07/06/2020
Black pirates. Excerpt from Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates.
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The racial makeup of pirate ships is also subject to the whims of the historical record, though more can be said on this subject, arguably, than the s*x lives of pirates at sea. A significant number of black men sailed on most, if not all, pirate ships. But determining their exact roles, and what white pirates thought of them, is very difficult, in large part because when pirate ships were captured, even if there were black crewmembers, they were usually not tried as pirates along with their white peers. Instead, government officials and the broader public viewed them as property and sold them off as slaves, thereby leaving little or no trace of their activities in the trial transcripts or local media coverage.
From the available evidence, however, it seems that many blacks on pirate ships were African slaves taken from captures, who remained slaves and either labored for their new pirate masters, performing low-level tasks such as cooking, or were resold, being viewed as nothing more than human chattel. Such treatment suggests, unsurprisingly, that white pirates, for the most part, harbored the same prejudices as their peers in the broader society, and viewed racial distinctions and divisions in a similar light. As historian Jeffrey Bolster observed, “To many white pirates the majority of blacks were pawns, workers, objects of lust [when pirates had s*x with female slaves], or a source of ready cash.”
Yet this is only part of the story. Evidence shows that many black pirates—likely a combination of former slaves, escaped slaves, and freedmen—became valued crewmembers who fought alongside their white pirate brethren and shared in the spoils. One analysis of the pirate crews operating between 1715 and 1726 “suggest[s] that perhaps 25 to 30 percent of them were black,” but their specific positions onboard, and how they were treated by their white crewmates, is for the most part unknown. Whether white pirates who accepted blacks as crewmembers had a more enlightened and equitable view of their fellow man than their peers, or simply welcomed blacks as readily available and competent force multipliers, is not clear. Either way, “it would seem,” as historian Kenneth Kinkor argued, that “the deck of a pirate ship was the most empowering place for blacks within the eighteenth-century white man’s world”—although not all the time, and certainly not for all blacks.
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You can order Black Flags from your local bookstore (https://bit.ly/30DLrWW), Amazon (https://amzn.to/2kFqafI), Barnes & Noble (https://bit.ly/2lJwSSa), or Booksamillion (https://bit.ly/2kCH8eR). It is also available in hardcover, kindle, audiobook, and CD.
Image below: Profile of a black pirate in Charles Ellms, The Pirates Own Book, or Authentic Narratives of the Lives, Exploits, and Executions of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers (Boston: S. N. Dickinson, 1837).
