the way the authorities wanted it to because these pirates would seize the moment of their own execution to continue their critique of the way they were treated as common sailors.
Audrey: Many pirates faced the gallows without fear. Some used their final moments to call out the injustice that had driven them to piracy in the first place.
Tyler: One of the most famous examples was William Fly, a notorious pirate, who approached his execution in 1726 with complete disdain.
Marcus: He’s going to be hanged and the famous Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, keeps talking to him, trying to get him to convert and to admit that what he had done was wrong. William Fly just completely refuses. He’s having none of it. He gets on the gallows and he makes a speech in which he says to all the ship captains out there in the audience, “Treat your sailors well or this is going to happen. This guy, Fly, had so much confidence in himself and his message that when he got up on the gallows and the hangman put the noose around his neck, William Fly took it off and said, “You don’t even know how to tie a proper noose, do you?” And, of course, sailors, who worked with rope all the time at sea, were experts in tying knots. So, Fly actually retied the knot that would go around his neck just to show them that he wasn’t afraid he was going to die game and he was going to die cursing the powers that be.
Audrey: The pirates who pulled these kinds of stunts at the gallows did so knowing full well that a large number of people in the crowd were actually on their side.
Marcus: That’s why the authorities didn’t just stage these public executions. They had large numbers of armed soldiers to prevent the crowd from rescuing people from the gallows and that did happen a couple of times. It happened once, for sure, in Jamaica where a rowdy mob went and rescued the pirate before he was hanged.
Audrey: The pirates responded to the terror of the ruling class in kind.
Tyler: In the last episode, Marcus talked about how pirates used the Jolly Roger to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies.
Audrey: But he also says many pirates used their sense of humour, absurdity, and their flair for the dramatic to turn that fear back on the ruling class.
Marcus: Pirates understood the drama of social life and one who understood it very well was a man named Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard. He was a huge man of six feet eight or six feet nine in a time when most people were about five feet six. He had this big, long black beard and when he went into battle, he would take sparklers and put them in his beard and his hair and then set them on fire so that he had this satanic halo around his head, which was absolutely terrifying to everybody. His idea was – “You’re afraid of satanic imagery? Okay, I’m that. I am your greatest nightmare.” So, he’s playing this part and it’s a part meant to terrify, if not terrorise, your enemies.
Tyler: Marcus says this dynamic of terror—this back-and-forth—is essential to understanding the Golden Age of Piracy.
Marcus: We do have to add one more terror to this story, which is the terror that ship captains used as they tried to control common sailors in their workplaces. That, in some ways, is the original terror. That’s the terror against which piracy grew up. It’s a dialectic or almost a trialectic of terror at three different levels. The pirates understood their role and they wanted to be remembered as heroes, as people who, in that moment of execution, had the courage to stand up to the authorities.
Audrey: This struggle between what Marcus calls ‘The Two Terrors’ would eventually bring the Golden Age of Piracy to an end.
Marcus: But then, the British government passed a new law in 1721, which was targeting these petty merchants who would buy, sell and trade with them, said, “Anyone who cooperates with pirates is subject to the same punishments as pirates themselves”, – meaning we will hang you too.
Tyler: The authorities thought that if they could separate pirates from their bases of support, they wouldn’t have the resources to continue disrupting trade.
Marcus: Hundreds and hundreds of pirates were hanged and, essentially, the struggle was forced back down below decks. In other words, you couldn’t really capture pirate ships anymore. You didn’t have a place where you could take them to refit. The smaller merchants, or the allies that you had, were terrified now of the government and that they, too, were going to be hanged. So, what happened was that piracy was… I won’t say eliminated but reduced to a very large extent,
Tyler: But stamping out piracy didn’t mean stamping out rebellion. The fight against exploitation had just found new battlegrounds.
Marcus: The defeat, you might say, of this generation of pirates forced people into other forms of resistance. One of the things that I noticed, which was quite fascinating, in doing my research, is that in the period after, piracy declines and the murder rate between captains and common sailors skyrockets. So, this is kind of displaced into another kind of more individual violence.
Audrey: In addition to individual acts of rebellion, collective resistance also took shape. A few decades later, in 1768, the word ‘strike’ was first used to describe work protests when sailors ‘struck’ down the sails of their ships in order to create a work stoppage.
Marcus: Sailors are natural-born storytellers. Storytelling is a maritime art because when you’re at sea, you’re separated from loved ones and your ship is under sail, there’s not that much to do, so people tell stories. These pirates became an endless source of stories: stories of courage, stories of resistance, stories of standing up to the authorities and stories of thumbing your nose at them when you’re on the gallows.
Tyler: By the 1730s, the Golden Age of Piracy was over. Naval patrols intensified, punishments grew harsher, and colonial powers worked together to stamp out piracy. The world had changed and there was no longer room for pirates.
Audrey: In fact, some of the pirates we talked about in Part 1 didn’t make it out of the Golden Age alive.
Tyler: Blackbeard was hunted down and killed in battle in 1718. Black Caesar was aboard Blackbeard’s ship at the time and was hanged in Virginia in 1718.
Audrey: Bartholomew Roberts, one of the most successful pirates of all time, was shot and killed in 1722.
Tyler: William Kidd was hanged in London, his body left to rot over the Thames as a warning.
Audrey: Anne Bonny and Mary Read avoided execution by claiming to be pregnant, as Marcus said earlier.
Tyler: Read died in prison and Bonny’s fate remains unknown.
Audrey: But the legends of these pirates didn’t die with them. They reappeared elsewhere—on stage, in paintings, and in the pages of books in perpetuity.
Tyler: Three hundred years later, we’re still thinking, talking and daydreaming about them.
Marcus: We remember the pirates. We remember their names. People love pirates today. We don’t remember the people who killed them. So, in a very real sense, the pirates have kind of won. They sort of lost the battle but won the war and if the war is for a sense of justice, then pirates have been the long-term winners in all this because people love them as folk heroes. They still do. I’ve been working on pirates off and on for decades and everywhere I go around the world, it’s the same. People are just fascinated by them and they’re especially inspired by their courage. So, that’s a way in which they weren’t defeated.
[Theme music]
Tyler: That brings us to the end of our double episode. Thanks to Marcus Rediker for taking the time to talk to us.
Audrey: We definitely recommend you get a copy of Marcus’ book, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, as well as his graphic novel Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, a Graphic Novel, with David Lester. Both available on the links in the show notes.
Tyler: It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.
Audrey: In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. If you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.
Tyler: Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
Audrey: Our theme tune is Bella Ciao. Thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. This episode was written by me, Audrey Kemp.
Tyler: And me, Tyler Hill. Produced by me, Tyler Hill. Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks so much for listening.
