©2005 Stephen Snelders Autonomedia POB 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568 USA www.autonomedia.org [email protected] Designed by Hiromi Aoki Thanks to Jordan Zinovich, Ian Toll, and Tanya Solomon for their help in preparing this book. Printed in Canada C ONTENTS vii Preface 1 The Sea Robberies of the Most Famous Pirate Claes G. Compaen 51 The Other Loose Roving Way of Life: The Very Remarkable Travels of Jan Erasmus Reyning. Buccaneer IntrodMuecmtoiefiot rnhsb.e u ccaTnheZeee resr. AanmerRkeeylsijYekoneuf. na gEn ra smuTshm.ea kiefn g ab uccaOnreiegefr.it nhbseu ccaInnedeiirnasfln.u oenn ces thbeu ccaMnuelearatsnt.Ndo e sg rBouecsc.ap niereart es. Libeerqtuyaa,ln .fridat tye,r innti hBtyer othefet rhheo od CoaTshtse.t rfaurggT loret uagnJada maiCcoan.s equences eft hceo nqefuJ easmta iCcuas.tef ot mhcseo aRsety.n ing's firsvto ywaigttehh B er ethPraernt.nw eirtRshoh ctipkh e BraziAlnei vaGinrl.a Aitlr?o efct ihtbeiu ecsc aneers. LeadecroseflhiipAc htasl.l ucwianefyal tifeoR.re yy ning anEdx quemTehfeeix np.e dtiPota inoanTm hae. BrothseerothusoSt oa.dLn o reTnhzceoo .n qefuP easnta ma. DisappointmoeJnna tmsa.Ti cheTaenr. do upefbi lraea te. 157 The Devil's Anarchy: The Politics of Piracy HieravrsAc.nh ayrI c ThhyGe o lAdgeefenp iracTyho.el d, ojro lRlyo,g Aen r.o otneC aptJaoihnn Hsioenr.av rsc.h y AnarIcIAh nya rvcsDh.ey m ocArnae ctyefe.rs ntailv al A brothefep rihroaoVitdoe lsec.nr cueea,ln wtdoy m,e n. Thpeo lefip tiircasc y. 207 Select Bibliography PREFACE Peter Lamborn Wilson ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO I arrived at the island of Koh Samui by boat (at that time the jetport hadn't yet been built) -off the coast of Thailand in the sluggish South China Sea -and at once was regaled by the locals with a grisly pirate story. A week ago, they said, seven corpses washed ashore: Vietnamese boat people slain by pirates. The "boat peo­ ple;' you may remember, were then escaping Vietnam in droves on anything that floated, from derelict freighters to homemade rafts. The pirates followed the despicable practice of killing everyone they robbed. Their level of tech was so low (their mod­ ified fishing craft scarcely faster than the refugee rafts) that only such slaughter enabled them to elude pursuit. No witnesses. The boat people themselves naturally lacked recourse to police pro­ tection from any state or power. And in fact few of these neo­ lascar pirates were ever apprehended. The islanders of Koh Samui saw no reason to report the seven corpses to mainland authorities. "Why bother? It won't bring them back to life." As Stephen Snelders points out in this book, most classical pirate violence was "instrumental" - that is, explicable in terms of the real existing conditions of the pirates. Quixotic chivalry and sadistic cruelty provided extreme cases of tem­ perament that must be measured against a norm based on maximum "purchase" with minimal effort. The Barbary cor­ sairs were famous for never fighting unless they had to, in vu The Devil's Anarchy which case they always tried to get everything done in one mad rush, shrieking and waving big scimitars and hoping to induce paralyzing terror. Moreover they tried not to kill anyone unnecessarily since they planned to ransom or sell their victims as slaves. In order to continue as pirates they had to kill very sparingly, but in the South China Sea in the early 1980s to be a pirate necessitated killing everyone. Cruelty to some extent seems determined by technology and economy - which explains why modernity.has outstripped the past not only in cruelty but also in the depersonalization of cruelty. We mod­ erns may no longer have "servants to live for us;' but we have machines to kill on our behalf. As Snelders points out, classical piracy depended on a technological edge. Simon the Dancer and other European renegades introduced Atlantic sailing tech to the Mediterranean corsairs, thus helping to launch a golden age for Barbary piracy. In the period of the "Spanish Main" the bucca­ neers operated in a power vacuum where skill and solidarity (and plenty of looted gunpowder) made them the equals of shaky colonial infrastructures. In Madagascar the pirates often outgunned and outsailed the Arabs and Indians and even the East India Company on occasion. In such circumstances the classical pirates could afford gestures of magnanimity, where the modern South China Sea pirates could not. In a pamphlet attributed to Defoe, The King of Pirates ... Captain Avery, the pirate himself is made to deny the calumny that he raped and murdered (or married) the Moghul princess whose ships he plundered during one of the most profitable and famous pirate cruises in all history. He admits that some of her attendants and maids consorted with some of his crew, but Vlll Preface the Princess was released unharmed, and with cool anti-chival­ ric irony Avery claims he was far more interested in her dia­ monds than her maidenhead. Some Marxist historians rejected any comparison between pirates and "social bandits" because the pirates seemed to lack either a maquis or a "people" to represent. Christopher Hill, Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh and other piratologists how­ ever identify the pirates' maquis as a class rather than a "peo­ ple": the Atlantic proletariat, so to speak. Snelders traces the buccaneers' sometime alliances with Indians and even Indian culture; the same analysis holds more strongly for Madagascar, where the Zana-Malata of "Pirates' Children" played a signifi­ cant role even after the pirate fathers had departed or died out in beachcomber bliss. And of course all writers comment on the international and interracial aspect of piracy: the "motley crew" as Linebaugh and Rediker call it (in their book The Many­ Headed Hydra, Beacon, 2000). The "social" aspect of piracy no longer needs defense - although it does require explication and analysis. Sea-going muggers who prey on the poor, and murder them as well, would seem to have forfeited all claim to consideration as social bandits or even "real pirates:' In my work I've argued that the pirates' activities on land (pirate utopias or temporary autonomous zones) should be considered just as significant as their activities at sea and the "Articles" that made each ship a floating republic. The bucca­ neers or hunters on Hispaniola began as an autarchic "Brotherhood" of castaways and only later took to the sea. And in Madagascar many pirates returned to the land quite happi­ ly. Looking at the whole picture, rather than individual careers, we get the impression that desire for total liberty constituted ix