CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE WAR AGAINST THE PIRATES
Robert C. Ritchie
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986
306 pp., $20.00
Pirates! What youthful memories that word evokes: Treasure Island, with Long John Silver, parrot on shoulder, a figure of friendly menace. One of N.C. Wyeth's great paintings depicted pirates in a longboat - Blackbeard, their leader with pistols thrust into his wide belt, gold earrings gleaming and surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of the world, eager to claim a treasure or cut a throat.
Another of Wyeth's famous illustrations shows a young boy bent over his schoolbooks - but in his imagination, a great Spanish galleon looms, beset by pirates - cannons booming and boarders swinging onto her deck. Ah, he doubtless thinks, must life be only little brothers and long division?
And who can forget the pirate ship captured by Peter Pan and the children, floating over Wendy's house with moon at its back, secured by a single line to a London chimney pot.
As we grew old and graduated to Errol Flynn, Cornell Wilde, Burt Lancaster, and Yul Brynner, our views changed. Hollywood's pirates were usually a tame lot, neat and clean shaven. If given the glimpse of a shapely ankle or toothy smile - usually belonging to Virginia Mayo or Yvonne DeCarlo - they readily surrendered their freedom for the dubious pleasures of domesticity.
Alas, disillusion settled in and, as a seventeenth-century judge reminded his jury, "piracy is merely robbery committed at sea."
The author of this book avers, however, that "piracy was never merely robbery." Robert C. Ritchie is professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, and author of a previous book, The Duke's Province, a study of seventeenth-century New York politics and society. Although Ritchie covers the careers of other pirates and a few political figures, this book is about Captain William Kidd, the famous buccaneer.
There were three types of piracy extant by the late seventeenth century: officially sanctioned piracy, commercial piracy, and marauding. The first type was permitted by the government, which privately financed warships to be used against an enemy. This was a cheap way, always appealing to the British, to create a navy. Letters of marquee permitted a merchant to raise a crew and raid their adversary's ships and settlements legally.
These privateers often operated under the "no prey, no pay" rule. This meant that they had to take an enemy ship or they went penniless. They did have a crude form of workmen's compensation: 600 pieces of eight for the loss of eye or limb, and 100 pieces for loss of finger or toe. The first man to spot a prize received 100 pieces of eight. Of the type of men willing to ship on such hazardous voyages, Ritchie says that "the dash and glamour had long since faded from piracy and privateering," and there were no more gentlemen.
In peacetime, merchants could obtain a
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