0:01

Hello, and welcome to Great Polycules

0:03

of History, your podcast that's usually

0:05

called cool pepolted cool stuff, but

0:07

this week I'm calling Great Polycules

0:09

of History. I'm your host, Margaret Keljoy, and

0:13

with me today is Miriam Rochack, one of my

0:15

favorite guests of all time. Miriam,

0:18

I'm good. I'm excited to hear what

0:20

sounds like some messy history.

0:23

Yeay, I'm kind of I'm

0:26

mislit whatever. I'm just gonna go with it. Okay,

0:28

you haven't. You still haven't told me what we're

0:30

recording about it? Neither has s Okay,

0:34

now you're lying. Now I'm now our

0:36

audi. Do you want to start over? I

0:39

tried very hard to not tell

0:41

Miriam what this episode was about. Anyway,

0:44

I'll just so, Miriam. Is

0:46

it fun that every time I introduce you, I do

0:49

so by saying Miriam and the rest of her

0:51

crew once stole a tall ship and sailed off without their

0:53

bosses permission because they weren't getting paid. Oh

0:57

yeah, it's that's slightly inaccurate. We didn't

0:59

sail off without the boss's permission. We just

1:01

started operating the boat on

1:03

our own terms and getting paid in

1:05

cash for it without involving the

1:08

owners of the boat. But yeah,

1:10

okay, okay, So

1:12

Miriam wants to stole a tall ship, sailed it to

1:14

a different continent and

1:18

interrupted the transatlantic slave trade.

1:22

That sounds years ago. So

1:26

and our producers Sophie, Hi, Sophie, how are you? First

1:29

of all, when you don't want me to tell Miriam

1:31

something? You say, hey, don't

1:33

tell Miriam something because I'm gonna blab

1:35

to my friend right away.

1:38

And I'm terrible at lying solid

1:42

of Miriam. Okay here, I'm remember a light of

1:44

Beriam. So the reason

1:46

that this was so hard for me to keep the secret is

1:48

that Miriam is one of my main friends that I like

1:51

send signal messages to throughout the week

1:53

as I do research, like tittering about

1:55

this or that great lesbian

1:58

and history are, who are whatever?

2:00

Like the stuff that I don't even necessarily include in the podcast. I

2:02

just get really excited about. I

2:04

did enjoy being there live for your

2:07

disappointment in last week's

2:10

Last Week's Hero when you discovered that

2:12

he was in fact terrible to his wife. Yeah,

2:17

didn't anyway, So it

2:19

was particularly hard.

2:21

It was a struggle to not

2:24

so what did we learn? What we're

2:26

talking about it. From this experience, Magpie,

2:30

don't trust people. If

2:32

you need me to lie to somebody, tell

2:34

me to lie. I wouldn't

2:36

tell you to lie. I just would have told you to note

2:39

on your behalf if you asked me too, I

2:41

appreciate it. If the if the

2:43

cops come, Okay, so all right. What

2:45

I have learned is to always assume that people

2:48

want to talk to me about what you're about

2:50

to tell us. We're going to talk about. Yeah,

2:52

okay, So Ian

2:55

as our audio engineer, and our music

2:57

was written for us by one woman, high Ian Miriam.

3:01

Have you ever heard about pirates pi

3:06

rits. It looks like it's pronounced oh

3:11

yeah, yeah no, Um. It took me a while. I looked

3:13

up a bunch of videos, but how to pronounce it? It's actually pirate.

3:17

I like when they spell it with a y. That

3:19

is actually the main source that. Yeah.

3:24

Today we're going to talk about

3:26

the golden age of piracy, which is means that

3:28

this is another moral complexity week.

3:33

They mostly weren't good people, no,

3:36

not not particularly. They're um

3:39

even the best of them could

3:41

probably appear on different shows on this network,

3:44

Like I gotta warn you, Um you know,

3:47

as you know, I had a tall

3:49

ship period of my career. During

3:52

that time, the

3:55

Pirates of the Caribbean movies, like the first

3:57

one was out, they were more

3:59

of them were coming out. The

4:01

I'm on a Boat song came out. During this

4:03

time. It was it was time to be

4:07

I have heard of pop culture from approximately

4:10

fifteen years ago. Ow cool, I

4:14

know what you put in the box. Anyway,

4:16

The truth is I burned out hard on pirates,

4:19

but that was about a decade ago, so I'm

4:21

probably ready to give pirates another try.

4:24

Yeah you know, I did used

4:26

to have to dress as a pirate at

4:28

work, I'm sorry,

4:31

and then interact with the public. Festival,

4:37

I attended a pirate festival and do you know

4:39

what band headlined that pirate festival. It

4:43

was Blue Oyster Cult. And I have no idea

4:45

why, but it fucking ruled. I think somebody,

4:49

I think somebody who was booking like thought

4:51

that they were a seafood themed band or something,

4:53

but they absolutely had lined a pirate

4:55

festival. It fucking ruled.

4:58

I think it's because boomers

5:00

like pirates and boomers like Blue Oyster Cult

5:03

could be I mean also

5:05

like I also like Blue Oyster Cult. Yeah,

5:08

and I could feelings

5:11

about pirates songs by them, Well,

5:14

mixed feelings is what we're going to talk about today.

5:17

Today we are going to deconstruct

5:20

the myth of the Golden Age pirates.

5:23

We're going to take a part of the idea that they were good,

5:25

noble rebels because they weren't. We're

5:28

going to talk about how these days they're romanticized

5:30

for all the wrong reasons. But we're

5:32

also going to talk about what's

5:34

undeniably interesting about them and why

5:36

they hold onto our cultural

5:39

attention so much. And most

5:41

importantly, we're gonna talk about the stuff that simple,

5:44

well, that's not the most important. We're also gonna talk about the stff

5:46

that they symbolize in certain contexts. Most

5:48

importantly, we're going to talk about literally

5:50

the only two Golden Age pirate women

5:53

we know about, a Bonnie and Mary Reid,

5:56

who are maybe in a polycuel with a snappy

5:58

dresser. Oh, they absolutely

6:00

were. That is that. I will

6:04

take no argument on that, but I'm really

6:06

excited to gossip about it with you. Great.

6:10

I'm sure that this podcast will talk about

6:12

the non Golden Age pirates in the future, too, many of whom

6:14

were like substantially more interesting for a ton

6:16

of reasons. Obviously, if for

6:18

anyone who's interested in lady pirates, check out our

6:20

fairly recent episodes where we talk about Grace O'Malley,

6:22

the Irish pirate Queen. So,

6:27

the Golden Age of piracy lasted

6:29

from about sixteen ninety to seventeen twenty

6:32

five, which is about thirty five years, which is

6:34

not an incredibly long period of time. The

6:37

extra Golden Age the age

6:40

in which all of the pirates that we talk about were

6:42

active, which I'm going to call the platinum

6:44

age, because that's the only thing I'd come up with in

6:47

D and D that's worth more than gold. I guess

6:49

it could be the like diamond,

6:51

I don't know, whatever, I think we can call it the Pieces

6:53

of eight Age. Okay, the Pieces

6:55

of eight Age is

6:58

seventeen fourteen to seven twenty

7:00

two, which is only

7:02

eight years. All of this fucking

7:04

culture is about something that lasted

7:07

eight years, which seems ridiculous

7:09

until you remember that's

7:11

twice as long as the Confederacy. I

7:15

really like that you are currently using Confederacy

7:19

as like a unit of short

7:21

periods of time. Yeah,

7:23

the Confederacy lasted one person

7:26

going to college. Ye a, the time,

7:29

yeah, longer than I went to college, but

7:31

the normal the normal college

7:33

length. And you know when you meet somebody

7:36

who's like still incredibly stuck on those

7:38

four years of their life and they suck,

7:40

Oh my god, uh huh yep, I'm

7:43

not gonna draw any conclusions. Yeah no,

7:45

yeah, they're literally just so. The pirates

7:48

were like master's degree. Wait,

7:50

no, that's only two more years PhD,

7:54

fast, fast PhD. They

7:58

quick doctors. I

8:00

wouldn't trust them to do much surgery.

8:03

But there's two problems

8:05

with pirate history. The first

8:07

problem is that everyone has really strong

8:10

opinions about pirates and wants

8:12

to claim them and sort of put them into

8:14

this or that camp, so all the

8:16

books are biased to shit or wants

8:18

to reject them. But everyone

8:21

feels really strongly about pirates and therefore

8:23

lies. The other problem

8:26

is that everyone who talks about pirates is lying

8:28

because we don't know shit about them, you

8:31

know how, like most of what we know about the Norse gods,

8:33

or about half of what you know about the Norse gods comes

8:35

from this. Like Christian Icelandic writer

8:37

who had been in a Christian country for hundreds of years,

8:40

I like you that you say that as though I

8:43

naturally would know the provenance of

8:45

nor Smiths. But I do

8:47

know that most of what we know about Pirates

8:49

came from a book that was probably written by

8:51

the guy who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and that he made

8:53

it the fuck up. Well, it

8:55

actually probably wasn't written by him. We're going to get to that.

8:58

Oh really, okay, I'm learning already,

9:00

okay, but it was written by explain

9:03

this stuff to me. I am, I am, I

9:05

am. Hey, I once went on a tall

9:08

ship. You were sailing it. Yeah,

9:11

So, okay, half

9:13

of what we know about the Norse gods comes from this Icelandic

9:16

Christian named Snorri, who is

9:18

legitimately a historian. And I don't think he like totally

9:20

lied, but it's why I think it's

9:22

why all the like Norse Smiths sound like Christian

9:24

Smith's retold you know anyway,

9:29

Okay, as we mentioned, the other problem

9:32

is that a professional novelist

9:35

who wrote pop history wrote half

9:37

of what we know about pirates. And you should never

9:39

trust a novelist who tries to

9:41

tell you history. That's that's

9:44

my statement right out the gate. Okay.

9:46

So there is this British guy. I go to lead with that as

9:48

the reason not to trust him. But his

9:51

pen name is Captain Charles Johnson.

9:54

He was almost certainly not a captain,

9:56

but throw on that title and you'll sell more books.

9:59

In sevent twenty four he comes out with a bestseller

10:02

with a sick title, A

10:04

general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious

10:06

Pirates. Those were the fucking

10:09

days when you're like, title alone

10:11

had to like, would have taken

10:14

up an entire tweet. Yeah, totally,

10:16

Like if you need a fucking semicolon

10:18

in your title, there isn't one in this, but you can imagine

10:21

it, you know. And very

10:23

importantly, this is pirates with a why God?

10:26

Yes, yeah, And this is a companion

10:28

of basically all the Pirates that people talk about now.

10:31

And this was written with a

10:33

incredible amount of artistic license. It

10:36

sells like crazy. It's the Eat Pray Love

10:39

of the seventeen twenties. It

10:41

starts this wave of people

10:44

publishing They're like great

10:46

highwaymen, great

10:48

prostitutes, like

10:51

like all these other books that didn't do

10:53

as well, although I would happily

10:56

read either of those other books. So

10:59

Eat Pray Love is doing really well in the seventeen twenties.

11:02

Within two years it's on its fourth edition.

11:05

So he's like, hey, why not add

11:08

more stuff, including, at

11:10

this point, entirely making things up

11:12

whole cloth. And we know this

11:14

because he made up an entire pirate

11:17

whole cloth named Captain Mission, who's

11:20

sort of a Republican anti pirate

11:22

who flies a white flag with the word liberty

11:24

on it, who's a dedicated abolitionist,

11:27

and is clearly just a representation of the author's

11:29

political opinions. At least that's it's

11:31

kind of fun, though, I know, I mean it

11:33

insert a character who, yeah,

11:36

espouses all your ideals. Wait, can we go

11:38

back for a second, though, Why do I think

11:40

that it was okay

11:43

great in nineteen thirty

11:46

two. It is like two hundred

11:48

years later. There's this guy

11:50

who's like, you know what this writing

11:52

is like Daniel Dafoe. I think Daniel

11:54

Dafoe wrote it, And he did a lot of

11:56

research. He like presented a lot of evidence that the

11:58

writing was very much like Niel Dafoe's in

12:01

some ways and then completely unlike it in other ways.

12:04

And this convinced like all the libraries to start

12:06

cataloging it under Daniel Dafoe, and it

12:08

was like, but the thing is

12:10

is, at this point it was like trendy to claim

12:13

books were written by Daniel Dafoe. People

12:18

he wrote a ton, right, he

12:20

properly like a couple, like a couple decades

12:22

after his death, like the sixteen nineties. He's been dead for like

12:24

sixty years. They're like, we know of one hundred

12:26

and one books this motherfucker wrote, which is

12:29

a lot of fucking books. Off the top of my head,

12:31

Michael Morecock is the only guy I know it was written more

12:33

than that. I'm sure there's more, but that's who

12:35

I know writing more one hundred books, a

12:38

lot of fucking books. By nineteen seventy,

12:41

people were attributing five hundred and seventy

12:43

books to Daniel Dafoe

12:47

just because they were like, well, this

12:49

guy was around, he was prolific, he wrote

12:52

everything. Basically,

12:54

all anonymous texts from the early

12:56

eighteenth century got attributed to Daniel Dafoe

12:58

at some point because Okay,

13:00

I think I literally have a copy of

13:03

that book him

13:05

as the author. Fuck yeah, Okay, So

13:08

so basically, like this

13:10

guy writes like Daniel Dafoe seems

13:12

to have practically meant while this guy writes like

13:14

an early eighteenth century Englishman, right,

13:19

Okay, so anyway,

13:22

Also, I didn't do a ton of research about Daniel

13:24

Dafoe, but he did add the duh to

13:27

his name to sound more proper. He

13:29

was originally Daniel Foe, which

13:32

is a more hard name. He did an extra syllable

13:35

in that name, you know, competing with all the long

13:37

titles. I know, but he didn't

13:39

even put his name on half the books, or

13:41

maybe put other people's names for no

13:43

reason. Yeah, totally, It's

13:47

more likely that it was written by this

13:50

this media guy, um like a guy

13:52

who ran a press and then did a lot

13:54

of journalism and shit, but very like biased journalism

13:57

that not necessarily a bad way. It was all, well, it's

13:59

all journalism now too. But this guy named

14:01

Nathaniel Missed who had a sick

14:03

fucking name that is such a

14:05

cool name. That would be a great pirate name.

14:08

It would be a great pirate name. And

14:10

he was like a sailor and Indian

14:14

ocean and shit. I didn't write this part into

14:16

the script, so I'm riffing it. But from what I remember

14:18

from Bratt reading him, and he ran a printing

14:20

shop, that did a bunch of political journalism, so

14:22

much to the point that he spent a couple of years in jail and eventually

14:24

had to flee to France and ship because he was one

14:28

of those guys who wanted the other Kings to be

14:30

in charge instead of the other Kings, the fucking

14:32

Brits. There is a chance

14:35

that he hired Dafoe because

14:37

he occasionally hired Dafoe to write anonymously

14:39

for his press, But I

14:42

think it's the whole thing was like crafted to be

14:44

a media bestseller and was

14:46

written probably by the guy who ran the press.

14:48

He might have gotten some help from some people. I

14:50

don't know Dafoema had something to do with it, It's

14:53

not impossible, but

14:57

whatever. The important thing here's the Book

14:59

of Lies, or it's a book of best guesses

15:01

mixed with outright lies, and

15:04

it is the source for almost

15:06

everything that we know about pirates. There's

15:09

court records, and there's occasional eyewitness

15:11

accounts of memoirs from people who are captured

15:14

by pirates, but most of the

15:16

mythology of pirates stems from this book,

15:18

which is why rather than having this episode.

15:21

Besides, when we get to the polyculem. Most

15:24

of this episode is not going to be like, here's a story about

15:26

individual pirates. It's going to be talking

15:29

about the golden age of piracy and what

15:31

it means for the world, which

15:34

is going to be fun. I didn't make that sound fun. It's

15:36

gonna be fun, motherfuckers, I

15:40

believe you. Yeah, yeah, say

15:43

things loudly, people will all

15:45

right. It all starts with this piece

15:47

of shit named Columbus. I

15:50

hate that guy. I know, well, he's

15:53

kind of famous. He's so famous. There's a

15:55

city in Ohio named after him, which

15:57

is weird when you think about it. Yeah,

16:03

yeah, they were going to rename that. I

16:05

feel like it's probably pretty low on the list of

16:07

priorities, but a

16:10

bigger promise to deal with, right yea, Ohio?

16:15

Yeah, fair enough, although I'm

16:17

probably as close to that horrible train

16:20

crashes as

16:22

um Columbus is. But Christopher

16:25

Columbus was this Italian guy who wasn't

16:27

Italian because Italy didn't fucking exist,

16:30

didn't speak Italian because

16:33

Italian didn't fucking exist, And he

16:35

sailed under the flag of Spain, except

16:37

he didn't because Spain didn't fucking exist.

16:39

Nothing that they tell you about any of the ship is fucking

16:42

true. Like, but

16:46

people didn't think the Earth was flat then

16:48

either. Yeah, that's the

16:50

one that really bothers me. Yeah that yeah,

16:54

so, I mean okay,

16:56

Spain in practical sense had existed

16:59

very recently, a couple decades,

17:01

I think at this point, because the two kingdoms

17:03

Castile and Aragon had like gotten

17:06

hitched or their monarchs had. In

17:09

fourteen ninety two, Columbus

17:12

sailed under the flag of Castile, the

17:14

same year that Spain became more officially

17:16

Spain and immediately kicked out all

17:18

the Jews and Muslims. Good job, Spain. Fuck

17:20

you. We're

17:22

not going to talk about Columbus much. He has no redeeming qualities.

17:25

He's a dick, and he's now in the bad place. I recently

17:27

rewatched The Good Place. It's pretty good, so good.

17:30

That's show is fucking great. You know, Columbus

17:34

shows up on an island called Hispaniola,

17:36

it's not what it was called before that.

17:39

When he gets there, yeah,

17:42

uh, Spain is like hell yeah, our

17:44

Italian guy called DIBs. So this place is

17:46

ours to the whole Caribbean, and

17:49

this last for one hundred and thirty years. They

17:52

don't respect Europe. The Spain doesn't respect

17:54

European peace treaties here. If

17:56

you show up, Spain is gonna fucking

17:58

stomp you. They have this line there

18:00

is no peace beyond the line, or

18:03

it is their motto, with

18:05

the line being the line on the map, where they were like,

18:08

sorry, we called DIBs on all the It's

18:11

it's cool when you have a motto that requires a

18:13

diagram to explain it. There

18:16

is no peace beyond the line. What are you talking about?

18:18

Like, oh, sorry, yeah,

18:20

totally, And then they pull out a globe because

18:23

it would have been a globe, and then they m yeah,

18:25

yeah. Then they're like, see we made this line. Yeah,

18:28

oh finally I understand that sucks.

18:31

Yeah, And so the European powers they

18:33

were like, but we want to go rob

18:35

enslave and colonize, but we

18:38

can't because we can't set up colonies.

18:40

So what we're gonna do is rob the

18:42

shit out of the Spanish that

18:45

I take no issue with this,

18:47

No, I actually honestly don't have a major problem

18:49

with this as a basic concept. Their

18:51

motive is not pure, but whatever, so

18:55

they invent. But if colonizers

18:57

are going to rob other colonizers, that's

18:59

sort of like all right, yeah,

19:02

yeah, So they do a bunch

19:04

of ocean robbery, which unfortunately

19:07

there's no word for except privateering,

19:10

because they had the king's permission

19:12

of this or that king or queen or whatever, so

19:15

it's technically privateering. You could

19:18

argue about whether it counts as piracy. For the most

19:20

part. For the show, we're going to for this episode,

19:22

we're going to distinguish

19:25

because I think this actually gets to what's really interesting

19:27

about the Golden Age piracy, which we are not at

19:29

is the difference between privateering, which is robbing

19:32

people in the name of a king, and

19:34

then pirating, which is robbing

19:36

people in the name of yourself and your friends.

19:39

So in fifteen twenty,

19:42

the French are like, all right, we're gonna

19:44

go rob Spanish boats, and they're the first ones

19:46

to get in on it. Within ten years, French

19:48

privateers are sailing all the way to the Caribbean. At

19:50

first, they're just robbing the Spanish as they come home,

19:53

which just seems simpler, definitely

19:55

easier. Yeah, but it's probably easier

19:58

for the Spanish to like respond

20:00

with more guns. The

20:03

annoying thing about robbing people is that like sometimes

20:06

the people have guns also so

20:09

they start going to the current Caribbean and robbing

20:11

people there and it's a really

20:13

easy job. It's really easy life. Everyone's

20:16

really happy about the not the Spanish.

20:18

So in fifteen fifty the English get

20:20

involved and they call their guys the Sea Dogs.

20:24

Shit, that is cool. I know, I

20:26

know, it's really annoying, and

20:28

that's cool, but it is another

20:31

guy with a fucking sick name. Francis Drake

20:34

is the most famous of the Sea Dogs who

20:37

because I liked taliing episodes together, but he's not an

20:39

important part of this episode. He was involved

20:42

in repelling the Spanish armada that

20:44

caused Spanish sailors to land

20:46

on Ireland as castaways, and

20:48

then the Irish either killed

20:51

them or secreted them to safety.

20:53

And that's all on the Grace O'Malley episodes you can listen

20:55

to if you want to learn more about piracy in

20:57

the English aisles. They probably don't

20:59

like being called the Englis shelves on the west coast

21:01

of that okay,

21:07

around sixteen hundred. The

21:09

Dutch, a little bit late, are like, oh,

21:12

robbing Spanish ships in the Caribbean is easy

21:14

and good, so they start doing

21:17

it and they are enough

21:19

to break Spanish power and

21:21

you get your first non Spanish colonies in

21:23

the area. Again completely

21:25

lateral move, like I

21:28

don't care more colonizers. Great,

21:31

But around this time you get something actually interesting.

21:34

You get the buccaneers and what's now Haiti

21:36

on Hispaniola. And

21:40

I really like these early buccaneers,

21:43

at least everything I've found about them, have

21:45

you, I don't know when

21:48

they're like land googles. Yeah.

21:51

The version that I have been

21:53

taught in my in my own

21:55

uh tall ship

21:57

days is that there was a community

22:00

people who are basically hanging out in what

22:02

is now Haiti, and they were smoking

22:04

meat to preserve it and sailing and selling

22:06

it to other people who were

22:09

sailing around so that they would have like

22:11

preserved meat that they could you know, take

22:13

with them across the ocean. And they

22:15

were like just chilling and doing that, and buccaneer

22:18

came from like the local word for smoking

22:21

meat, yep um. And then at

22:23

some point Spain was like, hey, fuck you and

22:26

wait, no, yeah, you're just getting ahead of the script. I'll

22:29

excuse me for knowing things about pirates.

22:32

Yeah, okay, I kind of set myself up for this

22:36

is literally I don't

22:38

know what and

22:41

who were the Buccaneers and why? Well,

22:43

I'm glad you asked Land

22:45

displain it to me the

22:52

first bucket of years. They're not pirates.

22:55

Land displain it to mean is

22:58

the best thing I've heard in a really

23:00

looked all right.

23:02

Well, while everyone's having fun

23:04

with this, no one else you could have fun with is

23:08

gambling. I feel like that's the ad that ends

23:10

up in all the fucking podcasts lately. Oh

23:13

yeah, that sounds about right.

23:15

There's it is. I just keep getting the gold

23:17

one, which would actually be appropriate for a pirate

23:19

episode. Oh my gosh, you're right. You're

23:22

so right, and

23:28

we are back. And

23:31

I can't believe you said that about behind the Bastards.

23:35

You know, I

23:37

just say it like it is. Rob

23:39

I thought you and Robert were friends. Oh

23:42

he thinks that. Hey, hey,

23:45

carry on, Okay, so

23:49

the first Buccaneers. I

23:52

feel bad. I have to defend him. He's my partner,

23:54

He's the best. Any I really

23:56

like Robert having said

23:58

anything, I know it. I

24:00

was like, I was like, nope, that's

24:03

it. Wasn't joke. This

24:06

is the whole thing about this podcast is that we're all too

24:08

earnest to take the bits too far because

24:11

we're like, no, wait, don't do crime unless

24:13

you really want to, or like whatever. The bit

24:15

is so buccaneers,

24:19

right, not pirates at first.

24:22

They don't live on the ocean, they don't steal shit.

24:24

They've got a lot of what becomes the pirate culture.

24:27

They're this like culture of rough and tumble folks who

24:29

gets called like half civilized or half

24:31

savage or whatever. A lot their

24:34

outlaw frontiersmen who travel with no fixed

24:36

home um in what's now called Haiti,

24:39

and they build little sheds to hang their hammocks

24:41

at night when they need to. There's

24:44

this quote, I found men

24:46

who could never live in the bosom

24:49

of ordered society, men who live for the moment,

24:51

swaggerers, love of lovers of glory.

24:54

Men sometimes cruel, often generous,

24:56

but cowards never un

25:00

Yeah, Like, I feel like that gets to some of the core of

25:02

what's that kind of interesting about some of the stuff I'm gon be talking

25:04

about. They're hunters. They

25:06

live off the wild boar and the wild cattle.

25:09

As far as I can tell, there's definitely cattle, and

25:11

I believe that they are wild from abandoned

25:14

Spanish settlements basically that have now

25:16

gone wild. I do like how

25:19

anybody who was

25:21

like not living in England,

25:24

regularly attending church and

25:26

like you know,

25:29

saying God Save the King a lot was

25:31

was considered like half civilized

25:33

in all of these writings, Like that probably

25:36

just meant that these guys like drank

25:39

sometimes and didn't

25:41

always wear shoes. I mean, I don't

25:44

know. It could mean they were they were doing crazier

25:46

shit. It's hard to tell with these

25:48

guys because like a lot of this, Yeah, there's

25:50

all this like exaggerated stuff about

25:53

you know, yeah, they didn't go to church, so they're

25:55

clearly wild animals or whatever. But

25:58

like there's a lot of story raise

26:00

about them, like continuing

26:03

to wear the pants that they do the slaughtering

26:05

and all the time, so they're just like walking around in blood

26:07

pants. Oh these

26:09

are crust punks. Yeah, No, they're crust

26:11

punks. And they travel with no fixed home

26:13

and they just lay their hammock where they want every

26:16

night, and they only gather to like

26:19

they like gather where the cattle are

26:21

and ship the wild cattle. Like I

26:23

actually feel like these folks were a

26:27

step more a step

26:29

culturally away from Western civilization.

26:32

And yeah,

26:35

that's that'll

26:37

raise some eyebrows. Yeah, but at

26:39

the same time a lot of whenever

26:41

it's like and they were all sturdy and filthy

26:44

and stinky. That's like a classic

26:46

like Western civilizations

26:49

shouvinism thing to like make up as

26:51

a lie about people. Also,

26:53

so it's like share the blood

26:55

pants thing I think is

26:58

true, but I only like sixty seventy per think

27:00

is true. But like, also, maybe they

27:02

only had one pair of pants because

27:04

I bet there wasn't a thriving textile industry

27:07

at that time. Yeah, you know, like

27:10

clothes are expensive back then, you had to hand make

27:12

everything. Maybe check your pants

27:14

privilege, I know European writers.

27:17

I mean also, they probably could have watched them. But it is a bunch

27:19

of unmarried men except for

27:21

the way in which they're married. But I'm gonna get to that in a second.

27:24

Is it gay? You

27:26

can't the audience can't see the eyes I'm making Margaret's

27:30

Margaret's eyebrows just went on a journey.

27:33

It's one of my favorite podcasting things.

27:35

This podcasts. Who's to forget that podcasting

27:38

is just audio? And then then

27:40

you're like, shit, this would be a great

27:42

cue. I know. So

27:45

this culture is what the word buccaneer means

27:48

for the first half of the seventeenth century. And

27:51

as you as you point out, buccaneer comes from the name

27:53

for as best as I can tell, the small

27:55

meat smoking shocks that they built to dry out

27:57

the meat, a style that they learned from the

28:00

carib people who are there. And the word is an

28:02

Arowack word, which is a language

28:04

family. Then case you had some weird belief, not you,

28:06

I wouldn't assume you have this, but audience

28:08

a weird belief that indigenous people of the Americas didn't

28:10

get around. This language family

28:12

has speakers scattered throughout the Caribbean, Central

28:15

and South America, including like deep

28:17

as fuck in the Amazon Rainforest, including

28:20

in Akra and what's now Brazil, which is where

28:23

the last episode took place. And I just again

28:25

like weird connections. So

28:29

you got these narrod wells. Most

28:31

of them are French, there's some English, Dutch, and

28:35

really lots of people arguing about this part. Indigenous

28:38

and African folks who are living as

28:40

buccaneers. Most started

28:43

away started off as runaway

28:45

bondsmen like people skipping out an indentured servitude,

28:48

runaway slaves. Potentially that's

28:50

like people like to argue about whether or not account as a maroon

28:53

society. Mutineers,

28:56

deserters, ship direct people, sex

28:58

workers, political exiles, just radicals

29:01

basically just like all the cool people. Yeah,

29:03

that's a fucking party as well. Yes, yeah,

29:06

And like a lot of it is like it was all

29:08

men except for all of these women who

29:10

were sex working, and you're like, are

29:12

you just discluding them? Is this like a no

29:14

true scotsman thing or you're like, you

29:17

know, it was all men, Like well, why there's all

29:19

these women around but they don't account. You

29:21

could sum up a lot of history with it

29:23

was all men except for all the women. Yeah.

29:26

Yeah, and it was mostly

29:29

men because

29:31

of some stuff that will get to at least there was

29:33

a lot of men only sections. There's

29:36

a lot a lot of people arguing about whether constituted marine

29:38

society. The buccaneers later

29:40

are notoriously also slavers, and

29:42

I believe that many of these people probably

29:44

also like owned people and claimed

29:47

own people, But that doesn't actually preclude

29:49

runaway slaves from having participated in I

29:51

think it would preclude it from counting as a true maroon

29:53

society. But anyway,

29:56

everyone wants to prove that they're all like either super

29:58

cool woke rebels or that they're all like slaving

30:00

murderers. Um, so

30:04

somewhere in the middle. I

30:06

don't know both extremes at the same time.

30:09

Yeah, it's weird. I don't feel the need to

30:12

like figure out whether they

30:14

were good or bad. No, that's

30:16

not that's not a thing I feel the need to do to

30:18

like people who died three hundred years ago.

30:20

Well, I appreciate it. Yeah,

30:23

Like it's I don't know, it's a very weird impulse.

30:25

Yeah.

30:27

So if you're living in a way that you don't

30:29

like on Haiti or at anywhere

30:32

in the Caribbean, at this point, the

30:34

awareness that these people exist gives

30:37

you a kind of out. There's a place

30:39

you can go. You can go be a buccaneer and

30:41

live in a live on the coast in a hut

30:43

and eat your fill and call no man master.

30:46

And they had a codified system of bromance called

30:48

the Materilio littage system, which I do not know

30:50

how to pronounce, in which two

30:52

bros would get married, live together,

30:54

share their possessions and income, name each other

30:57

each other's air, et cetera, et cetera,

30:59

et cetera. Soay,

31:03

no, definitely not. There's all

31:05

these historians are like, no, we can prove that they're

31:07

heterosexual men. And I

31:11

am certain this was not always a sexual relationship.

31:13

I am certain it was very often a sexual

31:16

relationship. I mean, heterosexual

31:18

marriage. It's not always a sexual relationship

31:21

either, Oh fucking right, okay,

31:24

And like the

31:26

main argument that they were not homosexuals

31:29

was historians being like, nah, because

31:31

they fucked ladies sometimes and sometimes they

31:33

shared ladies to fuck as

31:35

if gay as this like immutable

31:38

straighter than you and your buddy having sex

31:40

with the same person at the same time, now

31:43

I know. And it's just like and

31:46

I think this is like one of the clearest

31:49

examples of something that the historian

31:51

Hugh who's come, who's been on the podcast before,

31:53

talks about about how, you

31:55

know, homosexuality

31:58

and heterosexuality like didn't even get now

32:00

I'm putting words in his mouth. I'm just going to go on my own, Rent,

32:02

weren't even invented until the end of the nineteenth century.

32:05

Is like concepts, right, right, And so there's these acts

32:07

that people do, and some people prefer certain

32:09

acts and not other acts, right, But

32:12

a lot of people are like, yeah, I prefer that one act,

32:14

but I'll do this other act. And we

32:16

all know that's true, and you can look at

32:18

any like, I mean, prison is

32:20

the main example right now of like where

32:23

you know the concepts of heterosexuality

32:25

and homosexuality don't apply between men

32:27

having sex or whatever, and it's certain contexts, and

32:30

you know, it's this is shit that's been going on for fucking ever,

32:32

but here they actually get

32:34

fucking married. Well,

32:37

and you know, like you were saying, there's there's

32:39

different kinds of acts. Some of them are

32:41

legal and some of them are illegal, and you

32:43

are describing a context in which there

32:46

is no rule of law, right, So people who

32:48

are into the acts that are not

32:50

legal in places where there is rule of law probably

32:53

going to be doing a lot more of those acts. Yeah,

32:55

yeah, totally. The

32:58

powers that be are really upset about out this, so

33:02

they like write all of these things. I know they're

33:04

like, could you please send more lady sex workers.

33:06

We're trying to stop the men from falling in love with each

33:08

other. And I

33:12

think the buccaneers during this period are

33:14

the people that I'm like, no, but these

33:16

people rule, I want to hang out with them. They've

33:20

I mean, they've really got a good thing

33:22

going on. They're like, wait, so all

33:25

we need to do is keep fucking

33:27

each other and you will just send

33:29

more boatloads of sex workers to party

33:31

with. Like that's what you're telling

33:33

me? Oh, win win all around. Yeah,

33:36

all right, let's we're gonna go get married.

33:38

No homo though, Like, yeah, this

33:41

is just and I don't think they were like no

33:43

homo, you know, don't. I

33:45

think historians are trying to stick a no

33:47

homo out to some homos, just like

33:50

what they'll do, which some of them

33:53

might have been if they were alive

33:55

now heterosexual, I don't fucking care,

33:57

you know. Yeah. So the Spanish

34:00

they're like, we don't like all these people living free, so

34:03

they decide to fuck around. The finding out part comes

34:05

later, and so they start murdering

34:07

the ship out of all the wild boars and cows, trying

34:11

to starve out the mostly peaceful outlaws.

34:14

So the buccaneers and the cows get caught

34:16

in the crossfire, which just seems unfair. It

34:18

really is. I really hate the idea of like,

34:21

I mean, this is a really common on throat history. It's like, I want

34:23

to fuck with those people. So I'm gonna kill all the animals,

34:25

like fuck you, I have

34:27

a war, like an honest person, I don't know,

34:31

don't quote met.

34:39

So the buccaneers, they're

34:41

like they're already kind of fighty

34:44

right, and they're like these like rough and tumble frontiersman

34:47

and so they're like, well, we don't like being told

34:49

what to do, so let's go steal

34:52

shit now because we can't hunt,

34:54

so let's just go rob people now. Buy

34:57

boat and by sixteen

34:59

fifty buccaneer I means someone who steals

35:01

ships from boats by means of another boat.

35:04

This isn't yet grand pirate fleets at the

35:06

beginning. It's like folks and canoe is rolling up

35:09

on big boats but showing up a swords

35:11

and pistols, being like, you

35:13

know, you don't give me your shit. That'll

35:16

work a lot of the time. It

35:19

works well for the most of the time. Yeah,

35:21

most people don't want to deal with that. Yeah, I

35:23

don't want to deal with that. You put a collist

35:25

in my face. You can have my purse. Yeah,

35:29

that's a honest exchange of

35:33

yeah, I got nothing. Okay. This

35:36

is the aforementioned finding out for the Spanish

35:39

because like this

35:41

actually likes it. This is why

35:43

the United States of America se is like English.

35:47

But the privateering

35:49

culture that comes out of the Buccaneers breaks

35:52

Spain, like breaks their hold on the New

35:54

World. Whoa,

35:57

So they really should have just left those cows the

35:59

fuck alone. Yeah, you kill a cow,

36:01

you lose a continent. Like

36:04

I don't make the rules. I mean, you shouldn't

36:06

have the continent in the first place. Fuck you. But like

36:10

so, the Buccaneers they take

36:12

the island of Tortuga right off the coast,

36:14

and they build a pirate island or a privateering

36:17

island at this point, and this is way worse

36:19

for the Spanish than having cross punks who hunt wild

36:21

boor and are historically close friends. And

36:24

they call themselves the Brethren of the Coast at

36:26

this point, which is also a sick name.

36:29

They drop articles, Yeah, they

36:32

drop articles. A constitution of sorts,

36:35

a fairly democratic one. We're gonna talk more about, like

36:37

pirate democracy in a little bit. Everything

36:41

is cool and fine, I mean, within a certain context

36:43

is cool and fine. The buccaneers have an island. They're

36:45

doing their thing. They're robbing from the rich and giving

36:48

to themselves. The only reason they're

36:50

not the rich themselves is because they spend it as soon

36:52

as they get it. Really, they are robbing

36:54

the rich and then giving it to the sex workers and bartenders.

36:57

That seems good. They who actually seem like the real

37:00

smartest pirates in all of it. That's

37:02

my takeaway from everything I've read. Okay, so

37:05

yeah, no, set up a like I mean, this is

37:07

like what people did during the gold Rush, right,

37:09

Like, yeah, you're going to be doing much better

37:11

if instead of going out and trying to like

37:14

get money the dangerous but possibly

37:16

lucrative way, you just like set

37:18

up a bar nearby the people

37:20

who are getting all the money, Yeah, which

37:23

is even more effective because the pirates

37:25

are actually not doing it to get rich. They're doing it to like continue

37:27

their lives of hedonism and fun like

37:30

buy and large, and so

37:32

they will like drop fucking

37:37

six months wages in a night on like

37:40

someone they think is cute. You know,

37:42

they weren't living that beech bum lifestyle

37:44

because they wanted to get rich. Yeah,

37:47

so they do go privateer at this

37:49

point rather than pirates, and so they're

37:51

they're like, you know, they're pirates, but they have a note from King

37:53

Dad who says it's okay, that they're pirates as long

37:55

as they only attack the Spanish, and that's

37:58

basically what all of them do. I always privateering

38:00

was like each country kind of all against all the other countries,

38:02

and there's like some of that, but

38:05

by and large it's France,

38:07

England and the Dutch versus

38:10

the Spanish basically, okay,

38:14

and I mean the Spanish privateers of

38:16

course are not on that page. So

38:20

the part that people don't like talking about this is

38:22

that they're also slavers. At this point, most

38:25

of them are European and this

38:27

whole brethren thing. It's like kind

38:30

of the core of what philosophically

38:33

is like interesting and fails about pirates is that

38:35

they have this like they come up with all these ideals of

38:37

liberty and stuff, but they apply to a certain in group

38:40

and they don't apply it outside of that. And that's

38:42

going to be a god that sucks. You know. That

38:44

sounds like the thing that the

38:46

people who wrote the Constitution, I know, I

38:49

know, it's the different and it's like the pirates of

38:51

the chaotic evil and the founding fathers

38:53

of the cat lawful evil. Yeah,

38:56

just like, oh, we have this really cool set of ideas

38:59

about how you know all people and

39:02

then people stress next to people

39:04

but they don't know how to phrase it any other way. The asterisk

39:07

at the bottom is like people, and then there's

39:09

an astras ask risk. Yeah,

39:12

yeah, it's a winky face. It's

39:15

just yeah, it's just a picture of a white man working.

39:17

Yeah, totally. It's the only

39:19

spot color on the like Cepia document

39:22

that they like use white. Um.

39:27

So yeah,

39:29

they keep slaves

39:32

and they develop all this wild democracy shit

39:34

and honor among thieves and solidarity, and

39:36

their moral world only extends to

39:38

certain people, to European men. Um,

39:41

there's places and for different individuals

39:43

that will talk about it extends beyond that. And

39:47

it's actually funny. The next paragraph I have says

39:49

compared to funding fathers or whatever, but well we

39:51

already did that. Sorry, no, no, no,

39:53

no, this is really good. Um. Much

39:56

like the Founding Fathers, they're also zealously

39:59

protest didn't at this point, Wow,

40:03

you're gonna finally talk about some Protestants on this

40:05

podcast. Yeah, I never talk about

40:07

religion. They're

40:10

happy to attack the Spanish because the Spanish or

40:12

Catholic, and they

40:15

also really went around and killed all

40:17

the like Catholic priests and monks and all that shit. But

40:19

here's where it gets complicated. In

40:21

other stories that I tell on this show, people

40:23

go around and kill all the Catholics because the Catholics are

40:25

like stopping slavery. In this case, the

40:28

Buccaneers are killing the Catholics

40:30

because the Catholics are shitty

40:32

to the indigenous people the islands, and the Buccaneers

40:35

they don't quite extend their moral world

40:37

to the indigenous people, right, They're not like in

40:39

the in group, but there's a

40:41

lot of overlap and solidarity

40:45

and like a lot

40:47

of their rating tactics. I think this doesn't

40:50

end up in the scripts, and I'm just gonna use what I remember,

40:52

so don't directly quote me. A

40:54

lot of their like rating tactics and stuff come

40:56

from I think the carib people in

40:58

that area, like the literally like put a

41:00

fuck ton of people in a canoe and you can do anything

41:03

you want, and so like, and

41:05

the buccaneer culture of course it gets its name from

41:07

a caraboard and like like it's just this, like I

41:10

don't know, it's interesting, yeah,

41:13

I mean, and they had been living definitely

41:16

living alongside of indigenous communities

41:19

back in Haiti. Yeah, other

41:21

buccaneers were Catholic, mostly French crews,

41:23

and they had their own priests and they kind of like stayed

41:25

clear of the Protestants. I

41:28

don't know how I've gotten so far in

41:30

life and spent so much time on tall

41:32

ships without anyone ever telling me they were pirate

41:34

priests. I'm gonna need you to tell

41:37

me more about that right now. Okay. I only

41:39

know a little bit more about the pirate priests because so

41:41

there's two different things. There's the buccaneer priests

41:43

and they, as far as I can

41:45

tell, it's like the same way that you have a chaplain in

41:48

your military. You know,

41:51

you end up with a chaplain on this like because the privateers,

41:53

in a weird way, they are an extension of the state,

41:56

and so this is mostly inference.

41:58

I only found a couple of cents is about the pirate priests,

42:00

and then later I know a bunch of pirates, including

42:03

Protestants in the proper Golden

42:05

age, who um would

42:07

like try to get priests to come on board.

42:10

Fucking um Black Bart

42:12

Bartholomy Roberts.

42:14

He's like the biggest Protestant asshole of all the

42:16

fucking He doesn't like like drinking,

42:19

and no one's allowed to gamble, and like all

42:21

kinds of ship. Oh so now we have straight

42:23

Edge in addition to crust punk. Yeah.

42:26

Yeah, so he's the straight edge one. And

42:28

he like really likes Protestant

42:30

priests. I don't know if they're

42:32

called priests though, I think they are

42:35

asking the wrong person. Yeah, I don't know, all

42:37

right, and so I'm an expert.

42:42

But he kept trying to be like, hey, come on, join

42:44

my book, join my ship, joined my like merry

42:46

crew, and all the priests are like, no, you're

42:48

pirates. That's bad. Um.

42:51

It's like but we don't drink. Yeah,

42:53

and like all of his crew are like, we actually ship.

42:56

Yeah, totally yeah. And he's like one of the most

42:58

murderous of the fucking anyway. So

43:01

it's sixteen fifty five. The

43:03

English take Jamaica and they were

43:05

sent by the veteran villain of the pod Oliver

43:08

Cromwell, the guy who genocided

43:10

Ireland and deserves to only be remembered for

43:12

that. You can hear about him in the

43:14

Diggers and Leveler's episode. I just

43:16

really like when I alt I say that. Every fucking time

43:18

I say that, Okay, now you've got a

43:20

real like I mean, I was

43:22

going to call it the cool people extended Universe, but

43:24

then I realized that it's actually our universe. History.

43:27

Yeah, it's just history. But that's what I like

43:29

about history is it is it's the it's the

43:31

extended universe. It's the like the

43:33

way it all ties together. It's the grandest story

43:36

ever told, and we're fucking characters in it.

43:38

And so instead it is presented as this like weird,

43:40

boring thing, and I'm like, that's nonsense. There's

43:42

all of these different factions fighting. Like That's

43:44

part of why I like all the like religious shit is

43:47

because I mean the same way if I'm talking about

43:49

the nineteenth or twentieth century, I'm going to talk abou which communies

43:51

were killing, which anarchists were killing, which capitalists were

43:54

you know, like the ideological battle lines

43:56

are really interesting, and in

43:59

Renal Sons era, those

44:01

battle lines are religious. So

44:07

in eighteen sixteen fifty five, the

44:09

English take Jamaica and

44:11

a bunch of the English buccaneers they leave Tortuga

44:14

and they go over to join Jamaica, and so you kind

44:16

of like lose a lot of the multiculturalism at this

44:18

point, but you also get twice as many buccaneers

44:20

strongholds, which are basically pirate islands,

44:22

just all with the permission of the kings. It's

44:24

like not quite as cool. But the

44:27

romance system fades away, and

44:29

what fills it instead as

44:31

products and services? Oh

44:34

no, I know that's the worst

44:37

exchange. It's okay. They can just press skip

44:39

forward fifteen years and they'll

44:41

they'll get out of that right away. Here's

44:44

some ads. So

44:50

the bromance system is fading away in the sixteen

44:52

seventies, everything's going downhill as

44:54

soon as they get letters from the king. It's just like

44:56

everything's fucking getting boring.

44:59

But don't worry. Having a letter of

45:01

mark is really like it's

45:03

like being signed to a major record label, right,

45:05

It's like your fucking sellout. I

45:08

think it's okay to be signed a record

45:11

Yeah no, I'm not. I mean, you know

45:13

I'm not. Yeah no, I'm just

45:15

trying to make a comparison. Actually, maybe

45:18

that means the privateering. Like, I don't know,

45:20

what would I think if I lived in Tortuga

45:22

in the sixteen eighty I think

45:25

it was really cute when all the boys were married

45:27

to each other, I missed that. Yeah,

45:31

those are the days. I know, near

45:35

the end of the seventeenth century, sixteen ninety or so,

45:37

the government stopped endorsing privateering basically

45:40

because it's too big of a nuisance they

45:43

did there. It's there's

45:45

a lot of fucking around finding out in this the

45:48

buccaneers did. They're good, the privateers. They broke

45:50

the Spanish monopoly in the area. So

45:52

therefore, you know, you start getting

45:54

settlements and all of this stuff, right and

45:58

now though they don't want a siety

46:00

full of crazy, drunk

46:02

agro guys. They want an

46:05

orderly slave society of plantations.

46:08

So the pirates, the buccaneer, the

46:10

privateers, whatever they

46:12

gotta go, which

46:15

is to say, at this

46:17

point earlier, the state needed

46:19

the nomadic war machine. You

46:21

ever heard of the nomadic war machine, Miriam, Well,

46:25

I know of a band. There's a really good

46:27

band, Nomadic War Machine. Yeah. Yeah,

46:29

because I can't talk about pirates, about talking about the nomadic

46:32

war machine as a philosophical concept, which

46:34

is why you're like, why did I listen to this

46:36

another episode about Mary Reading and Bonnie and they're

46:38

not talking about them, and said, because this is a different

46:40

shit than you get on any other fucking podcast

46:42

talking about them. Yeah, that's why you can listen to

46:44

anybody be like and Bonnie and Mary read

46:47

they were girls but they were pirates. Who

46:49

Yeah, and then like credulously

46:52

read that book that talks about their upbringing.

46:54

That's mazed just about titillation

46:57

and lies. It don't get me wrong. It's

46:59

amazing how all of the like period woodcuts

47:01

of the time that show them are like, and they

47:03

fought with their boobs out as

47:06

one does. I know, well, okay, actually

47:09

the first edition, I know that there's a yeah,

47:11

I know the yeah yeah yeah, okay, well but the

47:13

audience doesn't the first edition ahead

47:16

of ourselves. All right, fine, all right, you know,

47:18

if you want to hear about their kids us, you're

47:20

gonna have to wait first. You

47:23

get a philosophy lesson is

47:25

what you get when I just finished watching The Good

47:27

Place. The

47:30

Nomadic war Machine is a philosophical construct

47:32

theorized by Delusing Quatari who or two French

47:34

guys. They're anti authoritarian Marxists,

47:37

and an interesting thing about them, nobody

47:39

has ever managed to explain a single one

47:41

of their concepts to me successfully.

47:43

Okay, so go for it. Well, the

47:46

way that I learned this concept was reading

47:48

about pirates a long time ago, and

47:51

it's the only context that would have helped

47:53

me understand it. There's

47:55

a book called Life under the Black Flag

47:57

by Gabriel Coon, which is one of the major sort

48:00

for today, and it talks

48:02

about essentially the philosophical ramifications

48:04

of the Golden Age of piracy. And it's

48:07

how I anything I understand about, like Nietzsche

48:09

and like Dionysianism

48:11

and the Nomadic War

48:13

Machine. All that shit is because I read this book as

48:15

a like young crustpunk

48:18

with blood pants. I didn't have blood pants. I had

48:20

patched pants. They were covered in like dumpster

48:22

juice instead of I'm really not making

48:24

it better. Okay. So I

48:26

like this concept enough that I named a band. My

48:29

dark pop band is called Nomadic War Machine. The

48:32

idea is that the state wants everything to be orderly

48:35

and controlled, and it wants sort

48:37

of non conflict by creating like stratified

48:40

society. So within this

48:42

concept, which is not

48:44

true right, but as a concept,

48:46

you know, war, chaos

48:48

and war are things that exist outside the

48:50

state, but the state requires

48:52

those things, so it basically hires

48:54

it. It kind of it recuperates

48:58

the raw chaotic energy of the non state

49:01

force, which is called the war machine.

49:03

And so that's

49:06

like the rough fucking idea. And so you can

49:08

see this is what happened the Caribbean is you have the buccaneers

49:11

there this like non state chaotic

49:14

force that is really useful

49:16

to the state, and then as soon as

49:18

they are no longer useful to the state, they've

49:20

broken the Spanish control, they're

49:22

discarded. The nomadic concept

49:24

part of it is a way to like fight against the recuperation

49:27

or Okay, I'm getting this part wrong because I also

49:29

don't understand to losing Gutari. But I think that's what's

49:31

cool about it, is it you use it as a starting point

49:33

to make up your own bullshit. I

49:36

strongly suspect nobody

49:38

understands to lose it. Yeah, and that's why

49:40

nobody has ever successfully explained it to me. It's

49:43

not I'm not the dumb one. It's

49:45

everything. Yeah, totally

49:48

no. And

49:50

so in this case, the nomadic part isn't necessarily

49:52

actual wandering around, but sort of a chaotic

49:54

embrace of non stateness. But actual

49:57

wandering around is really good for this, and

50:01

so the pirates actually wander

50:03

around quite a bit and are essentially this nomadic

50:05

war machine. That's what

50:07

happens with the pirates. Privateerian

50:11

licenses get harder and harder to come by. First

50:14

the Spanish killed all their pigs, and now the Dutch, French

50:16

and English take away their license to rob. But

50:18

they didn't go to go away, So

50:22

what's left for them to do but

50:25

be pirates. Seems

50:28

like it kind of backed them into a corner. I know, really

50:30

brought that on yourself, buddy. Turns

50:33

out you don't need anyone's permission to stick a gun in someone's

50:36

face and say give me all your money.

50:39

This is a new realization they

50:41

suddenly all had by

50:44

about sixteen nineties. I mean, if you're a privateer,

50:47

you're just a pirate according

50:49

to everybody except one country.

50:51

Yeah, so you're really just like subtracting

50:54

one country from like the list you're you're

50:56

just adding one country to the list of people who are mad

50:58

at you. Yeah. But the differences ero and one

51:00

as a big one, Like it took humans

51:02

a long time to figure out, you

51:05

know, the concept of zero, Like it's

51:07

a very different thing than one. So

51:09

theings get called like proper pirates or

51:12

whatever. I don't know. The

51:15

English legal dictum from the eighteenth century

51:18

was quote, a pirate is in a

51:20

perpetual war with every individual in every

51:22

state, Christian or Infidel. Pirates properly

51:24

have no country, but by the nature of

51:26

their guilt separate themselves and renounce

51:28

on this matter the benefit of all lawful societies.

51:32

They're doing that thing where they say a thing

51:34

that they think is bad, but they make it sound cool

51:37

as fat. And that's why you

51:39

have to You had to go to pirate

51:42

themed bullshit in

51:44

the twenty first century is because

51:46

ye, but I got to see blue Oyster call, so

51:49

it worked out. Yeah, four hundred years earlier,

51:51

the English tried to make something sound

51:53

bad and made it sound real cool. They

51:58

are presented as a means of all mankind

52:01

and villains of all nation, villains

52:04

of all nations. And this is what's interesting about them,

52:06

not their actual actions, which is mostly murder,

52:08

rape, torturing, cruelty. They're

52:11

remembered by the left is nice, happy gay

52:13

thieves who are chaotic good and presaged Western

52:15

democracy. But

52:17

realistically they're overall somewhere between

52:20

chaotic neutral and chaotic evil. But

52:22

they went to war against a lawful evil system

52:25

and so the chaotic part is what's interesting.

52:28

Not pretendially, I think you could make an argument for

52:30

true neutral no, not

52:32

a derailist. I'm

52:35

fully on the page of believing that they are a representation

52:37

of chaos. Okay,

52:39

yeah, no, I don't know. I mean, I

52:42

just think there's like this element of like perpetual

52:45

pure self interest where it's

52:47

like, well, so you know there isn't

52:50

that's what's interesting, Okay,

52:52

go on. It will get to this more

52:55

later. But they were really

52:58

fraternal amongst each other and

53:00

like essentially communistic in many many

53:02

regards within their

53:05

own culture. Not communistic isn't

53:07

really the right word, because there's still like individual all

53:10

right, we'll get to it. So

53:14

one of the things that makes them different from every other

53:17

era of pirates and like because I

53:19

was always like, as soon as I found out the golden Age of piracy

53:21

was like eight years, I was like, I feel like I got ripped off.

53:23

I was like, everyone talks about these motherfuckers,

53:26

But there was literally about four thousand of

53:28

them total, Like at

53:30

any given time, there was like at

53:32

the most peak, at any given moment,

53:34

there'd be like two twenty five hundred of them

53:36

on the ocean. I've hung out

53:38

with more people than that on a regular basis. I've

53:41

been to protest with way more people than that. Right,

53:44

there's probably more telship sailors. Now,

53:46

Yeah, then there were pirates in the Golden

53:49

Era, Like, so what

53:51

makes them so different? And so for a while I was like mad, because

53:54

it's like, there's pirates fucking everywhere all throughout

53:56

history. Why won't people shut the funk about these pirates?

53:58

And a lot of it is like bullshit

54:02

Western gays stuff, but

54:04

not all of it. And so I want to talk about what makes

54:07

the Golden Age pirates sort of different? It

54:09

seems as though, and this is the

54:12

premise of various you know pieces

54:14

I've read. This is not like I'm so smart and

54:16

I know everything, right, Most pirates in

54:18

history have been part of a community, as sort

54:20

of almost like a rude coast guard, right.

54:23

They've been like part of a bandit culture that

54:25

is attached to a community. The

54:27

Somali pirates, for example, got their modern

54:30

start as literally like a lot of

54:32

them call themselves as a gentleman who worked the ocean,

54:34

which actually sounds like the brethren of the coast to me. Yeah,

54:37

that sounds exactly like some Golden

54:39

Age of piracy ship, I know, and they attacked all

54:41

the international fishing vessels that showed up to fucking

54:43

their waters after the government stopped, you

54:45

know, being able to enforce laws within

54:47

the coastal waters. I'm not trying to make a

54:49

statement about the ethics of the current development

54:52

of the Somali pirates, right, but Golden age

54:54

pirates weren't part

54:56

of a specific broader community than that. There's

54:59

like, there are pirates ports, but it's a

55:01

really different thing. Robert see Ritchie's

55:03

way of distinguishing between these two types of piracy

55:05

is, and I quote, one

55:08

can be desfined as organized marauding,

55:10

the other as anarchistic marauding. Many

55:13

men were involved in both, yet a distinction can

55:15

be made. Organized pirates remained attached

55:17

to a port as their base of operation. Anarchistic

55:19

marauding involved leaving behind the base of operation

55:22

and wandering for months, even years

55:24

at a time. And I

55:26

think that's how we end up with this, is this

55:28

romanticization, is that they did something kind of

55:31

different. So the core argument of Gabriel

55:33

Coon's book, the one I learned about the Pneumatic war machine

55:35

from, is really interesting. The argument is

55:38

that pirates are worth thinking

55:40

or cool, but not for the reasons that radicals

55:43

claim. It's like this exploding head

55:45

diagram, you know, my favorite meme in

55:47

the world. There's like pirates

55:49

are cool because they live free fuck the law at

55:51

the bottom, right, and then there's like, I mean they

55:53

were murders and slavers on top of that, and

55:55

then you go up to like, no, they were radically democratic

55:57

and developed alternative societies outside the law and broke

55:59

free from society's conceptions of race, gender,

56:01

sex, and nationality, and that's like above that, and

56:04

then above that you're like mostly

56:06

no, not really, they were mostly just murderous

56:09

thieves. But then above it all is

56:12

pirates are cool because he fucked the law,

56:14

and it's a shame that they didn't apply their concepts of liberty

56:17

outside just themselves in their bros. All

56:21

right, that's my I'm listening. Yeah,

56:23

okay, Well, then the

56:26

golden Age of piracy actually

56:28

starts in the Indian Ocean. I don't

56:30

know if you knew this, Mirriams. You know, the ocean is really big

56:33

and connects all of the world. Yeah,

56:36

yeah, it's bigger than

56:39

most things. Yeah. Actually, yeah,

56:41

congrats serious,

56:48

always take Margaret serious the

56:51

Golden Thanks. Thanks, It's terrible

56:53

that I'll get you in trouble one day. Um. The

56:56

Golden Age pirates went everywhere that trade went, routes

56:58

went, and so even though their bases

57:01

were often in the Caribbean, they were fucking everywhere.

57:03

Two English privateer captains Henry

57:05

every and Thomas two, they

57:08

wind up going to the Indian Ocean and robbing whoever

57:10

they want, including Brits, even though

57:12

they were British Supposedly. In sixteen

57:15

ninety two, Thomas two told his crew quote

57:18

that it was better to risk your life for plunder

57:20

than for government. I

57:22

mean that is going to be hard to argue

57:24

with. No, I'm just I'm with him. Yeah,

57:28

And they all captains and crew alike, and we'll

57:30

talk about the how they split money

57:32

more equitably than other systems. They

57:35

all get richest ship for this. On its

57:37

second trip, Thomas two dies. He gets shot

57:39

in the belly because robbing people's a really

57:41

bad idea overall and kind of dangerous. You

57:43

don't pick the career pirate because

57:46

you're hoping to like rv around the country

57:48

after retirement looking at birds in Yellowstone. I

57:52

definitely associate that I

57:54

don't remember like whose phrase this

57:57

was, but a short life and a merry one is

57:59

like one that pops up a lot in like writings

58:02

about the about pirates of that era.

58:04

Yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense.

58:07

That is like probably a writer wrote

58:09

it and not a pirate, but you know, I

58:11

mean, you know, and it's like even when I'm like Thomas

58:13

two said, and I'm like, I don't fucking know Thomas who

58:15

said that, Like, was it like his ship's fucking

58:18

chronicler who wrote it down? Like,

58:20

yeah, I knew we weren't gonna like get super

58:23

far without a reference to our flag

58:25

means death. But the one

58:27

of the best things on that show is the

58:29

fact that he has like a guy following

58:32

him around writing down cool stuff

58:34

that he says. I know, I know.

58:38

This is what I thought about when I said, yeah,

58:41

a lot of pirates get their start

58:44

by mutiny, and I haven't read about

58:46

it, being like, um, it's not

58:48

that they're like usually like, oh, we don't

58:50

like following the law, let's be pirates instead

58:53

their mutiny like we aren't getting

58:55

paid, we aren't being fed,

58:57

Like one of the pirates that I read about, like at their start

59:00

because that mutiny, because the captain was like,

59:02

no, I don't have any food, but you can, like drink some rum.

59:04

I don't care, and the pirates like, no, we want

59:06

food, and so they like fucking killed

59:08

the captain and became parrots.

59:11

You know, if you, if you are ever in such a situation

59:13

as this captain was saying to your you

59:16

know, dissatisfied underlings,

59:18

no you can't have any food, drink

59:21

hard liquor on an empty stomach, and make

59:23

a level headed decision here.

59:25

That might not be your best

59:27

call. It's it's the let

59:30

them eat cake. But if cake was like a thing

59:32

that makes people angry historically let

59:35

me eat let them eat violence juice.

59:37

Yeah, totally. So

59:43

they don't view the project as a way to get

59:45

rich overall, but more as a way to live free. And

59:47

also specifically a lot of them are very

59:49

directly motivated by revenge

59:52

against the system, specifically

59:54

against the merchant captains who worked sailors

59:56

to death for work for fucking nothing. Pirates

59:59

pretty often would capture ship and then just ask

1:00:01

the crew of the ship like, hey, was this guy good to

1:00:03

you? And if the crews like, nah,

1:00:05

this guy sucked, they just fucking kill the captain.

1:00:07

And if the captain they were like, yeah, he was all right, they

1:00:10

might like not kill the captain. You

1:00:12

know, it's a very

1:00:14

good incentive to be a less shitty

1:00:16

boss exactly. That is

1:00:18

actually one of the things I don't think

1:00:20

has talked about is like the existence of this

1:00:23

thing happening probably

1:00:25

got a lot of fucking merchant captains

1:00:28

to get their ship together. You

1:00:30

know. Specifically, the

1:00:32

way that they killed some of these merchant captains was

1:00:34

to or at least one of them, wrap

1:00:36

a rope around the captain's face and tighten it

1:00:38

until his eyes popped out. Cool

1:00:42

people are every

1:00:44

episode I read at least two new torture

1:00:46

methods that they've never occurred to me. I

1:00:49

rarely include them, but I

1:00:51

don't know. Because this one's about bosses, I felt like including

1:00:53

it. I mean, and I think it's

1:00:56

probably good to remember that, like a

1:00:58

lot of the stuff the people were going

1:01:00

to be talking about are we're doing is

1:01:02

like really

1:01:05

just actually terrible. Yeah,

1:01:08

And there's a lot of argument about exactly

1:01:10

how murdery and rape and tortury the pirates

1:01:13

were. There's absolutely a decent

1:01:15

amount of all three. There's like proof of all

1:01:17

three, it's possible that

1:01:19

they were intentionally spreading gossip about

1:01:21

how horrible and mean and evil and terrible they

1:01:23

were, so that to anyone who

1:01:26

resisted, so that when they roll up on

1:01:28

you, people are like, no, I don't want to resist, then

1:01:30

we'll all get like tortured, right,

1:01:32

Absolutely, you don't want the rumor about you to

1:01:34

be like, oh, yeah, he's a chill guy. I

1:01:37

hear, you can negotiate with him, you

1:01:39

know, but that's said.

1:01:41

I actually think that they're like um later

1:01:44

pirates kind of there's a they

1:01:46

have this downward arc. Later

1:01:49

get even more like violent, right,

1:01:52

And I think they kind of like, you

1:01:54

have to be both good cop and bad cup. You have to be

1:01:56

able to be like, look, I don't

1:01:58

want to torture the shit out of you. You could just

1:02:00

give up, you know, you

1:02:03

have to be known for some level of mercy two

1:02:05

people who go along with

1:02:07

you in order to get away

1:02:10

with being a robber. Like if every mugger

1:02:12

shot the person that they stole from, people

1:02:15

wouldn't give up their wallets to the person with a gun.

1:02:17

They'd fight, you

1:02:19

know. Yeah,

1:02:22

I wonder if also there was like kind

1:02:24

of a self fulfilling thing of like

1:02:26

if you hype yourselves up as sadistic,

1:02:29

violent assholes, one

1:02:32

hundred years later people who are like,

1:02:34

well, I'm a sadistic, violent asshole. I

1:02:36

wonder if there's a way to monetize that might

1:02:38

be more likely to go into the career

1:02:40

that you have created. Yeah, yeah,

1:02:43

totally, totally. And

1:02:45

different crews were absolutely known for different

1:02:47

levels of all of this shit,

1:02:50

And so it's it's possible that pirates

1:02:53

lived in this like what can only be described as a horror

1:02:55

movie world. Like it's possible that

1:02:58

it was this fucking nightmare air, this

1:03:00

like sadistic, strange horror

1:03:02

thing with and some of

1:03:04

them were absolutely bloodthirsty. One

1:03:06

guy was literally bloodthirsty.

1:03:09

He was famous for hacking someone up with the cutlass and

1:03:11

then licking the blood off of the cutlasts. A

1:03:13

lot of them were cannibals, or at least presented

1:03:15

themselves as cannibals through like grotesque

1:03:17

acts in order to

1:03:19

scare the shit out of everyone. But

1:03:22

it's possible, and I think probable

1:03:24

that overall they were exerting a lot less violence

1:03:26

than the system that they were fighting against. And

1:03:30

I don't know they're pirates they're not a peaceful bunch.

1:03:33

By sixteen ninety seven, do you have an I means

1:03:36

sorry just I mean, oh no, when when you're

1:03:38

talking about like all of these ships that they're

1:03:40

attacking and robbing, these are ships

1:03:42

carrying the wealth created

1:03:45

by colonialists, like projects,

1:03:48

like colonial projects, and all of these countries

1:03:51

where it's slave

1:03:53

labor right being exploited

1:03:55

to extract resources

1:03:58

from other people's countries. Like there

1:04:00

is a whole mess of violence

1:04:03

happening before the pirates get their

1:04:05

hands on this money.

1:04:07

Yeah, no, exactly, and like and

1:04:10

not just in a like these

1:04:12

are the crazy violent ones in the state

1:04:14

is like calmly violent, Like the state

1:04:16

is also like torturing the shit out of everyone's like sadistic

1:04:19

as fuck. Like this is

1:04:21

not a fucking pretty time, none

1:04:23

of which makes me want to hang

1:04:25

out with seventeenth century pirates anymore

1:04:28

then I previously did. I'm just sort of saying, like, yeah,

1:04:30

in the context is

1:04:32

one of extreme violence, Yeah,

1:04:35

totally. By

1:04:37

sixteen ninety seven, you have an explosion of

1:04:39

piracy. By seventeen hundred, pirates

1:04:41

have a symbol for themselves, the fucking

1:04:44

Jolly Roger, which is a black

1:04:46

flag with various allegories for death on

1:04:48

it, a skull and bones, hourglasses,

1:04:50

bleeding hearts. When

1:04:52

they were privateers, they all wanted to be

1:04:54

upstanding and not seen as pirates like that was

1:04:57

like they were always like, yeah, we're not pirates.

1:05:00

This is a big change. Now they're fucking proud, which

1:05:03

leads to my argument that the first Pride flag

1:05:05

was black and had a skeleton holding a spear

1:05:08

and an hourglass. That's all I'm saying.

1:05:11

Sometimes those flags could

1:05:13

get absurdly intricate

1:05:15

too. There was one I don't remember

1:05:18

whose this was. I used to definitely

1:05:20

know this, but there's like a skeleton

1:05:23

or maybe it's a guy but like holding a

1:05:25

spear that is dripping blood, and he's standing

1:05:27

over two skulls and the skulls are labeled

1:05:30

like it's the country that they are, and

1:05:32

it's like, yeah, my guy, you

1:05:35

do not want to be a pirate. You want to draw political

1:05:37

cartoons like yeah,

1:05:39

And that guy changed. I think it was Black Bart, who's

1:05:42

not black, to be clear, None of the Goldench

1:05:45

pirate captains or black some other crew are. We'll

1:05:47

talk about that more, but yeah, no,

1:05:50

that guy changes fucking flag like every fucking

1:05:52

week too, like because he's

1:05:55

he's basically fucking Ben Garrison.

1:05:59

I can't think of and Garson's way, I'm

1:06:01

now maybe now I'm worried I got the name

1:06:03

wrongs that that conservative weird

1:06:06

like weird cartoonist who makes all of

1:06:08

these like incredibly intricate political cartoons.

1:06:11

Everything is labeled like the Downfall of

1:06:13

the West or AOC you

1:06:15

know. Yeah, No, and me not knowing

1:06:17

the name of anything or anyone is not a symbol

1:06:20

of it being obscure or wrong. It's

1:06:23

a symbol of the if it's not literally written

1:06:25

in front of me. I don't know anyone's names, gotcha,

1:06:28

but I think it was Bartholomi Robert who had that flag.

1:06:30

But I remember reading about it being

1:06:32

like this guy's a little much. And

1:06:36

that's where we're gonna leave it today. When we come

1:06:38

back on Wednesday, we'll talk about pirates and

1:06:41

that polycuele I'm like dangling in front

1:06:43

of people, much like the seventeen twenty sixth edition

1:06:45

of You were like, oh, when

1:06:47

we get to Annibondi and Mary Read, we'll talk about how they

1:06:49

did or did not have their boobs out all the time,

1:06:51

Like we're gonna to

1:06:54

tune in in episode two. Yeah,

1:06:57

the podcast that makes fun of how other people

1:07:00

use things for titillating purposes and

1:07:02

therefore basically plays into the same

1:07:04

system that it's fighting against. I

1:07:07

see what you're doing. See what you're doing, Margaret.

1:07:10

Thanks, But but Miriam, what

1:07:12

are you doing with your

1:07:14

life or plugs or things

1:07:16

that you want to tell people about. I'm

1:07:18

gonna plug moderate amounts of vitamin

1:07:21

C. Okay, you don't need to go

1:07:23

you know, overboard. Uh, you

1:07:26

don't need to keel all yourself with vitamin C.

1:07:29

Well, like, don't get scurvy, you know, eat

1:07:32

an apple? All

1:07:35

right, Sophie guiding

1:07:37

the plug. No, not today. I'm

1:07:41

gonna plug because I never plug my bands

1:07:43

for some reason in this podcast. I

1:07:46

have a band called Nomadic war Machine. Nomadic

1:07:48

Warmachine dot bandcamp dot com

1:07:50

has a bunch of albums. It's dark

1:07:53

beep boops that go beep boop boop. And

1:07:55

then I have a metal band called Feminasgal

1:07:58

that does not go whoop. Although

1:08:01

you'll pretty quickly be able to tell that I'm

1:08:04

a person who writes the drums for both. And

1:08:07

that's what I have to plug. I'll

1:08:10

talk to everyone on Wednesday when we're going to talk

1:08:12

about pirate tits.

1:08:15

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1:08:18

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1:08:20

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1:08:22

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1:08:25

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