See Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Villains of All Nations by Marcus Rediker, an historian at the University of Pittsburgh. The first book is a more general early-modern period Anglo-American maritime history focused on the experiences of common sailors, the second is an exapansion of the first one's chapter about pirates of that period. They're lots of fun to read.
Inventor is largely correct. Or at least, largely consistant with what Rediker says is true. There were no standardized articles, though, every crew created their own. They did consistantly make a number of the same provisions -- equality among the crew, the captain being elected by the crew and having no special rights to better food or quarters and having decision-making powers only in battle or fleeing, everybody voting on other decisions, profits from the venture being divided up by shares (as was done on medieval ships, wage-labour was a bit of an innovation at the time, with sailors being among the first to be treated that way) and various positions on the ship getting two, one, or a half share, plus provisions made to set some aside for guys who got maimed and couldn't sail any more. This stuff was obviously contrived by the men to protect themselves against abuses that they'd all experienced -- sailor's wages were very low, the work very difficult and dangerous, pensions non-existant, and sea-captains even in merchant vessels had ridiculous powers, they could legally execute seamen without trial.
The articles sometimes had lots of other stuff in them, including silly things like, "You must be at least this drunk to vote." You had to sign them, which meant that you'd get hanged if anybody in authority found the document. Often they signed them in a funny pattern, with everybody's signature radiating out from a central circle, so nobody could tell who signed it first. ("And we are all equally guilty.")
I understand that there's a complete lack of any historical record of 'walking the plank.'
Normal sort of way to become a pirate: One ship has a particularly nasty captain or a particularly volitile crew-member. They mutiny, kill their officers, and elect some crew-member captain. Now they are criminals and cannot take the ship's cargo to port to trade it without risking getting hanged, so they attack other ships to get supplies and fencable goods. When they took another ship, they'd ask its crew if anybody wanted to join them. They'd also ask after the conduct of that ship's officers, and kill them if crewmembers said they were bad. If the ship had 'good' officers they'd usually just take cargo and supplies out of it and let it go, otherwise they tended to take everything and then set it on fire. Most pirates of the 'Golden Age of Piracy' (1716-1726, plus less dramatic decades on either end) became pirates by having their ship attacked by pirates. There are numerous ships' books records of sailors getting flogged for remarking that they wished pirates would show up so they could join them. Pirates liked to overcrowd their ships, so that the pirate ship would have 80 or so guys on it when merchant ships often had less than twenty. That way the pirates didn't have to do as much work per person. Also, they could just raise their scary black flag, climb up into the rigging and howl and wave cutlasses and moon the other ship, scaring the heck out of them and impressing upon them how outnumbered they were, so they'd just surrender without a fight.
It's a pity that the famous historical pirates were all former privateers who turned pirate when they lost their letters of marque, and were not representative of the group. William Fly is much more interesting.
I really doubt they were aspies. They were much too intensely social and inconsistant.
19 Sep 2008, 3:00 pm
