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Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash
Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash
Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity

Hans Turley
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

© 1999 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turley, Hans, 1956–
Rum, sodomy, and the lash : piracy, sexuality, and masculine
identity / Hans Turley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-8223-X (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8147-8224-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Pirates—History.  2. Pirates—Sexual behavior.  3. Pirates in
literature.  4. Homosexuality in literature.  I. Title.

G535 .T87 1999

910.4′5—ddc21          98-40141
CIP

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface

Introduction: A Merry Life and a Short One

1 Life on Board an Early-Eighteenth-Century Ship

2 Hostis Humani Generis: The Common Enemy against All

Mankind

3 Trial Records, Last Words, and Other Ephemera: The Literary

Artifacts of Piracy

4 Captain Avery and the Making of an Antihero

5 Fabricated by the Frail Hand of Man: The General History and

Fictional Reality

6 A Brave, a Just, an Innocent, and a Noble Cause

7 Solemn Imprecations and Curses: Captain Singleton’s Search

for Identity

8 Robinson Crusoe and “True Christian” Identity

Notes

Bibliography

Index
About the Author

All illustrations appear as an insert following p. 76.

Preface

As a child I never played pirate. Of course, like many

children born in the fties, I was terri ed and fascinated by
Captain Hook in Mary Martin’s Peter Pan. In a sense, then, Cyril
Ritchard’s over-the-top portrayal of Hook (“What tempo,
Captain?” “A Tango!”) probably in uenced my choice of subject
thirty years later. But Christopher Hill’s short essay “Radical
Pirates?” was the main inspiration for this book. I had been
engaged by Daniel Defoe’s great pirate novel Captain Singleton, and
I had been trying to make sense of what seemed to be almost
explicit homoerotic desire shown by the title character for his
friend and companion, Quaker William. Hill’s essay examines
radical Christians after the Restoration and imagines that they
might have ed England and become buccaneers and pirates. Since
Hill looks at pirates as dissenting from a Christian, economic
perspective, I wondered if one couldn’t look at pirates from a
sexual perspective as well. This thought led to the notion that
pirates may have been sexually transgressive, but more important,
as the historian Robert C. Ritchie suggested to me, they were
culturally transgressive as well.
By the time I started to research late-seventeenth- and early-
eighteenth-century piracy, I realized that although many pirate
histories had been written over the past two and a half centuries,
not much use had been made of the primary sources that were
written contemporaneously with the emergence of the great pirate
gures. So began a long trip into pirate history and mythology and
a realization of the pirate’s importance as a cultural trope not only
in the eighteenth century but in the late twentieth century as well.
This trip could never have been completed without the
assistance and support of a number of scholars in eighteenth-
century studies. First and foremost I would like to thank Professors
Robert Markley and Thomas Lockwood. Bob read and reread the
various drafts of this manuscript. Some chapters he can probably
recite from memory. His comments and support over the past years
have been invaluable and inestimable. Tom, too, read and
commented on earlier versions of the book and restrained my
tendentious impulses while helping me with my forays into
archives. They provided the best kinds of mentoring and criticism.
Professor Lincoln Faller’s generosity with his time and
willingness to read and comment so fully on the manuscript at a
number of stages have helped me enormously. Lincoln’s
enthusiasm is contagious. Professor Kathleen Wilson’s illuminating
suggestions likewise have a ected the nal version of this book.
Credit for the title must go to Kate, pace Winston Churchill and the
Pogues, but I accept responsibility for using it. Professor Joel Baer
has shown great support for this project; without his help, I would
never have found my way through the Public Record O ce in
London. Joel’s essays about eighteenth-century piracy are
impeccably researched and elegantly argued. The essays have been
inspirations for my own attempts at pirate historiography.
Professors Henry Abelove’s and George Haggerty’s advice on
earlier versions of this book pushed my thinking about queer
theory and gay and lesbian studies. Professor Sara van den Berg
gave me valuable comments as a reader on my dissertation
committee. Professor Manuel Schonhorn’s wit kept my work in
perspective over the past several years. J. M. Coetzee and Dorothy
Driver asked questions and pushed my thinking in di erent
directions than I would have otherwise gone. In addition, I thank
Professors Paul Alkon, Paul Hunter, Jean Marsden, Jerry Phillips,
and my colleagues at the University of Connecticut, Kristina
Straub, James Thompson, Philip Baruth, as well as my former
colleagues at Texas Tech, particularly Ed Check, Sara Gadeken,
Leon Higdon, Allen Miller, Cat Moses, Bruce Clarke, John Samson,
and Don Rude. All of the friends with whom I discussed this book
contributed to the nal shape.
I could not have begun my research without the nancial
support from the University of Washington when I was a doctoral
candidate. A predoctoral fellowship enabled me to begin my
research at the British Library and the Public Record O ce. Uli—
librarian extraordinaire at the British Library—deserves special
thanks for his suggestions and help with the library’s collection.
Thanks to Uli, not once did I order a book that was lost in the
Blitz.
I have been lucky enough to have had fellowships from several
ne libraries throughout the United States and Canada. With
grants from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
and the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center and
ASECS and McMaster University’s William Ready Collections, I was
able to complete essential research for this project. The sta s at
both of these libraries were generous with their time and the
collections. I would like to thank the sta of the William Ready
Division of Archives on Research Collections, McMaster University
Library, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in particular for their
enthusiasm and for allowing me the use of the illustrations.
I thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to
reprint my article “Piracy, Identity, and Desire in Captain Singleton”
in Eighteenth Century Studies, v. 31, no.2 (1997–98): 194–214.
Chapter 7 of this book is a slightly revised version of the article.
A Dorothy Collins Brown fellowship and a Mellon Fellowship
from the Huntington Library enabled me to use the Huntington’s
vast pirate collection over two summers, and to comprehend the
immense resources available for a scholar of piracy. In particular,
Robert C. Ritchie’s advice gave me the con dence to carry on my
research.
My editors at New York University Press have been wonderful.
Tim Bartlett went beyond the call of duty during his last days
there. Jennifer Hammer’s advice and criticism were of great help.
Many thanks, too, go to Despina Papazoglou Gimbel and a
wonderful copyeditor, Rosalie Morales Kearns.
A special acknowledgment should go to Manfred Mickleson.
Manfred made me see that I was on to something with my book.
Although I have never met Manfred—and know I never shall—he
is certainly an inspiration for me and many of my colleagues
starting out in eighteenth-century studies.
Professors Joel Reed, Kathryn King, William Christmas, and
Alexander Pettit have been valuable colleagues. But more
important, their friendship helped me hold on to my sanity.
Without them this book may have been written, but I would never
have had as much fun doing it.
Finally, without Steve Arnold’s support, nagging, friendship,
companionship, and love, I would never have nished this project.
Steve drew the beautiful illustration for the cover. My heart stands
still, Steve, and this book is dedicated to you and to my patient,
loving parents, Pat and Bill Turley.
Introduction
A Merry Life and a Short One

They were a queer lot—in their oddities perhaps even more than their abilities lies the secret
of their fascination.

—Philip Gosse, The History of Pirates

In a famous passage lifted by many other pirate

historians, Captain Charles Johnson vividly describes Blackbeard
in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most
Notorious Pyrates (1724):

[His] Beard was black, which he su ered to grow of an extravagant Length; as to

Breadth, it came up to his Eyes, he was accustomed to twist it with Ribbons, in small
Tails, after the Manner of our Ramellies Wigs, and turn them about his Ears . . . and
[he] stuck a lighted Match . . . on each side [of] his Face, his Eyes naturally looking
Fierce and Wild, made him altogether such a Figure, that Imagination cannot form an

Idea of a Fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.1

Johnson depicts Blackbeard as the archetypical pirate. Like all the

mythic pirate antiheroes, Blackbeard is both the same and more
than the “typical” pirate who terrorized the seven seas.
The depictions of pirates in the eighteenth century can give us
insight into how certain ideas of masculinity came to be
understood as appropriate and “normal.” Rum, Sodomy, and the
Lash is not a traditional history of piracy per se; rather, it looks at
the ways history and ction merge in the representation of the
pirate in the early eighteenth century and over the past three
centuries. We cannot, I believe, recover the “real” pirate. However
—and this is how Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash di ers from other
books about piracy—we can uncover the ways the periodical press,
pamphlets, trial records, the confessions of the pirates, and other
primary resources established the pirate as “hostis humani generis,
the common enemy against all mankind.” We can then determine
how these early sources contributed to the pirate’s ctional
representations and make connections with other representations
of masculine desire and individuality. What, in other words, made
the pirate hostis humani generis? Was it only the threat he posed to
the economy? Or did he threaten not only economic stability but
also emergent notions of middle-class propriety? How did the
pirate—a serious menace to mercantilism and trade in early-
modern Britain—become the outrageously masculine antihero
familiar to us through novels, movies, plays, and other outlets of
popular culture?
The pirate lived outside the boundaries of conventional
European society. He was not only a sexual transgressor, as one
historian portrays him, or an economic or political transgressor, as
other historians portray him.2 Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash looks at
the economic, cultural, and sexual deviance explicit and implicit in
pirate characterizations through a wide-ranging body of primary
material. The pirate’s sexual ambiguity is especially intriguing.
Depicted as hypermasculine, the pirate is the antithesis of the
feminized sodomite. Yet, though he lives in a homosocial world,
sexuality is left out of almost all depictions of it.
Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash explores how the pirate’s threat to
trade became merged with narratives that suggest that the pirate
has “unnatural” desires to live in an all-male society, a culture that
transgresses English norms in myriad ways. At the same time that
this new representation of the pirate emerged, so too emerged a
new representation of homoerotic desire. The pirate was an
individual de ned by his desire; he had an unnatural desire to live
and carouse in a violent, transgressive homosocial world and to
perform piratical acts. The sodomite was de ned by his unnatural
desire as well, but the sodomite explicitly desired to perform sexual
acts with other men. The pirate threatened society because he
embodied all kinds of economic criminal desires and cultural
transgressions and deviance. Paradoxically, despite his very real
criminality, during these same years the pirate came to be seen as
the romantic antihero still popular to this day. The sodomite, on
the other hand, became criminalized not because of any explicit
threat to the economy, but because he posed a threat to sexual
propriety.
Were the pirates sodomites because they lived in an all-male,
transgressive society? The evidence for piratical sodomy is so
sparse as to be almost nonexistent.3 More signi cant for a cultural
history of masculine desire, the homoerotic implications of the
pirate’s transgressive homosocial world are either ignored or
overdetermined in popular and serious history, literature, and
culture. My aim is twofold: to analyze how eighteenth-century
writers perceived the pirate and to show how the pirate came to be
portrayed as both the criminal and the romanticized antihero par
excellence in the following centuries.
More broadly, as both a revisionist history of pirates and a
critical analysis of the early novel, this book is intended to open up
the pirate’s ctional and factual representations in eighteenth-
century literature to contemporary literary and cultural studies. I
will not retell the biographies of the pirates here, nor will I rehash
tales of famous pirate adventures. There are enough books that
solidly relate this kind of history. Through extensive archival
research of primary sources about the pirate as well as a critical
look at the early novel, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash is both a history
of pirate identity seen through trial records, confessions, and
eighteenth-century histories and a narrative of desire and
masculinity in the early novel.
Depictions of Blackbeard show how the pirate became
mythologized—indeed sexualized—throughout the centuries.
Johnson’s General History is, explicitly from the title, a history of
piracy. Its genre, however, is harder to determine because Johnson
embellishes his “history”—the “facts” that can be found in all the
primary pirate sources—with fanciful anecdotes. The book then is
as much “ ction” as it is history. Johnson focuses most of his
attention on the “golden-age” pirates who sailed the seas between
1695 and 1725. Although the book is a “history”—and has been
treated seriously as such by historians through the centuries—I
argue that through his use of fact and ction, Johnson began the
process that turned the pirate into the romanticized antihero
twentieth-century readers are familiar with.
For example, in Johnson’s description of Blackbeard’s
physicality, he suggests that Blackbeard deliberately attempts to
embody “a Fury from Hell.” Blackbeard is not only “naturally . . .
Fierce and Wild,” but even adds to his “natural” erceness. He ties
long, slow-burning matches, or fuses, to his curls to emphasize his
demonic appearance when he boards and plunders a ship.
Johnson’s depiction of Blackbeard illustrates the extremes to
which authors go to try to demonize the pirate.4 He heightens the
descriptions of Blackbeard’s physical appearance, found in trial
records and newspapers of the period, in order to emphasize
Blackbeard’s villainy. However, not all the pirates in the General
History are simply “demons.” The genre of Johnson’s book is
di cult to pin down because he makes up pirates within the
metanarrative of a wholly factual “history.” Some, like Blackbeard,
are based on fact. Others, such as the aristocratic and idealistic
Captain Misson—who started a democratic government on
Madagascar—he makes up out of whole cloth as a way to criticize
early-eighteenth-century government.
 Johnson shows respect for Blackbeard, this most “frightful” of
pirates. He depicts him not only as demonic, but as heroic at the
same time. The following passage describes Blackbeard’s nal
battle with Lieutenant Maynard of North Carolina:

They were now closely and warmly engaged, the Lieutenant and twelve Men, against
Black-beard and fourteen, till the Blood run out of the Scuppers in Streams; Black-
Beard received a Shot into his Body, from the Pistol that Lieutenant Maynard cock’d,
yet still stood his Ground and fought with great Fury, till he received sixteen
Wounds, and ve of them by Shot. . . . Here was an End of that couragious Brute,
who might have pass’d in the World for a Heroe, had he been employ’d in a good
Cause. (Johnson, 1:96)

A “couragious Brute”: the phrase reveals writers’ mixed feelings

about the pirate; admiration is combined with fear and loathing.
Blackbeard then becomes the model for modern perceptions of the
romanticized pirate. He may be a “brute,” but this brutality allows
him to ght with almost superhuman spirit. To the people of
Charleston and the colonial and British governments in 1718 and
1719, he was a threat to essential trade along the southern Atlantic
coast of the colonies. To Johnson, only a few years later, he is a
“couragious Brute,” whose vile actions are tempered by his
dauntless acts-as-pirate, his heroic defense of his piratical world. If
Blackbeard is not a “hero,” what is he? He is de ned by the
con icting depictions of his transgressive position as both a
cultural antihero—courageous—and a dangerous criminal—
brutish.
 This paradoxical representation of pirate identity can
illuminate our understanding of the early-eighteenth-century
sodomite. Both pirate and sodomite are, in a sense, outlaws.
However, the sodomite is a member of society—unlike the pirate,
who self-consciously pulls himself out of society. The sodomite
performs his transgressions in secret, afraid he will be discovered
and ruined or, worse, condemned and executed. The sodomite is
the feminized, e eminate sexual criminal. Blackbeard, too, is a
criminal, but his crimes are explicitly economic. On the surface,
Blackbeard’s sexuality is depicted as excessively masculine. His
hypermasculinity precludes any suspicion that he might indulge in
sodomy.
In the General History, Blackbeard’s outrageous relationship
with his men and one of his wives demonstrates the homoeroticism
inherent in transgressive homosocial worlds. Johnson repeats the
most famous story, which involves his “fourteenth wife”: “His
behavior in [the married] State, was something extraordinary; . . .
it was his Custom to invite ve or six of his most brutal
Companions to come ashore, and he would force her to prostitute
her self to them all, one after another, before his Face.” (1:88).
This story merges Blackbeard’s violence with sexuality; it illustrates
that “homosociality suggests a continuum of male-male relations,
one capable of being sexualized, though where and how such
sexualization occurs cannot be assumed a priori.”5 If relations
between men can be sexualized, how can this anecdote reveal a
piratical homoerotic? So the anecdote raises a question: What
sexually excites Blackbeard? The violence that his companions
show toward his wife or the voyeurism explicit in the anecdote?
The homosocial world of the pirate cannot be de ned as explicitly
homoerotic. However, in one of the few instances of eighteenth-
century depictions of pirate sexuality, the erotic specter raised here
is curiously ambivalent. It is as if Blackbeard’s sexuality has to be
linked with violence and voyeurism in order to be depicted: in an
unconventional world, conventional sex has no place. But neither
can depictions of sex be too unconventional. On a continuum of
homosocial behavior, violence and voyeurism are more acceptable
to readers (and authors) than explicit suggestions of
homoeroticism. Besides, pirates are too “masculine” to indulge in
consensual sodomy.
Blackbeard—like all the famous pirates—changes from
generation to generation. In a mid-nineteenth-century novel
entitled Blackbeard (1847), the author transforms the same “Fierce
and Wild” pirate into a peculiarly sensitive maritime marauder:

The head of this strange being was covered with a crimson cap, and his countenance,
might have been truly termed handsome, had not the lower part of it been enveloped
in a mass of long black hair, which gave to its possessor an air of wild and savage
ferocity.
“What strange apparition is this,” exclaimed the earl involuntarily, as this
singular personage stood erect before him.
“I am no apparition, sir,” exclaimed the stranger, in a voice so nely modulated,
that it might have been easily taken for a woman’s, “but a substantial specimen of
vigorous life, who kindly bids you welcome to the pirates’ palace.” (9–10)
In describing Blackbeard, this author uses diction similar to
Johnson’s: “long black hair” on Blackbeard’s face gives him
“savage ferocity.” However, he also creates homoerotic
implications in the pirate’s representation. Here Blackbeard looks
the part, but does not act the role of the “ferocious” pirate of
legend. He is indeed “strange” for a pirate, represented in such a
way that his villainy—his historical reputation—merges with his
deviant femininity—a literary reinterpretation. Although he sounds
and appears deviant or “strange,” he calls himself “a substantial
specimen of vigorous life.” The tension between his appearance
(hypermasculine), his voice (feminine), and his self-description
makes his sexuality both ambiguous and suggestive. In other
words, does this incarnation of Blackbeard have “feminine” or
“masculine” sexual desires?
Two hundred and fty years later, in a “serious” biography
written in 1974, Blackbeard is transformed from a voyeuristic
villain into a sort of hairy Hugh Hefner: “Few pirates treated
women or girls with greater respect than he. . . . He would not let
a girl serve him a drink; he preferred to serve the drink to the
girl.”6 Here Blackbeard’s transformation into a gentleman is
absurd, given the pirate’s prior depictions and how we imagine the
pirate in our mind’s eye. If a pirate like Blackbeard can go through
such incarnations—brute, e eminate marauder, gentleman with
impeccable manners—it is not surprising that an examination of
other representations of the pirate gure through the last three
centuries demonstrates the tensions in depictions of pirate
masculinity and sexuality.
I shall not make claims that the pirate was a sodomite and that
pirate ships were rife with buggery. What interests me instead is
the way pirates have been eroticized through the past centuries.
We can see this process by examining the way pirate tales change
through the last three centuries. Almost all pirate histories, popular
and academic, focus on piracy’s “golden years” and tell the same
stories over and over. We are familiar with at least the names, if
not the exploits, of larger-than-life personalities such as Black-
beard, Captain Kidd, and Captain Avery. Pirate history is narrowly
focused on personalities because there are few records that allow
us to reconstruct pirate life. “Parish registers, censuses, and tax
lists are of no use in studying a population that existed at the
fringes of, or even beyond, settled societies,” writes one maritime
historian. “As a result, the social history of the pirates remains
almost a void.”7 Unfortunately for the cultural historian, this
observation is correct. We are left with only one side of the story:
eighteenth-century narratives that sensationalize and demonize the
pirates. We read and thrill to tales of violence, tales of
bloodthirsty, lusty villains who take no quarter, slit throats without
compunction, and throw their victims overboard. But with readerly
inconsistency we admire the pirates for their individuality, their
success, their great wealth. Thus “serious” books retell these stories
and embellish them with rumors of buried treasure, cryptic maps,
and exaggerated ideas of plunder. I am not sure that the “reality”
of the pirates, their day-to-day social existence, is something
readers want to know. These larger-than-life gures remain
legendary precisely because there is no “truth” that can be
determined, as changing representations of Blackbeard show. The
legend and the reality are woven into a fabric impossible to
unravel. However, the way this fabric is woven can be examined.
All the great pirates will make an appearance in the following
chapters. No book that focuses on pirates and pirate literature can
neglect the famous personalities whose names still resonate three
hundred years after the pirate’s golden age. In the rst chapter,
though, we shall look at how life at sea was depicted by early-
eighteenth-century writers and perceived by early-eighteenth-
century readers. By closely examining the often dangerous life of
the ordinary seaman, we can understand why sailors decided to
“go on the account,” or turn pirate. In chapter 2 I shall carefully
de ne the di erences between buccaneers, privateers, and pirates.
Then I shall develop the concept of the “piratical subject” as a way
to make sense of why the pirate was both feared and admired by
eighteenth-century writers. The “piratical subject” is my term for
the merging of the legally de ned pirate—hostis humani generis or
homo economicus—and the culturally revered pirate, a
hypermasculine, transgressive, desiring subject. Through historical
and ctional representations of the pirate, these two depictions
merged into the antihero—the piratical subject—beloved by
generations of readers.
 In chapter 3 I shall examine how the ephemeral press
constructed the pirate gure in the early eighteenth century. We
shall look closely at the primary sources: the trial records and
pirate confessions. I will show that our own perception of the
pirate can be traced to these earlier sources. Chapter 4 builds on
these analyses and looks at changing depictions of the legendary
Captain Avery. Avery captured the public’s imagination when he
seized the Great Mogul’s treasure-laden ship in the 1690s,
supposedly kidnapped and married the Great Mogul’s
granddaughter, and created a pirate republic on the island of
Madagascar. Avery’s career illustrates the ways the pirate became
heroicized despite his very real threat to eighteenth-century
merchant shipping.
Chapters 5 and 6 are a close reading and analysis of A General
History of the . . . Pyrates, the most in uential pirate book ever
written. Despite its importance to later pirate historians, it has
never been given its due as a work of literature in its own right.
Daniel Defoe was given attribution as Captain Johnson in the
1930s. In the last ten years, that attribution has been under
considerable doubt.8 However, whether or not Defoe wrote the
General History is, I believe, beside the point for Rum, Sodomy, and
the Lash. The fact remains that the General History’s importance to
pirate history is inestimable and re ects early-eighteenth-century
ideas about the pirate.
 Coincidentally enough, the age of the pirates coincided with the
period in which Defoe was most proli c. However, because there is
much doubt that Defoe actually wrote the General History, I shall
consider it to be Captain Charles Johnson’s work. “Captain
Johnson” is, of course, simply a name to attach to the book for
convenience. This book—so important to pirate and maritime
studies—has been ignored as a literary text. But as I here argue,
the General History gives us signi cant insight into how the pirate
came to be represented as both archcriminal and antihero; the
book is also important in helping us understand modern ideas of
masculinity, masculine desire, and male identity.
In the last two chapters I shall examine Defoe’s Captain
Singleton (1720) as well as Robinson Crusoe and its two sequels
(1719–20). As the sheer quantity of Defoe criticism demonstrates,
in particular scholarship about Robinson Crusoe, it is hard to
overstate Defoe’s importance to the history of the English novel
and his in uence on our notions of the “modern” individual. Since
Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, the title character has had
an iconic status in Anglo-American and European culture. Despite
Defoe’s prominence in studies that examine the history of the
novel, the analysis of his contributions to the novel’s origins and
perceptions of early-modern identity has been remarkably narrow.
The Defoe novel, critical reasoning goes, begins to work out
newly emergent de nitions of bourgeois sexual and economic
desire that later authors re ne and complicate. Although I agree
with this general historical claim, I want to suggest an alternative
tradition for the novel and for Defoe’s place in a cultural history of
masculinity. I do this by emphasizing the transgressive nature of
economic and sexual desire and their sites within religious and
political ideology in both well-known and less-familiar ctional
works by Defoe. The pirate gure—the ultimate outsider in early-
eighteenth-century culture—is the place where I begin this
investigation. In these novels, Defoe pulled together all the
contradictory representations of the pirate. Defoe’s ctional
protagonists—read alongside representations of the “real” pirates
discussed in previous chapters—are the key to our conception of
the romantic antihero. His heroes are among the early-modern
archetypes for our notions of individuality and masculine desire. At
the same time, though, these heroes and antiheroes push the
boundaries of what counts as nondeviant masculinity. Indeed,
Defoe ends Captain Singleton as a celebration of the a ectionate—
and implicitly homoerotic—relationship between two men.
Because of the deviant homosocial world of the pirate, piracy
and implicit homoerotic desire go hand in hand. I am not making
overdetermined assertions. I am arguing that the literary and
historical representations of the pirate are rife with homoerotic
imagery, and that imagery infects our conceptions of the pirate.
Think of Captain Hook and the Lost Boys, Long John Silver and
Jim, ad in nitum, through John Belushi’s queer pirate on Saturday
Night Live and R. Crumb’s outrageous fellator Captain Pissgums.
 In Treasure Island, Jim the narrator suggests the appeal of the
pirate: “His stories were what frightened people worst of all.
Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and walking the plank,
and storms at sea, and the dry Tortugas, and evil deeds and places
in the Spanish Main.”9 Over a century later, the maritime historian
Marcus Rediker argues that “Pirates constructed that world in
de ant contradistinction to the ways of the world they left behind”
(Rediker, 267). “Dreadful stories” and a “constructed” world,
violent acts and exotic places: ction and history—like legend and
reality—merge. An analysis of this merger becomes the means to
understand how “identity” and notions of subjectivity are much
more complex than a simple dichotomy of villain and hero,
“heterosexual” and “homosexual.” I will examine subjectivity—that
enigmatic, impossible-to-de ne concept—in the early-modern era
and show how the complex depiction of the golden-age pirate can
make sense of changing notions of self, masculinity, and sexuality.
1
Life on Board an Early-Eighteenth-Century
Ship

I could not forbear Re ecting on the Prudence of those Persons who send their Unlucky
Children to Sea to Tame and Reform ’em, which, I am well satis ed, is like sending a Knave
into Scotland to learn Honesty; a Fool into Ireland to learn Wit; or a Clown into Holland to
learn Breeding; by any of which Measures they that send ’em may be sure that instead of
mending the ill Habits they have contracted, the rst will return more Wild, the second more
Knavish, the third more Foolish, and the fourth a greater Booby.

—Edward Ward, The London-Spy Compleat

In an infamous case of a captain’s brutality, published as

Unparallel’d Cruelty; or the Tryal of Captain Jeane (1726), an
eighteen-year-old cabin boy had the misfortune to sign on Captain
Jeane’s ship. At his trial for the young man’s murder, the captain
said that his cabin boy was “very naughty.” He had stolen a dram
of rum from the captain’s quarters.1 To the horror of the trial’s
spectators—and the lurid delight of the trial’s transcribers and
readers—Jeane showed no remorse for the way “That the
barbarous Villain, for no better he ought to be call’d had whipped
this poor Boy several Times in a very cruel Manner.” The captain’s
“punishment” did not stop with the lash:
 after whipping [the boy], [he] pickled him in Brine; that for nine Days and Nights he
tied him to the main Mast, his Arms and Legs being all the Time extended at full
Length; that not content with this, he had him unty’d, and laid along upon the
Gangway, where he trod upon him, and would have had the Men done the same,
which they refus’d; by which being exasperated as thinking, which indeed he might
very well do, that they pitied him, he kick’d him about as he lay, unable to get up,
and stamp’d upon his breast so violently, that his Excrement came up involuntarily
from him; which he took up, and with his own Hands forc’d it several Times down
his Throat; that the poor miserable Creature was eighteen Days a dying, being cruelly
allowed Food enough to sustain Life, and keep him in Torture all that Time; that he
was severely whipp’d every Day, and particularly the Day he died; that when he was
in the Agonies of Death, and speechless, his inexorable Master gave him eighteen
Lashes; that when he was just expiring, he put his Finger to his Mouth, which was
took for a Signal of desiring something to drink, when the Brute, to continue his
Inhumanity to the last, went into the Cabbin for a Glass, which he pissed in, and then
gave it him for a Cordial; that a little, ’twas believed, went down his Throat; upon
which pushing the Glass from him, he that Instant breathed his last; and God in
Mercy put an End to his Su erings, which seemed to cause an Uneasiness to the
Captain for not continuing longer. (4–6)

Asked why he punished the cabin boy so severely for stealing a

dram of rum, Jeane explained to the court that “he thought himself
oblig’d as a Master, to correct a Servant for such an enormous
Fault” (25), that is, breaking into his rum cabinet.
Jeane showed no remorse after he was condemned, nor could
he see what the fuss was about: “He insisted to the last, that he
could not apprehend it criminal in him to punish the Boy; and that
his dying under Correction, was the Lad’s Misfortune, but not a
Crime chargeable upon him” (22). Indeed, before he was executed
Jeane blamed his crew for being “rogues” because they turned him
in to the authorities.
The captain was punished by a nal irony at his execution. He
dangled from the end of the rope for eighteen minutes before he
died. “This might have mov’d the Compassion of the populace
upon other Occasions,” the narrator tells us, “but now it only
serv’d to put them upon recollecting the disproportion between the
time he su er’d, and the eighteen Days in which he had kept the
poor Creature in Torment for whom he su er’d” (33–34). Indeed,
the spectators did nothing to hasten Jeane’s death: “He was left to
die, as might happen, without that Assistance, from either the
People or the Executioner, which is usual; none gave him one
friendly Blow to help him out of his Pain, or even so much as pull’d
him by his Legs, to hasten his end” (33).
Although sensational and lurid, Unparallel’d Cruelty is germane
for a couple of reasons. First, in its over-the-top way, the
description of the cabin boy’s “discipline” shows how a captain
could abuse his power on board ship. Even though the pamphlet
might be an exaggeration (and Captain Jeane was obviously
mentally unbalanced), it still demonstrates the remarkable
discipline a crew was forced to put up with.2 The lash was the
usual punishment for sailors. “Pickling”—or rubbing salt in the
wounds after the whipping to promote healing—provided an extra
layer of discipline. Both whipping and pickling were accepted by
crews as part of life on board a ship. But obviously Captain Jeane’s
punishment of his cabin boy goes beyond mere discipline and the
use of the lash. And what did the cabin boy do? Steal a dram of
rum.
The anonymous narrator depicts a sadistic captain who derives
pleasure from torturing young boys. Furthermore, the description
of Jeane’s usage of the boy is pornographic in its attention to
sadistic details. Traces of homoeroticism intrude into this narrative,
albeit a displaced homoeroticism that substitutes violence for sex.
Indeed, sodomitical rape seems to be the only violent act that the
captain did not perform on the lad. This luridness demonstrates the
di erence between life at sea for a sailor and life on land for the
landlubber. It is doubtful that the landlubber equivalent of a cabin
boy—an apprentice—would have the same kind of punishment if
he stole a dram of rum from his master. Or at the least, if the
apprentice were punished in such a drawn-out, grisly way,
someone would have put a stop to the “punishment.” Captain
Jeane, the nal authority on board the ship, went to horri c
extremes to “punish” the boy. Captain Jeane’s cabin boy
underwent his own “tryal”—for eighteen days—and the crew did
nothing to stop the boy’s torture.
In its hierarchies and its maintenance of discipline, the
merchant ship or naval ship represented a microcosm of English
society. However, if the restraints of social custom were
unfastened, as they were here by a psychotic sea captain, there
was little the crew could do. That the crew stood by and watched
Jeane torture his cabin boy shows the reality of life at sea. The
ship was in fact a microcosm of English society. The crew, taught to
obey authority, was forced to watch and wait. They did nothing—
nor could they, since doing so would go against the status quo—
until they reached England and noti ed the proper authorities.
Captain Jeane’s actions demonstrate the power a ship’s captain
wielded, and the lengths he could go before his crew might begin
to think about mutiny. Why did Captain Jeane’s men wait until
they returned to England before they did anything about the cabin
boy’s torture and murder? For one thing, their inaction
demonstrates the sailors’ respect for or fear of power and their
acceptance of their status as maritime laborers. More signi cantly,
Unparallel’d Cruelty is a volume for nonsailors. Its shock value
highlights the landlubber fascination with maritime life, a
fascination exempli ed by the glori cation of the pirate gure
over the next three centuries.
In the guise of a moral tale—Captain Jeane was, after all,
punished for his crimes—the story conveys details of the cabin
boy’s torture with gruesome relish. As we shall see, the descriptions
of pirate cruelty are recounted in equally delicious ways in the
ephemeral literature of the era and by Johnson’s General History.
Captain Jeane’s brutality is a microscopic albeit sensational look
at the power held by a ship’s captain, one aspect of maritime life
hinted at but rarely addressed directly in travelogues by privateers
like Woodes Rogers, William Dampier, and others. In its appalling,
sensational way, Unparallel’d Cruelty probably con rmed for the
reader the brutal life of the ordinary seaman.
Of course, the pirate’s life was even more brutal. Moreover, the
pirate’s violence is part of his mystique. He lives in a society
against the state, to use Clastres’s phrase, an anarchic world to
outsiders that actually has its own rules and customs.3 For
example, Blackbeard—perhaps the most famous early-eighteenth-
century pirate—shoots his rst mate Israel Hands in the knee and
lames him for life. “Being asked the meaning of this, he only
answered, by damning them, that if he did not now and then kill one
of them, they would forget who he was” (Johnson, 1:99). Readers are
not surprised at Blackbeard’s unprovoked stunt because Blackbeard
acts the way a pirate is supposed to act: with capricious violence.
In another famous anecdote, Blackbeard says to some fellow
pirates, “Come . . . let us make a Hell of our own, and try how long we
can bear it” (Johnson, 1:100). The “Fury from Hell” (1:100) and
“two or three others, went down into the Hold, and closing up all
the Hatches, ll’d several Pots full of Brimstone, and other
combustible Matter” (1:100). Blackbeard sets the pots on re, and
the men stay below to see who can hold out longest in their “Hell”:
Blackbeard does, of course. Again readers are not surprised
because Blackbeard is merely acting out appalling behavior in a
piratical way.
When Captain Jeane insanely tortures his cabin boy, his
violence repels the readers. Blackbeard the pirate forces his men to
stay below, but he stays in the hold with them. He is, to use
Captain Johnson’s description, a “couragious Brute” (1:88). His
violence—or brutality—repels readers but at the same time
con rms his courage because he shares his crew’s discomfort.
Readers expect Blackbeard to be violent. Captain Jeane, on the
other hand, is the captain of a legitimate merchant ship. He
showed “Barbarity in the most perfect Degree . . . and all without
so much as the Shadow of a reason for it” (1). And “reason” would
seem to de ne the di erence between the legitimate world of the
merchant ships and the brutal, unreasonable world of piracy. If
Captain Jeane were a pirate who tortured his cabin boy in such a
loathsome way, readers would not be surprised. However, the
early-eighteenth-century maritime world was not a society against
the state. Indeed, its entire purpose was to support the state
economically. It took a sadist like Jeane to expose the possibility
for unwarranted violence in the legitimate maritime world.
Most sea captains, of course, were not insane and did not mete
out the kind of sadistic punishment that Jeane did. And they were
not selfconsciously violent criminals like Blackbeard. Besides, harsh
discipline was only one aspect of the trying conditions seamen
faced on their long voyages. Travelogues—the published journals
kept by explorers and privateers—were an enormously popular
genre in eighteenth-century England. These books focus on travel
and exploration and the novelty of the ora and fauna of the New
World. But the books also recount the deprivations su ered by the
privateers and their crews during their long voyages, and show
that captains sometimes held only a tenuous grip on their crews’
loyalties.
William Funnel was a mate on one of Captain Dampier’s
voyages around the world. The last line of Funnel’s account of the
trip sums up the perils sailors could face on such a cruise: “And on
the 26th of August, 1706. after many Dangers both by Sea and
Land, we happily arrived in England; being but eighteen out of one
hundred eighty-three which went out with us. Finis.”4 One-tenth of
the crew returned home. The rest died from shipboard accidents
and drowning, disease and starvation, and violence. The numbers
are horrifying.
Massive loss of life—whether by disease caused by bad food and
worse sanitation or calamities such as hurricanes and storms—was
not at all unusual on these long voyages, as eighteenth-century
readers knew. In 1720 Mist’s Weekly-Journal announced the recent
arrival at Cork of a ship from Borneo:

most of the Men that were on board her are dead, which was occasioned by the
Scarcity of Provisions; their Allowance for some Time being less than a whole Biskit
a Day a Man; of the rest that lived to come to Ireland, several died by the other

Extream, so that there were scarce Hands left to bring her Home.5

This story is only one of many like it in the Weekly-Journal. On 7

December 1723, the newspaper printed “A list of Vessels thrown on
Shore at Antegoa in a Hurricane on the 19th and 20th of Sept.
1723.” It is a huge list of ships that were destroyed and the people
who were saved. About thirty craft—snows, brigantines, schooners,
and sloops—were lost in that hurricane. More than any other
newspaper of the 1710s and 1720s, the Weekly-Journal focused
much of its news on disasters at sea and the hard lot of the sailor.
Readers of this popular newspaper were fully aware of the trials
su ered by the ordinary mariner.
In A Cruising Voyage round the World (1712), the famous
privateer Woodes Rogers describes the hardships faced in a voyage
that circled the globe.6 The book is perhaps best remembered
because Rogers discovered the marooned Alexander Selkirk,
generally accepted as a model for Robinson Crusoe.7 But Rogers
also brings alive the daily threat of accidental death that was
matter-of-fact on long cruising voyages.
For example, early in the voyage, a sailor “fell suddenly
without any noise from the Main-Top overboard” (24). Another
sailor “fell out of the Mizen-Top on the Quarter-Deck, and broke
his Skull . . . so that he died, and was buried the next day” (102).
Later, the men are at work on shore “but having sultry hot, wet
and unhealthful Weather, our Men being fatigued, they became so
weak that they could not work very well at this new Imployment”
(177). Although death could be sudden for the seaman, it could also
be slow and painful, caused by shortages of food and water and
the onset of diseases such as scurvy and the “bloody ux,” an
intestinal illness that caused severe diarrhea and great loss of
blood. Rogers’s crew is struck by the ux. After he and his two
ships have been seven months at sea, Rogers writes, “if we don’t
get ashore, and a small refreshment, we doubt we shall both lose
several Men” (122).
Rogers himself loses his brother to disease (159–60), and many
more of his crew die on the long voyage:

Finding that Punch did preserve my own Health, I prescribed it freely among such of
the Ships Company as were well, to preserve theirs. Our Surgeons make heavy
Complaints for want of su cient Medicines, with which till now I thought we
abounded, having a regular Physician, an Apothecary, and Surgeons enough, with all
sorts of Medicines on board . . . but now we found it otherwise, and had not su cient
Medicines to administer for the Recovery of our sick Men, which so many being sick
in both Ships, makes it a melancholy Time with us. (209)

Even Rogers, a seasoned sea captain, is not prepared for the illness
that a icts his crew. In his understated way—the sick men make
him “melancholy”—Rogers acknowledges the perils that a long sea
voyage entails. Over the next week, at least seven more men died
(210–11). He eventually made it back to England, but not before
his crew su ered massive losses, despite generous prescriptions of
rum “punch.” However, he got some reward for his perseverance:
his books made him famous, and he was made governor of
Jamaica, where he nally subdued the pirates.
Captain George Shelvocke, in a privateering venture a decade
later, was not so lucky. In 1719 Shelvocke began a four-year
journey that he later described in A Voyage round the World by the
Way of the Great South Sea (1726).8 Like Rogers’s venture,
Shelvocke’s was plagued by lack of food and water and the
accompanying illnesses and deaths of his men. Out of fresh water,
“we constantly drank our urine,” Shelvocke writes, “which, though
it moisten’d our mouths for a time, excited our thirst the more”
(351). Shortly thereafter, the whole crew began to sicken and die,
“which was undoubtedly in the greatest measure owing to the
quantities of sweetmeats they were continually devouring, and
also to our common food, which was puddings made of very coarse
our and sweetmeats, and salt water instead of fresh to moisten
them, and dry’d beef, which was partly destroy’d by ants,
cockroaches, and other vermin” (434–35). Captain Jeane forced
his cabin boy to swallow “excrement” and “piss.” Captain
Shelvocke and his crew were forced by circumstance to drink urine
and eat “vermin.” Indeed, drinking urine was not at all unusual
when thirst got to be too much for the sailors. When the marooned
sailor John Dean and his comrades were trying to reach some kind
of civilization on Madagascar, they too had problems nding
water and went to startling extremes to quench their thirst. They
were forced “to piss in their Mouths . . . which accordingly they
did, and then took Leave and set out on their Travel.”9 It is
unclear, though, who pissed in whose mouth.
In the most vivid of all the descriptions of a sailor’s hard lot, a
Dutch seaman—marooned on the Island of Ascension for buggery
—describes in a “journal” his pain as he slowly dies of thirst: “At
three in the Morning, went out to catch a Turtle, and found one,
which I kill’d with my Hatchet, and ll’d a Bucket with his Blood:
he had likewise a great deal of Water in his Bladder, which I drank
all out, and was much better than his blood” (25). This seaman, in
one of the very few early-eighteenth-century maritime texts that
actually talk about sodomy, begins to hear the voice of his partner
in crime (and lust), who had apparently died. At the same time, he
runs out of water and begins to see and hear “Apparitions” of the
devil. Whether this little book is authentic is doubtful; more
signi cantly, it reemphasizes the horrors that were possible for an
early-eighteenth-century sailor. Near the end of the volume, the
marooned sodomite is dying from the bloody ux exacerbated by
the lack of drinking water. He writes in his journal that he “drank
some boil’d piss mixed with Tea; which, tho I was so very
nauseous, revived me much. I made a Virtue out of Necessity, and
in my deplorable condition thought it was good” (27).
The problems that vexed Rogers’s and Shelvocke’s voyages or
John Dean and his comrades or even the delusional Dutch sailor
were by no means unusual. Like sudden death, these disasters were
the risks involved in long cruises through the South Seas or around
the tip of Africa. Over and over again readers are confronted by a
literal version of Swift’s excremental vision. The horror for the
readers lies not so much in the descriptions of ingesting vermin
and piss, but in the recognition that these men chose their way of
life.
Not only ship’s captains but ordinary seamen kept journals as
well. Unlike such privateers as Dampier and Woodes Rogers, these
men have been forgotten, their journals lost. Edward Barlow is a
remarkable exception. He may not be remembered by many
readers, but his journal has been preserved by the National
Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Barlow’s extraordinary
autobiography was published—in an expurgated form—in 1934.10
It is a shame that this volume is out of print because it is an
engaging and valuable document. His journal—as the title page
says—covers “His Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East and West
Indiamen and Other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703.” He began
his apprenticeship at eighteen on board the Naseby (christened,
Barlow tells us, by “Crumbwell”), renamed the Charles at the
Restoration (44).
Barlow had a knack of being at the right place during pivotal
historical moments. For example, his second voyage brought
Charles II from Holland to England in 1660. Barlow’s journal
describes his day-to-day life as Jack Tar until he retired at the
extraordinary age of sixty-two in 1703. Along the way, Barlow was
shipwrecked and marooned, was involved in mutinies, battled the
French and Spanish, was taken prisoner by the Dutch, fought
Tangier pirates, and had run-ins with Captain Kidd and William
Dampier. And he is notably human in his private account of his life
at sea. His complaints about food, the unfairness of his employers,
or the evils of the press vividly bring to life the sailor’s hard lot.
For example, on one of his earlier voyages, Barlow describes the
Christmas dinner the crew ate: “For we had nothing but a little bit
of Irish beef for four men, which had lain in pickle two or three
years and was as crusty as the Devil, with a little stinking oil or
butter, which was all the colours of the rainbow, many men in
England greasing their cartwheels with better” (68).
The bad food is not the only thing on Barlow’s mind. He
grouses about the unfair way the ship’s owners hold back the
crew’s pay. “But when payday came,” he tells us, “our commander
said the owners of the ship would stop 3£ from every man out of
his wages for goods that had been damni ed and spoilt in the
ship.” The commander tells the sailors that it’s their fault “for not
storying them better and not taking care enough of them” (89). In
the mid-eighteenth century ordinary seamen on board merchant
ships were paid around thirty shillings a month. During wartime,
pay was higher. The three pounds that Barlow lost was quite a bit
of money.11
Barlow is particularly explicit in his descriptions of disease.
“Several of our men [were] sick of the ‘ ukes,’” he tells the reader,
“the sea being an uncomfortable and bad place for sick men”
(213). Their health is not improved by their rations, “having no
other thing to eat and drink . . . unless we can eat a piece of hard
biscuit cake, or a piece of old salt beef or pork, and maybe both
stinking and rotten, having lain in pickle one year or two and
nothing to drink but a little fresh water, many times both stinking
and dirty, and yet cannot get half enough of it” (213).
Although the details about general conditions on the ship are
vague, a reader can imagine what it must have been like to be ill
on board a small vessel sailing around the world. Quarters were
tight, and water was for drinking, not bathing, so the men were
unwashed. Worse, to have the “ ukes” at sea, to have only a hole
to shit in at the head of the ship—and to share it with your fellow
crew—suggests just how vile sanitary conditions were on board.
Captain Rogers describes how lthy the sailors could get on a long
voyage. It was (and still is) tradition to dunk sailors into the ocean
who were crossing the equator for the rst time. Sailors would be
hoisted “above halfway up to the Yard,” and then dropped straight
into the ocean “having a Stick cross thro their Legs, and well
fastened to the Rope, that they might not be surprized and let go
their hold.” But there were practical reasons for dunking the sailors
as well: “This prov’d of great use to our fresh-water Sailors, to
recover the Colour of their Skins which were grown very black and
nasty” (23). The problem of unwashed bodies was nothing
compared to the unspeakable sanitary conditions on board a ship
lled with sick sailors. The early eighteenth century was not, of
course, a time that privileged hygiene. However, the “ ukes”
combined with the awful food and sanitation created conditions
that would have been horrifying for an eighteenth-century
landlubber, as indeed they are for a twentieth-century reader.
Barlow describes another harrowing voyage, both for himself
and some Dutch sailors he met in India in 1697, near the end of his
career:

One of our men died as soon as ever he came aboard, and another the next day, so
that we had then lost forty men since our coming from England. But one of the Dutch
East India ships that came in while we stayed, fared much worse, who had lost near a
 hundred men, and as many more sick and weak; for they carry more men out than
English ships to supply their need for their ships sailing to and fro in India. (464)

Despite the example of Captain Jeane’s crew, men could only

put up with so much deprivation and su ering. Mutiny—or at least
attempted mutiny—was common on these long voyages, and
discipline was harsh if captains heard mutterings of revolt or were
challenged by crew members for what seemed to be capricious
orders. Barlow, for example, describes an incompetent captain
who, he says, had become “so proud and scornful that we could
give him no content. . . . some business arose between him and me,
and some few words passing, he abused me very much.” The
captain, Barlow says, “o ered to strike me and took a carpenter’s
adze, o ering to cut me over the head” (357). Barlow was “turned
out of the ship and put ashore” by the captain (358). Captain Kidd
killed one of his crew whom he said at his trial was causing dissent
on board his ship. Kidd “took a bucket bound with iron hoops, and
struck him on the right side of the head, of which he died the next
day.”12 Kidd was tried for both the murder—for which he was
convicted—and the piracy for which he has kept his notoriety.
Alexander Selkirk, perhaps the most famous disa ected sailor, was
marooned by his own choice on one of the Juan Fernandez Islands,
about four hundred miles east of Valparaiso, because he argued
with his commander. Of course, Selkirk did not know that his
ordeal would last for ve years, until Woodes Rogers and his party
rescued him.13 Obviously, mutiny was a serious o ense because it
was a direct assault on the order—and thus the status quo—of a
seagoing vessel. Captains had full authority to invoke discipline to
keep order and deal with mutineers as they saw t. The mutineers
could be whipped, hanged, keelhauled, or, like Defoe’s ctional
Captain Singleton, marooned on an island.
Captain Shelvocke wrote his book as an attempt to justify his
actions and to complain about his inability to quell his crew’s
mutinous mutterings. Woodes Rogers, a much stronger captain
than Shelvocke, had his share of attempted mutiny:

Sept. 11. While I was on board the Swede yesterday, our Men mutiny’d, the
Ringleaders being our Boatswain, and three other inferior O cers. . . . We put ten of
the Mutineers in Irons, a Sailor being rst soundly whip’d for exciting the rest to join
him. Others less guilty I punish’d and discharg’d, but kept the chief O cers all
arm’d, fearing what might happen; the Ship’s Company seeming too much to favour
the Mutineers, made me the easier to forgive. Some beg’d Pardon, and others I was
forc’d to wink at. (12)

Rogers was “forc’d to wink at” a mutinous crew on a number of

occasions, but as this quote demonstrates, he was a savvy leader,
and able to quash the problems.14
Shelvocke’s voyage, on the other hand, was plagued by mutiny
attempts from the start. At the beginning of the voyage Shelvocke’s
rst mate—the second in command for his small eet of privateers
—began to “dispute the command of the ship” (6). Shelvocke’s
book, in fact, is a defense of his competence in leading a failed
venture, written to counteract the charges made by his second in
command, William Betagh, who also wrote a book about the
experience. Shelvocke writes, “But the time may be near at hand
when his villainy will be detected, and meet with its due reward,
and my innocence be clear’d” (viii-ix).
Betagh—the unnamed “villain” who blamed Shelvocke for all
the voyage’s misfortunes—says that his book was “written chie y
to undeceive mankind in the spurious account of a voyage around
the world, publish’d by captain George Shelvocke: which account is
not only injurious to me, but is intirely the most absurd and falst
narrative that was ever deliver’d to the publick.”15 In addition to
seeing di erent perspectives of the same voyage, we can also see
the tensions generated by long cruises, lack of supplies, and crew
illness.
Halfway through the voyage, Shelvocke has his men careen, or
scrape and repitch, the bottom of his ship on a deserted island.
Shelvocke is shocked to discover that careening the ship is the last
thing his crew has in mind. Instead of nding “every one
employ’d” at making the ship seaworthy, “caballing and mutinying
seem’d to be the only thing they had in view.” “[I]t was so
agreeable a subject to them to be continually opposing and
tyrannizing over their Captain,” he complains, “that I really
believe for the pleasure of thinking themselves the equal to me,
they would have contentedly have lived on this desart, at least, as
long as I had lived” (Shelvocke 226).
Betagh implies why Shelvocke’s crew held him in contempt and
thus “caballed”: “Nor is it so much to be wonder’d at, if we
consider a commander of a ship in a far distant latitude, with
unlimited power, bad views, ill nature and ill principles all
concurring—I say, it’s not to be wondered at whatever such a Man
does, for he is past all restraint” (Betagh, 40). Betagh suggests that
power in the hands of an incompetent leader turns into despotism.
“Restraint”—keeping the status quo—is all that allows things to
run smoothly on board a ship. Restraint is, of course, the one thing
that Captain Jeane lacked. To drive home the point, Betagh
compares Shelvocke’s corrupted “unlimited power” with that of his
lurid counterpart:

A late instance of this kind is captain Jayne [sic], of Bristol who, in a most
extraordinary lingering manner, cruelly starved and tortured his cabin boy to death;
nor could his whole ship’s company hinder it, tho’ it was long a doing: however,
when ashore the men were freed from that tyrannical power, and were bold enough
to speak the truth, which hanged him. (40–41)

Whether or not Betagh is justi ed in his characterization of

Shelvocke’s incompetence is impossible to answer. Signi cantly,
Shelvocke’s voyage was a rousing failure, and the “gentleman
adventurers” who nanced the venture lost a considerable fortune.
The quarrel between these two seamen demonstrates, however, the
tensions that seethe beneath the surface on board a ship, and the
problems that can arise if the captain’s power seems ill-managed.
If the ship is a microcosm of English society and culture, then of
course the sailors will internalize the power that a ship’s captain
wields. On the other hand, ships sailed far away from the
boundaries of English social structure. “Restraint” ran both ways. A
ship’s captain could go only so far before sailors might be tempted
to mutiny.
Mutiny was a threat to the status quo, or the power held by the
ship’s command. However, sailors on merchant ships were also
threatened regularly by impressment into the navy. Most
historians decry impressment, or “the press,” as cruel usage by the
British navy, citing the often strident language of eighteenth-
century commentators. The Sailors Advocate (1728), for example,
condemns impressment:

Yet not only our Trade, but Liberty also is in danger of being subverted, by a custom
which is supported under pretence of necessity. This custom is the pressing of
Seamen, a proceeding authorized by nothing but forced Constructions of laws, or
Unwarrantable violence. The Magna Charta says, that no freeman may be taken or

imprisoned, or be disseized of his freehold or liberties.16

By invoking the Magna Carta, The Sailors Advocate recognizes the

seaman as a “free-born Englishman.” The pamphlet suggests that
whether on land or at sea, the sailor has the same rights as any
citizen of England.
The anonymous author of Plunder and Bribery Further Discover’d
(1712) decries corruption among those who do the pressing: some
evil pressers may

nd another Man in the room of the Person so desired for private Consideration to be
released; to perform which Condition, they seize upon such other Person in the
Town or Parish to which they belong, without due Respect to legal Circumstances,
and force him into the Service, to supply the Place for him, who, for Bribery and
Corruption, they released.
The author goes on to compare the “wicked Practice” to “buying
and selling Her Majesty’s Subjects,” or a semilegal form of
slavery.17
In contrast to the narrators of The Sailors Advocate and Plunder
and Bribery (as well as to many twentieth-century scholars), the
maritime historian N. A. M. Rodger believes that these pamphlets
overstate the evils of the press. He argues that in the early
eighteenth century, impressment was looked on by government
authorities as the most e cient way to man ships during wartime:
“the political reality of eighteenth-century England was that the
very forces which made the press so unpopular also made it
inevitable.”18
In other words, notions of “liberty” were so ingrained into the
Englishman’s consciousness that even during times of war,
Parliament—or the central government—had trouble drumming up
support for the navy. And because of these notions of liberty (and
memories of Cromwell’s military dictatorship), a standing navy or
army was out of the question since either one was a threat to
liberty should the monarch choose to use it against the people. As
Rodger points out, the press “bore largely on an inarticulate and
politically weak group,” that is, ordinary seamen, and was the
only means to ensure that the navy had enough sailors.
Nobody asked the ordinary sailors what they thought of the
press, of course. Enforcers of the press, says Barlow, “will not
believe a poor man when he tells them that he belongs to another
ship unless the man whereto he belongs be in sight.” To be pressed
“causeth many a poor man to lose both his chest and clothes and
several months pay . . . which is a very evil custom amongst our
English one with another” (95). For Barlow, impressment meant
losing the few possessions he had. For others, impressment could
mean a lot worse: disease or even death.
Early-eighteenth-century pamphlets such as The Sailors Advocate
detail the horri c conditions faced by pressed sailors. The narrator
describes—in what could be exaggeration—what newly pressed
sailors discovered when they were hauled aboard a guard ship to
wait for orders:

And what was still more discouraging, they found seldom less aboard the Guard-ship,
than six, seven, or eight hundred at a time in the same condition that they were in,
without common conveniences, being all forced to lie between decks, con ned as
before, and to eat what they could get, having seldom victuals enough dressed, which
occasioned distempers, that sometimes six, eight, and ten, died a day; and some were
drowned in attempting their escape, by swimming from the Guard-ship; many of
whose bodies were seen oating upon the River, and one of them was drove into a
Creek at Chelsey. The rest that survived were parcelled out, to be divided to each
Ship that was ready to receive them, where they carried the sickness, that spread

itself so as to infect our Squadrons, before they sailed on their expedition.19

“Free-born” Englishmen were held prisoner by their own

government. Their conditions created disease, they drowned within
sight of their nautical comrades, and they “infected” the ships
before they even began their voyages.
 In The Sailors Advocate’s sequel, the author makes many more
points about the evils of the press. The navy, the “advocate” tells
us, keeps “Seamen on board our Men of War for several Years
together, by turning them from one Ship to another.” Finally, all of
this ill-usage was the major cause for sailors to have “turn’d
Pyrates, or have gone into the Service of foreign Countries.”20
Not all commentators were against the press. “Mr. Observator”
wrote in 1702, “if we have not Men to Man our Fleet, we had as
good have no Fleet: But a Fleet we must have at Sea, and we must
get Men as well as we can.”21 Of course, his observations must be
weighed against the perhaps overstated account in The Sailors
Advocate, or Barlow’s views on impressment: “His Majesty’s ships
taking pains to press poor men, but do not take that care to see
they have their right which is due” (146).22
Worse than being impressed into the navy, however, was being
taken as a slave by Sallee or Algerian pirates: “This week a Ship
arrived in the River in 5 Weeks from Barcelona, and brings an
Account, that the Sallee Rovers have taken an English Ship, having
on Board 15 Men, and carry’d her into Sallee, and the Men up into
the Country into Slavery; and that their Ship was chased by them,
and narrowly escaped being taken. He adds, That the Garrison of
Barcelona consists of French, Scotch and Irish.”23 In a fascinating
book called Barbarian Cruelty (1751), the author describes what
happened to the sailors on board a ship that was wrecked o the
Moorish coast. Only half of the original crew of almost two
hundred survived the wreck. Those who did survive became slaves:
“In these our deplorable Circumstances, many of our People were
for renouncing their Faith, and embracing the Law of Mahomet, in
order, at that dear Price, to be eased of their Slavery; accordingly
in less than a Month, Twenty-eight though with great Reluctance,
resign’d to the Laws of that false Prophet.”24 Some of the crew
managed to escape the worst kind of slavery (but not circumcision)
if they renounced Christianity. Seventy years earlier, in 1681, the
newspaper Domestick Intelligence printed several stories about
women whose husbands were held as slaves in “Argiers.” The wives
“have lately made Collections amongst their Neighbours, and have
to their no small encouragement found the Liberallity of several
disposed Persons to exceed their expectations, Insomuch that it is
not doubted but several of those to be deplored Persons will
suddainly be ransomed, there being near 4000 English under the
merciless Tyranny of those In dels.”25 The sailors could buy their
freedom if their families could a ord a ransom. However, most of
the four thousand Englishmen held were not o cers, who had a
little more money than ordinary sailors. Since they were unable to
pay the ransom, sailors could be held as slaves for years, perhaps
decades, before the English government took action. Of course, it
worked both ways, and East African pirates could be captured by
European ships and sold as slaves as well.
Slavery, disease, sudden death, impressment, high-handed
captains: the sailor’s lot was unpleasant at best. Yet the lure of the
sea, the romance of the sailor’s life, is part of Anglo-American
popular culture. To understand the realities behind the romance—
or at least the reality as men of the sea described it—is to
understand why some sailors opted to go on the account, to turn
pirate and be their own bosses. Rediker o ers many reasons why
sailors chose the pirate way of life. Certainly the international
political instability of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries can help to explain the attractions that inclined sailors
toward “the brethren of the sea.”
The waning of Spanish maritime power coupled with the
expansion of Dutch, French, and English trade contributed to the
upswing of piracy. While Spain still controlled the trading routes,
piracy was less of a problem for other European nations than it
was for the Spaniards. The buccaneers before the 1690s were more
hostis humani Iberia than hostis humani generis. As Spain’s control of
the Caribbean waned after England’s Charles II was crowned in
1661, the buccaneers were brought under control when they
became too much of a threat to other European nations with
interests in the West Indies. By the end of the seventeenth century,
piracy became an alternative for sailors who were eager for better
living conditions, more money, and a say in their fate.
Outbreaks of piracy, historians tell us, came in waves. The
temptation to turn pirate was dependent on the opportunities for
employment and pro t that warfare o ered. When England was at
war, there were jobs for sailors, either on privateers or with the
navy. But pro t was elusive for the ordinary seaman, and sailors
had other worries during wartime besides pro t, particularly
impressment. Sailors on privateer vessels or merchant ships during
war made more money than during peacetime.26 Once the wars
ceased, sailors faced either remaining idle or making smaller
wages. Or they could turn pirate.
The Treaty of Utrecht, signed on 11 April 1713, ended the War
of the Spanish Succession shortly before the death of Queen Anne.
Peace between England and France meant that free trade
stabilized at least temporarily. The opportunities to get rich
through privateering came to an end. Even with this new stability,
the sea was still a place of danger. Merchants and the big trading
companies lost pro t and sailors lost lives because of attacks by
pirates.
Privateer ships during wartime provided chances for great
pro t. And both privateers and pirates signed “articles” that
spelled out codes of behavior and how the booty was to be
distributed. Captain Shelvocke’s crew, for example, forced their
commander to draw up new articles at least twice during the
voyage around the world (34–43, 222–25). Their animus toward
Shelvocke shows the ne line between privateering and piracy.
Indeed, the second set of articles Shelvocke signed strongly implies
that the sailors were about to choose a new captain, and thus turn
pirate. Near the start of the voyage several of the men sent
Shelvocke a letter claiming that “we have very good reason to believe
that if what we shall have the fortune to make this voyage should be
carried to London, we should never receive half thereof” (31). The
letter was signed by the ship’s carpenter, a gunner, a boatswain,
an ensign, and ve mates.
Shelvocke reluctantly signed the new articles because, he says,
it was “not in my power to prevent what follow’d, though I us’d all
the arti ces I was master of, to destroy their project” (37). “Their
project,” of course, was mutiny. Shelvocke risked either angering
the “Gentlemen at home” who funded the voyage or causing a
mutiny by his men, who were worried that they would not get
what they thought was their due. He put o signing the new
articles. “But after some few days murmuring and uneasiness
among themselves and no work going on,” Shelvocke writes, “the
ship’s company came all on the quarter-deck to me in a mutinous
manner, desiring to know my nal resolution, saying, that I knew
theirs” (42). Shelvocke—after some resistance— nally agreed to
sign the articles, as he “thought it more adviseable for the general
good to sign, rather than su er them to proceed in such a piratical
manner” (43).
Shelvocke includes a copy of the articles, too long to quote in
full. But the main point, the “Imprimis,” states “That our part of
each prize we take, shall be equally divided, as soon as possible, after
the capture thereof, between the ship’s company, according to each
man’s respective shares, as born on the ships books” (34). The articles
that Shelvocke and the crew signed spell out not only the
de nition of “plunder” but exactly how that plunder will be
distributed to the men, to Captain Shelvocke, and to the
“Gentlemen” adventurers in London.
Shelvocke’s articles only deal with the economics of the voyage.
In contrast, the pirate captain Gow and his men signed a list of
articles that focused on rules for behavior without specifying any
of the ways the plunder should be shared:

I. THAT every Man shall obey his commander in all Respects,

as if the Ship were his own, and, we under Monthly pay.
II. THAT no Man shall give or dispose of the Ship’s Provisions,
whereby may be given Reason of Suspicion that every one
hath not an equal Share.
III. THAT no Man shall open or declare any Person or Persons
what we are, or what Design we are upon; the O ender
shall be punish’d with Death upon the spot.
IV. THAT no Man shall go on Shore till the Ship is o the
Ground, and in readiness to put to Sea.
V. THAT every Man shall keep his Watch Night and Day, and
precisely at the Hour of Eight leave o Gaming and
Drinking, and every one repair to their respective Stations.
VI. WHOEVER O ends shall be punish’d with Death, or
otherwise, as we shall nd proper for our interest.27

The articles suggest that Gow and his men have an actual society
against the state. Even though they pulled themselves outside the
status quo by declaring war against all mankind, they signed a list
of articles that regulated their behavior, as Rediker has argued.
Regulated behavior is, of course, relative. Ships’ crews, whether
pirates or Jack Tar, were a wild bunch. The reality of life at sea
belies romantic visions of cruising sailing ships or South Paci c
islands with happy natives and happier sailors. The reality was
that privateers were in it for the money, the navy enforced strict
discipline, and pirate ships were crowded, violent places. The
reasons for going on the account were many, but not every sailor
turned pirate. Those men who did, however, entered a
transgressive society and owed allegiance to no “gentleman
adventurers” in England, or to a violent or incompetent captain,
or to the cat-o’-nine-tails. A pirate was an individual in a
homosocial world that made its own discipline and regulations.
2
Hostis Humani Generis
The Common Enemy against All Mankind

It may be said, that privateers in time of War are a Nursery for Pyrates against a Peace.

—Charles Johnson, General History

Lastly, the crime of piracy, or robbery and depredation upon the high seas, is an o ence
against the universal law of society; a pirate being, according to sir Edward Coke, hostis
humani generis. As therefore he has renounced all the bene ts of society and government, and
has reduced himself afresh to the same state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind,
all mankind must declare war against him: so that every community hath a right, by the rule
of self-defense, to in ict that punishment upon him, which every individual would in a state
of nature have been otherwise entitled to do, for any invasion of his person or personal
property.

—William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

I will not act so disagreeable a part, to my readers as well as myself, as to dwell any longer
upon a subject, the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature. It will be more
eligible to imitate in this respect the delicacy of our English law, which treats it, in it’s [sic]
very indictments, as a crime not t to be named.

—Ibid.

No matter if the sailor were a pirate, an ordinary seaman,

a buccaneer, or a privateer, he still lived in homosocial
camaraderie with his fellow sailors.1 Unlike the pirate, however,
these other seamen were bonded together within the infrastructure
of English society. The maritime world replicated the values that
could be found at home on land. One of the basic di erences
between life at sea and life on land, of course, is that there were
few, if any, women on board navy ships, merchant vessels, or
privateers. Indeed, according to British naval regulations, the
captain of a ship was “not to carry any Woman . . . to Sea.”2
Even when women were not aboard, sailors were superstitious
about the very idea of women at sea. The privateer captain Hacke
regrets even discussing women on board ship: “there arose a
prodigious Storm, which did continue till the last Day of the
Month, driving us into the lat. of 69 deg. and 30 min. South, which
is further than ever any Ship hath sailed before South; so that we
concluded that discoursing of Women at Sea was very unlucky, and
occasioned the Storm.”3
Because women were absent from shipboard life does not mean
that sailors were “homosexually” inclined. On the contrary, the
social structure on board these vessels was part of the whole
economic enterprise of England, and it would do little good to try
to theorize a homoerotic paradigm for nonpirate sailors. If we
imagine a piratical subject, however—a merging of the economic
criminal and the cultural transgressor who “declares war against
all mankind”—we should be able to understand the implicit link
between homoeroticism and piracy. Pirates, in other words, were
not bound by any social conventions except their own.
 To make my meaning clearer, I will need to describe each of
these categories of seamen. The buccaneer ceased to be a threat to
Spain’s colonies by piracy’s golden age in the 1690s. The buccaneer
di ers from the pirate because he was an outlaw-made-nationalist
hero. The buccaneer was heroicized because of his daring raids on
Spanish colonial soil. Although condemning in its rhetoric, the
English government tacitly accepted these raids because they
strengthened the English presence by weakening Spain’s claims. By
the middle of the seventeenth century, the buccaneers were settled
into communities in far-reaching outposts of the Spanish empire in
the Caribbean.4 Given their pro igate ways, as Charles Leslie
suggests, they ran out of money very quickly: “Wine and Women
drained their Wealth to such a Degree that in a little time some of
them became reduced to Beggary. They have been known to spend
2 or 3000 Pieces of Eight in one Night; and one of them gave a
Strumpet 500 to see her naked.”5 As declared enemies to the
Spaniards and the pope, but still Englishmen, the buccaneers
moved both inside and outside English society. And women were
always a part of the buccaneer mythos, as we can see from Leslie’s
quote, and as Exquemelin makes clear in Bucaniers of America.
The privateer—unlike the buccaneer—was a working member
of society. A letter of marque issued by the king authorized him to
prey on enemy ships during wartime. A privateer like Sir Francis
Drake in the sixteenth century was an English national hero—
though certainly a pirate to the Spaniards. Privateering was an
accepted means of waging war throughout maritime history.6
Piracy and privateering were not the same for the ordinary
seaman, though at times the dividing line could be very thin.
Although Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea focuses
on ordinary seamen, he explicitly heroicizes the pirates from a
Marxist perspective. He argues that their “experience as free wage
laborers and as members of an uncontrolled, freewheeling
subculture gave pirates the perspective and occasion to ght back
against brutal and unjust authority and to construct a new social
order where King Death would not reign supreme” (286). Rediker’s
purpose is to focus on Jack Tar—the ordinary seaman—and “to
study the collective self-activity of maritime workers” (6). Although
he celebrates the pirates’ “freewheeling subculture,” Rediker’s main
points in the book make a distinction between “labor history” and
“working-class history.” Rediker argues that by the eighteenth
century, “pirates had worked in the merchant shipping industry,
and piracy was deeply imbued with the collectivistic tendencies
produced by life and labor at sea” (107). He describes a radical
displacement of conventional authority. The sailor-turned-pirate
embraced “a way of life voluntarily chosen, for the most part, by
large numbers of men who directly challenged the ways of the
society from which they excepted themselves” (255).
Rediker makes the crucial point that the pirate “excepted”
himself from society. The pirate was by de nition, then, positioned
as “other” both by himself and by his enemies. He is unlike, say,
the British privateer with a letter of marque that enabled him to
plunder French vessels. The privateer may “accidentally” become a
pirate because peace has been e ected with France. However, this
accidental pirate has not chosen his “way of life voluntarily.” But
neither is the pirate in any way like the radical Christian
buccaneer imagined by Christopher Hill in his essay “Radical
Pirates?”. Hill argues that the buccaneer’s religious dissent
enforced his displacement from English society. Unlike the
buccaneers and the privateers, the golden-age pirates not only
chose to live outside the parameters of social conventions, but as
Rediker and Hill both suggest, embraced a life that challenged
those conventions.
In “Radical Pirates?” Hill puts forward an imaginative and
compelling thesis that argues that the disappearance of radicals
from England after the Restoration has always been a problem
without a solution for historians.7 He suggests that historians look
at the literature about piracy, particularly works by Defoe. These
works of popular history and ction disseminate iconoclastic ideas
and depict a radical “reality” in the Marxian terms that Rediker
describes. “Some pirates must have seen themselves as egalitarian
avengers,” says Hill. “How are we to explain the radical element in
these pirate yarns or fantasies?” (167). Here, Hill wants to
historicize the “real” pirates, yet he wants to include them with
“pirate yarns or fantasies.” He misses the connection between the
pirates themselves—are they real “egalitarian avengers” or
imagined fantasies?—and the authors who write about them: men
such as Defoe and Captain Johnson, who mythologize the pirates
for their own ideological purposes.
Many of the buccaneers in the Caribbean, Hill suggests, were
social outcasts, free thinkers, and dissenters eeing from English
religious intolerance (172). Hill argues—correctly—that the
authorities’ tolerance for the buccaneers in the West Indies lasted
only as long as free trade was impossible for the English (174).
After the Spaniards lost much of their power in the Caribbean
toward the end of the seventeenth century, the buccaneers became
a nuisance to the English. The buccaneers no longer assisted in
strengthening the English position in the Caribbean because they
began to prey on their own countrymen’s ships. They became, in
other words, unambiguous pirates “at war against all mankind.”
In a striking but persuasive movement, Hill thus connects
religious dissent and economic transgression. He then examines
Defoe’s depiction of Madagascar—legendary seat of pirate
“government”—and the establishment of Libertalia, a sort of
communist society of pirates supposedly organized by the pirate
Captain Misson.8 Hill suggests that an investigation of Defoe’s
piratical utopian writings may help us “to understand how those
on the margins of society adapted themselves to a world which
seemed increasingly hostile” (180). In such biographies as “Of
Captain Misson” in the General History, Defoe—or Captain Johnson
—represents heroic pirates who self-consciously construct radical,
democratic worlds in direct opposition to the monarchical
governments of Europe. Captain Misson, for example, “propos’d a
Form of Government . . . a Democratical Form, where the People
were themselves the Makers and Judges of their own Laws”
(Johnson, II:100). These articulate and passionate men declared
themselves “at war against all mankind” because they were
dissatis ed with the class distinctions that constituted their lot in
life.
I want to emphasize that depictions of the pirate’s glamorous
life did not appear overnight with the publication of a single book.
Although the privateer authors such as Dampier, Betagh,
Shelvocke, and others included accounts of pirates in their
narratives, the earliest sustained and complete history of the
“golden-age” pirate is Charles Johnson’s General History of the . . .
Pyrates, reprinted many times since its initial appearance in 1724.9
Four decades before the General History, however, John [A. O.]
Exquemelin wrote The Bucaniers of America (1677).10 The image of
the fearless, bloodthirsty sea dog—the piratical “character” that
subsequent generations of readers imagine—can be traced to
Exquemelin’s volume.
Because of the changing European power structures in the
Americas, the buccaneer was almost completely wiped out of the
Caribbean. By the time the rst English translation of Exquemelin’s
book was published in London in 1684, the buccaneers were
integrated to the colonial Americas not controlled by the Spanish.11
Those buccaneers who were not integrated turned pirate. This
“taming” of the buccaneer—and the basic di erence between the
buccaneer and the pirate—is best exempli ed by the English
government’s legitimation of the violent and notorious buccaneer
Henry Morgan, who was knighted and made governor of Jamaica
during the 1680s.
Although the buccaneers faded as an important presence in the
Caribbean, their disappearance did not mean the end of colorful
maritime marauders. Only a few years later, in 1694, the “golden
age” of the pirate exploded into popular consciousness with the
exploits of Captain Avery. Avery was only the rst of many
celebrated antiheroes. He was followed by a legion of equally
famous pirates such as Blackbeard, Kidd, and Bonnet. This “golden
age” ended only thirty years later, around the time of the
publication of the rst edition and rst volume of Johnson’s book
in 1724.
According to a recent popular historian, “A basic distinction
between buccaneer and pirate was that the former carried the war
to the Spanish only, whereas the pirate attacked and stole from all,
and owed authority to none.”12 While correct as far as it goes, this
de nition ignores two crucial factors. First, unlike pirates,
buccaneers did not necessarily begin as sailors. Second, for the
most part buccaneers were northern European settlers who lived
originally as hunters or poor planters on the distant borders of the
Americas’ Spanish empire. They subsequently found more
advantage by pillaging the ships that strayed near their
settlements. Not satis ed with the loot they plundered from stray
ships, the buccaneers began to make incursions on isolated towns
in the Spanish colonies. Finally, the buccaneers made more daring
—and successful—raids on larger Spanish cities such as Puerto
Bello.
The most famous of the buccaneers, acclaimed as heroes by
their countrymen in Europe, epitomized the masculine heroic
gures who fought the Spanish with dashing bravery and almost
inhuman ferociousness. These men were not the hostis humani
generis represented by Avery, Blackbeard, and others, nor did they
live in strictly homosocial maritime communities. More like sailors
in the navy, they would group to battle, and then go back to their
settlements and colonies to spend their booty on rum and women.
Exquemelin—who purported to have sailed with some of these
renowned buccaneers—vividly recounts their dangerous, exciting
exploits. Bucaniers of America was written originally in Dutch, and
translated into English from Spanish in 1684. Given the unstable
relationship between Spain and England, it should come as no
surprise that the English translation of Bucaniers of America
positions the Spanish in much less favorable light than the Spanish
edition, entitled Piratas de la america.13
The printer or editor writes in the preface to an abridgement of
the second English edition, also published in 1684,
 these Gentlemen [who were eyewitnesses in the Caribbean] were pleased to correct,
purge and reform [the Spanish translation] of many Abuses and Mistakes, wherewith
this Account was sullied by Self-interested Pens; so as Reader, you have here the
History of the Buccaniers exposed open before you, and in a condition to undergo the

most impartial View and Scrutiny.14

Here the translator tells the reader that the buccaneer will be
represented impartially. This “impartial View and Scrutiny”
means, however, that the buccaneer will be shown to be a brave
ghter for English justice despite the inherent brutality of his
identity as buccaneer. No claims were ever made by historians such
as Defoe or Johnson that the pirate is represented through the
“impartial View and Scrutiny” of his describer. Any portrayal of
the pirate will be “sullied by Self-interested Pens” because the
pirate, unlike the buccaneer, is hostis humani generis.
Contemporaries who wrote about the pirates explicitly assert that
they will condemn their subjects, even if the resulting piratical
character is more ambiguously heroic than perhaps the authors
intended.
Despite their excesses, the buccaneers were allies and
countrymen of those Protestant European governments that had a
weaker presence in the Caribbean than the Catholic Spaniards. By
demoralizing the Spanish settlements, the buccaneers could help
these countries gain an economic foothold in the West Indies. “For
this is certain,” Exquemelin writes, “that the Kings of Spain, have
upon several occasions, sent, by their Embassadors, unto the Kings
of France and England, complaining of the molestations and troubles,
those Pirates did often cause upon the coasts of America; even in the
calm of Peace” (1:79). The Spaniards—who do not use the word
“buccaneer” to describe these men and would not recognize the
di erence here in any case—refer to them as piratas. The English
and French kings answer the Spaniards with a challenge of their
own: “That such men did not commit those acts of hostility and Piracy,
as subjects unto their Majesties; and therefore his Catholick Majesty
might proceed against them according as he should nd t” (1:79). The
English and French kings disavow any sovereignty over the
buccaneers, but paradoxically neither admit nor deny that the
buccaneers are English or French. The French and English
monarchs do not tell the Spaniards to leave the buccaneers alone.
But in direct contrast to their governments’ reactions to the pirates
of the early eighteenth century—when a “war” against the pirates
was declared—they do not o er to assist the Spaniards in ridding
the Caribbean of the buccaneers precisely because the buccaneers
are weakening the Spanish presence in the West Indies.
Sir Henry Morgan, the most famous of the English buccaneers,
was violent, barbaric, and cruel. For example, he burned and
sacked Panama (and then tried to sue the rst English printer of
Bucaniers of America for suggesting that he did).15 Despite Morgan’s
behavior, there is never a doubt that because he is at war against
the Spaniards, and only the Spaniards, and because he ghts for
the same side as the English, he is and should be considered a hero
by the English. To the Spaniards, however, Morgan is the enemy,
la pirata.
 Morgan epitomizes the heroic representation of the buccaneer.
When he decides to take Puerto Bello, “judged to be the strongest
place the King of Spain possesseth in all the West-Indies,” Morgan
gives a stirring little speech to his fellow buccaneers: “If our
number is small, our hearts are great. And the fewer persons we
are, the more union and better shares we shall have in the spoil”
(2:90–91).
Clichéd it may be, but Morgan’s speech is reminiscent of Henry
V’s exhortation to his fellow Englishmen who are about to ght the
French. But Exquemelin complicates this nationalistic exhortation:
the buccaneers are not exactly in the ght for honor, for the glory
of “Harry! England and Saint George!” The honor is secondary to
the economic triumph that motivates the buccaneers to win the
battle. Indeed, Morgan’s buccaneers do more than just sack the
city: “This being done, they fell to eating and drinking, after their
usual manner; that is to say, committing in both these things all
manner of debauchery and excess. These two vices were
immediately followed by many insolent actions of Rape and
Adultery committed upon many very honest women, as well as
married as Virgins” (2:98–99). Despite the excesses perpetrated by
Morgan and his men, the old buccaneer ended his career an
English hero, about whom ballads were written. He was made
governor of Jamaica and charged with rooting out the remaining
buccaneers. He forced them to become planters and to resettle as
more or less legitimate members of society. Along with such
buccaneers as the Dutch Brasiliano and the French Lo’lonaise, he is
not the culturally and economically transgressive hostis humani
generis, but instead a (barely) legitimate hostis humani Iberia.
Unlike pirates, buccaneers could be heroicized as individuals
precisely because of the economic havoc they wreaked on the
common enemy of England. Paradoxically, though, they retained
their status as outlaws within the parameters of conventional
society, as exempli ed by Morgan’s speech. Morgan and his fellow
buccaneers were ghting a “good” war, a war that directly helped
non-Spanish European interests in the Spanish-controlled West
Indies and lled their own pockets—at least temporarily. The
buccaneer—the buccaneer-hero—is the epitome of the masculine
and unambiguously “heterosexual” hero, whose e orts for his own
self-aggrandizement helped the merchants of the Caribbean and
thus the non-Catholic governments in Europe.16
In 1915 a new edition of Bucaniers of America was published,
“put into popular shape for juvenile readers.” A contemporary
reviewer of the edition wrote,

Much of the book is a bald recital of outrages in icted upon a helpless people who
had done nothing to incur the vengeance of the ru ans who tortured and killed
them. . . . If boys must read about ghting, let them turn to some of the great wars
which have been waged for a principle and forego these tales of coldblooded

outlawry.17

The “helpless people” were not seen as individuals by Morgan and

the other buccaneers. Rather, they were lumped together as
Spanish Catholics, hated by late-seventeenth-century English
readers leery of “popish plots” in ways unimaginable for this early-
twentieth-century critic. Thus the buccaneers are criminalized by
this reviewer because of the success they had as “outlaws.” Without
the historical context that explains the enmity held by the English
toward the Spanish, the buccaneer can be seen as similar to the
golden-age pirates. But he should not be.
A buccaneer, nally, was a hero precisely because he fought
“great wars which have been raised for a principle.” One
“principle” was an expression of hatred of Catholics in general and
outrage against the Spaniards in particular for what they did to the
Native Americans. Another “principle” was economic. Northern
European governments had imperatives to open up the Indies for
all of Europe. By 1915 all these “principles” had become confused
with the completely criminal exploits of the “golden-age” pirates.
The buccaneers, then, are a distinct breed of maritime outlaw.
Who remembers the most famous buccaneers, Brasiliano or
Lo’lonais? Except for Sir Henry Morgan—whose name and
romanticized visage grace a brand of spiced rum—the other
buccaneers are scarcely remembered today. But the names of the
next generation of sea rovers—the pirates of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries—still resound with mythic
resonance almost three centuries after their initial fame.
Exquemelin’s book was popular throughout the 1800s into the
early years of the twentieth century. But the glamour of the most
notorious pirates of the early eighteenth century soon outstripped
the celebrity of even the most popular buccaneers. Bucaniers of
America, so in uential for Defoe, Johnson, and other historians of
the pirate, became forgotten as the centuries wore on.18 The
nationalism that legitimated the buccaneer is overlooked by
popular culture, which favors the more romantic pirate.
The term “pirate” signi es the legally de ned criminal whose
exploits are exempli ed by such legendary names as Blackbeard,
Kidd, Roberts, and Bonnet. Each of these larger-than-life
personalities plays an important role in the General History, in the
early-eighteenth-century press, and in our own cultural memory.
But they are only the most famous pirates. Other, forgotten
marauders created as much or more havoc along European
maritime trading routes on the high seas. What I call the “piratical
subject,” however, exempli es the characteristic representation of
Defoe’s and other authors’ ctional characters that merge them as
explicit villains and antiheroes. Distinctions between history and
ction have become blurred in depictions of the pirates. The
piratical subject, then, represents the biographies of “real” and
ctional notorious pirates who lived or were created during the
three decades of piracy’s “golden age.” It is, in other words,
impossible to separate the “real” pirate who preyed on legitimate
traders from the romanticized version accepted as the “reality” in
the twentieth century. Historical and literary portraits of the
traditional pirate gure arose in the context of Spain’s weakening
hold on the Caribbean. Political divisions constantly shifted
between European nations and their competition for the steady
 ow of riches heading from the South Paci c and the Atlantic
toward northern Europe and Spain allowed the owering of this
“golden age.”19
By the 1690s, buccaneers no longer were able to keep a base in
the Caribbean. They had been brought under control temporarily
at least by Henry Morgan and others. The “sea wolves” were
forced into constant movement. They followed merchant ships
wherever trade went, be it to the coast of colonial North America,
on the middle passage between Africa and the Americas, or on the
Indian Ocean. This routing of the buccaneers from the Caribbean,
coupled with the political stability exempli ed by the end of the
Spanish War of Succession and the subsequent Treaty of Utrecht
between France and Britain in 1713 played havoc on maritime
employment for ordinary seamen.20 Fearful of impressment in
times of war, sailors might have trouble nding berths in times of
peace. Piracy became an attractive—often the only—alternative,
particularly if the harsh discipline of the British navy were to be
avoided.21
Unlike the pirate, a privateer occupied a semilegal, shady
status in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maritime world
following the Restoration.22 During times of war in England,
entrepreneurs who had the political or nancial clout were able to
obtain a letter of marque from the king in order to seize and
plunder enemy ships. For example, if England were at war with
France, then a ship could be out tted and manned by sailors in
order to seek French ships and their allies and take whatever
plunder they wanted.23 “All prizes and Purchase, which shall be
taken by said Ships shall be divided,” Captain Edward Cooke wrote
in his Voyage to the South Sea (1712), “viz. two third Parts of the
clear Pro ts to the Owners of the said Ships, and the other third
Part to the O cers, Sea-men, and Land-men, who shall be at the
taking of such Prizes and Purchase.”24
There were complications, however. Sometimes privateer crews
were frustrated by the lack of booty, or they got greedy or were
unhappy with the terms. Then they would deliberately perform
acts of piracy by plundering ships of England’s allies. Sometimes
the privateer captain would break down under pressure from the
crew and agree to out-and-out piracy. Sometimes the crew would
mutiny, and put the captain and his followers on shore or on a
deserted island.25
Even though the privateer was legally entitled to seize an
enemy’s ship and take all the booty, the moment that peace was
attained the letter of marque became worthless, and the privateer
became an enemy to his king and to his former sponsors if he
continued to plunder ships. In fact, he was a pirate, even if it were
accidental, because of communication problems in a world where
news travels very slowly. These complications caused by the
unreliability of information could be used against the privateer.
In a defense of the earl of Bellomont, who obtained a letter of
marque for Captain Kidd, an anonymous pamphlet writer points
out the dilemma that faced the privateer: “And therefore as
[pirates] must be subdued like Enemies, the Law considers them as
such, with this di erence, that Pirates are Enemies to all Princes, to
all Mankind, whereas [privateers] become Enemies by accident
only and continue such but while the War lasts.”26 Much of the
controversy surrounding Captain Kidd’s career and trial revolved
around the mystery of his missing letter of marque. Kidd was
arguably the most notorious pirate in early-eighteenth-century
England. However, he began his illicit career as a privateer, with a
letter of marque sponsored by the earl of Bellomont, then a
colonial governor in New England.27 When he began his
association with Bellomont, Kidd o ered to sail to Madagascar, the
infamous pirate nest. He told Bellomont that he could suppress the
attacks that were a serious threat to the East India Company and
other merchants along the major trading routes of Africa and
India.
Kidd’s o er (and Bellomont’s acceptance) is an indication of the
pirates’ great threat to late seventeenth-century trade. A politician
who managed to wipe out the pirates would see his stock rise high
among the merchants of England. In the process of ridding
Madagascar of the pirates, Kidd argued, he would strengthen the
power of Bellomont and his “junto,” a group of Whigs who tried to
wrest control of the government from the Tories in the 1690s. The
fractious partisan ghting between Whigs and Tories resulted in
the probable betrayal of Kidd by Bellomont and his cronies.
Defenders of Kidd believed him innocent of out-and-out piracy. He
became the fall guy for Bellomont and his followers when the letter
of marque disappeared and Kidd was unable to produce it at his
trial.28 In order to save their own political lives, after reports of
Kidd’s piracy began to be heard in England, Bellomont and his
cronies left Kidd literally to hang in a sensational trial in 1701. At
least that is the impression left by pirate historians over the years.
Kidd—according to his apologists—was only trying to reassert his
legitimate authority as captain. He was guilty of no more than the
justi able killing of a mutinous carpenter, whom he bashed on the
head with a bucket.
As one modern historian points out, the distinction between
pirate and privateer complicates the political issues behind Kidd’s
trial and his eventual mythologizing as a pirate archetype (Ritchie,
vi). Kidd was a dupe of Bellomont, but he also consciously turned
pirate. Then, after his capture, Kidd tried to use his position as an
underdog to save his skin. For Kidd, though, turning pirate was no
accident. The Adventure Galley—Kidd’s ship—was his “nursery,”
and the temptation to raid even allied and English ships became
too strong. The more powerful forces of Bellomont and his friends
prevailed, however, and Kidd was hanged. Kidd was only one of
the rst “golden-age” pirates to become a legend.
In a way, the pirate replaced the libertine as a cultural icon, a
gure of sexual and cultural anarchy. The heyday of the libertine,
during the reign of Charles II, was notable for such men as
Rochester as well as characters such as Horner, Don John, and
other rakes in the plays of Wycherley, Shadwell, and Behn, among
others. By the “golden age” of piracy the libertine was no longer
the gure that he had been earlier in the seventeenth century.
There are notable di erences between the libertine and the pirate,
of course. For one thing, a libertine like Rochester was an
aristocrat, whereas a pirate like Captain Avery or Blackbeard came
from the laboring class.29 Class—in the sense that nobility allows
the abuse of power—does not matter in the same way for the
pirate as it did for the libertine.
But we can see in contemporary literature how the pirate
resembles the libertine. In a pirate trial pamphlet from 1725,
“Robert Joyce deposed, that . . . we were attack’d and took o the
said Island, by a Pyrate Ship, of 24 Guns, and 86 Men, one
Captain Anstice Commander.”30 Joyce, an ordinary sailor, explains
to the court the actions of the pirates when they attacked his ship:

On Board which Pyrate Ship, were the two Prisoners at the Bar, who were the only
Persons that would hail me and Four more of our Company on Board the Pyrate
Ship, and Beat us sadly because we refused, and William Ingram said, G—d D—m you
for a cowardly Rogue, you shall be hang’d for your honesty, as well as we for our
Roguery.

From Joyce’s deposition, we see the ways the pirate is being

represented as a cultural icon, even in a “factual” account. The
pirate Ingram speaks like a pirate. His diction is clever, profane,
and frightening.
 Five years before this trial, Defoe’s ctional Captain Singleton
tells the reader that he is “well prepared for all manner of
Roguery” as he joins a gang of pirates (139). The di erence
between pirates and libertines, I would argue, lies in how the
pirates revealed their “roguery.” For the libertine, “roguery” was
sexual conquest, be it sodomitical or “heterosexual.” This sexual
conquest was a display of power by men who delighted in all kinds
of excess. Further, the libertine showed his power through an
anarchic refusal to bow to any conventions, sexual or cultural.
Because the libertine as represented by Rochester and others came
from the aristocracy and thus could circumvent laws and codes of
behavior, he could a ord to assert his power through excess. The
libertine had homosocial relationships, but these relationships
reveal a camaraderie based on a like interest in, basically, wine,
women, and song. Rochester refers a few times to sodomy, as in
his oft-quoted lines from “The Disabled Debauchee”: “Nor shall our
Love- ts Cloris be forgot, / When each the well-look’d Link-Boy,
strove to enjoy, / And the best kiss, was the deciding Lot, /
Whether the Boy fuck’d you, or I the Boy” (37–40). These lines,
however, reveal Rochester’s power over both the boy and Cloris
and not a reciprocal desire. Rochester would be happy fucking
either.31
In both Captain Singleton and The Whole Tryal, the pirates
obviously do not come from aristocratic backgrounds. Indeed, one
could argue that the pirates belong to no class at all, for they
“declare war against all mankind.” Since they have turned their
backs on normative society, they are de ned as pirates—and only
pirates—and thus de ned by their transgressive cultural and
economic de ance. Any debauchery takes place at sea away from
societal restraints. Their threat to society is criminal because they
wreak havoc on maritime trade, yet they are represented in print
by their “otherness,” their violence, cruelty, and over-the-top
masculine performance when they wreak that havoc.
The pirates’ well-known delight in the physical is explicitly
over-determined by Defoe, Johnson, and even the trial records, as
we can see in the extract from Robert Joyce’s deposition. Their
behavior is characterized by violence, costume, and profanity, as
well as a propensity to drink, play, and make merry, all to
outlandish excess. With the exception of some articles that Captain
Roberts’s crew signed—in which “No boy or woman [is] to be allowed
amongst them” (Johnson, 1:171)—the pirate’s sex life remains
uncontrolled by any pirate rules, at least in the primary sources.
The pirate’s sexual behavior, then, is left out of eighteenth-
century pirate accounts. However, other highly transgressive
cultural aspects of their all-male society complicate the accounts of
homosocial pirate camaraderie that ignore sexuality. Defoe and
other writers suggest that the pirate is a kind of libertine of the
seven seas. He thumbs his nose at any conventions, economic or
cultural, that might link him to the status quo. Early-eighteenth-
century authors thus connected the economic menace of the pirates
to the libertine excesses of the aristocracy.
 The di erences, then, between the buccaneer, the privateer,
and the pirate point to the complications inherent in any
de nition of the golden-age pirate. The pirate could and did go
back and forth between the navy or merchant sea trade, the less
secure trade of the privateer, and nally to the world of the hostis
humani generis. What fascinated early chroniclers of sea life, and
still fascinates readers and historians today, however, is the
romantic pirate gure, the man who declared himself “at war
against all mankind.”
In order to establish how concepts of desire and deviance are
encoded within the hypermasculinity of the pirate tradition, I shall
return to a discussion of the “piratical subject.” This literary
representation of male identity complicates dialectical models of
identity. Not only is he a masculine alternative to the noncriminal
“hero,” he is also opposed both to the heroine and the feminized,
e eminate sodomitical subject. The piratical subject is a merging of
representations of both economic criminal and cultural deviant. I
call this complex gure the piratical subject to di erentiate him
from a purely legal de nition as hostis humani generis, just as I
prefer to distinguish between the sodomite who performs the act of
sodomy and the desiring sodomitical subject, de ned not only by
the act of sodomy but a desire for other men.
To use Michel Serres’s terminology, both the piratical subject
and the sodomitical subject are parasites that destabilize seemingly
straightforward dichotomies such as hero and heroine or man and
woman.32 Imagine an upside-down triangle. In a model that places
the primary opposition of the masculine hero against the feminine
heroine, the feminized, e eminate sodomite—a criminal—is
opposed to both the hero and the heroine. In other words, the
dichotomy of man and woman or hero and heroine is interrupted
by the e eminate sodomite.
Where does the pirate t into this triangle? Instead of a
triangle, imagine a square. The primary opposition is on top of the
square: masculine hero and feminine heroine. On the bottom of the
square picture the pirate in one corner under the hero and the
sodomite in the other corner under the heroine. The pirate is not a
“hero” per se but an antihero; as such, he interrupts the
straightforward dichotomy of the masculine hero and the feminine
heroine. But the sodomite interrupts those same positions since he
is neither hero nor heroine. The pirate’s homosocialized
masculinity, however, complicates this square. The pirate is
opposed to both the heroine and the sodomite because he is
masculine. But he is also opposed to the masculine hero because he
is an antihero. The pirate is the masculine antihero on the “same”
side as the hero. He is the “criminal,” because he is not the hero,
but he is not portrayed as sexually criminal, which the sodomite
is.33
Now imagine another square. In one corner on top sits the
merchant; in another corner on top sits the pirate. In economic
terms and by legal de nition, the pirate is a criminal “merchant”—
hostis humani generis—opposed to the law-abiding seafaring
merchant. But in eighteenth-century narratives, the pirate’s
transgressions were as often heroic as they were criminal. The
privateer, a third gure in this model, sits in both corners under
the legitimate merchant and the pirate at the bottom of the square.
Furthermore, his status is unstable in the legal maritime world.
Depending on the political climate and relations between
countries, the privateer can move between the positions of the law-
abiding seafaring merchant and the pirate. Finally, the pirate can
occupy any position in the economic square model at any time; he
is represented by Johnson, Defoe, and other writers as the not-
criminal, not-merchant alternative to the seafaring merchant, the
criminal, or at times, the privateer.
In other words, although the pirate is not a legitimate
merchant, and is therefore a criminal according to English law, he
is still paradoxically portrayed at times by Johnson, Defoe, and
others as not only a criminal but a hero, and thus opposes himself.
The pirate’s refusal to be pinned down into any dichotomous
position in either the economic or the sexual model highlights the
instability of sexual and gendered identity, and the instability of
dichotomies represented by gender, sexual desire, masculinity, and
capital. If we acknowledge both the economic and sexual
ambiguities of the pirate, the revealing tensions between and
within the various subject positions and the two squares suggest
that the pirate can be, in fact, a heroic criminal, sexually and
economically embodied in a transgressive way. If the piratical
subject is, then, a hypermasculine hero but sexually ambiguous,
what does this say about representations of sexuality in the
“normal” world?
The pirate in eighteenth-century narratives neither explicitly
nor implicitly outlaws deviant sexual behavior in his pirate world.
Instead the absence of explicit sexuality in these accounts suggests
the piratical subject as an alternative paradigm of masculine
identity. This alternative identity, then, can authorize homoerotic
desire since there are no explicit prohibitions against this desire in
depictions of the pirate’s world. It follows that the homoerotically
authorized paradigm of the piratical subject resists the censures the
sodomite produces within standard boundaries of sexual license.
The di culty in pinning down the piratical subject lies in the
ways all these oppositions are played out not only by Defoe,
Captain Johnson, and other eighteenth-century authors, but also
by later historians who write about pirates. These authors
invariably try to “tame” pirates by damning their economic crimes.
Yet these authors are still fascinated by the pirates’ extreme
individualism. They cannot resist the impulse to heroicize the
pirates’ economic and cultural outlaw behavior. The pirate is thus
able to move between both squares. By looking at the ways
historians and eighteenth-century writers and readers perceived
the pirates, and further, demonstrating the often contradictory
literary representations of the pirate, we can understand the
complexity of pirate sexuality. Moreover, the ways the pirate can
be perceived as “queer”—as a radical, hypermasculine transgressor
who in fact glories in all his transgressions—can help us revise our
understanding of homoeroticism in eighteenth-century English
literature and culture.
Though I locate sites of homoerotic transgression in pirate
narratives, I am not saying that pirates were all queers, buggerers,
or sodomites. I am saying that once the hatches to the pirates’
holds are opened a crack, “reality” destabilizes, things unsaid may
be spoken, and the homoerotic implications of elements in pirate
history and ction can be explored. For example, until recently
Defoe critics have always worked from a heterocentric position.
Critics who investigate the historical context in Defoe’s narratives
have not acknowledged the di erent realities of transgressive
individuality that have been silenced by their critical practice.
Johnson and Defoe wrote about identities in ways not comfortably
suited to conventional sexual and economic depictions of desire.
And critical silence means the repression of voices in the
heteroglossia that we call the novel or in a narrative of history.
Jonathan Goldberg writes that “To read for sodomy—for
sodometries—is to read relationally” (23). Similarly, to read for
piracy and for piracies is to read relationally. An exploration of
what is repressed in the homosocial discourse surrounding the
piratical subject allows a re-vision of pirate history that celebrates
rather than represses homoerotic identity. The point is that
sexuality and language go hand in hand, and depictions of
sexuality are an essential part of any work of literature that is
purported to be a “novel” or a cultural history. The sexual
di erence implicit in representations of the pirate illuminates
powerful countertraditions in a history of sexuality.
3
Trial Records, Last Words, and Other
Ephemera
The Literary Artifacts of Piracy

A pirate is in a perpetual war with every individual, and every state, christian or in del.
Pirates properly have no country, but by the nature of their guilt, separate themselves, and
renounce on this matter, the bene t of all lawful societies.

—The Tryal, Examination and Condemnation, of Captain Green

The French King did it, and the Czar of Muscovy made Alexander, A Carpenter, a Prince, for
that Purpose . . . He had seen the Czar of Muscovy through a hole at Sea, lye with Prince
Alexander.

—An Account of the Proceedings against Capt. Edward Rigby

Despite the continued popularity of the pirate,

demonstrated by the hundreds of books published over the
centuries, the literary artifacts of piracy remain little explored.
Indeed, until recently a cultural history has not even been
attempted.1 Historians have contented themselves with retelling
the same stories over and over—usually based on what has been
called a “vulgarization” of A General History of the . . . Pyrates.2 Of
course, pirate historicity has not all been a regurgitation of these
stories. Some historians have looked at piracy’s impact on
economics or politics or have examined individual pirates and
privateers such as Avery and Dampier. In the past few years there
has been a host of books about the “female pyrates.”3
Despite this attention, little work has been done on the cultural
importance of piracy not only to eighteenth-century England but
also to twentieth-century readers. Pirates of ction and fact still
fascinate children and adults. Witness Disneyland’s pirates of the
Caribbean exhibit, the hourly pirate battles at the Treasure Island
Hotel in Las Vegas, and such books as Kathy Acker’s Pussy, Queen
of the Pirates and Zap Comics’ Captain Pissgums. A cursory search
of Books in Print reveals several dozen pirate books aimed at all
kinds of readers.
Our own fascination with pirates is nothing new, of course. A
huge body of pirate ephemera was published in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But left out of any
modern discussions of the pirate—with the notable but problematic
exception of B. R. Burg’s Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition—is his
sexuality. There are no records that focus directly on the
homoerotic life of the pirate. Some of the travelogues by privateers
mention sodomy, for example, Captain Hacke tells his readers that
his crew consisted of “all Run-away’s, some having merited the
Gallows, other Fire and Faggot for Sodomy.”4 Burg has uncovered
a few sodomy records in maritime archives. But other kinds of
cultural deviance can be found in the ephemeral literature of the
period.
 Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
the publication of trial transcripts and “dying confessions” was
very popular. Such pamphlets were a major source of
entertainment for the London reading public.5 The trials helped to
establish the public’s impression of the pirate, as did the “dying
confessions” written by Paul Lorrain, the ordinary of Newgate. The
ordinary wrote these confessions for didactic reasons, of course.
But he also wrote them to supplement his income as the prison
clergyman who ministered to condemned criminals. Other writers
who wanted to cash in on the ordinary’s success wrote confessional
pamphlets as well. The pamphlets describe the nal moments
before the pirates’ executions, and o er a moral for the readers.6
The trials for piracy were overseen by the Court of Admiralty
rather than the civil courts. At times during the early eighteenth
century the government cracked down on piracy. The Admiralty
held mass trials and executed large numbers of pirates at one time
in order to set an example to sailors who might think about going
on the account. The Admiralty wanted “to remind sailors of the
consequences of signing on as a pirate, and to comfort and
reassure the merchant community of London” (Ritchie, 1). For
example, in 1700, fty-two pirates were ordered executed in one
fell swoop, while another thirty-eight were acquitted (Johnson,
1:321-22, 2d ed.).7 At the trial of the pirates who sailed with
Captain Roberts in 1722, over fty men were condemned and
hanged. If the executions were meant to “comfort” the merchants
of London and warn Jack Tar not to go on the account, the
publication of these events was meant to inform, enlighten, and
entertain the reading public—and make a pro t for the book
sellers.
Until the turn of the eighteenth century, the trials were almost
always held in England because the Admiralty feared that o cials
in the far- ung outposts of the empire could be bribed. However,
there were few convictions in England because of such obstacles as
nding and transporting rootless witnesses and criminals across
vast distances. The law changed shortly before Captain Kidd’s trial
in 1701. Piracy trials were allowed to be held anywhere within the
English colonies that a Court of Admiralty could be assembled.8
Moreover, if pirates were captured at sea—if the hunters were
defeated by the hunted—the victorious captain had the authority to
hang the pirates without bene t of an o cial trial. A pirate named
Thomas Armstrong, for example—one of Captain Roberts’ crew—
was “executed on board the Weymouth” in 1722 (Johnson, 1:322,
2d ed.).
Criminal trials in general—whether current or past—could be
useful forms of propaganda for Whigs and Tories. Some of the
most notorious trials—such as Castlehaven’s sensational trial for
sodomy and blasphemy in 1631—might be republished decades
later if they could serve a political purpose.9 Indeed, the popularity
of the Newgate Calendar, reprinted many times throughout the
eighteenth century, testi es to the enduring interest in some of the
pirate trials. In the 1795 edition, the editor reprinted the texts of at
least half a dozen pirate trials from the rst two decades of the
century.10
During the years of piracy’s “golden age,” the trials were heard
in English and then translated into Latin for the o cial records,
although depositions by witnesses and accused were usually not
published and most often were transcribed in English.11 Both court
clerks and freelance transcribers would record the more popular
trials, and these trials would be published almost instantly as
pamphlets. The reproduction of a trial as a pamphlet suggests an
authority and a realism that are actually constructed by the trial’s
transcriber and the pamphlet’s printer. Captain Kidd’s trial and
subsequent execution, for example, led to numerous competing
publications.12 A trial pamphlet can give only a certain perspective
of the trial itself. The reader’s experience of the trial is distanced
from the original written transcript, unavailable to the public in
any case, and in Latin. The pamphlet is already a “frame” removed
from the actual event, ltered through the lens of the transcriber.
Published pirate trials generally follow the same pattern.
Except for di erent participants, the prosecutors use the same
language in the opening statement, and the accusations with few
exceptions are similar.13 The titles of these pamphlets
sensationalize and thus grab the potential buyer’s attention. One
of the most notorious pirate trials—of Captain Avery’s crew—is a
good example: The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William
May, William Bishop, James Lewis, and John Sparkes for Several
Piracies and Robberies by Them Committed, in the Company of Every
the Grand Pirate, Near the Coasts of the East-Indies; and Several Other
Places on the Seas. Giving an Account of Their Villainous Robberies and
Barbarities. At the Admiralty Sessions, Begun at the Old-Baily on the
29th of October, 1696. and Ended on the 6th. of November.14 This
pamphlet sells the “Villainous Robberies and Barbarities” of the
accused and speci es the pirates by name, in this case linking them
with “Every the Grand Pirate.” The actual text of the pamphlet
foregrounds a list of the judges and lawyers who hear the case.15
Printers wanted buyers, and buyers wanted sensation. This
particular trial dealt with the most famous pirate of the decade—
perhaps of the seventeenth century—Captain Avery. The printer
could be sure that his pamphlet sold well.
The transcriber lists the booty captured by Avery and his crew
from “a certain Ship called the Gunsway, with her Tackle, Apparel
and Furniture, to the value of 1000£ and of Goods to the value of
110£ together with 100000 Pieces of Eight, and 100000 Chequins,
upon the High Seas, ten Leagues from the Cape St. Johns near Surat
in the East-Indies” (A2r). The transcriber then notes that, “Dawson,
Forseith, May, Bishop, Lewes, and Sparkes, were brought to Bar and
their Indictment read” (1). The indictment—four pages long—is
printed in full, and the defendants are asked how they plead:
“Joseph Dawson confessed that he was Guilty, but the rest pleaded
Not Guilty, and put themselves on their Trials” (4).
 When the prosecutors speak, they are quoted verbatim. Notice
that the plea is reported in the third person, and the defendants
are e ectively silenced. Only Dawson, who pleads guilty, is
named. He is already listed rst on both the title page and in the
indictment. The other defendants are grouped together; thus the
accused criminals who plead “not guilty” are distanced from the
reader, and the pirates are robbed of any individuality.
Unlike the defendants, the attorney general is quoted in full as
he describes the heinous nature of piracy and presents the state’s
reasons for “trial without jury.” John Quelch and his cohorts hear
the prosecutor characterize them as something close to monsters.
The reader, already several “frames” removed, reads what the
accused heard:

for Pirates are not Entituled to Law, not so much as the Law of Arms; for which
Reason ’tis said, if Piracy be commited on the Ocean, and the Pirates in the Attempt
happen to be overcome, the Captors are not obliged to bring them to any Port, but
may exposs [sic] them immediately to Punishment, by Hanging them at the Main-
Yard: A sign of its being a very di erent and worse Nature than any Crime committed
upon the Land; for Robbers and Murderers, and even Traytors themselves mayn’t be

put to Death without passing a formal Tryal.16

The attorney general’s remarks demonstrate the extraordinary

contrast, in the eyes of the law, between piracy and other crimes.
The prosecutor explicitly states that piracy is not an “ordinary”
felony—like, say, highway robbery, murder, or even treason—but
something of “a very di erent and worse Nature.” It was, in fact,
in a pirate’s “nature” to be a pirate. The pirate is being constructed
as a man whose crimes—his piracy—and his desire to pursue those
crimes de ne who he is: a pirate. Furthermore, the law says that
pirates, unlike outlaws or murderers, may be executed without trial
at sea, away from the legal boundaries of the English government.
This is a remarkable law in a country that prides itself on trial
by jury, even if we consider the long list of capital crimes against
property in the eighteenth century.17 As all the felony trial records
of the period show, accused criminals were at least allowed a trial,
unlike the pirates who could be summarily executed at a sea
captain’s discretion. In Crusoe’s Farther Adventures, that is Crusoe’s
very real fear when he is mistaken for a pirate after he
accidentally buys a ship from some real pirates.18
The notorious and popular Captain Avery, the “Grand Pirate”
who was never captured, was the ringleader of Dawson’s group. In
the trial, the accused pirate David Creagh gives a deposition that
describes Avery’s plot to take control of the ship on which he and
his conspirators crewed. Creagh says he refused to join the pirates,
and was ordered below ship to the cabin. As he was going
downstairs, he testi es,

I met with W. May, the Prisoner at the Barr. What do you say here? Says he. I made
him no Answer but went down to my Cabin; and he said, God damn you, you deserve
to be shot through the Head, and then he held a Pistol to my Head. Then I went to my
Cabin, and presently came orders from Every, that those that would go ashore, should
prepare to be gone. And when the Captain was got out of Bed, who was then very ill
of a Feaver, Every came and said, I am a Man of Fortune, and must seek my Fortune.
(15)
This passage is unusually vivid. Creagh’s testimony suggests some
of the earliest details about the pirate way of life as twentieth-
century readers imagine it: the matter-of-fact violence, the
profanity, the nonchalant bravery, and the pirate captain’s clever
turn of phrase. The tension between the pirate-as-criminal and the
pirate-as-antihero in both the economic and culturally
transgressive models is apparent in this deposition. In a society in
which “fortune” signi es economic aggrandizement and heroic
individualism, Avery’s bravado illustrates the contradictory
depiction of the piratical subject. On the one hand, the pirate is an
economic criminal—the reason he, or rather his crew, is being tried
in the rst place. On the other hand, he is depicted in a highly
romanticized way that captures the imaginations of the readers
and popular historians of piracy.
Furthermore, a contemporary reader of a trial—particularly
one as sensational as the Dawson trial—was in uenced not only
by what the witness said, but what had been disseminated
throughout London about the pirates. Avery, the stories told,
plundered the Great Mogul’s ship and ravished his granddaughter.
These tales swept London co eehouses like a storm, so that the
reading audience was prepared for the trial. The liveliness of the
language—“God damn you, you deserve to be shot through the
Head” or “I am a Man of Fortune”—conveys the e ect that later
authors draw from for their fanciful and often fabricated histories
and novels about piracy.
 Dawson’s trial—along with Captain Kidd’s—is among the most
detailed and most famous of the great pirate trials. But like Kidd,
these pirates were already famous before the trial took place and
before the transcript was published. The result of the trial as it was
reported in the pamphlet was inevitable. The readers already knew
that the pirates were convicted. Further, anyone could see the
pirates’ corpses hanging in chains over the Thames.
As Hunter and Davis would argue, there is a novelty to an
individual trial. At the same time, though, the similarity between
the trials creates a conventional representation of all the pirates,
despite the di erences in their individual crimes. A pirate’s infamy
is based on both the similarity of the trials—the comprehensive
familiarity that de nes the pirate in general—and the particular
“heinousness” of the crime, the individual act of piracy.
Conventional pirates as a group are made more reprehensible and
dangerous; at the same time, certain individual pirates can be
criminalized and heroicized. Avery plundered the Great Mogul’s
ship and was never caught. Dawson and his cohorts were on trial
for that crime, and Avery was the absent presence who gives
readerly interest to the results. Dawson and his comrades were
hanged; Avery would be sung about in ballads and written about
in plays and novels. The popularity of Avery’s trial in absentia is
not an anomaly. In Captain Kidd’s case, for example, the political
“adventure” that got him a commission as a privateer in the rst
place is erased by the sensational aspects of his trial for piracy.
 Much to the horror and fury of the prosecution and the judges,
when the jury returned its rst verdict in the Avery/Dawson trial
the pirates were exonerated from plundering the Great Mogul’s
ship. Before the second trial began and a new jury was selected,
the judge told the prosecution that the “Verdict was a dishonour to
the Justice of the Nation” (8). The verdict may have been a
“dishonour” to England, but something about the accused pirates
helped them get acquitted. If the jury was not bribed (which is
doubtful, given the poverty of the accused pirates), then perhaps
the glamour of the crimes—the Mogul’s riches and the ravishment
of his granddaughter—may have had something to do with the
pirates’ acquittal. Perhaps because the Great Mogul was the victim
accounts for the verdict. The Mogul was not a European, and he
was an immensely rich autocratic monarch. That combination
made a less sympathetic victim for a jury made up of staunch
Englishmen. However, although we shall never know why the
pirates were exonerated, that they were shows tendencies to
humanize, in fact heroicize, these “enemies against all mankind,”
despite the best e orts and noisiest rhetoric of the state. Dawson
and his cronies were nally condemned for the piracy of a much
less signi cant vessel.
Sodomites, unlike pirates, were never humanized, much less
heroicized, in the literature and trials of early-eighteenth-century
England.19 In An Account of the Proceedings against Capt. Edward
Rigby, for example, the narrative begins with a paraphrase of the
indictment:
 For that [Rigby], the Seventh day of November last, did Solicite, Incite, and as well by
words as otherways, endeavour to perswade one William Minton (of about the Age of
Nineteen Years) to su er him the said Rigby, to commit the Crime of Sodomy with
him the said Minton. And the said Rigby did also Endeavour and Attempt, to Commit
the Crime of Sodomy with him the said Minton; and did also do and perpetrate divers
other Enormities and abominable things, with an intent to Commit the Crime of

Sodomy with the said Minton.20

The phrase “commit the crime of Sodomy” is used three times and
is linked with ambiguous “Enormities and abominable things.”
Additionally, the names of both the accused and the accuser are
repeated in ways that confuse who is who.
This trial is not the only one in which the complicated diction
confuses the reader. In The Tryal and Conviction of Several Reputed
Sodomites (1707), we get the following deposition:

Thomas Lane, a Foot Soldier, was Indicted for assaulting Mr. Richard Hemming: and
Mr. Samuel Baker on the 15th of September last. The Evidence declar’d, that Lane was
standing upon London-Bridge, and that he came to Mr. Hemmings, and pulling out his
Nakedness o er’d to put it into his Hand, and withal unbutton’d the Evidences
Breeches, and put his Hand in there, but Mr. Hemmings put his Hand away; He the
rather bore with the Filthiness of the Action, because Mr. Baker, the other Evidence,
had told Mr. Hemmings, that Lane the Prisoner was such a kind of Person, and

therefore design’d to apprehend him, which they did.21

By the end of both of these indictments, the reader is made to

separate the accused sodomite (Rigby or Lane) from the accuser
(Minton or Hemmings) and must think carefully about who did
what to whom. The crime of sodomy began to join the actor with
the act, and the actors with one another, just as pirates embodied
their crimes of piracy. The accused sodomite and the accuser and
their acts are depicted in ways that suggest that their identities and
desires to perform or denounce deviant sex acts are di cult to
di erentiate.
The pamphlets’ detail of the events that led to the trials is
striking. For example, in Rigby’s trial, the published record is
virtually pornographic in its description of the accusation; it uses a
kind of detail similar to the description of Captain Jeane’s torture
and murder of his cabin boy. In a summary of the events that led
up to Minton’s denunciation of Rigby, the following describes the
act that caused the arrest:

thereupon Rigby pulled down Mintons Breeches, turn’d away his shirt, put his Finger
to Mintons Fundament, and applyed his Body close to Mintons, who feeling something
warm touch his Skin, put his hand behind him, and took hold of Rigbys Privy
Member and said to Rigby, I have now discovered your base Inclinations, I will expose
you to the World, to put a stop to these Crimes.

The exact description of the attempted seduction leaves nothing to

the imagination. The diction of Minton’s denunciation of Rigby
brings to mind a heroine-in-distress ghting for her virtue. But
unlike a heroine, who lacks power to defend herself from “ruin,”
Minton literally grabs the symbol of his seducer’s power—“Rigbys
Privy Member”—and denounces him publicly for his attempted
seduction. Similar to the romans à clef by such late-seventeenth-
and early-eighteenth-century authors as Behn and Manley, this
sodomy trial’s narrative makes the reader a voyeur to the erotic
“crime.”
Rigby’s sodomy trial (indeed, all the sodomy trials I have
examined) “novelizes” the depositions and creates a sense of
“character” for both the accused and the accusers. Like a novelist,
the author of a sodomy trial pamphlet attempts a kind of narrative
“realism” that positions the reader as someone who could be like
the accused and accuser. There is a signi cant distinction, though,
between a pirate’s trial and a sodomite’s trial. The pirate is an
explicitly economic criminal, whose crimes are a threat to property
but who can still be acquitted of the crime, like Dawson, or made a
romantic hero, like Captain Avery. The sodomite, on the other
hand, is a criminal who poses no explicit threat to property. In a
burgeoning middle-class society, domesticity, private life, and
marriage are intertwined with the ow of capital. Marriage is not
about patrilineal inheritance of land. Instead the married couple
form a relationship based on the exchange of capital. For the wife,
the exchange is in the private life of the household: her work in
exchange for her support. For the husband, the exchange is in the
public life of the worker: his work in exchange for his pay. Since
the sodomite is left out of this male-female dichotomy, he is no
longer explicitly a part of this domestic economy. His threat to the
economic order is implicit.
In one of the most graphic of these sodomy trials the accused,
Mr. Blair, presents a defense in which he tells the court it is all a
misunderstanding. Nothing about the actual act of buggery is ever
mentioned in this trial. The only “evidence” presented by the
prosecution is testimony that two men were caught near each other
in an alley. The baili testi es, “I called out, and said, In the Name
of God, what are you doing? Who or what are you? They seemed to
jostle before they could get from one another; they had both their
Breeches down. Upon which I called to my Partner, and told him
they were a Couple of Sodomites.”
Then the baili tells the court, “I asked them what they did
there? Blair said, he went to ease Nature. I think, said I, It is in a
very odd Way. D—n you, Sir, said he, if I must tell you, I was at Sh-te.
As he said he went to ease Nature, I ordered a Watchman to take a
Lanthorn to see, and I went myself, and there was no such
Thing.”22 The argument between Blair and the baili boils down to
whether or not anything untoward happened between Blair and
the other accused sodomite, John Deacon. Nothing is ever proved
except that the baili was unable to “see it” when he went to look
for the evidence that Blair “was at Sh-te.”
Blair tells the court that he said to the baili , “what I am going
to propose is not cleanly or decent, but if you will please to order
any Servant to go along with me into a back Place, I will convince
them that I put [the Sh-te] into my Breeches.” The baili refuses to
look, and the two accused sodomites are found “guilty.” The
evidence presented by the prosecution does not establish guilt. The
evidence does establish, however, that the possibility of the
sodomitical act is enough to convict.
Unlike trials for pirates or sodomites, in which participants are
directly quoted, in the cases of the “dying confessions,” the pirate’s
words are conveyed through the voice of the ordinary of
Newgate.23 These pamphlets work to provide some sort of moral
closure to pirate misbehavior.24 Usually the ordinary makes the
pirate sound like a penitent, showing remorse for his actions and
ready to meet his maker. But once in a while the pirate is able to
frustrate the ordinary. Then the reader can see how the ordinary
scrambles to make a moral lesson out of an unrepentant pirate’s
execution.
For example, the ordinary was ummoxed by Captain Kidd,
who did not show the proper contrition at Execution Dock. The
ordinary writes, “to my unspeakable grief . . . [Kidd] was in amed
with Drink.” The ordinary then focuses his attention on a lesser
pirate, whom he can represent as being truly repentant. The
ordinary writes that the condemned pirate Darby Mullins
“confess’d he had been a great Sinner . . . had of late very given
himself to Swearing, Cursing, profaning the Sabbath-day, &c.
which he now acknowledged had deserv’dly brought this Calamity
upon him.”25
The ordinary’s account tries to depict the pirate Mullins as a
regular guy, an example for others because the pirate repents not
only his piratical acts, but his other “great sins”: swearing, cursing,
profaning the Sabbath. Mullins, the ordinary suggests, is just like
us. Of course Kidd, the star of the event, overwhelms the
confession of Darby Mullins, whose self-confessed “crimes” are not
too sensational in any case. Nor does Mullins show particular
remorse for his acts of piracy.
When the ordinary goes to hear Kidd’s dying confession, he
writes that Kidd “truly repented of his Sins, and forgave all the
World; and I was in good hopes he did so.” Between the time that
the ordinary spoke to Kidd and Kidd’s execution, the ordinary
discovers that Kidd is so drunk that liquor “discomposed his Mind,
that it was now in a very ill frame and very un t for the great
Work, now or never, to be perform’d by him.” The ordinary nds
that Kidd in his drunken state “was unwilling to own the Justice of
his Condemnation, or so much as the Providence of God, who for
his Sins, had deservedly brought him to this untimely End.”
Luckily, the ordinary is able to salvage the situation:

But here I must take notice of a remarkable (and I hope most lucky) accident which
then did happen which was this. That the Rope with which Capt. Kid was ty’d,
broke, and so falling to the Ground, he was taken up alive; and by this means had
opportunity to consider more of that Eternity, he was launching into. When he was
brought up, and ty’d again to the Tree I desired leave to go to him again, which was
granted. . . . Now I found him in much better temper than before.

Indeed, Kidd’s “better temper”—not surprisingly he is now stone-

cold sober—at being hanged a second time makes him repent his
sins “with all his Heart.”
 Another pamphlet that describes Kidd’s execution goes into
much greater detail about what Kidd said before he was hanged.26
According to this anonymous author, Kidd acknowledges that he
was a pirate and a robber. Kidd says that if he had “kept to his
commission” to root out the pirates it would have brought him
“more Wealth, than he got by indirect Practices.” But Kidd is, in
this version, pretty much unrepentant through the end:

Notwithstanding which he could hardly be brought to a Charitable Reconciliation

with those Persons, who were Evidences against him at his Tryal, alledging that they
deposed many things that were inconsistent with truth, and that much of their
Evidence was by hearsay; and in the general part of his Discourse seem’d not only to
re ect on them, but several others, who instead of being his Friends (as they
promised,) had traiterously been Instrumental in his Ruin.

Does Kidd’s drunkenness work against the moral point of the

publication of his “last words”? Was he drunk, as the ordinary
stated, or was he sober, since the other author does not mention
Kidd’s condition? Which pamphlet do we believe? In the ordinary’s
account, Kidd’s actions erase—or at least overwhelm—the
signi cance of the lesser pirate Darby Mullin’s confession. Everyone
may swear, curse, or profane the Sabbath. Sailors, in fact, were
expected to curse, as numerous pamphlets and proclamations
against profanity of the time make clear. Captain Kidd, though,
remains the archpirate, just as Captain Avery, never captured,
evolves from a criminal to an ever more romantic gure. Indeed,
in proclamations issued by William and Mary that o ered pardons
to the pirates, Avery and Kidd were both exempted from the
o ered clemency.
Eighteenth-century readers will bring to both of these
confessions the context of the trial, the consistency of the
confessions themselves, and their knowledge of piracy and pirates
constructed through these pamphlets and newspapers. The
ordinary of Newgate wants to make the piratical crimes a lesson
for everyone. This is an impossibility, as Foucault has noted.27 The
purpose of ideology is precisely not to work perfectly, to justify
continuing e orts to enforce that ideology. Readers know that
many of the pirates get away, are acquitted, or are pardoned by
the king. From the trials, readers know that the pirate is a legally
de ned criminal, yet “di erent” too, “for Pirates are not Entituled
to Law,” as Dawson’s prosecutor says. And besides, pirates are
hostis humani generis.
The trials and the confessions work against one another in their
characterizations of the pirate. The trials attempt to show that the
“nature” of the pirate and his crime is very di erent from the
“nature” of the public or the nonpirate criminal. The ordinary’s
pamphlets, on the other hand, try to bring the pirate back into
society by showing that the pirate can repent and display remorse
for his sins. The tension between these two extremes demonstrates
that the pirate cannot be made to t within boundaries of
normative society. His outsider status refuses to be pinned down.
 In many ways, Kidd’s status embodies the evolving “nature” of
the pirate, from the “common enemy against all mankind” in late
seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England to the
fascinating antihero in the following centuries. Many books have
been written about Kidd’s exploits, his supposed buried treasure,
and the per dy of the whiggish junto. Fictional recreations based
on his legend are legion.28 The fabled villainy of Captain Kidd has
far outstripped the comparably minor pirate acts he probably
committed. Through the stories told about Captain Kidd, we can
see how the political “truth” of his crime is erased, and he evolves
into a merging of archcriminal and romanticized pirate: the birth
of a legend.
According to historical and literary tradition, Kidd was either a
victim of political machinations or a notorious pirate. He was, in
actuality, both. He took advantage of his status as privateer;
relying on his powerful political sponsors, he made a self-conscious
decision to turn pirate. When, as Ritchie argues, the Tories began
to defeat Bellomont and his political friends in the junto,
Bellomont could not ignore Kidd’s piracy despite the pro t that
Bellomont might have seen (Ritchie, vi).
During Kidd’s trial and execution, pamphlets, trial records, and
at least two ballads were published. The political trade-o s within
the English government that resulted in Kidd’s conviction and
execution were obscured by the dissemination of the Kidd legend
throughout London. The tension between the “real” Captain Kidd
and the Kidd of legend can be located in ballads about Kidd dating
from the onset of his trial in 1701.29 Kidd is a near-perfect example
of the evolution of the pirate—an unambiguous criminal—into the
piratical subject. A onetime respectable maritime o cer, who in
the best middle-class tradition tried to get ahead, is rewritten to
become the “arch-Pyrate” after the reasons for his trial and the
details of his career have been forgotten. However, the Kidd
represented in actual trial transcripts di ers greatly from the
articulate, romantic Kidd represented in contemporary ballads:

I made a solemn vow, when I sail’d, when I sail’d

I made a solemn vow when I sail’d;
I made a solemn vow, to God I would not bow,
Nor myself one prayer allow, when I sail’d.
I’d a Bible in my hand, when I sail’d, when I sail’d,
I’d a Bible in my hand, when I sail’d;
I’d a Bible in my hand, by my father’s great command,
But I sunk it in the sand, when I sail’d.30

More than twenty- ve years after Kidd’s execution, Johnson

wrote in the General History,
Captain Kidd of balladry begins to represent the blasphemous
outsider who bows to no one, including God, and who buries his
Bible as he buries his treasure. Kidd in ballad and legend turns
pirate because piracy is in his nature, to the extent that he makes
“a solemn vow, to God [he] would not bow” and proclaims his own
individualism.

We are now going to give an Account of one whose Name is better known in England,
than most of those whose stories we have already related; the Person we mean is
Captain Kid, whose publick Trial and Execution here, rendered him the Subject of all
Conversation, so that his Actions have been chanted about in Ballads. (2:65)

Johnson asserts that he will tell Kidd’s story as the trial record
details it, without the embellishments provided by the ballads.
However, even though Johnson attempts to tell the “true” story,
like the ballad his account becomes part of the foundation for the
legend. The process that erases the motivations behind Kidd’s trial
—his involvement with soon-to-be discredited Whig factions in
shady entrepreneurial activity—begins in this version of Kidd’s life.
Johnson excludes the political circumstances surrounding Kidd’s
trial and his actual motivation to go to sea as a privateer. Instead,
he concentrates on the ships that Kidd and his men take, the
violence of the men on their voyage, and the booty that is
captured. It is, in fact, the ballad that becomes the “truth” through
the General History’s reinterpretation of the ballad.
Johnson writes that in the rst months of the voyage, “It does
not appear . . . that [Kidd] had the least design of turning Pyrate”
(2:70). However, in the next paragraph he writes,

he sail’d to Bab’s Key, a Place upon a little island at the Entrance of the Red Sea; here
it was that he rst began to open himself to his Ship’s Company, and let them
understand that he intended to change his Measures; for, happening to talk of the
 Moca Fleet which was to sail that Way, he said, We have been unsuccessful hitherto,
but Courage, my Boys, we’ll make our fortunes out of this Fleet. (2:70)

First Johnson emphasizes the site of Kidd’s initial foray into piracy:
Bab’s Key “at the Entrance of the Red Sea.” Because it is a well-
known pirate rendezvous for Captain Avery, Kidd is immediately
associated with that other great pirate.31 Even more important, the
words that Johnson puts into Kidd’s mouth make him sound like
the romanticized pirate in later ction and popular history. And
that, of course, is the basis for the image that the twentieth-century
reader pictures.
The “real” Captain Kidd is replaced by a version of the pirate
transformed into a pop-culture antihero who cries, “Courage, my
Boys.” One pictures an eyepatch, a tricornered hat, and a parrot
on Kidd’s shoulder. Kidd the criminal becomes Kidd the legendary
antihero: the piratical subject. The economic representation and
the literary representation of Kidd are merged. Forgotten is the
corpse in chains that hung over the Thames to warn others against
“going on the account.” That corpse signi es the important
di erence between the criminal who steals property and the
antihero who can be heroically embodied through his pirate
exploits.
The “real” Captain Kidd, represented by Admiralty Court
records, rst speaks like a defendant on trial for his life—which he
was—then he seems resigned to his fate because he has exhausted
all his defense. For example, in the following exchange drawn
from the trial record, Kidd pleads to have his trial postponed until
he can get his hands on his “passes,” or the letter of marque, which
he believes will exonerate him. Dr. Oxenden, one of the
prosecutors, asks him where the passes are. Kidd replies, “I brought
them to my lord Bellamont in New England.” The court does not
allow Kidd’s name dropping to get in the way of his plea. He is
told, “you have had reasonable notice, and you knew you must be
tried, and therefore you cannot plead you are not ready.” Kidd’s
tone becomes more and more agitated as the prosecutors and
judges become more and more annoyed that Kidd refuses to enter a
plea:

Kidd. If your lordships permit those papers to be read, they

will justify me. I desire my counsel to be heard.
Mr. Coniers. We admit of no counsel for him.
Recorder. There is no issue joined; and therefore there can be
no counsel assigned. Mr. Kidd, you must plead.
Kidd. I cannot plead till I have those papers that I insisted
upon.

Then Kidd says to the court, “My papers were all seized, and I
cannot make my defence without them.” The court will not budge,
and Kidd says, “It is a hard case when all these things shall be kept
from me, and I be forced to plead.” The recorder says, “If he will
not plead, there must be judgment.” Kidd replies, “My lord, would
you have me plea, and not to have my vindication by me?” The
court, obviously impatient with Kidd, asks him for the last time,
“Will you plead to the indictment?” Kidd says, “I would beg that I
may have my papers for my vindication.” The Court seems to have
had enough of Kidd’s begging, and moves to another pirate on
trial, who immediately asks for clemency.
The Captain Kidd represented by the trial transcript is much
di erent from the Kidd of legend. His desperation is obvious in this
trial. He needs the “passes”—the letters of marque given to him by
Bellomont. He is a far cry from the Kidd who sings,

I steer’d from sound to sound, as I sail’d, as I sail’d,

I steer’d from sound to sound, as I sail’d;
I steer’d from sound to sound, and many ships I found,
And most of them I burn’d, as I sail’d.

In the space of 150 years, Captain Kidd’s career became

embellished and romanticized; the real Kidd—whoever he was—
became a piratical subject. His piratical subjectivity is an
amalgamation of the stories told in the General History and all the
histories, plays, and novels about Kidd in particular and pirates in
general published in England and the United States. The Pirates
Own Book, published in 1853, is important because of its great
popularity.32 It went through many editions in the nineteenth
century, and an inexpensive facsimile is still in print. Not an
original work, it is a redaction of the General History, with fanciful
interpolations by the attributed author, Charles Elms.
 For example, Johnson introduces Kidd by writing, “yet there
were scarce any . . . who were acquainted with his Life or Actions,
or could account for his turning Pyrate” (2:65). Then Elms
interpolates his own analysis of Kidd: “Among the distinguished
individuals who lurked about the colonies, was Captain Robert
[sic] Kidd. . . . he had now become notorious, as a nondescript
animal of the ocean. He was somewhat of a trader, something
more of a smuggler, but mostly a pirate” (Elms, 172).
Unlike Johnson’s version, in which Kidd is rst represented as a
successful middle-class merchant (which he was), Elms depicts a
character whose identity is essentially piratical. I use “essentially”
carefully here. Kidd’s piratical transgressions—economic and
cultural—cannot be removed from any other part of his “nature.”
From the beginning of Elms’s biography, Kidd is a pirate even
before he links up with Bellomont. He is not simply tempted by the
possibility of riches or the patronage of his politically powerful
nancers. He is an “animal”—not a human, but a pirate. Even his
given name has been changed from William to Robert: his surname
is all that is needed to signify who and what he is.
In the middle of the General History’s straightforward biography
of Kidd, Elms attaches the following paragraph: “Previous to
sailing, Capt. Kidd buried his bible on the sea-shore, in Plymouth
Sound; its divine precepts being so at variance with his wicked
course of life, that he did not choose to keep a book which
condemned him in his lawless career” (Johnson, 2:68; Elms, 178).
Taking his evidence from the ballads sung about Kidd, Elms
elaborates the Kidd legend and adds one more “fact” that will help
to construct the “truth” of this “arch-pirate”: Kidd buried his Bible,
a literal transferal of his identity as criminal to all of his
transgressive actions. He may have been an “animal,” but as the
ballad and Elms suggest, he chose to become an “animal.”
The rest of the chapter remains the same as Johnson’s until the
end. Elms repeats the stories of buried treasure, the gold Kidd hid
“that set the brains of all the good people along the coast [of New
England] in a ferment” (178). From the stories of Kidd and his
buried treasure come the tales that help to create the allure of the
piratical subject. The ctional characters such as Captain
Singleton, Long John Silver, or Captain Hook merge with the
biographies of the “real” pirates such as Blackbeard, Avery, and
Kidd. It becomes impossible to separate the truth from the
fabricated in the histories of the pirates who really existed.
Almost fty years later, at the turn of the twentieth century,
Frank R. Stockton—a proli c and popular author of children’s
adventure books—published Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts.33
The nal chapter of this popular history is entitled “The Real
Captain Kidd.” Stockton follows the outline of Johnson’s
biography, but rewrites it in an e ort to show the psychology
behind Kidd’s crimes. For example, Stockton writes that Kidd chose
not to attack “a ne English ship” because “his character was not
yet su ciently formed to give him the disloyal audacity which
would enable him with his English ship and his English crew, to
fall upon another English ship manned by another English crew”
(312–13). Stockton writes that “Kidd’s conscience had been
growing harder and harder every day” (314) and “the shrewd and
anxious pirate began to act the part of the watch dog who has
been killing sheep” (317). The terms of “reality” for subjective
identity in the late nineteenth century allow a psychological
biography of Captain Kidd. To put thoughts into Kidd’s mind
further de nes Kidd’s pirate behavior as an internalized “truth.”
Stockton still uses pirate mythology to tell the “real” story of
Captain Kidd. Although the author does not believe in the tales of
treasure buried all over the eastern seaboard of North America, he
gives credit to the story of “hidden booty” buried on Gardiner’s
Island. He writes that its hiding place was discovered, the chest
was dug up, and subsequently “all given up to the government”
(319). While some money was indeed found, dispersed among
former colleagues of Kidd, it is a far more attractive story to say
that the money came from a burial site on an island—even if
Gardiner’s Island, New York, has little of the allure of either
Crusoe’s paradise or Treasure Island. Thus Stockton, in purporting
to tell the “real” story of Captain Kidd, perpetuates the mythology
of the pirate antihero.
Stockton nishes his chapter on Kidd by suggesting two reasons
for his notoriety. First, the partisan nature of his trial “made him a
very much talked-of man,” although Stockton does not establish
exactly how the politics worked against Kidd. Second, according to
Stockton, the tales of a buried treasure “made him the object of the
most intense interest to hundreds of misguided people” (324).
Stockton repeats the stories of buried wealth, but stresses that the
treasure has already been found. He both has his pirate legend and
dismisses it too.
Stockton’s characteristic representation of Kidd creates one
more reason for the pirate’s reputation. Throughout the chapter, he
mixes ction and fact to create his own version of “reality.” The
importance of Captain Kidd lies in his embodiment as the
“archpirate,” despite hopeless e orts to uncover the truth, the
“real” Kidd. What matters is that Kidd represents the piratical
subject, the man who, in the words of an anonymous pamphlet
writer, cannot be pardoned because “a pardon of Felonies is no
pardon of Piracy. The Statute does not Corrupt the Blood.”34 Kidd’s
blood, perhaps, is already corrupted. I want to argue that Kidd is
more than the sum of his crimes. He is now the embodiment of
evil, yet sympathetic despite his wickedness. He is criminal,
merchant, not-merchant, and not-criminal; hero and antihero;
masculine and—as Johnson demonstrates in his General History
and Defoe demonstrates in his pirate ction—the masculine
alternative to the deviant sodomitical subject. The “real” Captain
Kidd makes an engaging subject because his career—as I have
indicated—is well documented.
 I do not wish to locate piratical origins where none exist,
despite my e orts to di erentiate on some level between “reality”
and “ ction.” I believe, however, that by examining the piratical
subject we can see the instability of identity exhibited through
sexual and economic desire that Defoe deals with in his novels.
While the piratical subject is being de ned with an identity of his
own, the sodomite evolves into the sodomitical subject, de ned by
homoerotic desire rather than just the sodomitical act. The trials
and the “Last Words” of the pirates help to initiate the instability
of the pirate character in the rst years of the eighteenth century.
The literature published in the decades following the “golden age”
of the pirate established all the cultural manifestations of the
pirate way of life, and begins the implicit eroticization of the
pirate.
4
Captain Avery and the Making of an Antihero

Avery’s glory could not be dismissed as romance: it was fact that persons claiming to
represent him had been received at several European courts and were prepared to negotiate
alliances; it was fact that from 1705 to 1709, English and Scottish authorities were tempted
to consider seriously the proposals of Madagascar’s pirate-diplomats.

—Joel Baer, Introduction, The King of Pirates

The literary “career” of Captain John Avery (or Every)

demonstrates how the pirate has been mythologized and implicitly
eroticized. Like Kidd, Avery was the subject of ballads and
pamphlets. But in his day, Avery was more of a folk hero than Kidd
and Blackbeard ever were. In 1713 he was turned into the
protagonist of a tragicomedy by the popular early-eighteenth-
century playwright Charles Johnson (not to be confused with the
author of the General History). In addition, several “biographies”
about Avery appeared between 1700 and 1810, including The King
of Pirates (1720), attributed to Defoe.1
Little is known about Avery’s actual biography. What we do
know, however, is that Avery’s life became the fodder for a legend
that soon outstripped the actual sensational crime that Avery
committed: the plundering of the Great Mogul’s treasure-laden
ship, an incident that enraged the English government and almost
caused catastrophic problems for the East India Company and its
trade with the Great Mogul. Avery was accused of all kinds of
sensational crimes. None of these exploits is entirely true, although
there is a kernel of “truth” behind the stories. Avery was said to
have established an empire of pirates in Madagascar. He sent
emissaries to European countries in order to establish recognition
as a sovereign state. And most notoriously, after he plundered the
Great Mogul’s ship, Avery either ravished or married or ravished
and married the Mogul’s granddaughter.2
By 1720, the year The King of Pirates was published, Avery’s life
had been told and retold, until the myth of the pirate precluded
any possibility of uncovering the “truth” about the man. The
author writes in the preface,

It has been enough to Writers of this Man’s Life, as they call it, that they could put
any Thing together, to make a kind of monstrous unheard of Story, as romantick as
the reports that have been spread about him; and the more those Stories appear’d
monstrous and incredible, the more suitable they seem’d to be to what the World

would have made to expect of Captain Avery.3

Defoe recognizes the paradox of the piratical subject. What is

“monstrous” to Defoe is the ctional exaggeration of Captain
Avery, and by extension the attempts by earlier eighteenth-century
writers to sanction piracy politically.
In 1718, just two years before The King of Pirates was published,
a new generation of pirates terrorized the eastern seaboard of the
North American colonies. Now that the pirates once again posed a
threat to trade, a new Avery biography was a useful way to o er
suggestions that might help to mitigate the situation. According to
Defoe, writers romanticized—exaggerated or lied about—a man
from a generation earlier whose criminal actions were no better
than those of marauders now wreaking havoc like Blackbeard,
Bonnet, or the particularly devilish Captain England. A new
biography was necessary because Avery’s previous biographers
“put any Thing together.” They claimed to tell the truth, but they
distorted the “truth,” since it was made up out of hearsay and
rumor. These authors heroicized the stories that by implication
should be most rejected: illegitimate sovereignty, thievery, and
economic havoc to the status quo.
For example, in 1709[?] a sixteen-page “biography” of Avery
appeared entitled The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery; the
Famous English Pirate, (Rais’d froma Cabbin Boy, to a King) Now in
Possession of Madagascar. The preface credits the book to “one
Adrian Van Broeck, a Dutch Gentleman, who, after a very liberal
Education at Leyden, apply’d himself, as Men of the best Fashion
in Holland do, to the Business of Trade” (1). What follows is a
remarkably monarchist biography that turns the title character into
a heroic libertine.
In this version of Avery’s life, he begins as a young man of “low
Birth” (3) who manages through pluck and good nature to become
captain of a ship at a very young age. As in a Restoration comedy,
all the “discerning” people in the story recognize that Avery is a
great man. The author describes Avery as “middle-siz’d, inclinable
to be Fat, and of a gay jolly Complexion. . . . His Temper was of a
Piece with his Person, daring and good-humour’d, if not provok’d,
but insolent, uneasy, and unforgiving to the last Degree, if at any
Time impos’d upon” (6). “Provok’d” into a duel, he acquits himself
heroically. He makes a bad marriage with a sluttish “Farmer’s
Daughter” (6) who gives birth to a child six months after they
marry. To add insult to injury, Avery is cheated out of his portion
by his father-in-law. So Avery decides to turn pirate.
This version of Avery’s life is remarkable because it is told in
the guise of a “real” biography, yet it becomes an encouragement
for monarchical virtues. Avery’s life follows a few of the usual
paths, but with some di erences: he captures the Great Mogul’s
ship, but refuses to ravish the granddaughter. Instead, the two
marry in a ceremony performed by one of the Great Mogul’s
priests, because “Avery was e’en contented to dismiss the scruples
of his being mary’d after the Church of England Method, out of
complaisance to so desireable a Creature” (8). He sets up a pirate
government on Madagascar and is elected “their Chief, with such a
Power as the Doges or Dukes of Venice or Genoa are now possess’d
of” (11).
Indeed, his “commonwealth” becomes so strong that he has
fteen thousand pirate-soldiers at his command. “Towns were
built, Communities establish’d, Forti cations built, and
Entrenchments ung up, as render’d his Dominions impregnable
and inaccessible by Sea and Land” (11). By now Avery is so
powerful that it is no surprise that his second in command, a
Frenchman named de Sale, plots against him. De Sale’s plot is
discovered, however, and all the French pirates are forced to leave
Madagascar. By the sleight of a pen, Avery becomes an English
hero. The biography ends with a kind of “golden-age” description
of Madagascar: “the Soil is extraordinary fruitful, in many places
a ording all Things necessary for the Life of Man in great Plenty”
(15–16). The author then suggests to the reader that it would be “a
might Advantage . . . to the Crown of Great Britain, if Means could
be found out by our Superiors, either to suppress these Pyrates by
Force, and so get Possession of this wealthy Island, or by
Compliance with such Advances as have been made by their Chief
towards his Pardon” (16). This suggestion that it might be a good
idea to form some kind of treaty with the pirates in Madagascar is
one of several from the eighteenth century’s rst decade.4
This small volume was published around the time Defoe wrote
in his Review that it might be legal to either give the pirates of
Madagascar a pardon or “take what they have by force”: “it must
be lawful to take it as a Condition of admitting them to come in—
And all this, supposing they cannot easily or without Hazard or
Blood, be otherwise reduc’d—Let them o er their illgotten Money,
then I am clear, it will be well gotten money to us.”5 There are any
number of texts from this period that defend an alliance with the
Madagascar pirates.6 No other writer, however, is as starry-eyed as
the author of The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery. By
reading The Successful Pyrate and The Life and Adventures of Capt.
John Avery we see how the criminal pirate—hostis humani generis—
became heroicized into the legendary Captain Avery.
In the tragicomedy The Successful Pyrate, the playwright
Johnson exploited Avery’s notoriety in order to demonstrate the
danger of a too-strong monarchy.7 The play was published when
worries about succession were once again on Englishmen’s minds
since Anne—who had no heir—was very ill, and would die the
following year in 1714. Johnson romanticized Avery in precisely
the ways that enraged Defoe.
In Johnson’s version, the pirate—named Arviragus—sets up a
glorious kingdom on Madagascar. But Arviragus realizes that as an
Englishman, he cannot be an absolute ruler. Just as in the legend
of Captain Avery, Arviragus captures the Great Mogul’s
granddaughter. There is a twist, however, for she is Arviragus’s
own illegitimate daughter—unknown of course to him—and he
plans to marry her. He nally repents his acts, gives his daughter
to his rival, and reveals that he desires to return to England after
handing over his kingdom to his new son-in-law and daughter.
Through illegal trade, the pirate king has established a monarchy,
but renounces his monarchical ways and returns to England a self-
made rich man.
 In The King of Pirates, Defoe wants to set the record straight by
writing a rst-person narrative in Avery’s voice—a voice that
sounds a great deal like those of Defoe’s other heroes. Defoe claims
to tell the “real” truth, to demonstrate the extent of the
misrepresentation of Avery’s legend. “There is always a great
di erence,” he writes, “between what Men say of themselves, and
what others say for them, when they come to write Historically of
the Transactions of their Lives” (iv). Defoe dramatizes the moral
transgressions of the “real” Captain Avery. Paradoxically—within
the set of expectations put forth in Robinson Crusoe—Defoe also
shows how Avery’s moral transgressions result in his economic
success.
When eighteenth-century readers picked up The King of Pirates
their responses to Avery were conditioned by the pirate’s depiction
over the previous decades as both archcriminal and antihero. In
The King of Pirates, which is written as if it were an autobiography,
Defoe’s narrative strategy creates a ction out of assertions of
truth based on the “real” narrator’s inside knowledge. Instead of
“the extravagant Stories already told,” Defoe tells us that these
letters are “genuine; and, as [the publishers] verily believe these
letters [published as the book’s narrative] to be the best truest
account of Captain Avery’s Piracies,” then readers should believe
this account. Defoe asserts that the letters are free of the
embellishment and lies told in the co eehouses of London or
reported in pamphlets and the periodical press. The di culty is, of
course, that readers and Defoe are in uenced by preconceptions
that construct all pirates as piratical subjects, even in “the best
truest account.” They are literary antiheroes, whose cultural
transgressions disrupt Defoe’s emphasis on the economic crimes.
In the earlier narratives of his life, Avery makes a conscious
decision to turn pirate and talks his fellow sailors into mutiny.8 As
a privateer, he occupies the unsure place of the freebooter in
seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century maritime history. Avery
has a license from the king of England, and is sanctioned by his
government to plunder and steal from enemy ships. However, once
he “turns pirate” in the eyes of English law, the legend and the
reality take on the mythical force that establishes him as the
eighteenth century’s rst maritime outlaw-hero.
Defoe attempts to control this legend, already blurred by the
passage of a quarter century. In Defoe’s version, Avery begins his
career in the uneasy status of a sailor on a privateer ship, where
“we had been a Kind of Pyrates, known and declar’d Enemies to
the Spaniards” (5). Instead of inciting his fellow sailors to mutiny,
however, he is captured by pirates, Defoe tells us, and he willingly
turns “real” pirate “at War with all Mankind” (5). But although
Avery becomes an “accidental” pirate, one who might not have
gone on the account if the circumstances had not allowed it, he is
still a pirate whose legal status makes him hostis humani generis.
After Avery and his companions are captured by “real” pirates,
Avery says, “we found they were a worse Sort of Wanderers than
ourselves . . . for [before] we never o er’d to rob any of our other
European Nations, either Dutch or French, much less England; but
now we were lifted into the service of the Devil indeed, and, like
him, were at War with all Mankind” (6). Defoe does not erase the
transgressive behavior explicit in the homosocial pirate world, the
cultural and legal deviations from the conventions of the
legitimate maritime world. Indeed, he goes so far as to link Avery
with Satan himself. Avery says he and his fellow sailors had been
“a kind of Pyrates,” acknowledging the potential criminality of the
freebooter’s vocation. However, it is not until they go to war
against “all Mankind” and cross the boundaries (always shifting
for the privateer) into out-and-out piracy, that they are themselves
criminalized by the legal de nitions of their countrymen.
Until Avery makes the move from privateer to pirate, he is still
on the edges of the legitimate maritime world, still—to some
extent—a part of the economic and sexual social order of
conventional England. The moment he is no longer “a kind of
Pyrate,” but a real, true, undeniable pirate, he leaves the
normative order. The ambiguous “nature” of Avery’s sexuality is
evident in his depiction of his relationship with the princess. The
literary pirate, in the “service of the Devil,” and the criminal—or
legally de ned—pirate become the piratical subject, quite di erent
from the libertine “hero” of the 1709 pamphlet.
Avery describes in great detail the booty the pirates take. After
one particularly successful battle, Avery says,
 Our Men found in the Ship 6 Brass Guns, 200 Sacks of Meal, some Fruit, and the
Value of 160000 Pieces of Eight in Gold of Chili, as good as any in the World: It was a
glittering Sight, and enough to dazzle the Eyes of those that look’d on it, to see such a
Quantity of gold laid all of aheap together, and we began to embrace one another in
Congratulations of our good Fortune. (16)

The detail and description of the booty recall Moll Flanders’s erotic
response to money. In Avery’s world, Defoe eroticizes money and
material wealth, as he does in Moll Flanders and Roxana. There is a
connection between the ambiguous sexuality of the pirate and the
“phallic” sexuality displaced onto jewels and money that we see in
Moll Flanders and Roxana. The ability to make money outside
“normal” channels of trade and inheritance—in Moll’s case, for
example, her life of crime and prostitution—seems to unmoor
identity from traditional sexual as well as economic de nitions.
Moll has an unconsummated a air with a rich gentleman.
Instead of the sexual act, they share their wealth: her gentleman
friend

bade me open a little walnut-tree box he had upon the table, and bring him such a
drawer, which I did, in which drawer there was a great deal of money in gold, I
believe near two hundred guineas, but I knew not how much. He took the drawer,
and taking my hand, made me put it in and take a whole handful. I was backward at
that, but he held my hand hard in his hand, and put it into the drawer, and made me
take out as many guineas almost as I could take up at once. (121–22)

Defoe’s language here makes Moll sound like a young woman

about to lose her virginity. Likewise, the riches discovered by the
pirates cause them to express their joy physically, to ‘’embrace one
another” and to share their happiness over their “good Fortune.”
The excitement that they show over the wealth is enacted through
their transgressive brotherhood, just as Moll puts her hand in her
friend’s money “drawer” (197).
Avery and his men are so successful at piracy that they become
notorious throughout the South Seas, hunted by the government
that originally sanctioned their outlaw behavior when their
enemies were the Spaniards. They are bound together by their
criminality and their love for plunder, though they have no place
to go and spend the wealth: “So that upon the whole, we concluded
there was no Safety for us but by keeping all together, and going
to some Part of the World where we might be strong enough to
defend ourselves” (28). Alone in the world, they must stay
together, outlaws and criminals forced to unite in a transgressive
camaraderie.
In order to save their lives (and their booty), they must nd a
place to hide, a giant closet to go into until they are able, or
willing, to come out in the open again. Unlike sailors who work
for lawful gain and are thus free to return home and spend their
pro t, these men have no “home” to return to. If others like them
wish to join their brotherhood, they are welcome. Although they
“had no great Need of Company, yet [they] were overjoy’d at
meeting” others like them who would show up at their hiding
place. To be “like” them means to be a pirate, a criminal. To be
“like” them, is to share a subjectivity outside the circle of
legitimate sexuality, to be piratical subjects. The sodomite’s acts
pose a threat to normative sexual—and thus economic—
relationships. The pirate performs implicit acts of cultural deviance
or “Monstrous unheard of Stories.” These acts are not con rmed,
and consequently they are too ambiguous to criminalize explicitly.
The pirates’ illicit wealth is the only authentic means to con rm
their deviance as hostis humani generis.
The pirates choose to hide, of course, on Madagascar, an island
whose fame grew along with that of the pirates, an exotic place
that provides anything a pirate would need.9 As we have seen with
the two earlier tales about Avery, on Madagascar literary
mythologies of the piratical subject converge with the pirate’s real
legal status as criminal. The legends tell us that Avery established
his great notoriety as the “king of pirates” on Madagascar.10 Much
of the early-eighteenth-century fascination with the Avery
character came from English interest in Madagascar, the huge
island two hundred miles east of Africa in the Indian Ocean.
Madagascar is isolated between Africa and India, between the
unknown and the exotic. It is a place where pirates can rest,
careen, and carouse. According to the stories in Europe, the
settlement that the pirates built evolved into a great city and an
empire that controlled trade in the Indian Ocean.11
Defoe, in his version of Avery’s story, tries to downplay the
legend of Avery’s piratical colonization of Madagascar. Avery
discounts the stories that he had sent emissaries to European
governments in an attempt to gain recognition for the “nation” in
the eyes of the world:

they were told at London, that we were no less than 5000 Men; that we had built a
regular Fortress for our Defence by Land, and that we had 20 Sail of ships; and I have
been told that in France they have heard the same Thing: But nothing of all this was
ever true, any more than it was true that we o er’d ten Millions to the Government
of England for our Pardon. (63)

Defoe details the imagined strength of the pirates’ empire, just as

he details the incredible booty of a successful raid. On the one
hand, then, Defoe is discrediting a legend that constructs the pirate
world and its threat to English trade. On the other hand, he is
applauding the very legends that he is trying to contradict. Avery
and his men become rich, with “gold enough to dazzle the eyes.”
Avery denies that “we o er’d ten Millions” to England, but he does
not deny that he could have o ered all that money.
Because the pirates are outlaws, they have no need for
recognition by European governments. The legends of wealth and
desire for recognition are rewritten by Defoe in a way that asserts
Avery’s desire to be independent of English societal norms. The
pirates, says Avery, are not trying to gain the legitimacy of being a
nation; on the contrary, they just want to be left alone with their
money on their island. They have no desire to be pardoned because
they refuse to be a part of the conventional world.
In The King of Pirates Avery admits that he himself made up
these stories to seek recognition. His pirate colony will seem to be
a formidable power and the pirates will be left alone. This
assertion represents the ambiguous status of the piratical subject.
Defoe wants to discredit the legends that give credence to their
legally de ned piratical acts, but at the same time cannot resist
glorifying the economic success of his antihero. He creates a gure
not bound by conventional restraints—represented by the order
imposed by the British government—in order to minimize the e ect
of a nancially successful pirate. However, the pirate’s
unconventional “nature” is precisely what provokes such
fascination with the piratical gure. The Avery legend, then, is
much more complicated as a cultural sign than simply Defoe’s
representation of his economic transgressions. Averio homo
economicus already has been determined as Averio homo eroticus
in the stories told about Avery and the Indian princess in The
Successful Pyrate and The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery.
On the one hand, Defoe tells us that Avery was not as rich as
the public believed; that Avery exaggerated stories of enormous
wealth so that sailors would return to Europe and frighten the
governments from attacking him. On the other hand, Avery also
brags about the hugely pro table raids on individual ships, as we
have seen, and particularly the plundering of the Great Mogul’s
ship, the most famous incident in the creation of the Avery myth.12
While trying to demystify this episode, Defoe inadvertently points
up how homo eroticus and homo economicus are connected. Defoe
exploits this story not for the implicit sexual tensions between
Avery and the Mogul princess, but instead for the economic
anxiety that the mythic piratical act produces. However, if vast
wealth fascinates readers of Avery’s history—including Defoe—
then Avery’s sexual exploits necessarily are mythologized as well
because the transgressive individuality of the pirate—exempli ed
here by the Avery legend—intrudes on the legal de nition of
piracy.
As they cruise the Indian Ocean, Avery and his crew come upon
the ships of the Great Mogul, which they take with little resistance.
The ship that holds the princess and the treasure “was the main
Prise”:

When my Men had enter’d and master’d the Ship, one of our Lieutenants call’d for me
. . . he thought no Body but I ought to go into the great Cabin . . . for that the Lady
herself and all her Attendance was there, and he fear’d the Men were so heated they
would murder them all, or do worse. (57)

The other pirates may be rabble who would rape an Indian

princess, but Avery can nd a way to save her honor. Although his
gallantry may seem to grant more importance to the fate of the
princess than the pro t from the treasure, it makes more sense to
read the episode as a representation of how Defoe tries to
negotiate the tensions within the representation of the piratical
subject as both antihero and criminal.
In the more traditional tales of Avery’s exploits, both the
princess herself and the treasure are the objects of Avery’s desire.13
In Johnson’s play, for example, the princess is the prize desired by
the hero and his rival. In Defoe’s narrative, however, the diamonds
are eroticized, not the princess. Avery is accused of raping her, but
he insists, “they wrong me, for I never o er’d any Thing of that
Kind to her, I assure you; nay, I was so far from being inclin’d to
it, that I did not like her” (58). What he “likes,” of course, is the
booty, and although the legend insists that Avery resorted to sexual
violence and even reciprocal desire for the princess, he does not
succumb, despite the temptation that should tantalize any pirate,
unless his community is homo-erotically de ned.
Avery revels in the treasure and disdains the princess. When he
enters the cabin of the princess, he is struck by

such a Sight of Glory and Misery [as] was never seen by Buccaneer before; the Queen
(for such she was to have been) was all in Gold and Silver, but frighted; and crying, at
the Sight of me she appear’d trembling, and just as if she was going to die. She sate
on the Side of a kind of a Bed like a Couch . . . she was, in a Manner, cover’d with
Diamonds, and I, like a true Pirate, soon let her see that I had more Mind to the
Jewels than to the Lady. (57)

Sexual desire in a traditionally gendered form is of little interest to

Avery, the piratical subject. He sees the “glorious” jewels, and he
sees the princess as a kind of “miserable” display case for the
jewels that he wants. Defoe’s attempt to de ne piracy as an
economic transgression, however, is constantly undermined by the
eroticism that is implicit in any literary history of the pirate. Avery
disdains sex with the princess but enjoys the company of his men,
with whom he lives on Madagascar, who are excited and ‘’embrace
one another” at the sight of a heap of treasure. “Like a true
Pirate,” he is not interested in the lady. But if he does not desire
the princess, neither is he a feminized sodomitical subject. He is,
instead, the masculine alternative to the conventional hero.
Whatever Avery may desire sexually, his sexual subjectivity cannot
be de ned by his outward masculinity. Transgressive sexual desire
—or sexual desire of any kind—is masked by the desire generated
by the treasure.
If this were an instance of racial tension and the masking of
desire between the genders, the homoeroticism would not be
implicit. However, the legends and Defoe’s account contradict one
another here. Avery’s inclinations have to be read alongside the
other tales of his desire for the princess. Most other versions of this
legend insist that Avery carried the princess away to Madagascar,
and that they married and had children. Defoe’s e orts to remake a
character whose legendary status as a romantic antihero is too
wellknown by the public to be totally reinvented as an economic
criminal result in a self that can be read through a newly emergent
homoeroticism.
Avery, in fact, declares that he and his crew “look like Hell-
hounds and Vagabonds; but when we are well dress’d, we expect to
look as other men do” (80). He does not de ne himself as being like
other men, he only wants to look like other men. He is unlike other
men, yet at the same time he is unlike the legend, the rapacious,
insatiable pirate king. Who is the “real” Captain Avery? No one
ever nds out. Defoe suggests that Avery, with a few comrades,
leaves his home, and abandons Madagascar and the citizen pirates.
One “Particular Friend” asks to join him when he leaves the others.
The book ends in the same way that Defoe’s pirate novel
Captain Singleton does. Avery and his friend are making their way
to Europe, where they will live together in seclusion. Defoe’s
ending di ers from other representations of the Avery legend. In
most other versions Avery disappears from view—just as Defoe
tells the story—but steals his comrades’ treasure, and probably died
in poverty, unable to spend his wealth for fear of discovery.14 As
the story gets told and retold, Avery’s greed becomes the cause of
his fall. Not only was he a criminal in the eyes of the law, but the
literary representation makes him a criminal against other
criminals. In Defoe’s version, however, years after the “facts” of
Avery’s death, the pirate king, the transgressive hero made rich by
his crimes, gets away with his jewels and retires with a companion.
He is a man who, read through the narratives of homo-erotic
desire, nds a kind of peace with a companion of his own gender.
The ending of The King of Pirates is surprisingly similar to the
ending of Captain Singleton, in which Avery makes a prominent
appearance. Unlike The King of Pirates, however, Captain Singleton
makes no pretense toward “truth” and “history” in the same
determined way that Defoe represents Avery. On the contrary,
despite the usual title page that asserts the “truth” of Captain
Singleton’s narrative, the novelistic qualities of the book are
paramount, and closer to Defoe’s other, more popular novels such
as Crusoe or Moll Flanders. If two decades later Richardson can use
the domestic milieu to engender female subjectivity, then Defoe is
using the popular literature of the day—pirate stories and
seamen’s journals—to develop a di erent kind of subjectivity.
Subjectivity—an always unstable notion—can be di erent from
more transparent domestic, or what we now call “heterosexual,”
desire.
5
Fabricated by the Frail Hand of Man
The General History and Fictional Reality

It’s a Wooden World, fabricated by the frail Hand of Man, and yet is of a more rm
Contexture, than the great One, if we may believe old Sages, who tell us, that this would drop
to Pieces, if but one Atom only was wanting; whereas our Wood-Creation holds rm together,
when batter’d worse than a Bawdy-house.

—Edward Ward, The Wooden World Dissected

No Man can have a greater Contempt for Death, for every Day he constantly shits upon his
own Grave, and dreads a Storm no more, than he does a broken Head, when drunk.

—Ibid.

Captain Johnson’s General History of the Robberies and

Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates vividly recounts the
biographies of famous and obscure marauders of the “golden age.”
In volume 1 Johnson concentrates on the most famous sea rovers,
such as Blackbeard, Major Stede Bonnet, and Captain Avery. The
stories of these men were well known to the reading public. In the
second volume, however, Johnson invents pirates out of whole
cloth and includes their stories alongside the tales of “real” pirates
such as Captain Kidd. Ironically, because of the General History’s
in uence on pirate history, these fabricated pirates have become
“real.” Popular historians write about them as if they actually
existed. In The Pirates’ Who’s Who, for example, Philip Gosse makes
no distinction between those pirates in the General History who
have historical precedents and those whom Johnson makes up.1
Johnson, of course, makes no distinction either. The unintentional
e ect of the General History is to show us that history and ction
are interpenetrating discourses.
The signi cance of the General History to eighteenth-century
culture has been unacknowledged or underestimated by both
historians and literary critics in English studies.2 But the rst
volume went through four editions between 1724 and 1726. In
1728 a second volume was published.3 The General History is the
primary—at times, only—source for the many popular histories
that have appeared in the last two centuries, until the ground-
breaking work of a few academic historians. This neglect is
particularly noticeable given the work’s enormous in uence on
later generations of popular historians and novelists of piracy.4
Beyond the limits of Defoe studies, piracy itself is such an
important cultural trope in early-eighteenth-century England that
it is surprising that this book has almost never been seriously
treated, given the ways it constructs and mythologizes the pirates
as we know them.5
Both “history” and social criticism, the General History
integrates ction and “fact.” The work’s unsure generic status
probably accounts for its critical neglect. In the rush to discover the
“origins” of the novel, critics have overlooked the General History’s
own ctional attributes because it is called—explicitly—a
“history,” and its subjects are “real” pirates.6 Additionally, pirate
ction is not a reputable genre. Witness the huge number of
“penny-dreadful” novels and romances in the 1830s, 1840s, and
1850s, and the notable dearth of critical studies about this genre.7
These novels are a fascinating site for further research, since the
way the piratical gure is romanticized demonstrates how the
piratical subject changes depending on the cultural context. The
issue of generic “respectability” is particularly signi cant given the
emphasis on a few of Defoe’s texts and their relevance to the
origins of the novel at the expense of his less familiar works.
Defoe’s novels that have captured critical attention are Robinson
Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and A Journal of the Plague Year. His
other novels, while discussed in Defoe scholarship, tend to be
ignored by more inclusive studies of the novel. The Farther
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The Serious Re ections of Robinson
Crusoe, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton, A New Voyage round the
World, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Captain Roberts all come to mind
as “forgotten” or neglected in histories of the novel and even in
major studies of Defoe. With the exception of Memoirs of a Cavalier,
all these novels have piratical elements. The neglect of piracy in
criticism of Defoe’s canon is ba ing because scholars have recently
examined other traditionally popular literary genres such as crime
literature to contextualize and o er new readings of Defoe’s major
texts and novels.8
 I want to rectify the neglect of piracy and argue for its
importance as a trope in Defoe studies and, more broadly, gay and
lesbian studies and queer theory. The purpose of this chapter is not
to make conjectures about sex between pirates, or to argue that a
readerly response to the pirate is based only on later novels and
histories. As I suggested in chapters 2 and 3, the piratical subject
can be connected to the newly emergent sodomitical subject. This
connection makes perfect sense if we consider the burgeoning
emphasis on domesticity, economy, and sexuality in seventeenth-
century pamphlet literature, and the emphasis on private
experience exempli ed by novels such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,
Roxana, and Captain Singleton. In the General History, piracy
represents an economic transgression. But piracy also represents
transgression against middle-class and domestic notions of
“reality,” since as we have seen, women play little part in
eighteenth-century depictions of pirate life.9 As Jonathan Goldberg
asks, “How is gender di erence produced if the trajectory of desire
is not determined by the gender of its object?” (37).
I shall argue, then, that English society’s dialectic of fear and
admiration of the pirate indicates a con ict between the pirate’s
representation as legal or economic criminal and his portrayal as a
literary antihero. More broadly, this dialectic is a con ict between
normative sexuality—private domesticity—and sexually deviant
subjectivity. For example, Johnson wonders why Captain England
decided to turn pirate: “It is surprizing that Men of Good
Understanding should engage in a course of life that so much
debases human nature” (1:114, 2d ed.). For the pirate, this “course
of life” is both economically and socially transgressive. In the early
eighteenth century, the sodomite already was de ned by his
“course of life,” internalized erotic and transgressive desire for
other men.10
Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1720),
published only four years before the General History, shows this
depiction of the “unnatural” sodomitical subject.11 The anonymous
author argues that since the sodomite is “un t to serve his King, his
Country, or his Family, this Man of Clouts dwindles into nothing,
and leaves a Race as e eminate as himself; who, unable to please
the Women, chuse rather to run into unnatural vices with one
another, than to attempt what they are but too sensible they can’t
perform” (9–10). The di erence between Captain England and the
sodomite represented here lies in the contrast between the literary
embodiments of the sodomite and the pirate. The “unnatural vices”
make the sodomite an explicitly sexual criminal: his crimes are
both his unnatural desire for other men and the sexual acts that
follow. His private life—unnatural desire—is here made public.
Further, the sodomite is impotent around women, but somehow—
to this author’s dismay—manages to have sex with other men.
Likewise, the pirate is unnatural, but paradoxically, despite the
assertion that Captain England “debases human nature,” he and
his ilk can be set up as antiheroes precisely because they transgress
in so many public cultural ways. Any private experience he might
have, though, is left unexamined.
Blackbeard. In this early engraving, Blackbeard’s erceness is not nearly as pronounced as the
description in the text would suggest. From A General History of the Pyrates, 2d ed., 1724.
Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster
University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Blackbeard. In this engraving twelve years later, Blackbeard’s visage begins to take on
demonic qualities and details that exaggerate even the description from the text. From A
General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers,
Street-Robbers, &c., 1734. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research
Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Captain Avery and his crew taking one of the Great Mogul’s ships. From A General History of
the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c.,
1734. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections,
McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Title page from A General History of the Pyrates, 2d ed., 1724. Courtesy of the William Ready
Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton,
Ontario.
Captain Fly’s profane speech. An example of Robinson Crusoe’s “sodomy of the tongue.”
From The General History of the Pyrates, vol. 2, 1728. Courtesy of the William Ready Division
of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Anne Bonny and Mary Read. From A General History of the Pyrates, 2d ed., 1724. Courtesy of
the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University
Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Captain Bartholomew Roberts. From The General History of the Pyrates, vol. 2, 1728.
Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster
University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Title page from Captain Singleton, 1st ed., 1720. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of
Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Robinson Crusoe’s Island of Despair. From The Serious Re ections of Robinson Crusoe, 1720.
Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster
University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Robinson Crusoe meets Friday. “I beckoned to him to come nearer.” From Robinson Crusoe
(Boston, 1884). An engraving from a drawing by George Cruikshank. Courtesy of the William
Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library,
Hamilton, Ontario.
Robinson Crusoe discovers the footprint. From Robinson Crusoe (London, 1820). Engraving
by Thomas Stothead. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Research
Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.
Robinson Crusoe destroys the pagan idol. From La vie et les aventures surprenantes de
Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam, 1720), the rst French edition. Courtesy of the William Ready
Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton,
Ontario.

The “e eminate” sodomite “debases human nature.” Although

he is a part of English society, he is an “unnatural” sexual criminal
whose desires are in opposition to the “normal” heterosexual man
and woman. He “dwindles into nothing,” out of sight, out of mind,
unless caught in the act, or set upon, as groups of early-eighteenth-
century young men did to supposed gangs of mollies.12 The
anonymous author writes, “I scorn to stain my paper with the
Mention” of the reprehensible acts that the sodomite performs
(23). Not the enactment of desire between two men but homoerotic
desire itself is anathema to this author, and nearly impossible to
imagine.
The sodomites “chuse” a deviant course of life. The piratical
subject chooses a course of life and “debases human nature” as
well. The actions of these men suggest the complex matrix of homo
eroticus—the legally criminalized sodomite—and homo economicus
—the legally criminalized pirate. The historical pirates posed a
tangible threat to the economic basis of English society. The
economy was a foundation as “natural” as heterosexual desire had
become by 1720. Captain England—a literary representation
—“debases human nature” despite his “good understanding” that
ought to prevent his criminal acts. Johnson writes that Captain
England took a ship and tortured the master:

for the Boatswain immediately called to his Consorts, laid hold of the Captain, and
made him fast to the Windless . . . afterwards they whipp’d him about the Deck, till
they were weary, then told him, because he was a good Master to his Men, he should
have an easy Death, and so shot him thro’ the Head, and tumbled him overboard into
the Sea. (1:135)

Unlike the author of Plain Reasons, who leaves the sexual acts
between men to the reader’s imagination, Johnson explicitly
details the criminal actions England and his brethren perform in
order to “debase human nature.” The pirate’s actions—the acts of
piracy—are explicitly economic crimes, enacted against seafaring
merchants. In popular history of the piratical subject, however, the
crimes are embellished by gruesome detail. The reader is both
repelled and thrilled by the pirate’s violent actions. The narrative
detail that imagines how Captain England behaved not only
enriches the psychological embodiment of the piratical subject, it
also draws a curtain around certain kinds of behavior between
pirates that do not jibe with their hypermasculinity.
The sodomite’s private sexual transgressions—like the pirate’s
public economic transgressions—are criminalized. But unlike the
pirate’s private identity, the sodomite’s private identity as homo
eroticus is foregrounded. In a reversal of the pirate’s
representations, the sodomite’s economic crimes are masked.
Sodomites do not marry, and even if they do, as the author of Plain
Reasons argues, they are unable to “perform.” These men are thus
left out of the heterosexual domestic economy. Armstrong and
Foucault have shown us the economic rami cations of
“heterosexual” desire and the rise of capitalism. Heterosexual
desire occupies a dominant place in an emergent middle-class
society. This is a society that, as Armstrong writes, classi es men
and women into separate and interlocking spheres of economic
subjectivity (59). Armstrong argues that the domestic wife “was
supposed to complement [her husband’s] role as an earner and
producer with hers as a wise spender and tasteful consumer” (59).
The desire displayed by the sodomitical subject has no place in this
paradigm because he has no economic value in a world centered
on desire between the genders. There is then a subtle merging of
the sodomite’s distinct sexual crimes and his implicit economic
transgression against the gendered model of the transmission of
capital.
The parallels between the sodomitical subject and the piratical
subject would be even stronger in the passage quoted above if the
author of Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy did not further
demonize the sexuality of the sodomite and erase his economic
transgression. In not very imaginative poetry, the anonymous
author joins the sodomite’s identity with his acts:

By thy jaws all lank and thin;

By that forc’d unmeaning grin:
Thou appear’st to Humane Eyes,
Like some Ape of monstrous Size;
Yet an Ape thou can’st not be,
Apes are more adroit than thee;
Thy Odittys so much my Mind perplex;
I neither can De ne thy Kind or Sex. (26–27)

The sodomite’s “kind,” or his “identity” and his “sex,” or his

gender, “perplex” the author because the sodomite is a man who
acts in a nonmasculine way. “Odd” as the sodomite appears in this
doggerel, his appearance is inseparable from his sexual identity
and his nonhuman action: “Like some Ape of monstrous Size.” In a
dichotomous world of black and white, men and women, or pirate
and legitimate merchant, the feminized sodomite is positioned
against both the heterosexual man and the heterosexual woman.
Since he does not act like a man, and he is not a woman, how can
he be “human”? To the author of Plain Reasons, the sodomite is
closer to an “Ape” or a beast. But even “an Ape” he cannot be.
This triangular situation recalls the ways the pirate is
positioned as a deviant criminal beyond his economic
transgressions. The monstrous “nature” of the sodomite in this
early-eighteenth-century pamphlet re ects the outrageous
descriptions of the behavior and physicality of individual pirates in
the General History. But while the sodomite’s sexual transgressions
are mostly left to the imagination, the pirate’s o enses, diverse
and not explicitly sexual, are graphically described.
For example, Captain Low, one of the most violent of the
pirates, has an “inhumane temper” (Johnson, 1:293). Johnson
writes (with slightly odd syntax) that Low “ty’d lighted Matches
between Men’s Fingers belonging to a Sloop bound in to Amboy . .
. till the Flesh was all burnt o ” (1:293). Then, after taking two
whalers, Low “caused one of the Master’s Body to be rip’d up, and
his Intrails to be taken out; and cut o the Ears of the other, and
made him eat them himself with Pepper and Salt” (1:301). Captain
Low’s behavior is inhuman, di erent from the sodomite’s behavior
whose sexual acts are too “monstrous” to describe and thus not
human. Low even observes social niceties: he “made” the sea
captain season his own ears before he consumed them, an
ironically civilized gesture in a world of uncivilized behavior.
Further, despite their despicable actions, England, Low, and their
ilk appear “normal” within the terms of masculine embodiment,
while the sodomite is monstrously and uncertainly embodied “like
some Ape of monstrous Size.”
Johnson depicts the “inhumanity” of the pirate’s acts, in
contrast to the “nonhumanity” of the sodomite’s acts and
appearance portrayed by the author of Plain Reasons. The
sodomite’s acts are “impossible to imagine” since desire between
two men makes no sense and goes against “nature.” Because he
lives in conventional society, then, the sodomite must be “less than
an ape” or not human.13 The pirate, on the other hand, never loses
his humanity, violent as it may be, despite his brutality toward
followers of the status quo. The violent acts he performs on others
are graphically represented. These representations, I would argue,
attempt to mask the sexual connotations that can be uncovered in
a transgressive homosocial piratical society.
According to Joel Baer, the concept of “hostis humani generis
suggested the extent to which a pirate was thought beyond the pale
of civilized society and hence the lawful prey of any who could
destroy him by foul means or fair.”14 He points out that in the
early eighteenth century the decisive legal view of piratical acts
and their consequences allowed the state extraordinary power.
According to early-eighteenth-century legal thinking, the pirates’
“total denial of human values disabled them from claiming the
protection of any established state and validated the severity of
their punishments. As they have willingly denied the social feelings
that distinguish men from beasts, so mankind may deny to them
the bene ts of distinctly human institutions, such as civil law”
(Baer, 8). This interpretation of eighteenth-century beliefs about
“piracy rights” demonstrates the way the state recognized how
beyond the pale the pirates were, because of, as we shall see, the
pirates’ establishment of their own highly organized social
institutions. Baer points to a paradox: on the one hand, pirates are
more beast than man; on the other hand, they have rules and
regulations that make them more man than beast.
The General History deals with this problem: by the terms of
English maritime law, the pirates can hardly be distinguished from
“beasts,” yet at the same time, they create homosocial utopian
centers in Madagascar or sites of wild excess in the West Indies.
One is a remote outpost on the European trading route, the other
smack in the middle of colonial trade.15 Unlike judicial minds that
designate the pirates as ipso facto criminals, Johnson complicates
matters; he contrasts the “bestial” natures of pirates such as
Captain Low to other pirates’ heroic attempts to maintain a
di erent kind of society, for example, Captain Misson’s “utopia” on
Madagascar. Johnson vacillates between depicting the pirate as an
economic outlaw and portraying him as a political exemplar.
 Captain Misson became the democratically elected leader of a
utopian society on Madagascar called Libertalia:

Misson thanked [his comrades] for the Honour they conferr’d upon him, and
promised he would use the Power they gave for the publick Good only, and hoped,
as they had the Bravery to assert their Liberty, they would be unanimous in the
preserving it, and stand by him in what should be found expedient for the Good of
all, and should never exert his Power, or think himself other than their Comrade, but
when the Necessity of A airs should oblige him. (2:14)

Baer—who attributes the General History to Defoe—argues that

“Defoe as well as John Esquemeling, historian of the West Indian
Buccaneers, simply highlighted the depravity of criminals already
notorious for barbarism” (17). But I suggest that the author of the
General History does more than “simply highlight” the criminals’
barbarity; he emphasizes their radical departure from societal
norms in other ways as well. Misson and his men are still hostis
humani generis because they will plunder any country’s ships.
However, they self-consciously “assert their Liberty” and create
their own society against the state. They individually ght to
create better lives for themselves in their own society, apart from
the structures of English government and power. The pirates were
not necessarily religious dissenters, but as Hill suggests, they did
dissent from the status quo of nationalism and class di erence that
left them alienated and in poverty.16
Because Johnson’s chapter “Of Captain Misson” is a history,
and because Misson is a product of Johnson’s imagination, the
liberty espoused by Misson is a literary—or ctional—reality. That
is, because his life is in a history, Misson and his utopia become
“true” or as real as any other pirate depicted with a biography in
the General History. This “truth” in turn threatens the total
demonization of the pirate that the legal reality intends. Who in
the General History are the “real” pirates? Blackbeard, Avery, Kidd,
and Bonnet existed, and hard evidence, much of it available at the
Public Record O ce in London, reported the threats they posed
and the attempts to capture them. Misson, on the other hand,
probably did not exist, but within the explicitly “historical” terms
of the General History he is as real as any of the pirates, and his
actions as genuine as Blackbeard’s atrocities.
Furthermore, the “liberty” espoused by Misson is a radical idea
in early-eighteenth-century England. The early-eighteenth-century
concept of liberty itself “came to be a negative one. . . . The
Englishman’s house is his castle, a ‘liberty’ in the feudal state from
which state power is excluded.”17 Obviously, this idea of liberty is
only for those who can a ord their own property, their own
“castle.” Misson and his men are pirates who assert their liberty
despite their class and propertied situation. They make a world—
build themselves a castle—dependent on other people’s property
(the plunder) on an island far from Great Britain (Madagascar).
Not all the pirates are like Misson, who heroically challenged
European class division, or like Captain Avery, who captured the
public imagination by staging a spectacular act of plunder against
the in del Great Mogul. The bloodthirsty, ear-roasting Captain
Low was emphatically not a hero. Edward Thatch, better known as
Blackbeard, was an unredeemable monster who preyed
indiscriminately on English citizens in the colonies and treated his
own crew with self-conscious brutality. (Of course, even
Blackbeard got grudging respect from Johnson—“a couragious
Brute”—as we saw in the introduction.)
Like the sodomite, the pirate will “chuse to run into unnatural
Vices with one another,” that is, piracy. Unlike the sodomite—that
“Man of Clouts”—the pirate is portrayed as an individualist. He
can most certainly “perform”—exempli ed by the havoc he
unleashes at sea—because the British government has de ned him
as “a common enemy against all mankind.” Both the pirate and
the sodomite share complicated homosocial bonds. Unlike the
horror shown toward the sodomite, who could only be demonized
and thus remained a criminal, complex reactions that individualize
pirates such as Blackbeard, Misson, and England disclose both
respect and admiration, along with abhorrence.
Pirate society is an alternative world governed by di erent
kinds of norms not de ned by gender di erence. Both the pirate
and the sodomite are attracted to and gravitate toward other men.
For the sodomite, this attraction is explicitly eroticized. For the
pirate, this attraction is homosocial, but implicitly eroticized
because he is culturally deviant, yet his sexuality is neither
questioned nor determined. However, the heightened masculinity
of the piratical subject comes to interrupt and complicate
bifurcations in depictions of gender and economic representation
that leave out notions of sexuality. Moreover, the piratical subject
interrupts burgeoning domestic concepts of subjectivity that
elevate heterosexuality as the only norm. He shows the ne line
that separates transgressive homosocial and homoerotic
relationships. The pirate will never “dwindle into nothingness,”
like the “e eminate race” described by the author of Plain Reasons
for the Growth of Sodomy. To use Michel Serres’s terminology, the
pirate is a parasite on the social and cultural norms represented by
domesticity. The noise that the pirate makes is too loud. That noise
cannot be suppressed because the noisemaker—the piratical
subject or here the heroic Captain Misson—is represented as
economically and culturally unstable. The piratical subject, unlike
the sodomitical subject, will not stay in a xed position, either as
an economic transgressor or as a romanticized hero. You never
know what the pirate will do next.
In the opening of the chapter on Major Stede Bonnet, ironically
one of the most celebrated pirates of the age despite his supposed
incompetence,18 Johnson writes,

The Major was a Gentleman of good Reputation . . . and had the Advantage of a liberal
Education. He had the least Temptation of any Man to follow such a Course of Life,
for his Condition was superior to any Thing that could have been expected from the
most fortunate Adventures in the pyratical Way: It was surprizing to every one, to
hear of the Major’s Enterprize, in the Island where he lived; and as he was generally
esteem’d and honoured, before he broke out into open Acts of Pyracy, so he was
afterwards rather pitty’d than condemned, by those that had been acquainted with
him, believing that his Humour of going a pyrating, proceeded from a Disorder in his
 Mind, which had been but too visible in him, some Time before this wicked
Undertaking [; and which is said to have been occasioned by some Discomforts he
found in a married State]. (1:60, bracketed section from 91, 2d ed.)

I do not wish to be reductive and make overly simplistic

connections between piracy and sodomy; however, in this passage
one can locate sites that mask the threat of the pirate as a
sexualized individual much the same way that the sodomite’s threat
is trivialized in eighteenth-century literature.19 Johnson calls
Bonnet’s deviance a “Humor of going a Pyrating, proceeding from
a Disorder in his Mind.” Bonnet is “psychologically” warped into a
course of piracy, just as we see the sodomite “bent” and de ned by
his sexuality. Indeed, Johnson (and thus the readers) de nes
Bonnet by his piratical self. His identity cannot be separated from
his acts of piracy. Bonnet’s medical disorder helps Johnson explain
his surprise that an otherwise upstanding man should turn pirate
and “debase human nature.”
But Bonnet’s story shows the instability of the piratical subject.
Because of Bonnet’s failure as criminal he is “pitty’d” rather than
“condemned,” seen as “ill qualify’d for the Business,” as Johnson
puts it (1:91, 2d ed.). The menace Bonnet poses as a pirate is very
real, since he and his crew did commit acts of piracy. Yet Johnson
obscures that threat because he emphasizes a dysfunctional
marriage over Bonnet’s criminal activities.
The bracketed section at the end of this long quotation comes
from the second edition of the General History. When Johnson
revised the text he added the reference to “discomforts of the
married state.” Johnson interprets a medical illness, a “disorder in
the mind,” as a gendered domestic problem; the disorder is caused
by vague di culties with his marriage. These “discomforts” could
be anything from impotence to arguments with his wife over
money, drinking, or housekeeping. Two hundred years later, the
pirate historian Philip Gosse explicates the “discomforts” and turns
them into explicitly “psychological” problems. Gosse writes that
“the Major’s mind had become unbalanced owing to the unbridled
nagging of Mrs. Bonnet.”20 Other historians even in the late
twentieth century pick up Gosse’s conjecture. In a 1992 history,
Jenifer Marx writes that “Discord with his shrewish wife may have
spurned [Bonnet] on” (emphasis mine). According to another
recent historian, Clinton Black, “[Bonnet’s] friends were
scandalized at rst by his strange behavior, but later sympathized
with him when it was discovered that he had gone to sea to escape
his wife’s unbridled nagging.”21 Bonnet’s history is the perfect
example of a pirate story that gets told and retold, changing little
by little. The assumption made by Gosse, and perpetuated by
anyone who reads his book or uses his unreliable history as a
source, is that Bonnet left his wife because she was an impossible
nag. However, Bonnet did not leave his wife for another woman;
he became a pirate, a man driven by a shrewish wife to live in a
transgressive world with other men.
If a writer can devise the transition from “discomforts in the
married state” to general nagging, an alternative suggests itself:
the “discomforts” are sexual. Middle-class society privileges
domestic relations as an explanatory structure. “Discomforts in the
married state” can be linked to gendered attraction and sexual
performance as much as to a “nagging” wife. “Nor was the Major
at all quali ed for this Business,” Johnson tells the reader, “he not
being acquainted with Sea A airs, but had always lived at Land, in
a peaceable and creditable manner” (1:60). Johnson explains that
Bonnet bought a ship with the speci c intent of going on the
account. Bonnet did not have to turn pirate to get away from his
wife, presumably because he could have become a legitimate sea
merchant despite his inexperience. Johnson and Gosse blame
Bonnet’s wife, thereby occluding the possibility of homoerotic and
economically transgressive desire as an explanation for his choice
to turn criminal.
The traces of homoerotic noise suggested by the General
History’s biography of Bonnet and concealed by Gosse’s explication
are indicative of the shift from a homosocial economic license at
sea for the ordinary seaman or merchant to a transgressively
homosocial, and thus potentially homoerotic, identity for the
piratical subject. Bonnet’s main crime seems to be leaving his
“nagging wife” rather than the actual piracy. At the very least, the
piracy is a radical departure for a man “with a seeming Sense of
Virtue and Religion” (Johnson, 1:60). Bonnet may be rather
“pitty’d than condemned” by his friends who are not a ected by
Bonnet’s economic threat. Yet his criminal actions result in a
blistering sentencing speech by the judge who presides over
Bonnet’s trial. The judge—a spokesman for the state— rst points
out that Bonnet is a gentleman and has had a “liberal education”
(Johnson, 1:82). He then tells Bonnet, “but that considering the
Course of your Life and Actions, I have just Reason to fear that the
Principles of Religion that had been instiled [sic] into you by your
Education, have been at least corrupted, if not entirely defaced, by
the Scepticism and In delity of this wicked Age” (1:83). The judge
fears that Bonnet’s crimes represent the worst aspects of early-
eighteenth-century social trends, a denial of all the values that hold
society together. Bonnet’s “in delity” has less to do with his actual
crimes of piracy—his status as hostis humani generis—and more to
do with the “crime” of turning his back on his wife and what
Crusoe calls the “middle state” (Robinson Crusoe, 28). The point
that the judge makes about Bonnet’s moral violations begins to
unravel, displaying the complicated merging of homo economicus
and homo eroticus in early-eighteenth-century society. In a
domestic ideology, new values in which sexuality became identi ed
with gendered domesticity and capital economy clashed with old
values, based on class di erences, bloodlines or patrilineal
inheritance, and religious beliefs.
In a conventional, middle-class world, the meaning of
“in delity” and “scepticism” is wrapped up not only in notions of
religion, class, and sovereignty, but with gendered sexual
de nitions as well. The state and the married couple are complexly
intertwined. Bonnet’s “in delity” is not only against the common
good, or property rights, of British society—an economic
transgression—but against a domestic ideology, his relations with
his wife. Bonnet’s embrace of the pirate way of life reverses the
judge’s logic. Bonnet’s “scepticism” causes him to leave his wife.
His abandonment of normative society leads to a strengthening of
transgressive fraternal and political bonds in the pirate world.22
Bonnet has been represented as the least “dangerous” of the
legendary pirates. So incompetent was he, according to the General
History and later sources, that when Blackbeard joined forces with
him, he relieved him of his command and let Bonnet keep only his
title. But the historical evidence suggests an alternative “truth.”
Bonnet did pose a great threat to trade along the coast of the
Carolinas. Newspapers such as the Weekly-Journal gave regular
accounts of Bonnet’s crimes.23 Even the judge’s speech at Bonnet’s
trial gives ample evidence for his success: “you pyratically took and
ri ed no less than thirteen Vessels, since you sail’d from North-
Carolina. So that you might have been indicted, and convicted of
eleven more Acts of Pyracy, since you took the King’s Act of Grace,
and pretended to leave that wicked Course of Life” (Johnson,
1:107, 2d ed.). However, the literary insistence on Bonnet’s
incompetence as a pirate, coupled with the in delity and
skepticism he is accused of by the state, hints at a di erent kind of
sexual desire for the piratical subject, with pirate traditions to
authorize deviance and nondeviance.
Bonnet remains an important gure in pirate history to both
early-eighteenth-century and modern writers in part because he
tried to do something about his “inadequacy” by turning pirate.
Like the sodomite in Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, Bonnet
is one of those “antiquated Lechers; who have out-lived the Power
of Enjoyment; and so Conscious of their own Insu ciency they
dare not look a Woman in the Face” (14). But there is a di erence
between the sodomite and Bonnet. Bonnet tried to indicate his
masculinity by turning pirate. He may no longer have desired his
wife, but he was not an e eminate, e eminized monster.
Pirates have their own notions of conformity, but “conformity”
becomes transgressive camaraderie. Their deviant homosocial
brotherhood is reminiscent of the fellowship and camaraderie
shown by the libertines. The libertine, exempli ed by Rochester,
was of course an aristocrat who gloried in sexual anarchy and had
sex with both women and boys. The pirates, outside the
conventions of English society, do not belong to any class. Most of
these men were ordinary seamen turned pirates, though some—
like Captain Misson, Johnson’s ctional hero—came from noble
backgrounds. But the pirates’ anarchy was primarily economic.
Their sexuality is curiously ambiguous. Yet their individuality is
exempli ed by their heightened masculinity.
Johnson relates the career of the pirate Captain Vane and his
crew, who plundered a ship bound for Providence. He writes that
they “went to a small Island and cleaned; where they shared their
Booty, and spent some Time in a riotous Manner of Living, as is
the Custom of Pyrates” (1:104). The ordinary sailor goes to port
after weeks or months of legitimate sailing and nds a woman.
The pirate goes to an isolated island to share his booty with his
fellow transgressors. What exactly is the “riotous Manner of
Living” that is their custom? By the 1720s sexuality is a component
of identity nearly impossible to ignore in any “history” of an
individual or group. Because sexuality and identity cannot be
separated, the dead silence in the space of the pirate’s homosocial
private life suggests that the transgressive homosocial world of the
pirate requires the presence of homoeroticism. Whether or not the
pirates sodomize one another is beside the point. Rather, sodomy is
tantalizingly implicit and repressed. Despite popular perceptions,
women were left out of almost all pirate literature in the
eighteenth century. Captain Misson’s story is one exception—but
the women are “natives” and Johnson’s purpose is to legitimize a
utopian community, to depict and promote an alternative political
world. But because other pirate representations are consistently
unstable, the pirates’ sexuality is repressed in most of these
depictions.
Further, because sexuality becomes a de ning trait of identity,
to ignore the repression of sexuality is to recognize its existence.
When Captain Davis stops a quarrel between some fellow pirates,
it is di cult not to hear traces of homoeroticism in his speech:
“Hearkee you Cocklin, and La Bouse, I nd by strength’ning you, I
have put a Rod into your Hands to whip my self, but I’m still able
to deal with you both; but since we met in Love, let us part in
Love, for I nd that three of a Trade can never agree” (Johnson, 1:
156). In a burgeoning domestic ideology, “love” takes on meanings
that link capital and domesticity with sexuality.24 The pirates—
enemies to everyone except each other—meet “in love” because
they are three of a kind who share through their camaraderie a like
identity as piratical subjects. Captain Davis links “love” with his
status as a pirate—an illegitimate businessman. Conventional
though this use of “love” may be, ordinary merchants probably did
not meet or part in love because they were inherently competitive.
Nor did they “whip” each other with “rods.” Unlike the merchant
adventurers who sign contracts with one another, pirates “share
their booty . . . as is the Custom of Pyrates.” This “Custom” of
sharing their spoils is based not on legal contracts, but on their
word as pirates. The complication lies in what exactly a pirate’s
word means. Are they criminals or heroes? Their competitive
“nature” is de ned against the merchants whom they plunder.
Pirates “part in love” because they recognize their likeness as both
pirates (or criminals) and piratical subjects in this world without
women.
Implied homoeroticism is just one transgressive trait of the
pirates that should be emphasized. Norman O. Brown writes that
“language is an operational superstructure on an erotic base.”25 If
Brown is correct, and language is always erotically driven, then
the profanity exhibited by the pirates is a transgressive vocabulary
that celebrates the pirates’ deviance. In Defoe’s Serious Re ections,
Crusoe says, “Talking Bawdy, the Sodomy of the Tongue has the
most of ill Manners, and the least of a Gentleman in it, of any Part
of common Discourse” (105). Crusoe’s metaphor is a striking
denunciation of verbal transgression. The language of the pirate is,
in Defoe’s words, sodomitical. In the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries reformers complained about the profane way
the youth spoke. William and Mary and Anne issued many
proclamations to stop the populace from cursing.26 Pirates, not
bound by any proclamations and not “gentlemen,” glory in the
profanity.
Johnson depicts the pirate Captain Fly’s dialogue with a
prisoner as a series of signi ers that the reader must decipher:

Look ye, Captain Atkinson, it is not that we care a T--d for your Company, G-d d--n
ye; G-d d--n my Soul, not a T--d by G-d, and that’s fair; but G-d D--n ye, and G-d’s B---
d and W---ds, if you dont act like an honest Man G-d d--n ye, and o er to play us any
Rogues Tricks by G-d, and G-d sink me, but I’ll blow your Brains out; G-d d--n me, if I
don’t. (2:235)

And so on for a full page. What fascinates is what is not being

said, and how Johnson’s represents what is not being said. Fly’s
discourse, if one can call it that, is like a pie to the face of polite
speakers of English, or more speci cally, socially sanctioned
language. The author of Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy does
not have to describe the sodomitical act because his readers will
understand what he implies. Defoe can call “bawdy” language
“Sodomy of the Tongue,” and his readers will understand the
metaphor. At the very least, it is morally wrong, ill mannered, and
self-consciously transgressive in middle-class society. Anyone can
 ll in the gaps in the representation of Fly’s words, and if not,
even the most naive reader knows why the gaps are there. This
depiction of pirate verbal abuse is a word game that compels the
reader to see into the pirate’s mind, or at least the mind as
Johnson represents it. Fly’s censored profanity is so distinctive
because it parallels the language that we know. We can all ll in
the blanks; however, the way Johnson represents Fly is both alien
and familiar. The speech’s deviation lies in the ways readers must
imagine profanity as “Sodomy of the Tongue.”
The exuberant use of profanity contrasts pirates with sailors in
eighteenth-century literary representations. However, language at
sea contrasts pirates and sailors with landlubbers who speak
“normal” English because seamen use specialized sea terminology.
The seamen’s dialect is further complicated by the makeup of the
sailors on board a pirate ship: men from all over Europe who
speak an alphabet-soup patois (Redicker, 150, 162–69, 278). If
English, Dutch, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Spanish, and other
languages are combined into a singular tongue, a sailor cannot
understand it unless he has been initiated into its mysteries.27
Indeed, Edward Ward in The London-Spy has a lot of fun
representing the sailor’s speech. Ward overhears sailors talking in
a tavern, and uses that opportunity to lampoon the sailors and
make their language almost unintelligible:

They swear and so forth and talk a funny way “The Devil D—n the Ratlings of these
Wooden Shrouds, for I have broke my Shings against ’em; I had rather run up to the
 Cross Trees of the Main topmast in a Storm, than six Rounds of these confounded

Land Ladders, after the Drinking a Kan of Phlip or a Bowl of Punch.”28

Sailors speak a strange language—almost English but not familiar.

What are Cross Trees or Land Ladders, anyhow? The pirate’s
“Sodomy of the Tongue” shows that pirates deviate even from the
ordinary seaman’s language. The way Fly’s dialogue gets recorded
works to horrify everyone and point up the transgressive “nature”
of an already fallen language. Ordinary seamen may swear as
much as pirates, but their oaths do not get written down. Johnson
reproduces Captain Fly’s oaths precisely to emphasize their
transgressive nature. Captain Fly revels in the profanity, in the
“sodomy” of his tongue in ways impossible for individuals tied
down by conventions of decorum.
A century later, an edition of the General History dated 1825
represents Captain Fly’s speech in the third person: “Upon Mr.
Atkinson’s desiring to have his liberty with the others, Capt. Fly
refused it with the most horrid oaths and imprecations.”29 A
century has “tamed” Captain Fly considerably. A reader must now
base an understanding of the “horrid oaths” not on dialogue by
Johnson (a vernacular that creates a kind of piratical “character”
“horrid” in its baseness), but on the mythological construction of
the piratical subject. Fly’s character is a construct and is refracted
by representations of all the pirates. Johnson used his explicit
representation of Fly’s profanity as one of the building blocks for
the foundation of pirate mythos.
 The reader of 1825 knew what the “horrid oaths and
imprecations” signi ed. In other words, the Fly of Johnson is
portrayed as transgressive to readers in the 1720s in ways that the
Fly of the 1825 edition does not have to be. By an edition of 1860,
Fly has been excised from the volume.30 Moral behavior, the
internalization of cultural standards, is so embedded, as Foucault
would argue, that for the reader explicit language transgression by
a pirate like Fly no longer needs to be forthrightly represented.
Fly’s transgressive language is part of the cultural knowledge of
the piratical subject.
There is more to pirate deviance than language di erence.
Despite their utterly masculine embodiment, Johnson’s pirates at
times embrace an e eminate outward deportment and dress at
odds with their reputations. For example, in the chapter “Of
Captain Martel” Johnson represents pirate cross-dressers who self-
consciously parody the beau. In one sense, of course, the pirates
are lampooning class di erences. In the early eighteenth century,
however, the sodomite began to be depicted as e eminate and
feminized, as historians like Trumbach and Greenberg have shown
us. A “correspondent” to the General History, who was captured by
the pirate Martel, writes,

Notwithstanding the melancholy Situation I was in, I could not refrain laughing when
I saw the [pirates] who went on board the Greyhound, return to their own Ship; for
they had, in rummaging my Cabbin, met with a Leather Powder Bag and Pu , with
which they had powder’d themselves from Head to Foot, walk’d the Decks with their
 Hats under the Arms, minced their Oaths, and a ected all the Airs of a Beau, with an

Aukwardness would have forced a Smile from a Cynick. (2:334)31

The complications in this passage are fascinating. To use the

critic Lennard Davis’s terminology, Johnson is “framing” it through
the correspondence of a sea captain. This captain relates the story
of pirates who use his powder in order to make fun of a “Beau.”
We easily picture the pirates as great hairy masculine men,
particularly since we have read about their violent and profane
ways and seen engravings in books. These powdered pirates
parody the e eminacy of a certain kind of masculinity,
represented by the beau and, implicitly, by the e eminate
sodomite—that “Man of Clouts.”
During the Restoration e eminacy as portrayed by the fop
gure did not necessarily constitute sexual identity. By the 1720s,
however, the beau and the e eminate sodomite were embodied in
ways that were much more intertwined. One need only to read the
short novel Love Letters between a Certain Late Nobleman and the
Famous Mr. Wilson (1723) to see how this change occurred.32
Wilson—a young beau-about-town—cross-dresses in order to
sexually excite the “Late Nobleman.” What follows in the short
novel is a passionate physical a air between two men.
Johnson’s pirates nd the powder in the rst place in the cabin
of the man who is amused by their burlesque: a sea captain.
Presumably, this sea captain powders himself as well. Who is being
feminized here? The pirates, already implicitly homoeroticized
even though they are masculine in their deportment? The captain
—the pirate’s masculine nemesis—whose powder is used and is
certainly not representing himself as e eminate? Society, which
makes the powdered “beau” a paragon of fashion but likewise
feminizes the sodomite? The pirates’ parody becomes very
ambiguous for readers, who must envision what they know of the
pirate and balance that with what they see in “everyday” life.
The objects of the parody are not only the pirates who “mince
their oaths”—as much as the correspondent would like to think—
but also the correspondent himself, whose powder creates these
dandi ed pirates. On the other hand, homoerotic noise suggests
that the pirates are being parodied as well, despite their genuinely
masculine image. The “noise” insinuates that a mincing pirate is
not too far out of the realm of possibility, that something about the
pirate makes his parodic e eminacy disturbing, if e eminacy
marks homoerotic identity as well as the class di erence
represented by the beau.
The parodic behavior of the pirates in the Martel chapter is
further complicated by the reader’s awareness of pirate dress. The
pirate’s costume, like the sailor’s, is distinctive. Put together from
the clothes of dead or captured sailors, booty, and what they can
scrounge up, their clothing was patched and falling apart. After
months of staying unwashed, the pirate wore whatever he could or
whatever the captain could nd. For example, Woodes Rogers, in
his Voyage, tells the readers how his crew was dressed: “We had six
Taylors at work for several weeks to make them Clothing, and
pretty well supply’d their Wants by the spare Blankets and red
Clothes belonging to the Owners; and what every O cer could
spare, was alter’d for the Mens Use” (107). However, some pirates
were known for their sartorial air. Indeed, at times Johnson
emphasizes their singular appearance as part of their transgressive
characterization. For example, “Calico Jack” Rackham—
remembered because he captained the ship on which the “female
pirates” Mary Read and Anne Bonney served—got his nickname
because of his outrageous dress.33
Captain Roberts, about whom Johnson writes in the most
detail, is a snappy dresser, even for a dandi ed pirate:

Roberts himself made a gallant Figure, at the Time of the Engagement, being dressed
in a rich crimson Damask Wastcoat, and Breeches, a red Feather in his Hat, and a
Gold Chain Ten Times round his Neck, a Sword in his Hand, and two pair of Pistols
hanging at the End of a Silk Sling, which was slung over his Shoulders (according to
the Fashion of the Pyrates). (1:213)

Even during battle, Captain Roberts dresses in a glamorously

dazzling way at odds with the aggressively masculine embodiment
maintained by the pirates themselves—Blackbeard comes to mind
as the most obvious example—and their chroniclers. However,
Roberts’s foppish dress and its e ect on his behavior are mitigated
because he “is said to have given his Orders with Boldness, and
Fire” (Johnson, 1:213). Roberts refuses to allow the re ned
impression he makes on an audience—or his enemies—to in uence
the way he acts as a pirate: “with Boldness, and Fire.”
Roberts may wear gold chains and ing silk slings over his
shoulder “according to the Fashion of the Pyrates,” but he is a
pirate, rst and foremost, who like Captain Fly can swear oaths,
and, like Blackbeard, ght to the death. Roberts revels in the
explicit dichotomy between his behavior and his distinctive
costume. Roberts can shout to his crew, “We would set Fire to the
Powder with a pistol, and go all merrily to Hell together”
(Johnson, 1:179), but he wears clothing parenthetically dismissed
by Johnson as “fashion.” “Fashion” was a word loaded with
contemptible, unmanly connotations in the early eighteenth
century. But fashion shared by the pirates suggests that their world
was in fact a society, with its own standards of fashion.
In the preface to the second edition Johnson writes, “I presume
we need make no Apology for giving the Name of a History to the
following sheets, though they contain nothing but the Actions of a
Parcel of Robbers” (1:A4r-v, 2d ed.). This “Parcel of Robbers” may
prey on innocent sailors and merchants of the sea and are indeed
criminals. However, they are also portrayed by Johnson as
antiheroes who buck tradition and live by their own rules. These
rules challenge conventional depictions of masculinity and
masculine desire.
6
A Brave, a Just, an Innocent, and a Noble
Cause

[I]f there is one common Enemy, we have the less need to have an Enemy in our Bowels.

—Daniel Defoe, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters

Every Herb, every Shrub and Tree, and even our own Bodies, teach us this Lesson, that
nothing is durable or can be counted upon. Time passes away insensibly, one Sun follows
another, and brings its Changes with it.

—Charles Johnson, General History

Captain Roberts’s biography is by far the longest in the

General History.1 Johnson says that this is because Roberts
“ravaged the Seas longer than the rest, and of Consequence there
must be a greater Scene of Business in his Life” (1:A4r). Captain
Roberts is intended to represent all the pirates: “we found the
Circumstances in Roberts’s Life, and other Pyrates, either as to
pyratical Articles, or any Thing else, to be the same, we thought it
best to give them but once, and chose Roberts’s Life for that
Purpose, he having made more Noise in the World, than some
others” (1:A4r). The “noise” that Roberts makes is no “noisier”
than that of other pirates. Undeniably certain pirates from the rst
volume will be better remembered because of their individual
exploits: Avery, Blackbeard, and Bonnet are the most obvious
examples. In Roberts, however, Johnson nds the pirate whom he
can most usefully represent as both criminal and hero. This
dichotomy most obviously is exempli ed by The King of Pirates, an
“autobiography”; by Captain Singleton, explicitly a novel; and by
the ctional chapter “Of Captain Misson” in volume 2 of the
General History. With Captain Roberts, Johnson is able to build a
“history” that pulls together such facts as trial records, a list of
articles, and names of men condemned, as well as an accretion of
detail and a number of anecdotes, all of which work to create a
“real” history of a pirate. Using Roberts as his de ning pirate,
Johnson can analyze many of the transgressive qualities of the
pirate and demonstrate how the pirate comes to transgress in
con icting heroic and criminal ways.
As a way of trying to stereotype the pirates, however, this
approach back res. Johnson positions Roberts near the end of the
rst volume, so that Roberts is preceded by many other pirates,
each of whom exhibits a distinct individuality or personality.
Further, in volume 2 Johnson emphasizes the peculiarities of many
di erent pirates, beginning with the memorable Captain Misson.
The history of one pirate cannot contain all the variations of
character displayed in pirate history. And variations of
individuality undermine Johnson’s attempts to “tame” pirate
representations through Roberts’s history.
 For example, the “democratic values” of the pirate, well known
before Johnson’s and Defoe’s books, are foregrounded throughout
the General History.2 When pirates “went on the account” they
usually wrote up articles that detailed the distribution of the booty
as well as prescribed their behavior on board the pirate ship. The
articles are “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of
resources to be found anywhere in the early eighteenth century”
(Rediker, 264). Further, “The pay system represented a radical
departure from practices in the merchant service, Royal Navy, or
privateering. It leveled an elaborate hierarchy of pay ranks and
decisively reduced the disparity between the top and bottom of the
scale” (Rediker, 264). Besides percentage scales that regulated the
distribution of booty based on a pirate’s position on board ship, the
articles might include prohibitions against deserting, ghting,
stealing, and “meddling” with women. The articles even included a
kind of insurance that detailed speci c reparations for loss of limbs
or eyes. “The articles also regulated discipline aboard ship, though
‘discipline’ is probably a misnomer for a system of rules that left
large ranges of behavior uncontrolled” (Rediker, 265).
The distinction between rules and “uncontrolled behavior”
interests me. “Behavior” is de ned by the system that the pirates
are rebelling against. Roberts’s articles serve as signs for Johnson’s
commentary on the political, and thus cultural, dangers of piracy.
But the articles complicate the way Johnson represents Captain
Misson and other “radical” pirates. The pirates’ articles
demonstrate the extent to which the pirate milieu opposed the
political structures of conventional society and the economic
structures of mercantile seafaring.
According to Johnson, Captain Roberts and his crew “formed a
Set of Articles, to be sign’d and sworn to, for the better
Conservation of their Society, and doing Justice to one another. . .
. How indeed Roberts could think that an Oath would be obligatory,
where De ance had been given to the Laws of God and Man, I
can’t tell” (1:169). Johnson explicitly represents Roberts and his
men as being a “society,” but they are outside “the Laws of God
and Man.” At the same time—even though the men have a society
—he is unable to comprehend why they would have articles in the
rst place since they are so deplorably criminal. Johnson assumes
here that any “oath” replicates conventional society’s values. The
pirates, however, have created their own society—as Johnson has
demonstrated throughout the General History. Their oath, then, is
given within the terms of camaraderie in their own transgressive
world.
Sodomites had a secret society as well, as numerous pamphlets
make clear.3 Molly clubs were gathering places for sodomites in
early-eighteenth-century London. But these clubs represent a secret
society within the conventional structures of English society.
Johnson himself sets up the pirates as creating a “society,” with a
moral system in “de ance” of the world. The pirates, who “defy”
the “Laws of God and Man,” are, as we have seen, the masculine
alternative to the hero, opposed to the legitimate sea merchant
and the hierarchical economic system that he represents. The
di culty for Johnson lies in representing the pirates as hostis
humani generis and at the same time avoiding the contradiction
that they morally and economically support one another at sea.
After listing Roberts’s articles—a model, we are told, for other
pirates’ regulations—Johnson comments on each one. For
example, article 5 declares that the pirates must make every e ort
“To keep their Piece, Pistols, and Cutlass clean, and t for Service”
(1:170). The article itself is straightforward: make sure your gun is
ready to re. Johnson adds embellishments that serve to con rm
the reader’s impression of the pirate:

in this they were extravagantly nice, endeavouring to outdoe one another, in the
Beauty and Richness of their Arms, giving sometimes at an Auction (at the Mast,) 30
or 40 £ a Pair, for Pistols. These were slung in Time of Service, with di erent
coloured Ribbands, over their Shoulders, in a Way peculiar to these Fellows, in
which they took great Delight. (1:170–71)

These embellishments to the forthright article emphasize both the

pirate’s extravagance and his “peculiarities,” his love for costume
and display. The depiction of Captain Roberts in his nery
demonstrates a necessity for Johnson to mark all the pirates as
“other,” both in the earlier descriptions of the costumes of Roberts
and his brethren, and in this description of the need to keep their
weapons “ t for service.” In addition, “30 or 40 £ a Pair, for
Pistols” was an enormous sum in 1724. That the pirates are willing
to “auction” their guns for that much money suggests either the
kind of property that may be important to them (their guns, here)
or their cavalier disregard for money at all (there’s always more
where that came from when the whole world is your enemy).
However, at the same time they may not be quite as “other” as
he maintains, given his construction of their world. Precisely
because the pirates have a society de ned by the articles, their
separate world may be a little too close for comfort. The articles
show that these criminals have their own cultural and legal system.
Johnson must elaborate on the articles to demonstrate that the
pirates still di er from members of English society. That he
reproduces the articles in the rst place implies a way to
complicate the reader’s understanding of the pirate: Is he hero or
villain? Is he civilized or bestial?
Johnson is very careful in this respect. He reemphasizes the
implied perversion of the piratical articles:

These, we are assured, were some of Roberts’s articles, but as they had taken Care to
throw over-board the Original they had sign’d and sworn to, there is a great deal of
Room to suspect, the remainder contained something too horrid to be disclosed to
any, except such as were willing to be Sharers in the Iniquity of them. (1:172)

This is a tantalizing passage. Not only does Johnson rely on

hearsay and innuendo, but he also manages to hint at dark—or
perhaps even sexual—misbehavior. It is hard to tell what he is
getting at, what is “too horrid to be disclosed.” But the “noise” of
pirate transgression interrupts his commentary and makes the
reader ask exactly what “Iniquities” the pirates may be “Sharers
in.” Is Johnson “suspecting” some misdeed other than the usual
pirate misbehavior, that is, plundering, looting, and pillaging? If
so, what horrible secrets lie behind the missing articles? Norman O.
Brown argues that “the mythical archetypes of the race . . . say
things which it is still not possible to say in any other way” (219).
The literal demonization of these “mythical archetypes” suggests
several alternatives for a depiction of hyper-masculine identity
that is inclusive of homoerotic desire.
Given the coded ways deviant sexuality was talked about in
early-eighteenth-century England, it is not going too far out on a
limb to suggest that the “dark secrets” can signify sexual
transgression.4 For example, in The Conspirators, “Britannicus”
compares the authors of the South Sea Bubble to Roman
degenerates like Catiline, who “married several times, but chie y,
as People suspected, for the Convenience of strengthening himself
by Alliances with Great Men, rather than out of any A ection for
the Ladies.” Britannicus takes the innuendo a bit further than is
usual:

For if we may believe some Authors, he had a most unnatural Tast [sic] in his
Gallantries: And in those Hours when he gave a Loose to Love, the Women were
wholly excluded from his Embraces. . . . There are some Vices, which give too gross

Ideas, to be repeated by the Names that are a x’d to them.5

Catiline indulges in vices that are “too gross” to name. Britannicus

uses Catiline and ancient Rome to comment on a dreadful
economic situation caused by implicitly deviant sexual desire.
Roberts and his men—who live in a transgressive world—likewise
wreak havoc on the economic status quo. It is not a
misinterpretation, I would argue, to suggest that homoerotic desire
is implicit in Johnson’s commentary on the pirates’ articles.
Indeed, the physical expression of deviant sexuality is not
entirely prohibited by the articles, as Johnson implies in article 6:

No Boy or Woman to be allowed amongst them. If any Man were found seducing any of
the latter Sex, and carried her to Sea, disguised, he was to su er Death; so that when
any fell into their Hands . . . they put a Centinel over her to prevent ill Consequences
from so dangerous an Instrument . . . ; but then here lies the Roguery; they contend
who shall be Centinel, which happens generally to one of the greatest Bullies, who, to
secure the Lady’s Virtue, will let none lye with her but himself. (1:171)

Although boys and women are not “allowed amongst them”

because of their “disruptive in uence,” there are neither implicit
nor explicit prohibitions against sodomy.6 Either the idea of
sodomy is so beyond the pale that Johnson cannot articulate why
boys should not be “amongst them,” or it never occurs to him that
boys can be a sexually disruptive in uence. We know from naval
records that cabin boys could be as young as twelve or thirteen.
They could easily become pirates if the situation warranted (and
this is exactly what happened to the very young Singleton in
Defoe’s novel). Additionally, there are no bans against “meddling”
with boys: only women are speci ed as sexually threatening.
Whether or not sodomy occurred is, as I have argued, beside the
point. What is to the point is the dead silence in the space between
gendered relations in the “real” world and those in the world of the
pirates. The pirates’ well-known physicality, exempli ed by their
violence, costume, and profanity, complicates homosocial and
heterosexual depictions of their identity that ignore pirate
sexuality.
I have described the articles at length because their importance
to pirate culture allows us to see that their dissemination, in fact,
portrays a “world” of the pirates, a world with its own laws and
proscribed behavior. Those laws are mutable, however, and change
from pirate gang to pirate gang. Although the articles speci cally
prohibit women from being brought on board a pirate ship, two of
the most famous pirates from the “golden age” were women
disguised as men: Mary Read and Anne Bonny.
According to a recent historian of piracy, “Whether Anne and
Mary were in fact the passionate but faithful mates of two of their
fellow pirates or whether they were whores is beside the point. No
one disputes the facts of their dramatic careers which equalled
those of the most dashing pirates.”7 It is exactly the point that Read
and Bonny were sometimes “passionate but faithful mates” and
other times “whores.” This dichotomy is precisely how Johnson and
later writers characterize Read and Bonny, with novelistic detail.
But here the author sweeps aside the ctive qualities of Johnson’s
biography to privilege Read and Bonny’s “dramatic careers which
equalled those of the most dashing pirates.” The trial record deals
with the facts of the crime rather than the perhaps more
interesting personal details of the “female” pirates, the place
where Johnson focuses his attention.8 Read and Bonny would
never be remembered if, rst, they weren’t women, and second,
their stories didn’t emphasize the “whore”/“faithful mate”
dichotomy.
Even though the meager “facts” of these female pirates do not
stand up to this dichotomous scrutiny, Read and Bonny are still
represented as either whores or faithful mates. Any “facts” about
their lives and “dramatic careers” are based on Johnson’s
representation in the General History. In “The Life of Mary Read”
Johnson writes, “some may be tempted to think the whole Story no
better than a Novel or Romance; but since it is supported by many
thousand Witnesses . . . the Truth of it, can be no more contested,
than that there were such Men in the world, as Roberts and Black-
beard, who were Pyrates” (1:117). Read and Bonny’s backgrounds
before they turn pirate sound like the stu of romance novels, a
fact most historians pick up. But most historians do not question
these ctive details.9 Why are their backgrounds described in
greater detail than those of any other pirate in Johnson’s book?
First, Johnson suggests that despite the fact that these pirates are
women, it is no odder that there are female pirates than “such
Men” as the most famous pirates, Roberts and Blackbeard.
Representations of Read and Bonny’s explicit sexuality,
oppositionally gendered in a predominantly homosocial world,
alleviate the anxiety caused by the libertine homoerotic
implications of the all-male pirate world. Second, these
representations of the female pirates, in turn, subvert conventional
gender norms for the reader because Anne Bonny and Mary Read
are pirates in the rst place. And pirates are, with the exception of
Read and Bonny, masculine men who bond with other men.
Finally, Johnson bases his history on “thousands” of witnesses.
As in Defoe’s ction (think of the prefaces to Robinson Crusoe or
Roxana), Johnson asserts testimony based on his own authority as
the writer in order to establish the “truth” of his story. Otherwise,
the history of Read and Bonny could be taken for a “romance” or
“novel.” Just think of all the tales of buried treasure in the
following centuries. Or in the most sensational pirate act, where is
the “evidence” that Captain Avery kidnapped and married the
Great Mogul’s granddaughter? Unlike the stories of Read and
Bonny, the outrageous stories of the male pirates do not need such
veri cation. In other words, pirates live in such a male culture,
with male bonding and pseudolibertine excess as the de ning
features of their culture, that the very oddness of the trangsressive
female pirate demands that the “truth” be told, that it be “veri ed”
by witnesses, particularly in a book explicitly titled a “history.”10
Johnson and the popular and academic writers who follow tell
the same story: both of the female pirates were raised as boys, for
convoluted reasons that involve adultery, illegitimate birth, and
poverty (1:119, 130). In a time of changing gender roles and
de nitions of identity, the implications of their upbringing raise
many questions. In fact, Mary Read “becomes” a man through her
own skill at replicating masculine roles. Read’s cross-dressing skill
—at least in Johnson’s highly anecdotal narrative—demonstrates
the transparency of an essential sexual “nature.”
Before she went to sea Read joined the army, where “she
behaved herself with a great deal of Bravery, yet she could not get
a Commission, they being generally bought and sold” (Johnson,
1:119). Read was never discovered and so she was never kicked
out of the army. It seems odd, then, that it is not her gender but her
class that disables her career. In fact—discounting her gender—
Read’s case is similar to that of many soldiers and sailors in
eighteenth-century England who could not a ord to buy their
commissions.
Read shares her tent with another soldier. After a long
infatuation for both of them, which is of course confusing to the
man she loves since he thinks she is a he, Read “found a Way of
letting him discover her Sex, without appearing that it was done
with Design” (1:120). Johnson leaves the details of her lover’s
discovery unclear. Later writers, however, play with variations on
Read seducing the man by letting her tunic open up to her lover’s
delight and surprise. But Johnson tells us that when the soldier
“thought of nothing but gratifying his Passions with very little
Ceremony . . . [Read] prov’d very reserved and Modest . . . so far
from thinking of making her his Mistress, he now courted her for a
Wife” (1:120). As a soldier—a member of conventional society—
Read is portrayed less as an amazonian warrior than as a faithful
mate: an object of sexual desire.
 Read’s modesty, then, is a part of her female “character.” It is
signi cant, I think, that at this point she is not “at war against all
mankind” but in the service of her country: “The Story of two
Troopers marrying each other, made a great Noise, so that several
O cers were drawn by Curiosity to assist at the Ceremony, and
they agreed among themselves, that every one of them should
make a small Present to the Bride, towards House-keeping, in
consideration of her having been their fellow Soldier” (1:120). In
the topsy-turvy world of Mary Read, she is given a wedding
present not because she is a woman marrying a soldier, but
because she is herself a fellow soldier. Johnson writes that two
soldiers marry, not, I emphasize, that everyone recognizes that a
soldier marries a woman whom he and everyone else thought was
a male soldier. This may be a small distinction, but gender games
are rampant in this chapter. Nothing is as it seems to be.
Soon Read becomes a widow. She goes to sea and joins Captain
Rackham’s pirate ship. Usual prohibitions against women on board
pirate ships are ignored, since Read is still cross dressing. Guess
who else is on the ship?

[Read’s] Sex was not so much as suspected by any Person on board till, Ann Bonny. . .
took a particular Liking to her; in short, Ann Bonny took her for a handsome young
Fellow, and for some Reasons best known to herself, rst discovered her Sex to Mary
Read; Mary Read knowing what she would be at, and being very sensible of her own
Incapacity that Way, was forced to come to a right Understanding with her, and so to
the great Disappointment of Ann Bonny, she let her know she was a Woman also.
(1:122)
Mary Read is dressed like a man, and she becomes a pirate and the
lover of that dandy “Calico Jack” Rackham himself. Read is
depicted as both a “faithful mate” and a “warrior woman.”
However, she just happens to come across another female pirate.
These ships were small; sometimes hundreds of pirates were
packed in them. Yet nobody on board knows that these two men
are in fact women. At the same time, Bonny “took a particular
liking” to Read, but was unable to follow through on her desires
because Read was not inclined with lesbian tendencies. What are
the gender and sexual issues at play here? Johnson goes to a lot of
trouble to “prove” that Bonny and Read are women—through their
coincidental meeting, their love a airs with fellow pirates, their
pregnancies—once they actually turn pirate. The “facts” are lost to
history by the romantic mythologizing that preserves the hetero-
centric status quo.
Less important to later writers (and this has been “lost” in
pirate histories) is the idea that despite the almost universal
injunctions against women on board pirate ships, these women
serve alongside the homosocialized pirates. Johnson writes that
both of them are “of a erce and couragious Temper” (1:132). So
on the one hand, the female pirates are admired for their bravery
—just as Blackbeard is depicted as a “couragious Brute.” On the
other hand, the historians are titillated by two women surrounded
by hundreds of men who can’t gure out that Read and Bonny are
women, unless the love a airs are a “secret.”
 Next comes a very interesting point in Read’s biography in
which gender does not play such an explicit part: “A young Man,”
Johnson writes, “ask’d [Read] what Pleasure she could have in
being concerned in such Enterprizes, where her Life was
continually in Danger, by Fire or Sword; and not only so, but she
must be sure of dying an ignominious Death, if she should be taken
alive” (1:125). Read replies,

She thought it no great Hardship, for, were it not for that, every cowardly fellow
would turn Pyrate, and so infest the Seas, that Men of Courage must starve:—That if
it was put to the Choice of the Pyrates, they would not have the Punishment less
than Death, the Fear of which, kept some dastardly Rogues honest; that many of
those who are now cheating the Widows and Orphans, and oppressing their poor
Neighbours, who have no Money to obtain Justice, would then rob at Sea, and the
Ocean would be crowded with Rogues, like the Land, and no Merchant would venture
out; so that the Trade, in a little Time, would not be worth following. (1:125)

Who is speaking here? A female pirate? A male pirate? Just a

pirate? Why, in all of the General History, is Mary Read given the
most articulate voice to justify piracy? As I have argued, the ways
that early-eighteenth-century writers represented piracy are very
complex: a dialectic of admiration and disgust for their
transgressive homosocial world and economic criminality. What is
interesting to me is that the women have to be women in order for
sexuality to be disclosed on board a pirate ship. Yet the gender of
Mary Read seems to matter a great deal in order for piracy to be
defended so explicitly in the General History.
 It is in fact necessary for a “female pyrate” to ventriloquize a
justi cation for the pirate trade. On the one hand Read is a
passionate ghter, a pirate par excellence. On the other hand she is
a “faithful mate”—both faithful to her captain and faithful to her
lover. But she is a woman—and her gender allows her to defend
the indefensible without causing unease for the reader. But it is all
still complicated by the dichotomy of sexualized object and
amazonian warrior.
The terms of the “reality” of the female pirates are based on the
usual “truths” that Johnson works with in telling the history of a
pirate. He swears that the tale of Mary Read and Anne Bonny “is
supported by many thousand Witnesses, I mean the people of
Jamaica” (1:117). At the same time, he says that although this wild
story may sound like a “romance,” it is not. Any beliefs in the story
of the female pirates, then, have to be based on the same
assumptions about “history” that one makes about the authenticity
of any of Johnson’s pirate stories, or any eighteenth-century ction
and histories based on the narrator’s protestations of “truth.” The
only real evidence is the author’s word.
Mary Read and Anne Bonny: passionate whores, faithful mates,
women warriors, cross dressers. The “female pirates” are in fact so
overdetermined as “feminine” at the same time that they are
singled out for their “masculinity”—their ferocity with a sword,
their incredible bravery, and Read’s articulate defense of piracy—
that their gender questions the meaning of their inclusion in the
General History. The point, nally, is that the anxiety created by an
absent heterocentric foundation in stories of the pirate world
requires gendered tranquilizing, and the female pirates are the
sedatives. Sedatives, that is, until we see how complex their
representation is: “whores” or “passionate mates,” “feminine” yet
embodying very “masculine” characteristics.
“Of Captain Misson” is the most familiar of the chapters in the
General History. Misson and his crew are a di erent sort of pirate
gang than that to which readers of the General History have become
accustomed. Much like Captain Singleton and his companion,
Quaker William, they kill only out of necessity. Misson and his
men do not y “old roger” or the “black ag,” usually a skull and
crossbones on a black background. Instead they y a white ag,
the customary banner of peace. Misson’s mentor, Caraccioli, says
to the crew, “As we then do not proceed upon the same Ground
with Pyrates, who are Men of dissolute Lives and no Principles, let
us scorn to take their colours: Ours is a brave, a just, an innocent,
and a noble Cause; the Cause of Liberty. I therefore advice a white
Ensign, with Liberty painted in the Flag” (Johnson, 2:16). As
important as the ag’s color—an ironic reversal of pirate self-
identi cation—is the fact that “Liberty” is painted on it. These men
“at war against Europe” assert that they do not consider
themselves pirates. Yet, like their “dissolute” opposites, they also
set up a world de antly outside European culture. They proclaim
the “Cause of Liberty,” in this case liberty for criminals. The
piratical subject’s position as both criminal and alternative to the
masculine hero becomes complicated by Johnson’s distinction
between “good” pirates and “bad” pirates. Johnson’s literary
representation of the “radical” pirate and the reality of the legally
de ned pirate become deeply intertwined by volume 2 of the
General History. Like Defoe’s ctive protagonists Robinson Crusoe,
Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Captain Singleton, Misson desires
a “home”—a place for himself—that resists conventional
ideologies. For Misson, the desire is explicitly class-based. Unlike
Singleton, Misson has a history: he is from French nobility, but
unfortunately is a second son. Like Singleton and Crusoe, Misson is
of a “roving temper” (Johnson, 2:2). Unlike them, Misson is
supported by his father, who buys him a berth on a ship. As he sails
around Europe, Misson becomes intrigued by Catholicism and visits
Rome, where he meets his mentor, a deist and dissenting priest
named Caraccioli. They join arms and eventually turn pirate.
Caraccioli argues that the pirate life is good for Misson because

[Misson] might with the Ship he had under Foot, and the brave Fellows under
Command, bid De ance to the Power of Europe, enjoy every Thing he wish’d, reign
Sovereign of the Southern Seas, and lawfully make War on all the World, since it
wou’d deprive him of that Liberty to which he had a Right by the Laws of Nature.
(2:12–13)

Whether Misson is the second son of a nobleman or an ordinary

sailor, Caraccioli asserts any man’s right of “liberty” because it is
“natural.”
 Even though Captain Misson’s account is like a conventional
novel—with a beginning, a middle, and an end—his story is just
one of a larger narrative. New pirate histories follow “Of Captain
Misson,” so that even though Misson’s story is over, others that
precede and follow it complement his narrative. One critic has
characterized “Of Captain Misson” as “a sketch of political theories
rather than a study of human beings.”11 This analysis is correct as
far as it goes, but “Of Captain Misson” is about only one pirate,
surrounded by the stories of many other pirates.
To grant literary worth to one chapter outside the context of
the others results in a reductive understanding of the General
History and its signi cance for pirate history as well as the
development of the novel. In the preface to the rst volume of the
General History, Johnson writes that “had [the pirates] all united,
and settled in some of those Islands, they might by this Time, have
been honoured with the Name of a Commonwealth, and no Power
in those Parts of the World could have been able to dispute with
them” (1:vi, 2d ed.). Misson and his crew may be “good” pirates,
but their colony has to be placed in the context of the society as it
is characterized for all the other pirates, what Johnson calls “a
Refuge of Thieves and Outlaws” (1:vi).
Captain Avery, for example, sets up a Madagascar colony in
direct contrast to Misson’s own democratic utopia in Madagascar.
Avery’s only desire is to raid ships and make himself rich. Despite
his memorable piratical acts such as plundering the ship of the
Great Mogul, Avery steals not only from ships that stray in his
wake, but also from his fellow pirates. Johnson writes that Avery
and his crew headed to Madagascar, “intending to make that Place
their Magazine . . . but Avery put an end to this Project, and made
it altogether unnecessary” (1:31). He runs away with the treasure
that he and his men have accumulated. Thus Avery is not only
hostis humani generis, but hostis pirati generis as well. He is a thief
who steals from his own comrades. How does a legal de nition of
piracy work in a world that de nes itself outside any of the laws
that pertain to all “mankind”? The literary representation of the
piratical subject— ctional or “real”—upsets de nitions that totally
criminalize the pirate.
Misson never existed. Without crediting Johnson, Gosse writes
that “This unique pirate came of an ancient French family of
Provence” (Pirates’ Who’s Who, 210). He might as easily have
written that this “unique pirate” came of a great literary
imagination, whether or not Johnson was Defoe. While details
about any speci c pirate’s life may be questioned, the inclusion of
Misson in Gosse’s book determines his actual existence.
Gosse, like so many other pirate historians, takes the General
History at face value. As I have said, whether or not a pirate
actually existed is beside the point. “Of Captain Misson” is
signi cant because in it Johnson explicitly heroicizes the “enemies
against all mankind.” Consequently, he both creates the myth of
the “democratic” pirate and contradicts all the other stories of the
pirates’ depravity he has written thus far.
“Of Captain Misson” is in the exact center of the two volumes
of the General History.12 The location of Captain Misson’s “history”
confounds readerly reactions to the stories of the other pirates that
bookend this chapter. Its placement as the rst chapter in volume
2 also foregrounds what some critics believe to be Defoe’s
representation of an ideal government. For example, neither Hill
nor Novak takes Misson’s story at face value.13 However, Hill
writes, “I think we may conclude that [Defoe] was reproducing the
substance of what he had been told [by pirates]. Some pirates must
have seen themselves as egalitarian avengers. How are we to
explain the radical element in these pirate yarns or fantasies?”
(165). Hill argues that Defoe’s narrative of a utopian pirate society
may help us “to understand how those on the margins of society
adapted themselves to a world which seemed increasingly hostile”
(180). Even the most revisionist pirate historians over-determine
the place of the “real” radical pirates in revisionist English
history.14 The most radical of the pirates whom Johnson represents
are, after all, creations of his imagination. However, Hill and
Rediker make important points that try to recontextualize the
pirates outside the mythological framework of literary
representation. Their analyses undoubtedly help us to understand
both the undervalued relevance of the pirate to eighteenth-century
culture and the reasons pirates might explicitly choose their way of
life “at war against all mankind.”
More important than an example of the hard-to-prove political
extremism of the pirates, I believe, is the way that “Of Captain
Misson” works as realistic ction, and thus proves its utility for
Hill’s argument by demonstrating how ction and reality re ect
one another. Even the way Misson’s story is broken up and
resumed with the chapter on the real-life Captain Tew— ction
within the reality of “fact”—parallels the structure of Defoe’s more
familiar novels, particularly Captain Singleton. A good portion of
Captain Singleton combines the adventures of Singleton and Avery.
In Captain Singleton, Defoe uses a ctional form to tell a coherent
narrative about the ideological awakening of a pirate. This, too,
shares similarities with Defoe’s other ction.
For example, in Robinson Crusoe Defoe creates the “Island of
Despair,” which becomes a capitalist—but ultimately unworkable
—utopia. Similarly, Johnson imagines a kind of democratic utopia
with Misson’s colony on Madagascar. Defoe’s representation of
Crusoe’s island is read as a serious meditation on economic
philosophy, whereas “Of Captain Misson” has been neglected in
critical discourse. This neglect of “Of Captain Misson” is because
Misson’s story is perceived as fact, and has been ignored by most
literary historians. Crusoe’s story, in contrast, is determinedly
ction, despite claims of “truth” in the preface.
 In both cases, the island settlement breaks down. In “Of
Captain Misson,” Misson is killed and the story ends, the dream
destroyed along with its leader. In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe leaves
his island in the care of others, and, we discover in the Farther
Adventures, con icts between the English and the Spanish as well
as attacks by “savages” contribute to its downfall. However, unlike
Misson, Crusoe continues his adventures; his story does not end
with the demise of his colony, because he sails away from it for
particular reasons. Crusoe’s need to ful ll his goals for economic
aggrandizement is determined by his unsure sense of identity; his
interests go in other directions.
Novak is one of the very few critics who read “Of Captain
Misson” as an example of Defoe’s economic philosophy (or, for
that matter, consider the chapter at all as a signi cant piece of
literature). Consequently, he is more interested in the chapter as a
work of utopian ction than as a history of one of many notable
pirates. He writes that “Defoe was more interested in dramatizing
proletarian utopian ideals than in developing the inner workings
of Misson’s mind. The novelette is uni ed by its epic theme, not by
its study of character or its episodic plot” (iii). The problem with
Novak’s characterization of this work is that he disregards the rest
of the General History and presumes that Defoe is the author.
Notions of “inner workings of Misson’s mind” presuppose that “Of
Captain Misson” ought to be treated either as a “realistic” novel
that privileges the inner life of its hero or as an articulation of
Defoe’s utopian beliefs, what Novak terms “epic themes.” In fact,
Johnson is working toward more complex goals than this either/or
distinction; “Of Captain Misson” complicates the lives of all the
pirates in the General History.
In other words, their homosocial world has been an uneasy
union of the demonic and the heroic, and the economically
transgressive and the culturally transgressive throughout. The
subjectivity—or “inner workings”—of the pirate, however
unstable, has already been established through the
characterizations of all the other maritime criminals about whom
Johnson has written, as well as all the literary artifacts and
newspapers. Johnson confuses the character of the pirate further
by turning Misson into a paragon of egalitarian virtue despite his
identity as a pirate. Johnson demonstrates the instability of
identity in the conventional world through his depiction of the
pirate.
I suggest that a “good” pirate subverts the conception that all
pirates were “bad”: “Desperadoes, who were the Terror of the
trading Part of the World” (Johnson, 1:17). Standards of “badness”
are already complex because Johnson represents some pirates,
such as Blackbeard, as “heroic” despite their “badness.” We
empathize with both the “good” and the “bad” pirates. Misson and
the other pirates become the means to interrogate and question the
“reality” of normative subjectivity, represented by Defoe’s more
accessible and obviously ctional—but no less transgressive—
characters such as Crusoe and Singleton.
 Captain Misson enables Johnson to talk about an egalitarian
government. “Realism” in “Of Captain Misson” is centered on the
economic system of these pirates, not their domestic relations with
one another. Sexuality itself is not implied because Johnson is
setting up Misson’s government in direct opposition to the form of
English power and control. Unlike the other pirates in the General
History, slippery rovers who sail the seven seas, Misson and
Caraccioli band together to create a government in absolute
resistance to the English system. The “bad” pirates about whom we
have read in the rst volume were irresistibly “noisy.” Despite the
focus on a political critique in “Of Captain Misson”—and the focus
on “Of Captain Misson” by critics such as Novak—the alternative
masculinity of these other pirates impresses readers. These readerly
responses threaten the egalitarian critique represented by Misson’s
colony. The transgressive camaraderie of these other pirates
suggests that normative sexuality is complicit with the
“Oppression, Poverty, and all the Miseries of Life” (2:15) that
caused Misson and his crew to turn pirate in the rst place.
“Of Captain Misson” is a striking contrast to Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe. Like Crusoe’s island, which Crusoe has “peopled” with
English pirates, Catholic Spaniards, and “savage” men and women,
Misson’s democracy contains women—albeit “savage” women—
and is composed of di erent races and nationalities. But Misson is
not their “governor,” the title Crusoe takes to rule his island.
Instead, all the pirates in Misson’s crew meet; Caraccioli “spoke to
the Necessity of lodging a supream Power in the hands of one. . . .
That such a Power however should not be for Life, nor hereditary,
but determinate at the end of three Years, when a new Choice be
made by the State, or the Old con rm’d for three Years longer”
(2:100). The “supream Power” is called “Lord Conservator.” He
stands in direct contrast to the monarchs of Europe because he is
chosen by the people, who are the state. Like England, which has a
parliament, Libertalia has a senate, but that senate is made up of
all the men in the country: it is an all-male commonwealth, what
Johnson calls “a Democratical Form, where the People were
themselves the Makers and Judges of their own Laws, the most
agreeable” (2:100). Libertalia is the logical extension of a pirate
world that might be termed a “society against the state.”
Novak points out that Libertalia is “Defoe’s best expression of
political and social ideals which he admired but considered
unworkable” (iii). These ideals are “unworkable” because Misson
and his men set up egalitarian legal structures. Besides, the
government does work, at least for a time. The possibility of their
replication within conventional structures simply is not a part of
the early-eighteenth-century political economy. This utopian
community takes the pirate myth as far as it can go, given the
transgressive “nature” of pirate communities and the articles that
govern the pirates’ behavior. Misson, in a speech to his brother
pirates, says, “[we] were no Pyrates, but Men who were resolved
to assert that Liberty which God and Nature gave [us] and own no
Subjection to any, farther than was for the common Good of all”
(2:14). Although Misson denies that he and his men are pirates,
they still act like pirates because they prey on other ships and live
outside the boundaries of European laws. On one level the
di erence between Misson and other pirates lies in Misson’s
articulate espousal of “democratical” virtues, which Johnson sets
up in opposition to English and French government.
Novak suggests that “Although Defoe apparently thought that
democracy was the ideal form of government, he may have
regarded it as impractical.” In one sense, Novak is wrong. The
colony is not “destroyed through its very basic belief in human
equality,” as Novak argues. While Libertalia has its own internal
tensions, it is actually destroyed by an attack by natives from the
interior of Madagascar. Pirates are so unstable in their
representation, exempli ed by the whole General History, that
prospects for the success of Libertalia seem remote to begin with.
The “good” pirates—represented by Misson and his brethren—are
in opposition to the “bad” ones, such as Blackbeard, Avery, and
Low, pirates who are determined by their violence and their
criminality, rather than by the “ideals” of a government.
If “Of Captain Misson” were only a means for Johnson—or
Defoe for that matter—to articulate his vision of an “ideal”
government, I would not attach importance to its place in the
General History. However, the chapter complicates the
representations of already unstable depictions of heroic and
criminal pirates. It demonstrates that pirates can imagine an
“ideal” egalitarian government. Even more signi cant, the
“liberty” that Misson espouses goes much further than “egalitarian”
values.
The “liberty” that Misson envisions suggests all kinds of
freedom. Notions of “liberty” become wrapped up with sexual and
economic standards regulated by English hegemony. Johnson’s
depiction of “liberty” shows how close the piratical subject’s
transgressive identity—identity embodied by such individuals as
Blackbeard, England, and Roberts—and Johnson’s representation
of that identity are to the heroic character exhibited by Misson.
Even though Libertalia could not survive, the other pirates about
whom we have read continued to roam the seven seas. For
Johnson and the readers, egalitarianism is part of the pirates’
threat as well as their allure.
7
Solemn Imprecations and Curses
Captain Singleton’s Search for Identity

The ordinary story of the pirate, or the wicked man in general, no matter how successful he
may have been in his criminal career, nearly always ends disastorously, and in that way
points a moral which doubtless has a good e ect on a large class of people, who would be
very glad to do wrong, provided that no harm was likely to come to them in consequence.

—Frank R. Stockton, Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts

Captain Singleton and, to a lesser extent, The King of Pirates

represent the most compelling union of implicit homoeroticism and
sanctioned economic transgression in Defoe’s canon. In these two
works, the piratical subject is embodied by both the “real” Captain
Avery (who, with Captain Kidd and Blackbeard, was the most
notorious of late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century
pirates) and Defoe’s ctional Captain Singleton. Defoe’s use of the
trope of the pirate challenges critical histories that reduce the
“novel” to middle-class experiences of “self” and economics.1
Captain Singleton is not supplemental to Defoe’s “major”
accomplishments, as critics tend to argue, nor is it haphazardly
plotted or constructed.2
 I have proposed that homoerotic desire is implicit in early-
eighteenth-century representations of the piratical subject,
particularly in the General History. The “noise” of homoeroticism
can be located in Captain Singleton as well, not only through the
instability of the piratical subject’s opposition to both the
feminized, e eminate sodomite and the masculine hero but also
through the anxiety that this sexualized “nature” generates for
twentieth-century critics. I intend to analyze homoeroticism rather
than ignore it in Captain Singleton and then to imagine the
homoerotic subject in the context of all the attributes that construct
“subjectivity.” The attributes—such as class, gender, religion,
politics, and sexuality—all contribute to the complexity of the
masculine individual. A recognition of homoeroticism as an
alternative—and positive—means of identifying masculine
individuality provides an alternative way to reread this lesser
known work. Further, a homoerotic analysis suggests ways to
recover and put into perspective other narrative forms with which
Defoe experimented.
In 1720, the year after the great success of Robinson Crusoe,
Defoe published Captain Singleton, his most famous novel with a
pirate setting.3 This novel is not structured like Crusoe; rather, it is
broken into two seemingly disparate halves. When read through a
homoerotic analysis, the two parts form a whole and the
randomness helps explain a transgressive protagonist who shares
similarities with the sodomitical subject. To investigate the
sodomite—and by extension, the pirate—“will never deliver [him]
per se; but only . . . relational structures precariously available to
prevailing discourses.”4 These “relational structures” show how
Captain Singleton is a template for an alternative model of ction.
This alternative model, further, acknowledges the power of
heterocentric de nitions within the genre of the novel.
Of all Defoe’s novels currently in print, Captain Singleton
remains one of the least known today, and the least understood.5
The title page shows, however, Defoe’s ctional manipulation of
some of the iconic cultural metaphors in early-eighteenth-century
England. These metaphors, signi cant in the years Defoe wrote his
great ction, must be placed in historical context if we are to grasp
the implications of Captain Singleton for the history of the novel.
The title page reads:

Containing an Account of his being set on Shore in the Island of Madagascar, his
Settlement there, with a Description of the Place and Inhabitants: Of his Passage from
thence, in a Paraguay, to the main Land of Africa, with an Account of the Customs
and Manners of the People: His great Deliverances from the barbarous Natives and
Wild Beasts: Of his meeting with an Englishman, a Citizen of London, among the
Indians, the great Riches he acquired, and his Voyage Home to England: As also
Captain Singleton’s Return to Sea, with an Account of his many Adventures and
Pyracies with the famous Captain Avery and others.

Like Captain Singleton, Robinson Crusoe—Defoe’s most popular

novel—uses “piracy” as a selling point to potential readers. In
Captain Singleton, however, piracy is the guiding trope and is
foregrounded to a far greater extent than in Crusoe. The title page
focuses attention on the rst half of the novel, in which Singleton
crosses the mysterious “dark” continent. His adventures as a pirate,
however, are suggested with much less detail. It is enough for
readers to see that this book is an “account” about “Madagascar”
and a “pirate.” The brutal, exotic preconceptions—as we have
seen, so dominant in early-eighteenth-century popular culture—
will allow the readers to ll in the details.
The tensions between the apparently realistic account of
exploration and the legendary status of the pirate, if interrogated,
reveal that Captain Singleton is an important novel in the
development of both modern and eighteenth-century notions of
subjectivity. Captain Singleton seems an unstable text to twentieth-
century readers because traditional criticism reads backwards to
try and de ne an essential subject as the raison d’être of acceptable
“realistic” ction. The novelty of its title character—a pirate hero
—coupled with the exotic settings leads to critical dismissal of the
novel’s importance and intent. For example, some critics believe
that in his novels Defoe was working toward what have become
critically validated notions of psychological realism. Other critics
argue that Defoe used ction to address his concerns about the
English economy.6 If he is successful, as in Robinson Crusoe, Defoe
is able to negotiate the complex relations between the rise of
capitalism and the rise of the domestic psychological subject.7
Captain Singleton “fails” as a novel because of its fragmented nature
and Defoe’s di culty in portraying the emergence of subjectivity
at a moment of early-modern history. Although arguably we can
see a progressive middle-class hero in Robinson Crusoe, Singleton
poses obstacles because his psychological makeup is not “real” in
the modern sense. And he is a pirate: his behavior is not acceptable
within the con nes of early-eighteenth-century notions of
heterocentric identity.8
Singleton’s milieu is not only a ctional world in which the
absence of women questions paradigms implicit in any discipline’s
version of “history.” As we have seen, early-eighteenth-century
representations of traditionally gendered desire are alien to the
maritime world of the pirate as well. These tensions form the
narrative’s framework, a structure read di erently by eighteenth-
century readers than by twentieth-century critics. The disjointed
elements that form the narrative framework of the novel make
sense if we recognize that Singleton’s outlaw behavior as a pirate
parallels his subjective desires as a transgressive erotic subject: to
become rich on the one hand, and to nd “home” or a place in
society on the other. Captain Singleton presents a di erent kind of
psychological realism that challenges the validity of normative
sexuality.
In this chapter I shall analyze the second half of Captain
Singleton, generally overlooked in the criticism of the book. After I
examine Singleton’s early career as a pirate, I shall pay careful
attention to the relationship that builds between the title character
and his companion, Quaker William. The novel’s rst half has
received most of the critical attention in recent years because it
can be seen as a precursor to such novels as Heart of Darkness and
other colonial and postcolonial works.9 This section of the novel is
indeed important, and I shall brie y discuss it. However, we need
to consider Captain Singleton as a cohesive whole. By focusing on
the second half of the novel, we can see how these two parts t
together. We shall see that Singleton’s journey across Africa, his
return to England as a rich man, and nally his decision to go on
the account all point toward the hero’s search for an identity. This
search questions the terms of masculine sexual desire both in
England and in the transgressive homosocial world of piracy.
Shortly after the novel opens, young Singleton and a group of
sailors are marooned on Madagascar after they attempt a mutiny.
They escape to the east coast of Africa, and Singleton relates an
account of his journey across the vast, uncharted continent by boat
and on foot. Nothing in the men’s journey suggests transgressive
economic or cultural desire. Their wealth establishes the terms for
their nontransgressive camaraderie; their goal is to reach
civilization, to return to the conventional world. They are
rewarded for their perseverance by the accumulation of gold and
ivory, which they literally stumble over as they make their way
west through jungles and across deserts. “I thought I had enough
already,” the fabulously rich Singleton says just before he returns
to England, “and all the Thoughts I had about disposing of it, if I
came to Europe, was only how to spend it as fast as I could, buy me
some Clothes, and go to Sea to be a Drudge for more” (132). For
Singleton, wealth means nothing because he has nothing on which
he desires to spend it.
 This point is driven home by Singleton’s experiences when he
returns to England midway through the novel. His return marks a
change in the narrative. A fantastic travelogue that catalogs the
wonders of Africa becomes the story of Singleton’s adventures as a
pirate. However, he does not go on the account until he loses his
fortune. “Thus ended my rst Harvest of Wild Oats,” he says of his
African adventure, “the rest were not sowed to so much
Advantage” (137). Singleton is embarrassed by the way he frittered
away his fortune in England: “the rest Merits to be conceal’d with
Blushes, for it was spent in all Kinds of Folly and Wickedness”
(137–38).
Singleton’s return to England and disenchantment with what he
nds there signal a shift toward a desire for the transgressive
camaraderie he will nd once he turns pirate. Were Singleton’s
experiences in England—“conceal’d with Blushes”—homoerotic or
“heterosexual”? Defoe does not let us know. However, the sexual
connotations implicit in the loss of his fortune—his “oats” that
“were not sowed to so much Advantage”—are provocative because
he stays silent and does not tell the reader what his “Folly and
Wickedness” are. More signi cant, however, Singleton literally
misses his chance to buy into English society through marriage and
property. As Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack both recognize,
someone without property—and Singleton has said he does not
even desire property—is always an outsider, as are pirates such as
Avery and Misson.10 His trek across Africa proves to Singleton that
he is a successful if reluctant leader. He is dubbed “Captain Bob”
by his companions (35), and he and his men pro t enormously
from their journey. Prudent investments such as buying property
or marrying well ought to be just as pro table when he returns
“home” to England. But these desires for a normal life leave
Singleton cold. He does not “ t in” with the “ill company” he nds
in his birthplace. He is an outsider; former “friends” are now
spoilers who take advantage of his wealth and his naïveté. They let
him know that he has “nothing to expect of them farther than I
might command it by the force of my money” (138). Singleton
loses his vast fortune and decides “that it was Time to think of
farther Adventures” (138). His undetermined identity precludes
allegiance with or a ection for his home-land. He resolves to
return to sea—wide open and not restrained by land-based
conventions—to live in the only place he can possibly call home.
With his resolution we come to the second half of the novel, in
which Singleton wholeheartedly embraces the pirate way.
Singleton discovers that the pirate’s transgressive world
provides ful llment and pleasure that the easy accumulation of
wealth in Africa—riches without work—never did. John J. Richetti
points out that Singleton’s two-year stay in England leads him into
his pirate adventures, and “is manifestly a continuation of that
aversion to restrictive identity and that drive towards the
possession of a dynamic process.”11 Richetti’s observation is valid
as far as it goes, but he does not fully appreciate the motivation
that drives Singleton away from a “restrictive identity.” After he
loses his money, Singleton discovers that he has no place in
England. He reveals what the trek across Africa and his earlier
behavior only suggested: “I that was, as I have hinted before, an
original Thief, and a Pyrate even by Inclination before, was now
in my Element, and never undertook any Thing in my Life with
more particular satisfaction” (140).
As a pirate, Singleton must work hard for his pro t; he nds a
camaraderie among these self-made outcasts that he felt neither
crossing Africa nor among the “ill company” of his homeland.
Singleton’s “Inclination” toward piracy suggests that he will nd a
bonding with the “brethren of the sea” that he has not found
elsewhere. If pro t has no meaning for Singleton, then he has an
“Inclination” toward piracy for other, perhaps unaccountable
reasons. Singleton’s rejection of a “restrictive identity” leads
inevitably, I think, to transgressive desires not predicated on birth,
marriage, and property and the social identity they promise.
Singleton suspects that he can nd some satisfaction among these
men who bond both economically and culturally in an outlaw
world unrestricted by the economic and cultural conventions of
English society.
The pirate exploits take over as the narrative drive of the novel
once Singleton decides to follow his “Inclination.” He signs himself
on a ship bound east and, he says, “I fell into Company with some
Masters of Mischief” (138). One of these “Masters,” Harris,
becomes his mentor. Harris reveals his plans to mutiny and asks
Singleton to go along with him on the account: “He then asked me
if I would swear to be secret, and that if I did not agree to what he
proposed, I would nevertheless never betray him; I readily bound
myself to that, on the most solemn Imprecations and Curses that
the Devil and both of us could invent” (138). Singleton sees in
Harris a kindred spirit, someone else born to be an outsider and a
pirate by “Inclination.” Is Singleton attracted to the “secrecy” of
the mutiny, the chance to “bind” himself to a band of outlaws? Or
does he look forward to a chance for very public—if transgressive
—deportment, to show the world that he is his own man? The
transgressive culture of piracy is more alluring than any wealth he
might accumulate, as his earlier adventures in Africa suggest. I
would argue that Singleton jumps at the chance for camaraderie.
By swearing “Imprecations and Curses,” he can become a member
of a group that recognizes a “kindred spirit” and accepts him as he
is.
Harris introduces him to the gang’s leader, a Captain Wilmot,
who welcomes Singleton “with a great deal of Joy” and becomes a
key player in Singleton’s pirate adventures. Singleton tells us that
he was “well prepared for all manner of Roguery” and thus further
emphasizes his sense of “home” that the pirate world should o er
him (139). It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Singleton’s new
friend and leader shares the name of the most infamous libertine of
the seventeenth century, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Since the
actuality of pirate life is left vague in Singleton’s narrative, a
recognition of Wilmot’s link to Rochester allows the reader to
imagine the pirate world as a place of libertine excess. Further,
Defoe relies on the reader’s knowledge of pirate life to ll in the
blanks. Eighteenth-century readers had easy access to pirate stories
found in newspaper accounts, trial records, and other ephemeral
literature. As we have seen, these readers knew that pirates were
hostis humani generis. And of course, we know that pirates declared
themselves “at war against all mankind.”
Defoe suggests the a nities that the pirate shares with the
libertine through his representation of the pirate’s disruption of
both trade and culture. Singleton follows his “true Inclination” “to
consort with the most famous Pyrates of the Age” (139) in a
pseudolibertine world not constrained by “Conscience” or the
values imposed on it by the domestication of erotic or economic
desires. Moreover, Captain Wilmot’s “joyous” welcome is
e ectively suggestive for the reader not only because of Defoe’s
allusion to Rochester, but also because of Rochester’s notorious
bisexuality. The warm welcome by the great libertine’s namesake
—coupled with the notoriety of “the most famous Pyrates” such as
Avery, Blackbeard, or Kidd that any reader could envision—only
strengthens Defoe’s suggestive linking of the libertine and the
pirate. These men are outsiders, a “gang . . . prepared for all
manner of roguery.” Singleton enthusiastically enters into a life of
secrecy and dissolution.
At this stage of Singleton’s career—narrated in hindsight by an
older, retired Singleton—the pirates lead lives that echo the
accounts of debauchery by Restoration libertines such as Rochester.
The di erence between these pirates and the libertines, of course,
lies in how the pirates reveal their “roguery.” For the libertine,
“roguery” was sexual conquest, be it sodomitical or “heterosexual.”
This sexual conquest was a display of power by men who delighted
in all kinds of excess. Further, the libertine showed his power
through an anarchic refusal to bow to any conventions—sexual or
cultural. The libertine represented by Rochester and others,
however, came from the aristocracy and could a ord to assert his
power through excess.
The pirate Wilmot’s gang comes from a di erent class
altogether. As we have seen, the pirate’s sexual behavior was left
out of eighteenth-century pirate accounts. These highly
transgressive cultural aspects of their all-male society complicate
the homosocial constructs of pirate camaraderie that ignore
sexuality. The pirate—Defoe and other writers suggest—is a kind
of libertine of the seven seas who thumbs his nose at convention.
Indeed, the gang belongs to no class at all, for they “declare war
against all mankind.” Since they have turned their backs on
normative society, they are de ned as pirates—and only pirates—
and thus de ned by their transgressive cultural and economic
de ance. Any debauchery takes place at sea away from societal
restraints. Their threat to society is criminal because they wreak
havoc on maritime trade, yet they are represented in print by their
“otherness,” their violence, cruelty, and over-the-top performance
when they wreak that havoc. Furthermore, the pirates’ well-known
delight in the physical is explicitly overdetermined by Johnson,
Defoe, and other early-eighteenth-century writers. Their behavior
is characterized by violence, costume, and profanity, as well as a
propensity to drink, play, and make merry, all to outlandish
excess. Defoe thus links the economic menace of the pirates to the
libertine excesses of the aristocracy, through the pirates’ disruption
of the economic and cultural status quo—and implicitly the sexual
status quo as well.
For example, the gang’s rst act is “making an Agreement, that
whatever was taken by either of our Ships, should be shared
among the Ship’s Company of both” (141). These nancial
arrangements, shared by most early-eighteenth-century pirates,
have fascinated both eighteenth-century and modern chroniclers of
piracy. As Marcus Rediker has demonstrated, the articles suggest a
“democratic” society of murdering marauders. They establish how
the criminalized pirates’ nancial agreements di er from other
maritime payment systems. The pirates—unlike ordinary seamen—
are freed from economic dependency on employers from their
home countries. This economic freedom, then, allows the pirates
freedom from all kinds of restraints. They are thus able to declare
themselves “at war against all mankind” not only economically but
culturally as well.12
Singleton could just tell us about his cruel piratical acts—how
he “murthered the People in cold Blood, tying them Back to Back,
and throwing them into the Sea” (144). But then the book would
be nothing more than a criminal tract, what one critic would call a
“frivolous” crime novel because it has no “moral” underpinning.13
Singleton’s stories of barbaric cruelty disappear, however, when
his mentor, Harris, dies and Quaker William is introduced into the
story. From this point onward Captain Singleton di ers signi cantly
from other Defoe novels because its hero becomes involved in a
stable emotional and economic relationship with another man that
lasts the rest of the book.
As a result of his relationship with William, Singleton’s way of
de ning himself undergoes a transformation. Singleton evolves
from a libertine pirate who “murthered the People in cold Blood”
to a man who de nes himself in an a ectionate relationship with a
Quaker pirate. Their relationship will become an alternative to the
transgressive bonding of the pirate world or to an identity based
on property and marriage. Before William becomes the center of
his world, Singleton’s pirate acts depend on the physical power he
and his gang wield over any ships that stray into their path. Like
any pirate worthy of the name, Singleton loots, pillages, plunders,
and murders. With the introduction of William, the focus of
Singleton’s desires shifts. His desire for economic aggrandizement
coupled with violence shifts to personal a ection and paci sm
centered around another person. An emotional attachment
develops between two men whose business just happens to be
piracy.
One of Defoe’s most fascinating characters, William is a
religious dissenter who refuses to shed blood, but is happy to join
Singleton’s gang and share in the booty. Defoe turns tradition
topsy-turvy and rede nes the criminalized pirate through his
characterization of William, a Quaker pirate. William, despite his
professed Christianity and paci sm, has no compunction about
“turning” pirate. He manages to have it both ways. Indeed,
William’s sensible, businesslike mind—as well as his enthusiastic
though passive assistance—enables the gang to become richer and
richer. He becomes Singleton’s inseparable companion, and is
culpable in the pirates’ crimes. Yet he is always represented as an
“advisor.” He never participates in the bloodshed but always helps
Singleton and his men to pro t from their crimes. William o ers
counsel on the least dangerous ways to plunder unlucky vessels
that cross the pirates’ path.
William is, too, the ultimate “outsider” on board the pirate ship.
As a dissenter, he is outside mainstream English political and
religious culture; but he also remains aloof from pirate culture
because he refuses to take up the sword even as he dives
wholeheartedly into their “trade.” He is thus implicated in all the
criminal acts without participating in the actual violence. The
gure of William suggests that the pirate, if stripped of his
libertine aspects, di ers little from other traders: he is constructed
by a desire for pro t. Through William’s participation—and the
ways Defoe represents his “character”—we see the correlation
between the more usual libertine pirate’s immoral criminality and
the uncertain morality of what William calls “money without
ghting” (154), that is, legitimate trade.
 After Quaker William joins the gang, the pirates rove the
Indian Ocean, taking ships and amassing enormous treasure. He
o ers crafty suggestions on nancial opportunities that for the
pirates would have overlooked in order to get at the loot in
conventionally violent ways. He and Singleton have an exchange
about the desires of the pirate shortly after they meet:

Why, says William gravely, I only ask what is thy Business, and the Business of all the
people thou has with thee? Is it not to get money? Yes, William, it is so, in our honest
Way: And wouldst thou, says he, rather have Money without Fighting, or Fighting
without Money? I mean, which wouldst thou have by Choice, suppose it to be left to
thee? O William, says I, the rst of the two to be sure. (153–54)

Defoe complicates the usual literary representation of the violent,

bloodthirsty pirate in the characters of William and Singleton.
These two men are not brutal murderers whose desire for ill-gotten
gain is associated with their uncontrolled behavior. They are,
however, criminals who cause economic havoc. Paradoxically, their
crimes go unpunished even as they increase their wealth. But in the
context of British culture and society, they are still hostis humani
generis, and they still live in a transgressive world from which
women are excluded. Singleton has already insisted that he has an
“Inclination” for the pirate way and has no desire to turn his life
around. What does it mean to be “inclined” if pirates are both
economic criminals and outrageous antiheroes? The only way
Singleton knows to make a pro t is to plunder the “enemy,”
legitimate traders. At the same time, he feels comfortable only with
the camaraderie of men in a world of libertine outlawry. His
desires, then, seem to be satis ed by his pirate way of life. Further,
piracy is a “business” to Singleton, and an “honest” one at that,
with, he suggests, di erent standards for honesty.
Defoe is exposing the English government’s hypocrisy and
ambivalence toward renegades like Singleton. As we saw in
chapter 2, piracy was, of course, legally sanctioned during times of
war with the issuance of letters of marque for privateers such as
William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. However, during peacetime,
privateers and navy men were left without employment, so they
often went on the account. During piracy’s “golden age” the British
government issued proclamation after proclamation giving
clemency to pirates who turned themselves in to the authorities.14
This strategy would work for a time, but the pirates simply took
the pardons they were o ered and went back to their old “trade,”
forcing the government to deal with the havoc in the Caribbean or
the Indian Ocean all over again. Whatever schemes the British
government used to stamp out piracy, nothing seemed to work,
and in fact pirates set up semipermanent colonies in the Caribbean
and on Madagascar. Singleton himself settles brie y in
Madagascar, legendary seat of pirate “government.” Given the
demonized and complex status of the pirate within maritime law,
how can we make sense of Defoe’s heroicization of Singleton’s
criminality?
In an extraordinary pamphlet attributed to Defoe, the
anonymous author argues that trade with the Madagascar pirates
might prove pro table for Britain. “In the last Place,” the author
reasons,

though it was not thought consistent with the Honour of the Nation to grant the
pirates of Madagascar a Pardon, yet since they have establish’d and form’d
themselves into a kind of regular government, it would not be more dishonourable
for the South-Sea Company to trade with them, than it was for the People of Italy to
hold a Commerce and friendly Correspondence with the First Founders of old Rome,

who were but a Company of Publick Robbers.15

The author uses a sort of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”
argument, coupled with the potent but peculiar comparison of the
pirates to Romans. Romans, of course, were usually characterized
as embodying features of British strength. Here, Romans are “a
Company of Publick Robbers,” and Rome is linked to the
completely illegitimate “government” of Madagascar. Thus the
author of the pamphlet acknowledges the power that the pirates
have asserted for themselves in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, the
tract demonstrates—at least in part—the ambivalence that some
English felt toward the pirates of the Indian Ocean. The author
suggests that although the pirates have not exactly reformed, they
have created a home for themselves with a “kind of regular
Government” that ought to be recognized as such. The end result of
explicitly criminal acts potentially o ers credible pro t for the
British economy. By using these comparisons, the author is on the
verge of depicting trade as a kind of state-sanctioned piracy.
 Whether or not the author of this pamphlet is Defoe, Defoe
himself made a similar point a decade earlier in his Review of the
State of the British Nation:

for if it be lawful to admit them to Pardon, and if it be lawful to take what they have
by Force, it must be lawful to take it as a Condition of admitting them to come in—
And all this, supposing they cannot easily or without Hazard or Blood, be otherwise
reduc’d—Let them o er their illgotten Money, then I am clear, it will be well gotten

money to us.16

From Defoe’s argument here we can see the similarities to the

author’s argument in A True Account . . . of the South-Sea Trade.
Defoe is making a similar point in Captain Singleton. Flying in
the face of pirate legend and mythology, William and Singleton
show piracy’s similarities to “legitimate” business. Singleton has
told William that he would just as soon be a nonviolent pirate, if
he could get rich that way. Pirate histories—including the General
History—contradict Defoe’s depiction of Singleton and his gang as
budding paci sts, as we all know from our cultural knowledge of
bloodthirsty freebooters. Even Captain Misson establishes a colony
on Madagascar with the intent of continuing his piracies. In
Captain Singleton, Defoe hints at the pirates’ a nity with legal
trade, and further, the pirates themselves have a code of honor—
their articles—where pro t is concerned. What kinds of pirates are
these, who do not revel in calling for quarter, who free their
victims instead of throwing them overboard, or try to avoid slitting
their quarries’ throats?
 Defoe raises uncomfortable questions for those who condemn
piracy outright. Perhaps the line between legal and illegal trade is
a little too ne, as is suggested in the anonymous pamphlet,
Defoe’s argument in his Review, Captain Singleton, and the legalized
piracy by such privateers as Dampier, Funnel, Rogers, and Cooke.
With William’s help, Singleton manages to accumulate enough
illegal riches to think about giving up piracy and settling down
permanently. Defoe has suggested that at least in part Singleton’s
lack of an identity is based on his lack of property; as we have
seen, Singleton remained an outsider even after he had collected
enough capital to buy property in England. The ending of the
novel undermines the apparent return to the status quo, a nal
recovery of lost normative subjectivity. Singleton’s uncertain
desires become focused on his relationship with William. Their
a ection for each other o ers an alternative to a normative
identity based on “heterosexual” psychological desire. The
relationship between the two men suggests that homoerotic
a ection—at least for Singleton—can displace normative desires
for property and by extension middle-class stability.
All the disparate parts of Captain Singleton that construct the
title character’s search for an identity—the African journey, the
outrageous pirate adventures, the enormous pro t—come together
when William and Singleton agree to turn their backs on the pirate
life but still remain outside conventional society. In a fascinating
dialogue, indirect in its meaning, the two men talk about
Singleton’s desires. The dialogue is reminiscent of the initial
meeting between Harris and Singleton. “If thou dost not like what
I am going to propose to thee,” William tells Singleton, “thou shalt
promise me not to make it publick among the Men” (255).
Singleton’s response reminds the reader of the “solemn
Imprecations and Curses” he shared with Harris: “I will not,
William, says I, upon my Word, and swore to him very heartily”
(255). Further, Singleton is willing to agree to any of William’s
terms, with a notable exception: “In any Thing, says I, William, but
leaving me, I will; but I cannot part with you upon any Terms
whatever” (255). The a ectionate language here is extraordinary
when compared with Singleton’s earlier incarnations in Africa, his
discussions with Harris and Wilmot, or, in a broader sense, the
language used by other Defoe characters such as Captain Avery in
The King of Pirates, Moll Flanders, or Robinson Crusoe. Unlike these
other Defoe characters, William and Singleton share a language
not dependent on economic diction for its e ect. Furthermore, the
“terms” that Singleton agrees to are contingent on the two men
staying together.
William wants Singleton to give up “trading,” “for no body
trades for the sake of Trading, much less do any Men rob for the
sake of thieving” (256). William’s arguments have no precedents in
other Defoe novels. Crusoe’s whole self, for example, is based on
his desire to pro t and trade, as critics have shown.17 At the end of
Colonel Jack (1722) the title character, by this time a powerful and
rich trader, is a prisoner in the Spanish colonies because he could
not resist the opportunity for illicit trade. In a reversal of Crusoe’s
end, when Crusoe promises “farther adventures,” or the
ambivalent ending of Colonel Jack, William suggests that the pair
run away together and return “home” to England: “Why truly, says
William. . . it is natural for most Men that are abroad to desire to
come Home again, especially when they are grown rich, and when
they are (as thou ownest they [sic] self to be) rich enough, and so
rich, as they know not what to do with more if they had it” (256).
“Why, Man, I am at home,” Singleton replies, “here is my
Habitation, I never had any other in my Life time” (256). He has
no notion of “home” other than his life at sea as a pirate, as he
told the reader when he rst went on the account. His pirate
“Inclination” is far more “natural” than anything he can expect to
nd in England. William is confused by Singleton’s response and
pushes him to explain. Madagascar, Singleton replies, has felt
more like home and “has been a fortunate Island to me more than
once, as thou knowest, William” (257). “William was quite stunn’d
at my Discourse,” says Singleton, “and held his Peace” (257).
William is “stunn’d” not only because Singleton feels more at home
at sea living among the pirates but also because his “Projects are
come to nothing, and gone” (257). Singleton is curious about
William’s “Projects” and pushes him further. He tells William, “I do
not say I like this roving cruising Life, so well as never to give it
over; Let me hear if thou canst propose any thing beyond it” (257).
Because Singleton shows some interest, William gets to the
point. With tears in his eyes, he tells Singleton, “That there was
something to be thought of beyond this way of Living” (258):
 Why, William, says I, what was that? It was Repentance, says he.
Why, says I, did you ever know a Pirate repent?
At this he started a little and return’d, at the Gallows, I have one before, and I hope thou
wilt be the second.
He spoke this very a ectionately, and with an Appearance of Concern for me. (258)

The gist of their conversation suggests that William would like

them to return “home” to England and become members of
conventional Christian society. Moreover, Singleton himself
recognizes the a ection William shows and is moved by William’s
tears, even if Singleton does not see the point of repentance.
Singleton has no notion of Christianity or religion of any kind.
Further, he tells William that it is pointless even to think about
repentance until they quit the pirate life. Once they do, he tells
William, “I’ll begin there with you with all my Heart” (259).
William is touched by Singleton’s response, “and if he had Tears in
his Eyes before, he had more now, but it was from a quite di ering
Passion, for he was so swallow’d up with Joy, he could not speak”
(259).
Singleton is moved by William’s reaction as well; indeed, their
roles are reversed. “As I have commanded you all along, from the
Time I rst took you on board,” he tells William, “so you shall
command me from this Hour; and everything you direct me, I’ll do”
(259). William has gone from sorrow that Singleton does not
understand his request to “Joy” that Singleton has agreed to do
what he asks “with all my Heart.” What seems a simple Christian
repentance, however, is complicated by Singleton’s ignorance of
both religion and “home.” Singleton repents because he has
allowed William to become the center of his life. He can put all his
trust in William because he has depended on William for pro table
advice. More signi cant, with William’s guidance he has given up
the outrageous libertine aspects of piracy while remaining a
criminal, and is considering giving up the pirate way altogether to
live with William.
I quote at length from this section of the novel because it is of
great importance for an understanding of how Captain Singleton
works as a coherent text. Singleton has been, as he cries in his
sleep, “a Thief, a Pirate, a Murtherer, and ought to be hanged” (269).
He has pro ted enormously from his pirate adventures, and he has
had no sense of “home” other than the libertine, transgressively
homosocial world of his fellow freebooters. In his discussion about
repentance, Singleton makes a connection with William. Even if
Singleton knows nothing of “repentance,” he is still moved by
William’s talk and the a ection William shows for him. Further,
the a ectionate language between the two men, despite—or
perhaps because of—its diction of religious conversion, gives
Singleton an attachment, a way “home” even, that he has not felt
elsewhere in the novel.
The ambivalence in Singleton’s talk with William recalls his
entry into piracy. It is as if William shares a nities with
Singleton’s dead mentor, Harris. Like William, Harris asks
Singleton to go to a private place. Like William, Harris asks
Singleton if he had “a Mind for an Adventure that might make
amends for all past Misfortunes” (138). Singleton’s response to
Harris is much like his answer to William: “yes, with all my Heart,
for I did not care where I went, having nothing to lose, and no
Body to leave behind me” (138). The di erence is, of course, that
Singleton does not bind himself to William by “solemn
Imprecations and Curses.” Instead Singleton is bound by William’s
a ection and desire to “save” him. Although Singleton has no
understanding of repentance or reformation, he does understand
that he can leave behind the pirate way and nd a “home” with
William. That leave-taking, I would argue, establishes a kind of
male bonding di erent from the anarchy of consistently unstable
pirate desire. But it is not coded sexually in any way that early-
eighteenth-century popular culture would have understood
sodomy. Sodomitical behavior was seen as a criminal act that
disrupted the societal status quo, not a way to de ne oneself as a
desiring subject. Their relationship is closer to Foucault’s de nition
of identity that links sexuality with desire between two subjects.
William and Singleton have established a bond based on their
desires for one another, an a ectionate—but not necessarily
nonsexual—union of two selves.
Current historians of sexuality are of course unable to pinpoint
the exact moment when sodomy became a crime that merged the
act with the actor. An analysis of Captain Singleton demonstrates
how complex an interlocution of sexuality in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries can be. I am not arguing, I want to
emphasize, that pirates were all sodomites. As I have said, there is
no evidence that they were and the notion is, in fact, beside the
point here. I am arguing that Singleton and William’s relationship
moves beyond a self-conscious disruption of power—which pirates
have always been known for—to a paradigm that brings these two
men together because of their mutual desires. This paradigm is
still, of course, a disruption of power and the status quo, but that
disruption is secondary to their own desires.
The two men retire from piracy and turn their booty into
diamonds. Singleton thinks about William’s suggestion as they
roam across the Middle East toward Europe. “The Nature of
Repentance,” Singleton tells William, “includes Reformation, and
we can never reform; how then can we repent?” (266). In this case
“reform” takes on multiple meanings. On the one hand, “reform”
means to pay back the booty they have taken from so many ships.
On the other hand, in the Christian terms of repentance, “reform”
suggests a rejection of the pirate way of life to which Singleton has
an “Inclination,” a life that he is unable to separate from his own
internalized sense of self. William replies with a reasonable
suggestion that takes into account the practicality of reformation.
It would be impossible to return the booty to the original owners.
He suggests that they should keep the fortune “with a Resolution to
do what Right with it we are able” (267). Singleton then repents,
but he repents to the legalized de nition of piracy, the crimes that
they have committed. He does not repent the lives they have led as
demonized pirates whose identities are linked with the
transgressive world in which they live.
The transgressive camaraderie of the pirate world—and
William and Singleton’s relationship in particular—is not a part of
that repentance because they are still together and still embody the
cultural desires of the pirates: to be apart from men and women in
the normative society of England. Further, their feelings for one
another are cemented by their a ectionate speech. William,
Singleton says, “was my Guide, my Pilot, my Governor, my every
thing, and took care of me, and all we had” (271). In this speech
Singleton combines religious diction with maritime diction. It is
with William that Singleton decides to spend the rest of his life.
Defoe has spent the entire novel setting up Singleton as the hero,
and Singleton has spent the entire novel as a man with unful lled
desires. Repentance is his only choice when the one connection he
makes is with another man who demands that he “repent.” It
seems to me that it is inevitable that he turn to William—the
dissenting gure in the novel—and that he become “every thing”
to Singleton. William is the one person who has shown a ection
and concern for Singleton that go beyond economic
aggrandizement. As a dissenter, William is—like Singleton—an
outsider. He is, therefore, the one person with whom Singleton
desires to spend the rest of his life.
Homoeroticism, then, because it is linked in the sense of
“a ection” to the desire between two men, becomes implicated in
repentance in ways that the libertine sexuality of the pirates in the
book does not, and in ways that normative society cannot o er
them. Repentance—for Singleton and William—becomes the
foundation for their a ectionate relationship in both the present
and the hereafter. For Singleton, that repentance becomes the
foundation for, I would argue, implicit homoerotic desire for
William. Any traditional ideas of the pirate as a libertine outlaw
collapse by this point in the novel. William and Singleton are
inseparable, both literally and symbolically; these two “reformed”
pirates change the terms for male-male bonding to something quite
di erent from either economic transgression or notions that link
sodomy with power as enacted by the libertine. Singleton is at last
realizing that he need not wander the world any farther because he
found what he desired all along: stability and security with Quaker
William. He is nally discovering that his own identity begins and
ends with Quaker William: “I am loath to part with you so long as
to go to the Bottom of the Persian Gulph,” Singleton tells William
as William leaves to do some trading. William is gone much longer
than he said he would be; Singleton is distraught because for the
rst time he sees a future for himself: “I began to be very uneasy
about William, sometimes thinking he had abandoned me” (260).
By the end of the novel, Singleton cannot imagine a life without
Quaker William.
That Singleton repents, reforms, and tries to restore all he has
taken does not mean that he and William will live as “normal”
people. On the contrary, they begin entry into society rst by
dressing as Persians who, like the historical pirates, speak a
private language “as was su cient to make us able to talk to one
another so as not to be understood by any Body, though sometimes
hardly by our selves” (272). It seems as if even though Singleton
may have trouble at times understanding what William says to
him, he does on a deeper level understand the real a ection the
two men share. Their return to Europe is marked by their
continued outsider status and the remarkable symbiosis they share.
They never see themselves as part of society, but only as living
within that society.
Defoe has created a situation in which Singleton longs for a
“home” but at the same time is neither a pirate nor an Englishman.
He neither owns property nor rebels against ownership as a
de nition of identity. Singleton’s only connection with others is a
desire to spend the rest of his life with his friend William. Given
the clear echoes of the Book of Ruth in their conversation, it is
curious that no one has pointed out the vividly loving language
that Defoe employs when William speaks to Singleton: “William
look’d very a ectionately on me; nay, says he, we have embarked
together so long, and come together so far, I am resolved I’ll never
part with thee as long as I live, go where thou wilt, or stay where
thou wilt” (274). The emotional desire implicit in the a ectionate
words that William and Singleton speak to each other here and
elsewhere in the novel contrasts with the language of economic
and erotic desire spoken by the usual Defoean characters, like Moll
Flanders, who routinely con ates sex and money, or Captain Avery
when he comes upon the Great Mogul’s granddaughter.
In a way, William’s and Singleton’s words echo the language of
Moll and Avery or even the language of Singleton himself when he
stumbles across gold in Africa. The di erence from these other
outlaws or Singleton’s earlier incarnation in Africa is that
Singleton and William verbalize their a ection. These men do not
desire objects: money, jewelry, or women’s bodies. Rather, their
desire is a reciprocal yearning for each other: William cares for
Singleton’s soul and Singleton desires to be led by William. There
is, however, a complication to this religious foundation. Unlike
Crusoe, Singleton never has the kind of epiphany that
demonstrates true faith. Instead, as the novel ends, Singleton nds
what he has been looking for all along through the “terms” he
agrees to: he repents in order to live out his life in domestic
solitude with Quaker William.
Singleton still retains some control over his return to England
and still re ects some of the ways piracy has in uenced his sense
of self. He tells William he will return to England on four
conditions. First, they will disclose themselves only to William’s
sister. Second, they will wear beards “after the Grecian Manner . . .
that we may pass for Grecians and Foreigners.” Third, they will
speak English only in private. And nally, “That we will always
live together and pass for brothers” (277). Singleton’s conditions
embody some of the characteristics of the transgressive pirate. Like
the fanciful, colorful dress and alien language of the pirates, their
clothing and their speech will distinguish them from their
neighbors. Like the pirates who call themselves the “brethren of the
sea,” Singleton and William live together as “Greeks,” and rich
Greeks at that.
In the novel’s penultimate paragraph, Singleton lists all the
wealth that the two men have accumulated, “with all of which I
arrived safely, and some time after married my faithful Protectress,
William’s Sister” (277). The marriage, I would argue, becomes
nothing more than a g leaf—like their costume and language.
Indeed, the way that Singleton characterizes his marriage is
strikingly similar to Crusoe’s famous dismissal of his own marriage
and his wife’s death in one sentence.18 Singleton’s marriage, like
Crusoe’s, symbolizes his intent to remain in England. However, the
marriage is subordinated to the wealth Singleton accumulated with
William and their disguise as “Greeks” with all the connotations
that implies. The e ect is to reemphasize the deep a ection that
has developed between the two men throughout the latter half of
the novel and the desire Singleton shows for William.
They will not spend their lives together as brothers, in a kind of
benign homosocial camaraderie; instead they will “pass for
brothers,” a signi cant distinction. They will de ne themselves to
others in a relationship that others can understand, and in turn
live as they desire. Underneath the costume, language, and
presumed camaraderie of these ex-pirates lies something else, the
implications of homoerotic desire exempli ed by their Greek
disguise and by their a ectionate relationship that goes far beyond
camaraderie. The choices that Singleton makes are tied up with
shifting de nitions of self and the di culties inherent in de ning
identity as a function of sexuality—whether deviant or not.
Singleton has given up being a pirate for being a Christian, but he
is still an outsider. He can never “ t in,” but all the same he has
found a “home” and has learned what to do with his “property.”
All this stability is contingent on his own desire for William and
William’s reciprocal a ection.
Richetti writes that at the end of the novel Singleton “is his own
man, something else behind the disguise, as he was really
something else behind his various other roles.” However, what
Richetti goes on to describe as a “myth of a residual person behind
the visible social personality” is, more accurately, the
establishment of a nontraditional identity.19 Singleton has found a
home, but it is a secret transgressive world within the boundaries
of heterocentric English society. Defoe’s construction of the
desiring subject nally sets Captain Singleton apart from Robinson
Crusoe, Roxana, and Moll Flanders. Unlike these other, more
familiar novels, Captain Singleton ends with a sense of closure. This
closure is discomforting for critics of Defoe and the novel. The
subversive happily-ever-after ending questions the normative terms
that critics use to construct the antecedents for the origins of the
novel. Further, Defoe’s ending challenges the standards by which
individuality must be integrated with and de ned by social norms.
8
Robinson Crusoe and “True Christian”
Identity

To me the Impiety of this Part of the Book, in making the Truths of the Bible of a Piece with
the ctitious Story of Robinson Crusoe, is so horribly shocking that I dare not dwell upon it;
but most say, that they make me think that this book ought to be printed with Vaninus, and
Freethinker, and some other Atheistical Tracts, which are condemn’d and held in Abhorrence
by all good Christians.

—Charles Gildon, The Life and Surprizing Adventure of Mr. D ----- De F--

No political arithmetic can make a calculation of the number of true Christians while they
live blended with the false ones, since it is not only hard, but impossible, to know them one
from another in this world.

—Daniel Defoe, The Serious Re ections of Robinson Crusoe

The success of Robinson Crusoe as an early masterpiece of

the modern novel has relied on criticism that takes into account
only the events that lead up to and include Crusoe’s stay on the
island. The incidents that occur after his rescue and in Robinson
Crusoe’s two sequels are dismissed as tangential to Defoe’s rst and
greatest attempt at ction.1 In The Reluctant Pilgrim, for example,
Hunter writes that the Farther Adventures and the Serious Re ections
“seem . . . to have been separately conceived” (ix-x). Robinson
Crusoe, on the other hand, has a de nite form that contributes to
the book’s continued power:

Robinson Crusoe is constructed on the basis of a familiar Christian pattern of

disobedience-punishment-repentance-deliverance, a pattern set up in the rst few
pages of the book. . . . Crusoe’s continual appraisal of his situation keeps the con ict
at the forefront of the action throughout, for his appraisal is not the super cial,
unrelated commentary some critics have described, but rather an integral part of the
thematic pattern set up by Crusoe’s rebellion and the prophecy of his father that
Crusoe “will be the miserablest Wretch that was ever born.” (Hunter, 19–20)

Hunter is correct, as far as he goes, but he sells Defoe—and Crusoe

—short by limiting his discussion to Robinson Crusoe.
Like other critics, Hunter argues that Crusoe’s “deliverance”
ends with his rescue; the last section of the book does not count or
is reduced to an epilogue. The emphasis on volume one while
dismissing the two sequels can explain Crusoe’s behavior, and
allows Hunter and other critics to nd the “thematic pattern” in
the novel. In the last lines of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe writes that he
has more to tell of his life after his rescue. “All these things,” he
says, “with some very surprizing incidents in some new adventures
of my own, for ten years more, I may perhaps give a farther
account of hereafter” (299).
The implications of Crusoe’s “farther account” are important for
a new reading of Robinson Crusoe that can embrace all of Defoe’s
ction without excluding his less familiar novels. Crusoe’s o ering
of a “farther account” suggests that the sequels challenge and
extend Defoe’s “thematic patterns.” The Farther Adventures and the
Serious Re ections are not the “failures” they have been called.2 If
we look at all three novels and consider that Crusoe’s stay on the
island is one adventure out of many, then Crusoe’s
characterization, apparently a transparent merging of a belief in
providence and middle-class economic values in the rst novel,
becomes increasingly inde nite in the Farther Adventures. If his
“serious re ections” are read along with Robinson Crusoe and the
Farther Adventures, what seems to be a random series of events can
be seen to anticipate and parallel the structure of Captain Singleton.
Crusoe is on a quest to determine his identity, a tension between
homo eroticus and homo economicus that nally—implicitly in the
Farther Adventures and explicitly in the Serious Re ections—
becomes displaced by a narrative that emphasizes violent and
radical religious faith.
Of course, it can and has been argued that the narrative voice
of the Serious Re ections represents a persona for Defoe. We
cannot read the Serious Re ections as a continuation of the kind of
story that Defoe has been writing in the rst two Crusoe books.
However, let us accept that Defoe was not working toward an
“invention” of the novel (Ian Watt’s assumption in The Rise of the
Novel). Instead Defoe wrote the book as a continuation of the kind
of moral instruction that he asserts is the purpose of the rst two
books. The Serious Re ections does not contain the “entertaining”
episodes found in the rst two novels that might divert the reader
from the book’s overtly didactic purpose. However, one can also
argue that the “persona” is Crusoe’s voice, since over the course of
two novels we have seen the development of a mutable character:
Robinson Crusoe himself. If read as a second sequel, the Serious
Re ections is the culmination of all the stories and “incidents” that
Defoe relates in the rst two Crusoe novels: an answer to Gildon’s
critique quoted in the epigraph at the start of this chapter.
Crusoe’s religious beliefs in Robinson Crusoe are transformed
into religious zeal in the Farther Adventures and the Serious
Re ections. The “zeal”—particularly in the Serious Re ections—is a
violent exaggeration of the faith that Crusoe professes on the
island. Hunter’s “reluctant pilgrim”—a man who converts out of
necessity—is transformed into a crusader who wants to
exterminate any people who are not Christians or who refuse to
convert to Christianity. This extremism—a religious desire made
explicit by violence—displaces the inferred sexual and economic
desires that de ne the modern individual. And the modern
individual is, of course, the character of Crusoe, a character
archetypical in Western literature who exempli es Defoe’s genius
as a novelist.
Throughout the rst two novels, Crusoe’s “wandering
inclination” takes him from one adventure to another. Defoe had
to write the Serious Re ections in order to conclude Crusoe’s story
de nitively, to bring an end to his unrelenting rambling. Crusoe
says, “I have frequently mentioned the unconquerable impressions
which dwelt upon my mind and lled up all my desires,
immovably pressing me to a wandering, travelling life, and which
pushed me continually on from one adventure to another, as you
have heard” (Serious Re ections, 110). Unlike Captain Singleton,
who found a home and an identity in a relationship with Quaker
William, Crusoe, in hindsight, wants to resolve or understand his
“inclination” to travel, to nd some meaning that “pressed” him to
wander. His “desires” are similar to Singleton’s roving inclinations.
Crusoe, in the rst two novels, travels the world in order to
discover who he is, to nd some way to negotiate the con icting
demands of society that equates identity with the desire for
property and marriage, or domestic stability. If Defoe had not
written the Serious Re ections, it would be easy to imagine Crusoe
wandering the globe in the Farther Adventures volumes 3, 4, 5, ad
in nitum, until he dies in some foreign land. The third volume,
however, brings together all the disparate elements of property,
trade, and middle-class domesticity—represented by the
colonization of his island, his pro t from trade, and his barely
mentioned marriage—implicit in the rst two novels. The
representation of religion both at the end of the Farther Adventures
and in the Serious Re ections becomes the means to understand his
inability to settle down.
Based on his experience as a traveler and his observations of
di erent religions, Crusoe determines that the English “are the
most religious nation in the world” (Serious Re ections, 159).
However, he makes a distinction between Christian practitioners of
what he calls “negative religion” and “true religion”: “The negative
Christian I speak of is so full of himself, so persuaded that he is
good enough, and religious enough already, that he has no thought
of anything unless it be to pull o his hat to God Almighty now
and then, and thank Him that he has no need of Him” (167).
Negative Christians go through the motions of religious piety; they
profess but do not practice true Christian principles. In this
passage, Crusoe could be alluding to his own experience, his own
several crises of faith, when he was marooned on the island in the
rst of the Crusoe novels. Necessity and fear drove him toward
repentance and providence when he was alone and his life was
threatened by disaster. All the signs of providence that moved
Crusoe toward repentance on the island meant nothing after his
rescue in the rst two novels. The chaotic ending of Robinson
Crusoe becomes clearer if we take Crusoe’s “re ections” as
seriously as Defoe intends.
In the most signi cant passage in the Serious Re ections, Defoe
makes clear the motivations behind Crusoe’s conversions and
“wandering inclination.” Crusoe writes that for the hypocritical
Christian, negative religion “is the opiate that doses his soul, even
to the last gasp; and it is ten thousand to one but the lethargic
dream shoots him through the gulf at once, and he never opens his
eyes till he arrives in that light where all things are naked and
open” (167). As an old man, Crusoe anticipates Marx by more than
a hundred years.3 Further, he seems to anticipate Norman O.
Brown’s argument that religion and dreams—both signi cant
aspects of the Crusoe novels—“are expressions, distorted by
repression, of the immortal desires of the human heart” (Brown,
13). The “opiate” is both the material success he had on the island
and the “pro table and diverting” incidents that occur one after
another in the Farther Adventures (vii). Crusoe is able to make
sense of his “diversions” because through his experience and age he
“arrives in that light where all things are naked and open” and
becomes a “true Christian.” Defoe, unlike Marx, makes a
distinction between “negative” and “true” religion; that distinction,
in turn, enables Crusoe to make some sense out of his “wandering
years” and give meaning to his past. By professing “true
Christianity” as an old man, Crusoe shows how he was deluded by
his easy “pro t.” Further, his “wandering inclination” was
symptomatic of his lack of faith. But both negative and true
religion are symptomatic of the repression of his desires. Religion
for Crusoe becomes the means to make sense of an identity that
has eluded him for seventy years.
“True Christianity” is not, to Crusoe, a benign or dissenting
version of the Puritanism that he professed when he was marooned
on the island. In the Serious Re ections, Crusoe suggests a
“subscription” to raise an army and destroy the in dels. “Ten
millions should be asked,” he says, “to be subscribed for sending a
strong eet and army to conquer heathenism and idolatry” (237).
This attitude contrasts sharply with his reaction to the cannibals in
Robinson Crusoe. He is fearful and bewildered when he rst
discovers the footprint and then sees the cannibal feasts, but he
nally asks himself “what authority or call I had, to pretend to be
judge and executioner upon these men as criminals. . . . How do I
know what God Himself judges in these particular cases?” (177).
The di erence, then, between his belief on the island and his belief
at the end of his life is a zeal that, while not unusual in early-
eighteenth-century England, is astounding in its violence in the
context of Crusoe’s own life. In both Robinson Crusoe and the
Farther Adventures, religion plays a signi cant role in Crusoe’s
adventures, but there is always the sense that Crusoe’s conversions
are temporary. Toward the end of the Farther Adventures, however,
his religious beliefs become stronger. His nal “conversion” in the
Serious Refections comes out of the beliefs he professed in the
Farther Adventures.
In the author’s preface to the Farther Adventures Defoe writes,

The second part, if the Editor’s opinion may pass, is (contrary to the usage of second
parts) every way as entertaining as the rst, contains as strange and surprising
incidents, and as great a variety of them; nor is the application less serious and
suitable, and doubtless will, to the sober as well as ingenious reader, be every way as
pro table and diverting. (vii)

Defoe was a notorious pen-for-hire; but he insists that his sequel is

not written to cash in on the success of the rst Crusoe novel. The
critical determinism that assumes that the Farther Adventures is
aesthetically less successful or a hastily written sequel ignores the
importance of the sequel to an understanding of Robinson Crusoe
itself.4 The tendency to downplay the importance of the Farther
Adventures is based on the inclination to dismiss any sequel as less
perfect than the original, a point Defoe himself suggests in his
preface.
But the Farther Adventures was enormously popular in
eighteenth-century England and went through seven editions by
1747, only two fewer than Robinson Crusoe. It was published
initially in August 1719, just four months after the rst edition—
and enormous success—of Robinson Crusoe.5 Defoe’s situation is
exacerbated because of his own reputation as a hack and his
chameleon-like ability to assume authorial expertise no matter
what the political circumstances. His prefaces, then, tend to be
read with a jaundiced eye and can lead critics like Watt to con ate
Defoe the author with Crusoe the narrator. However, the very
instability of authorial intent in the preface allows a complicated
reading across the novels themselves, since the reader cannot
know exactly how to take the author’s meaning.6
Crusoe and Singleton—the piratical subject par excellence—
share an “inclination” to see the world. That “inclination” leads
Crusoe to leave England and join the homosocial camaraderie of
the sailor’s world. Like Singleton, he has a desire to make his
travels pro table; unlike Singleton, he never desires to use that
pro t to make a home in England. He is, in fact, discontented by
the “middle life” his father desired for him when he returns at the
end of Robinson Crusoe. With Singleton and Quaker William’s
“Greek” relationship, Defoe provides a perverse sense of closure to
Captain Singleton. Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, ends with the
promise of more to come, presuming that the popularity of the
novel warrants a sequel.
Near the end of the Farther Adventures Crusoe says “with some
truth, that if trade was not my element, rambling was; and no
proposal for seeing any part of the world which I never had seen
before, could possibly come amiss to me” (214). When Crusoe—
who has accumulated great wealth through his e orts—says, “trade
was not my element,” the reader might be forgiven for taking this
with several grains of salt. However, Crusoe is telling a truth. To
focus only on his mercantile endeavors ignores the reasons that
“rambling” was his “element.” Trade indeed provides the narrative
drive for this book, in much the same way that Crusoe’s taming of
his island provides the motivation for Robinson Crusoe and piracy
drives the second half of Captain Singleton. He is a success in
“trade,” but trade by itself is less signi cant to Crusoe than his
“rambling”—his ambivalence about returning home—in the Farther
Adventures. Critics locate the heart of Robinson Crusoe, indeed its
“thematic meaning,” in the “inner life” of his character. Unlike
Singleton, whom we have examined, or Moll Flanders, Roxana, or
Colonel Jack, Crusoe’s constant self-awareness—in Robinson Crusoe
at least—stands as a paradigm for like novels written over the past
250 years.7 It is no less interesting, however, to suppose that
Defoe’s idea of “character” is unstable precisely because that
character does not t into normative, middle-class paradigms of
identity. In other words, notions of religion and dissent implicit in
much of Defoe’s other work make Crusoe’s character less stable
than critics suppose, if the Farther Adventures and the Serious
Re ections are not ignored.
Once Crusoe is rescued, he makes sure his “tyrannical”
government—as he describes it in the Farther Adventures (304)—
can succeed without him when he returns to England. Crusoe says
that by his constant re ections about God and the meaning of his
exile on the island, “I gained a di erent knowledge from what I
had before” (Robinson Crusoe, 140). The island teaches him to rely
on his belief in God. “In a word,” Crusoe says, “the nature and
experience of things dictated to me, upon just re ection, that all
the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they
are for our use” (140). But after his rescue, Crusoe’s self-re ection
and desire to learn about his inner life, so much a part of the
heritage of the novelistic tradition, disappear until the overtly
didactic but strangely fascinating Serious Re ections, published the
next year in 1720.
In the Farther Adventures Defoe o ers all the entertainment and
“strange and surprising incidents” that he gave in the rst novel.
He also insists on the moral importance of both works for “the
sober as well as the ingenious reader.” Defoe is objecting to critics
like Charles Gildon, who wrote in 1719 after the publication of
Robinson Crusoe, “I hope, Dear D—, that you have taken more care
of Probability and Religion than you have in this; tho’ I am afraid
you are too harden’d a Sinner in these Particulars.”8 The constant
movement and travel in the Farther Adventures—with little time for
the kind of re ection admired by readers of Robinson Crusoe—tend
to over-shadow exactly what the “surprising incidents” might
represent for the “sober” but “ingenious reader” of the novel.
This disjunction between inner re ection by the reader—at
least in the second half of the Farther Adventures—and outward
plot movement is made more apparent by the focus on Crusoe’s
“inner life” in the rst novel. Crusoe himself realizes in hindsight
the direction his inclination to ramble is taking him:

But I was gone a wild-goose chase indeed, and they that will have any more of me
must be content to follow me through a new variety of follies, hardships, and wild
adventures; wherein the justice of Providence may be duly observed, and we may see
how easily Heaven can gorge us with our own desires, make the strongest of our
wishes be our a ictions, and punish us most severely with those very things which
we think it would be our utmost happiness to be allowed in. (Farther Adventures,
187)

If Crusoe, like Singleton, is unable to stay at home but must travel

the world, the “lessons” that he and the reader learn must end with
the rst novel, because in the sequel Crusoe once again interacts
with the world as if he never learned the lessons on the island.
While Gildon notices this tension, later critics simply ignore the
plot shift by ignoring the Farther Adventures or declaring it
aesthetically inferior.
As the lack of scholarship on the Farther Adventures
demonstrates, the “ingenuity” of the reader that Defoe presumes
has been ignored by traditional criticism. To reject the second
Crusoe novel as inferior is to miss the ironic point: Crusoe—
perhaps more of an “everyman” than didacticists or moralists
would like to think—did not learn anything from his stay on the
island.9 He admits as much in the rst paragraph of the Farther
Adventures:

Any one would think that, after thirty- ve years’ a iction, and a variety of unhappy
circumstances, which few men, if any, ever went through before, and after near
seven years of peace and enjoyment in the fulness of all things, grown old, and when,
if ever, it might be allowed me to have had experience of every state of middle life,
and to know which was most adapted to make a man completely happy; I say, after
all this, any one would have thought that the native propensity to rambling, which I
gave an account of in my rst setting out in the world to have been so predominant in
my thoughts, should be worn out, the volatile part be fully evacuated, or at least
condensed, and I might, at sixty-one years of age, have been a little inclined to stay at
home, and have done venturing life and fortune any more. (1)

In this long, digressive justi cation for his desire to “ramble,”

Crusoe’s reasoning hinges on his “experience of every state of
middle life.” Just as he wanders the globe to try and nd
“meaning” for his existence, his pen wanders the page to justify his
“inclination.” He tries to understand why a life of plenty and
comfort results in an edgy desire to “venture life and fortune” on
the uncertainty of travel. Middle-class life—even with the material
comfort he lacked on the island—leaves him unhappy or
dissatis ed. Like Captain Singleton and Roxana, he is unsure of his
“place” in the world despite his fame, family, and wealth.
The Farther Adventures can be read as a ctionalized version of
the travel books so popular in the early eighteenth century. For
instance, when Crusoe talks about the people, sights, and society
of China (250, 268, 270) or his trip through the steppes of Russia
and the Mongolian desert (281), the reader is reminded of such
privateer/authors as Woodes Rogers, Edward Cooke, and William
Dampier.10 But from the beginning, the Farther Adventures, like
Captain Singleton, is more than an imitation of a travelogue by a
privateer. The narrative is instead the logical development of a
character who nds that nothing or nobody—except Friday—is
important in the “real” world. Crusoe showed this tendency in the
rst novel, although then it was based on his relationship with
God. Indeed, Crusoe often writes that he purposefully does not
intend to give detailed descriptions of coast lines and the ora and
fauna of the places he visits as the travelogue writer does. Instead,
Crusoe undertakes or describes a di erent kind of travel, a search
for self-knowledge that the reader discovers along with him in
Robinson Crusoe. The reader and Crusoe nd out in the Farther
Adventures that “self-knowledge,” that is, belief in providence and
satisfaction derived from material success, were attainable only
when Crusoe was alone on the island. Crusoe may be born into the
middle state, but his “happiness” hinges on travel, a restlessness in
stark contrast to the middle state his father desired for him.
What happens if the terms of validation for Robinson Crusoe are
reversed, if we suppose that the Farther Adventures is the more
important volume? Crusoe’s “rambling”—read in the context of his
time on the island—becomes neither a quixotic gambol halfway
around the world, nor a picaresque novel, nor an imitation
privateer journal. Instead, the overarching goal—more important
than the individual incidents—is to return to his island, and then,
after he is marooned in Bengal, to get back to England. The travels
in the Farther Adventures become a reversal of the static, inward
search for self-knowledge in Robinson Crusoe. In this rst novel,
Crusoe makes a home on his island and recreates a sense of
material and domestic comfort, since money is worthless on the
island. When his Edenic, self-contained world is threatened by
cannibals, then overrun by Spaniards and pirates, he retreats to
the fears that haunted him before he read the signs of providence.
As he watches the pirates’ cruelties near the end of the rst
volume, Crusoe says, “This put me in mind of the rst time when I
came on shore, and began to look about me; how I gave my self
over for lost; how wildly I looked around me; what dreadful
apprehensions I had; and how I lodged in the tree all night for fear
of being devoured by wild beasts” (250). If Crusoe’s paradise can
be invaded by outsiders—whom he compares to “wild beasts”—
what will happen to him when he returns to the outside world
itself, to “civilization”? Like Gulliver, who reacts with undisguised
disgust toward his countrymen on his return to England after his
stay with the Houyhnhnms, Crusoe will discover that all the fears
represented by the cannibals he had avoided for his last ten years
on the island can come true, at the same time that his desires
cannot be satis ed. But once he returns to England, after his
narrow escape from wolves in the Pyrenees, Crusoe says, “I was
inured to a wandring life . . . I could not resist the strong
inclination I had to see my island” (Robinson Crusoe, 297). Even
though Crusoe spent all those years alone on a deserted island for
the most part happily, he also discovers that civilization can be as
dangerous as the unknown. The lust for travel is too strong to
ignore, however; he has not learned the lessons of his twenty-
seven-year displacement from society, despite the safety provided
by his material and domestic success in London.
After his return, the only thing that keeps Crusoe in England is
his wife. She dies, as the reader learns in the famous paragraph at
the end of the rst Crusoe novel. At the beginning of the Farther
Adventures, Crusoe says, “When she was gone, the world looked
awkwardly around me. I was as much a stranger in it, in my
thoughts, as I was in the Brazils when I went rst on shore there;
and as much alone, except as to the assistance of servants, as I was
in my island” (7). Always feeling like an outsider at home—both
before he left at eighteen and after he returns at the age of fty-
ve—he had at least a semblance of “home” when he lived in
England, married, with young children. The death of his wife
leaves him isolated in ways that make him see the tedium of
everyday life for an Englishman with an inclination to travel. His
“inclination,” however, runs deeper than a desire to see the world.
Bored in England, frustrated by the “middle state,” Crusoe looks
back with nostalgia at the way life was for him when he survived
alone and, as critics like to emphasize, the ways he looked inward
to nd justi cations for his solitude by signs of providence.
 The apparently simple goal of Crusoe’s story in the Farther
Adventures—to return to his island—becomes complicated by his
assertion that “there was something which certainly was the reason
and end of life, superior to all these [material] things, which was
either to be possessed, or at least hoped for, on this side of the
grave” (8). Defoe’s plotting of the novel gives further complication
to Crusoe’s initial design. Although Crusoe aims to nd out what
had happened to his “subjects” in his absence, that impulse to
return to his “kingdom” results in a trip from England to South
America to Asia and nally back to England through Russia and
Europe. As the reader discovers, Crusoe is a man torn by both his
inability to settle down and his inability to view the world as an
impartial traveler. This understanding of his reasons to ramble
might relieve him of the scrapes in which he nds himself. He is a
quintessential provincial Englishman in his responses to the sites
he visits, but also a man metaphorically without a country. Crusoe
looks for something that he desires—he is not sure what—but that
mysterious something eludes him, until he looks back on his life in
the Serious Re ections.
Toward the end of the Farther Adventures Crusoe is forced to
spend the winter in Siberia with an exiled Russian prince. The
prince, he decides, is a “truly great man.” He is content in his
banishment because, Crusoe says, the prince “showed that his mind
was so inspired with a superior knowledge of things, so supported
by religion as well as by a vast share of wisdom, that his contempt
of the world was really as much as he had expressed” (307). After
so many years alone on an island, Crusoe has had the chance to
get to know his own “mind.” He explicitly professed “contempt of
the world” when he was marooned. The prince’s story, then, is
both emblematic of Crusoe’s time alone and, for the reader,
suggestive of the unhappiness that causes Crusoe’s wandering
inclination in the second novel. His wife is dead, Friday is dead,
and he has been left behind by his own sailors. He is an old man
who must, in fact, nd his way home, in his case a “home” that we
know has left him unsettled and unhappy. Crusoe cannot express
his own “contempt of the world” except through analogous stories
such as the tale of the exiled prince. And Crusoe believes that this
prince has learned to control his desires through “a superior
knowledge of things.”
Both Crusoe and Captain Singleton return to an England of
strangers. As the rst half of Singleton’s story comes to an end, he
says, “I had neither Friend, Relation, nor Acquaintance in England,
tho’ it was my Native Country” (137). Singleton is “betrayed” by
friends and loses all the money that he accrued in his trek across
Africa. Crusoe, on the other hand, returns to his “Native Country,”
keeps his money, marries, and has a family. Singleton says that the
rst half of his life “may be said to have begun in Theft, and ended
in Luxury; a sad Setting out, and a worse Coming home” (138).
Crusoe’s trials began when he left home. His isolation on the island
began “in Theft” because he went against his instincts and became
involved in slavery. Like Singleton, Crusoe has new trials when he
tries to settle down at the end of Robinson Crusoe. His return
“ended in Luxury,” and enables him to buy a ship or “property”—
only to begin his wandering and his a ictions all over again. The
parallels between Crusoe and the piratical subject Captain
Singleton are striking. Both men are unable to settle down, to nd
a “home” in England. Both men are searching for a sense of
identity that does not have to be de ned by ownership of property
or domestic stability.
Given the opportunity to travel again, Crusoe jumps at his
nephew’s o er to go to sea with him, and asks, “What devil . . .
sent you of this unlucky errand?” (Farther Adventures, 10). His
deliverance from tedium—the middle state that he vowed to resign
himself to after his rescue from the island—he attributes to “the
existence of an invisible world” and “the occurrence of second
causes with the ideas of things which we form in our minds,
perfectly [p]reserved, and communicated to any in the world” (9).
The providence that earlier enabled him to keep faith on the island
has been transformed into those “thoughts” that tell him to go on
board a ship again, exactly what, as he says, “compleated my ruin”
in the rst place (Robinson Crusoe, 40). His unsettled “nature”
requires his claim that “it would be a kind of resisting Providence if
I should attempt to stay home” (Farther Adventures, 11). Providence
for Crusoe in the rst two novels is the sign that gives him the
justi cation to do what he intended to do anyway.
When Crusoe returns to his island he learns of the trials that his
settlers went through. The pirates who settle with the Spaniards
are distinctly di erent from the heroic piratical subjects of the
General History and Captain Singleton. The pirates in the Crusoe
novels are hostis humani generis, criminals with no redeeming
qualities, “rogues,” “villains,” and “brutes” (Farther Adventures, 45,
46). They exhibit none of the mythic qualities we have seen in
other eighteenth-century depictions. Homoerotic desire is absent
from the representations of these pirates, and absent from
representations of the Spaniards who settle Crusoe’s island. The
Spaniards were usually represented as “bad” in eighteenth-century
texts, not only because they were Catholic but also because of their
massacres of Native Americans in Mexico and Peru.11 In the Farther
Adventures, by contrast, Crusoe’s Spaniards are morally superior to
anyone, including any British citizens:

And here I must, in justice to these Spaniards, observe, that let the accounts of
Spanish cruelty in Mexico and Peru be what they will, I never met with seventeen
men, of any nation whatsoever, in any foreign country, who were so universally
modest, temperate, virtuous, so very good-humoured, and so courteous as these
Spaniards; and as to cruelty, they had nothing of it in their very nature; no
inhumanity, no barbarity, no outrageous passions, and yet all of them men of great
courage and spirit. (83)

The Spaniards—England’s enemies—have the qualities embodied

by people in the “middle state” described by Crusoe’s father:
“temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable
diversions, and all desirable pleasures” (Robinson Crusoe, 28).
These are not the usual Spaniards at all. However, Defoe has to set
these men up heroically in contrast to the criminalized pirates.
Through Defoe’s representation of the Spaniards, Crusoe can
reassert his authority over his subjects and his island. The
Spaniards are no more “legitimate” as settlers than the pirates or
even Crusoe himself. They all arrive uninvited to the island.
However, the Spaniards show their willingness to carry out
Crusoe’s wishes. Therefore he can leave them in control of the
island that he “tamed” in the rst place.
Compare these heroically embodied Spaniards (saints, if
Crusoe’s world would allow such “idols”) with the pirates, who
destroyed the “plantations” of some of Crusoe’s settlers:

When the three [pirates] came back, like furious creatures, ushed with the rage
which the work they had been about had put them into, they came up to the
Spaniards, and told them what they had done, by way of sco and bravado; and one
of them stepping up to one of the Spaniards, as if they had been a couple of boys at
play, takes hold of his hat, as it was upon his head, and giving it a twirl about,
sneering in his face, says he to him, “And you Seignior Jack Spaniard, shall have the
same sauce if you do not mend your manners.” (49)

The pirates in the Farther Adventures are the antithesis of the

Catholic Spaniards. They are without redeeming qualities, unlike
the title characters of The King of Pirates or Captain Singleton, both
of which were written within a year of the Farther Adventures.
Crusoe’s pirates—unwilling to take care of themselves in any way
—exhibit none of the dichotomous pirate traits that fascinated
early-eighteenth-century readers. Defoe even compares them to
children—“boys at play”—to emphasize their distance from the
usual pirates, who were serious in their enmity to the world. A
representation of the more complex piratical subject—the antihero
who is both valorized and vili ed in early-eighteenth-century
England—would make it di cult for Defoe to show these pirates’
redemption.
Crusoe allows “liberty of Conscience” on his island (Robinson
Crusoe, 248). These are strong words with explicit political
connotations for Defoe’s English readers. This liberty anticipates
Captain Misson’s democratic utopia. Further, Defoe, the author of
The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters twenty years before and other
works that justify “liberty of Conscience” in the face of great
resistance, shows how such a society can live in peace.12 The
Spaniards and the pirates, from di erent countries and with
di erent religions, live together in the same community.13 This
“liberty of Conscience” is problematized, however, because the
island almost falls apart. The pirates, unlike the Spaniards, refuse
to help make the island habitable. It takes the arrival of Crusoe
and the establishment of a unique kind of Christianity, tolerated by
all the islanders, to control the pirates and establish a new order on
the island.
Atkins, the worst of the pirates, never ceases to pester and
harass the Spaniards until he and his crew are brought together
with the Spaniards by a common fear of “cannibals.” When Crusoe
returns, Atkins has settled down and is in fact living with a native
woman, though without the bene t of marriage. When Crusoe
gives the Spaniards and the pirates the opportunity to marry, the
Spaniards refuse because “some . . . had wives in Spain, and the
others did not like women that were not Christians, and all
together declared that they would not touch one of them; which
was an instance of such virtue as I have not met with in all my
travels” (77). Defoe the ironist plays with the expectations of the
readers. Spaniards, England’s most notorious enemies (but not the
enemies of “all mankind”) are the most virtuous men in either
volume. Not only do they refuse to marry non-Christians, they
refuse to have sex with them. Even though Crusoe himself is unable
to settle down, Defoe is making an important moral and political
point about the signi cance of marriage and stability, but at the
same time complicates his construction of the island. The reader is
left to wonder how long the island can remain habitable if it is
“peopled” by nonpropagating settlers, or, as in the case of
Misson’s Libertalia, how long the island can remain “European” if
Europeans are propagating with natives. Defoe’s imagination is a
little extreme in this depiction of a group of men who have been
marooned for many years, particularly given the context of the
maritime world and the sexual proclivities of the sailor.
This contrasts sharply with depictions of pirates in Defoe’s
other works. In Captain Singleton and The King of Pirates, the single
status of the pirates is foregrounded. And in the General History, a
work probably not by Defoe but surely in uenced by him, pirates
are always either unmarried or ambiguously attached, with the
notable exceptions of Blackbeard and his fourteen wives, Rackham
and his cross-dressing female lover, and Misson and his Libertalia.
These exceptions—all overdetermined or parodic instances of
heterosexual behavior—contrast with the transgressively
homosocial world of the other pirates in the General History. If the
pirates are to be brought into Crusoe’s society, they must marry,
even if their marriages are to native women. However, these
pirates deviate from English norms in another way because they
are married in a Catholic ceremony. The detail with which Defoe
narrates the marriage of Will Atkins to his wife suggests that
dissent from the Church of England is the norm on Crusoe’s island.
The “liberty of Conscience” Crusoe allows makes him resort to
deceit so that a French priest—whom he had earlier rescued and
brought with him to the island—performs the ceremony for the
reformed pirates.
In order to convince the pirates of the necessity of a “legal”
marriage, Crusoe says to Atkins that he has “no doubt but they
were married in the sight of God, and were bound in conscience to
keep them as their wives; but that the laws of men being
otherwise, they might pretend they were not married, and so
desert the poor women and children hereafter” (136–37). To
Crusoe, the importance of the ceremony lies in the legal
rami cations of marriage for the wives and children. Crusoe’s
concern is ironic since “desert the poor . . . children hereafter” is
exactly what he did when he abandoned his young children after
his wife’s death. He tells the pirates that a marriage “was not only
to prevent any scandal, but also to oblige them that they should
not forsake [their wives], whatever might happen” (Farther
Adventures, 138). Crusoe is “despot” of his island and is ultimately
responsible for his subjects’ behavior. The wedding, therefore, is
not only to “protect” the wife and children, but also to cover up
any possible scandalous behavior and to screen Crusoe’s island
from potential sexual and economic repercussions these
transgressive relationships between pirate and heathen might
reveal. Perhaps more important, the marriages serve to civilize the
island and its inhabitants. By forcing the pirates to marry, Crusoe
is building a society that replicates England and goes against usual
depictions of the pirate world. Crusoe’s society provides stability
for the island based on the relations between di erent kinds of
property: land, wives, and the harvest that each produces—and
typical pirates have neither land nor wives.
The marriage—and its ties to property—and the avoidance of
scandal are very similar to the relationship between Quaker
William and Captain Singleton. In order to prevent “scandal,”
William and Singleton live as “Greeks”; further, they promise
never to “forsake” one another, and live together on their own bit
of property in England. A subversive tension permeates the ending
of Captain Singleton, as we have seen. Likewise, the tension
between English moral conventions and the world of Robinson
Crusoe and his island is very strong in the Farther Adventures. The
tension lies not only in the marriage of the reformed pirates to
native women but in Crusoe’s encouragement of liberty of
conscience on his island. He wants the pirates to marry, but allows
a French priest to handle the ceremony. This is in itself a striking
representation of religious tolerance. Of course, one could argue
that Crusoe has no choice, because the Frenchman is the only
clergyman around. However, Crusoe rationalizes the moral virtues
of the Catholic priest:

It is true this man was a Roman, and perhaps it may give o ence to some hereafter if
I leave anything extraordinary upon record of a man whom, before I begin, I must, to
set him out in just colours, represent in terms very much to his disadvantage in the
account of Protestants; as, rst, that he was a Papist; secondly, a Popish priest; and
thirdly, a French Popish priest. (121)

The “French Popish priest” has three strikes against him, yet
Crusoe insists that he perform the marriages. A more threatening
religious man to early-eighteenth-century English readers—other
than a satanist in league with the devil, or an idol worshiper—
Defoe could not have come up with. However, this priest is a
paragon of Christian virtue, a “true Christian,” not drugged by the
opiate of “negative religion.” In fact, Crusoe says to the priest
after they talk about Christianity, “How far . . . have I been from
understanding the most essential part of a Christian, viz., to love
the interest of the Christian Church, and the good of other men’s
souls!” (131). In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe spent years alone because
he had no “interest of the Christian Church” and never thought of
the “good” of others. His experience on the island told him that
toil, thrift, and belief in providence would a ect his spiritual and
thus material well-being. Now he sees that not only his own soul,
but the souls of others must be “saved” if the “interest” or stability
of his island is to be maintained.
 The priest’s embodiment as a “true Christian” is undercut,
however. For the reader there is a tension between the speci city
of Christian religious belief and the “scandal” that Crusoe fears
might blacken his island’s reputation. Furthermore the nancial
connotations of “interest” indicate how economic and religious
social convention both play a large part in Crusoe’s thinking,
despite his continual subversion of convention through his
rambling and his inability to settle down. After he has once again
put his stamp of authority on the island, Crusoe leaves his
“subjects” to fend for themselves. He has reasserted his power over
them, turned pirates into “true Christians,” and left his island in
the capable hands of the Spaniards, who will presumably continue
to “pro t” from their hard work and religious convictions. The
marriages of the pirates demonstrate the compelling desire Crusoe
has to rea rm convention at the same time he is unable to
conform to convention himself.
As we have seen, Crusoe never thinks about marriage and
“settling down” before he is rescued in the rst volume. When
Crusoe’s wife dies at the end of Robinson Crusoe, he dismisses not
only her death, but the marriage as well in one sentence (248).
Crusoe’s relationship with Friday is delineated much more clearly
and at much greater length than his union with his wife. This
connection is fascinating to read in the context of both Crusoe’s
marriage and the marriages of the pirates to their native wives. In
part because I see the homoerotic connotations in Crusoe and
Friday’s relationship—and similar relationships in the General
History and Captain Singleton—I see the desire exhibited by Crusoe
toward Friday as distinct from the usually uncomplicated
master/slave dichotomy that critics tend to observe.14 After Crusoe
rescues Friday from cannibals and teaches him English and about
Christianity, the two men return to England together. There is no
question that Friday is an essential part of Crusoe’s life. In fact, his
unusual status as “companion” and “servant”—never “slave”—is
taken for granted in the Farther Adventures until he is killed o
midway through the novel.
Friday’s death scene begins as an amusing episode after the
excessive moralizing that accompanies the marriage of Will Atkins
and his native wife. Crusoe and his ship are sailing down the
eastern coast of South America and are set upon by “a hundred and
six and twenty” canoes lled with furious natives (178). Neither
side can communicate with the other, until Crusoe sends Friday to
“go out upon the deck and call out aloud to them in his language,
to know what they meant” (179). Friday attempts to talk to the
natives. They pay no attention to Friday’s e orts; instead, “six of
them, who were in the foremost or nighest boat to us, turned their
canoes from us, and stooping down, showed us their naked
backsides; just as if, in England, saving your presence, they had
bid us kiss—” (179). Unfortunately, Friday is killed in the ensuing
fusillade: “Friday cried out they were going to shoot; and
unhappily for him, poor fellow, they let y about three hundred of
their arrows, and to my inexpressible grief killed poor Friday”
(179). The humor of the situation works in two ways. Not only
does it undercut the signi cance of Friday’s death because mooning
natives are a striking image. Defoe’s use of the humor also
unmasks the depth of Crusoe’s response to his loss because the
attack comes as such a surprise to the reader.
Crusoe, so nonchalant when his wife dies, becomes “so enraged
with the loss of my old servant, the companion of all my sorrows
and solitudes, that I immediately ordered ve guns to be loaded
with small shot, and four with great, and gave them such a
broadside as they had never heard in their lives before, to be sure”
(179). Friday’s death has an indelible e ect on Crusoe, an e ect
that permeates the entire second half of the novel, just as his
father’s presence is never completely out of Crusoe’s—or the
reader’s—consciousness in Robinson Crusoe. The repressed violence
that Crusoe had shown toward the cannibals in Robinson Crusoe in
the years before he rescued Friday is unleashed by Friday’s death.
Religion, which had been the means to create a working society
and economic stability on his island both when he was alone and
when he returns, manifests itself as a violent hatred of “heathens”
and “pagans.” Friday, not always visible in the Farther Adventures
before his death, is the catalyst for Crusoe’s reactions toward non-
Christians in the remainder of the novel and toward “negative
Christians” in the Serious Re ections.
Crusoe makes a point of saying that it is not “the ill manners of
turning up their bare backsides to us” that aggrieved him. Instead,
the natives “killed my poor Friday, whom I so entirely loved and
valued, and who, indeed, so well deserved it, I not only had been
justi ed before God and man, but would have been very glad, if I
could, to have overset every canoe there, and drowned every one
of them” (180). Crusoe’s response to the natives’ actions contrasts
with his reaction to the massacre of an entire town by his sailors, a
few pages later in the novel. In that instance, Crusoe is horri ed
by his men’s actions, and for weeks berates them because they
horribly overreacted to the killing of one of their own by a group
of Madagascar natives. When Friday is killed, Crusoe’s response is
as violent as that of his men will be, although he manages in part
to repress that violence. The a ection Crusoe shows toward Friday
is quite di erent from the a ection he professes when he
introduces the slave boy Xury in Robinson Crusoe.
As a young man, years before he is initially shipwrecked on his
island, Crusoe is captured by a Sallee pirate. He makes his escape
with Xury, for whom Crusoe shows some fondness. After they make
their escape and are sailing along the coast of Africa, Xury o ers
to go on shore, to risk certain death from “savages” or “lyons and
tygers” (Robinson Crusoe, 47). “I asked him why he would go; why
I should not go and he stay in the boat; and the boy answered with
so much a ection that made me love him ever after” (47). The
“a ection” that Xury shows and the “love” that Crusoe asserts
contrast sharply with Crusoe’s reaction to Friday’s death. After
Crusoe and Xury are rescued by the Portuguese captain, Crusoe
ends up selling Xury. Even though he protests that he is “loath to
sell the poor boy’s liberty,” he does, for sixty pieces of eight (54).
And that is the last the reader hears of Xury.
In contrast, memories of Friday keep intruding into Crusoe’s
thoughts. When he speaks of Friday, Crusoe can barely repress the
bubbling emotions that come through the prose. He describes the
way the “natives . . . always add two e’s at the end of the words
where we make one . . . nay, I could hardly make Friday leave it
o , though at last he did” (Farther Adventures, 182). This memory
sets Crusoe o once again in a digression about his late friend:

And now I name the poor fellow once more, I must take my last leave of him, poor
honest Friday! We buried him with all the decency and solemnity possible, by
putting him into a co n, and throwing him into sea; and I caused them to re eleven
guns for him; and so ended the life of the most grateful, faithful, honest, and most
a ectionate servant that ever man had. (182)

There is no indication that sexual relations took place between

Friday and Crusoe. Rather, it is more signi cant that Crusoe lives
in a homosocial world in which a ection for Friday causes him to
be devastated at Friday’s death, indeed, devastated in ways that
elude him when his wife dies. In Crusoe’s world, conventions of
religion and master/slave relationships mask and discipline the
love and a ection that are explicit and the eroticism that is
implicit in their relationship.
The implicit sexuality in Crusoe’s world can be seen in the
retelling of the Crusoe story in an amusing little pornographic
novel from the 1960s entitled The Secret Life of Robinson Crusoe.
“Humphrey Richardson” (surely a pseudonym) writes in the
introduction,

And the tale that follows is nothing more or less than an attempt to visualize and to
recapture the secret side, the neglected aspect of Robinson Crusoe’s life, a life led in a
world perhaps less devoid of at least the thought of women (in the practical absense
of their carnal presence) than an XVIIIth Century journalist’s version of the story has

led us to suppose.15

What follows is an at times hilarious retelling of the Crusoe story.

Toward the end of the short novel, after Crusoe has tired of
fantasies and onanism, he sets his eyes on Friday and “he would
possess the unhappy lad. Possess him furiously.”
Each night, Friday lies awake and waits for a drunken Crusoe
to come into his bed:

Robinson staggers over to the bed. He reaches down, grabs the undershorts, pulls. His
fumbling hands nd their way to the y. . . . Finally pulls the garment o . Friday
hides his timid nudity. “Hey, by God! Turn over, d’ye hear!” Robinson bellows.

    Shocking scenes like that.16

I quote at length from this “complete and unexpurgated” book

because Crusoe and Friday act out what is implicit in the Crusoe
character: sexual desire made manifest by its very silence in
Defoe’s novels. Other, more serious books, such as J. M. Coetzee’s
Foe and Maurice Tournier’s Friday, suggest hidden sexual desire as
well. In Friday, for instance, the island literally becomes Crusoe’s
lover: “Then, with strength renewed . . . he would turn to press his
loins to the huge, warm female body, to furrow it with a plow of
 esh.”17 Part of the fascination with the Crusoe story, I would
argue, is this “secret” side of Crusoe’s life. We hear about his
relationship to God, we read in great detail his taming of the
island. But if we are reading about a fully “psychological” human
being in Defoe’s depiction of Crusoe, much is also left out. Bataille
is absolutely correct when he argues that “eroticism is that within
man . . . which calls his being into question.” Bataille asserts that
religion and eroticism are but two sides of private experience: one
sacred and one profane. “Private experience” (and what else do we
get in Robinson Crusoe but the title character’s own account of his
private experience?) and religion and eroticism are dialectical and
inextricably linked.18
Of course, when Crusoe and Friday live together in England,
the terms of their relationship change because a “civilized” man
and a “savage” would be watched by all of Crusoe’s acquaintances
in London. However, the island is a world where di erent rules
apply, and Crusoe attributes his friendship with Friday to
providence (206). The transgressive nature of their relationship—
not entirely subordinated by notions of servitude and slavery—is
in fact sanctioned by the signs of providence. Crusoe and Friday
rescue honorable Spaniards, and Crusoe is able to create his own
little “kingdom,” a homosocial world in which gendered di erence
is entirely absent from representations of human relationships.
If Friday’s death scene were the only example of the “a ection”
between Crusoe and his servant, then this would be an e ort to
make a mountain out of a very small molehill. Friday’s a ection
for Crusoe, however, is equally strong, and not simply because
Crusoe saved Friday from being the main course at a cannibal
feast. In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe o ers to let Friday return to his
own people. Unhappy with Crusoe’s proposal, Friday says, “What
you send Friday away for? take, kill Friday, no send Friday
away?” (227). Surprised by Friday’s response, Crusoe says, “In a
word, I so plainly discovered the utmost a ection in him to me,
and a rm resolution in him, that I told him then, and often after,
that I would never send him away from me, if he was willing to
stay with me” (227). The relationship between Friday and Crusoe
must then be read in the context of both Robinson Crusoe and the
Farther Adventures. Their conversation, reminiscent of the
a ectionate vows between Quaker William and Captain Singleton,
is a transgressive speech, a window into the a ectionate, possibly
homoerotic world implicit in both Robinson Crusoe and the Farther
Adventures. Crusoe extends his promise to “never send him away”
only if Friday chooses to stay with Crusoe. By looking at the Farther
Adventures in addition to Robinson Crusoe, we can see the ways
Crusoe’s relationship with Friday extends through both volumes,
and see that his stay on the island is not entirely detached from the
later events in both novels.
After Friday’s death, Crusoe’s journey loses the purpose that it
had as means to an end: to return to England. For the remainder of
the Farther Adventures, Crusoe becomes embroiled in one violent
incident after another. Many of these events metaphorically
resemble his encounters with wolves at the end of Robinson Crusoe.
Indeed, Defoe uses the image of the wolf more than once implicitly
and explicitly as an e ective analogy to Crusoe’s response to the
world. The episode with the wolves toward the end of the novel is
one of the most puzzling and seemingly arbitrary sequences in
Robinson Crusoe. Modern critics are unable to make sense of this
scene. What does it have to do with anything else in the novel? Is
it nothing more than sensationalism tacked on for readerly
excitement? The wolves attack Crusoe, Friday, and their party as
they travel through the mountains between Spain and France in
“the severest winter all over Europe that had been known in the
memory of man” (285). A less literal representation of this lupine
image is repeated twice more in the Farther Adventures. If both
parts are read together, the deceptively capricious inclusion of the
wolves in the rst novel begins to take on meaning that does not
have to be explained away as aberrant in an otherwise coherent
masterpiece.
In the long chase sequence at the end of Robinson Crusoe, the
wolves present horrifying and violent images of “devils,” gruesome
death, and senseless appetite that parallel and make real Crusoe’s
fears of cannibals on the island. However, Defoe’s description of
the wolves’ attack and Crusoe’s self-defense reads like a war
between two well-organized armies. In the wilds of the mountain
passes, Crusoe and his party are assaulted by “troops of wolves”
(293):
 We were not gone half over the plain, but we began to hear the wolves howl in the
wood on our left, in a frightful manner, and presently after we saw about a hundred
coming on directly toward us, all in a body, and most of them in a line, as regularly as
an army drawn up by experienced o cers. (292)

Like these wolves, both the cannibals whom Crusoe and Friday
attacked to save the Spaniards and the heathens whom Crusoe will
attack in the Farther Adventures “howl” and make similar frightful
noises. The wolves, however, are overcome, and retreat before
Crusoe and his companions can in ict further damage. They have
more “sense,” it seems, than the “heathen” cannibals and Chinese
and “Tartar” pagans. Even though they show some sense, the
wolves are horrifying to Crusoe. It is inexplicable to Crusoe that he
meets such “hellish creatures” (293) when he is so near civilization
and “home.” He says, “I think I would much rather go a thousand
leagues by sea, though I were sure to meet with a storm once a
week” than cross those mountains again (296).
When the wolves reappear in the Farther Adventures they recall
both the wolves Crusoe met in the mountains and his fear of the
cannibals. In the Farther Adventures Crusoe says that his colony
“had, as I may say, a hundred wolves upon the island, which would
devour everything they could come at, yet could very hardly be
come at themselves” (102). Near the end of the novel Crusoe has
allowed religion, even fanaticism (since other Christians try to
dissuade him from his actions) to take over his identity. He again
uses a lupine image, this time to describe the Chinese “heathens.”
Defoe’s use of the wolves works to unveil the purpose behind
Crusoe’s unrest: he is disinclined to marry again and settle down.
Instead, he is “inclined” to travel. And he wants to get away from
an England he does not really know, nor wants to know.
The trope of piracy appears more frequently than the wolves in
the Crusoe novels. The fear of pirates and piracy is never far below
the surface of the Farther Adventures. After Friday’s death, the ship
sails halfway around the world to Madagascar. While they are at
the island made famous by pirates such as Avery and Kidd, one of
the most vivid episodes in the book occurs. Interacting and trading
with the natives of Madagascar, Crusoe and his men believe they
are on friendly terms with them. Unfortunately, one of the sailors
rapes a native woman during the night, and then disappears. The
sailors—without Crusoe—go in search of their comrade, believing
he is held hostage in the natives’ “city.” Defoe writes, “and so it
was indeed, for there they found the poor fellow, hanged up naked
by one arm, and his throat cut” (198). Enraged by their comrade’s
murder, the men go on a horrible rampage. “They swore to one
another they would be revenged,” writes Defoe, “and that not an
Indian who came into their hands should have quarter; and to
work they went immediately, and yet not so madly as by the rage
and fury they were in might be expected” (198–99). Here the
sailors act with the ferocity of the pirates when they raid a ship.
The ferocity is also reminiscent of the wolves’ insatiable appetites
and military precision when they meet Crusoe and his party in the
mountains.
 As Crusoe notices, at rst the sailors are able to control their
passions. In a sort of inverted way, they are reasonable in their
methodical reprisal. Instead of ransacking, looting, and murdering
the “Indians,” they set about burning the houses of the sleeping
natives. As more and more of the natives wake up and come out of
their houses to see what is the matter, the sailors give in to their
passions and massacre all of them. What begins as a systematic
retribution for the murder of their friend becomes a holocaust of a
whole village. All this time, Crusoe is on board his ship with his
nephew. They see the ames coming from the shore and decide to
try to put a stop to the massacre. Crusoe says, “I must confess I
never was at the sacking a city, or at the taking a town by storm .
. . I never had any idea of the thing itself before, nor is it possible
to describe it, or the horror which was upon our minds at hearing
it” (201). The sailors act like the wolves in Robinson Crusoe,
stripped of all restraint, and indeed show the brutish nature of the
pirates. The sailors’ uncontrolled passions are unmasked. Their
unmasking demonstrates the horrible “nature” of mankind to
Crusoe.
In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe describes the sight when they come
upon the wolves’ carnage in the mountains: “But here we had a
most horrible sight; for riding up to the entrance where the horse
came out, we found the carcass of another horse, and of two men,
devoured by the ravenous creatures . . . as to the man, his head
and the upper part of his body was eaten up” (293). Crusoe
describes in detail his entry into the Madagascar village:
 plain now to be seen by the light of the re, lay four men and three women killed;
and, as we thought one or two more lay in the heap among the re. In short there
were such instances of rage altogether barbarous, and of a fury beyond what was
human, we thought it was impossible our men could be guilty of it. (202)

Defoe depicts the scenes of horror here in the same kind of

detail he uses to describe the minutiae of Crusoe’s life on the island
in the rst novel. The numbers of natives, how the wolves’ victims
and the sailors’ victims die, and the detail of the barbarity and
carnage are a vivid reminder of just how lively a writer Defoe can
be. Defoe ties together the “natural” violence of the wolves and the
overwrought violence of the sailors. Further, the two scenes
anticipate Crusoe’s violence toward the Asian “heathens” near the
end of the Farther Adventures. Defoe—probably inadvertently—
shows that there is a ne line that separates Christian violence and
anti-Christian, uncivilized violence. All these examples serve to
question and complicate the meaning of Crusoe’s plans for a
religious “war” at the end of the Serious Re ections.
At this point Crusoe does not know why the sailors have turned
so brutal, although he can understand the “madness” of the wolves,
because they are starving to death. He says of the scene on
Madagascar, “I was so terri ed in my thoughts at this outrageous
attempt, that I could not stay there, but went back to my own
men, and resolved to go into the middle of the town through the
re . . . and put an end to it” (203). He berates the men for their
barbarity, and they in turn show him the body of their murdered
comrade. Crusoe admits that
 I was urged then myself, and at another time would have been forward enough; but I
thought they had carried their rage too far, and I thought of Jacob’s words to his sons
Simeon and Levi, “Cursed be their anger, for it was erce; and their wrath for it was
cruel.” . . . nay, my nephew himself fell in with them, and told me in their hearing
that he was only concerned for fear of the men being overpowered; for as to the
people, he thought not one of them ought to live . . . and I, seeing it quite out of my
power to restrain them, came away pensive and sad, for I could not bear the sight,
much less the horrible noise and cries of the poor wretches that fell into their hands.
(204–5)

Crusoe uses similar diction when he describes coming upon the

cannibals for the rst time in Robinson Crusoe (172). The ways he
attributes “inhuman” character to the sailors and his nephew
through his description of the “poor wretches,” and his sadness at
their inhumanity demonstrate a concern for the natives that Crusoe
has hitherto not shown. He implies that what upsets him is the
sailors’ inability to restrain their passions. What is masked, I think,
is Crusoe’s desire, this displacement of unknown, unful lled
wandering into violence. The con ation of the wolves, the
“cannibal” anxiety, and the sight of his own people acting like
savages suggests that Crusoe is lost in the world, neither “despot”
nor “subject.” These men, who act like pirates although they are
not, threaten Crusoe’s sense of identity predicated on authority
and control.
After Crusoe witnesses the massacre by the sailors, he
complains loudly and at length about the violence and moral
blindness of their actions. The sailors become so tired of his
constant lecturing and moralizing that they tell Crusoe “they will
have nothing to do with me any more, neither on board or on
shore; and if I came on board, they would all go on shore” (211).
Crusoe is left behind in Bengal:

Here I had the particular pleasure, speaking by contraries, to see the ship sail
without me; a treatment, I think, a man in my circumstances scarce ever met with,
except from pirates running away with a ship, and setting those that would not agree
with their villainy on shore; indeed this was next door to it both ways. (212–13)

Although Crusoe does not call the mutineers “pirates,” he sees their
action as piratical. Ironically, even his nephew, the captain of the
ship, goes with his men. Crusoe is left behind, once again a
stranger—without family—in a strange land.
Now that the ship has sailed away, Crusoe is at a loss: “I had a
kind of impatience upon me to be nearer home, and yet the most
unsettled resolution imaginable which way to go” (217). Just
getting home is not enough for Crusoe; this indecision re ects the
ambiguity of his desires. He and his partner buy a ship together
and decide to trade throughout Asia. The two men agree that not
only will they return to Europe, but they will make some pro t as
well. He says to his partner, “I shall pursue it so eagerly, I shall
never let you lie still” (218). Once again, Crusoe acts before he
thinks. His desire for money gets him into trouble, just as it did
when he dealt in slaves in Robinson Crusoe.
Crusoe’s latest troubles begin when he is mistaken for a pirate
because, unfortunately, the ship that they buy belongs to someone
else. He does not know he owns a stolen ship, but his desire to
make money—or perhaps the per dy of the pirates—gives him
away to the authorities as the possible pirate. The di erence
between his “ill-fate” in the Farther Adventures and the troubles he
encounters in Robinson Crusoe is that providence itself never enters
into Crusoe’s thoughts in the former. Religion is not yet the driving
force that will take over the end of the novel and give him the
reason to go home.
If Crusoe can be mistaken for a pirate, anyone can be. In this
case, it is Crusoe’s word against his accusers’. Crusoe is so upset by
the accusation that he never stops to consider that his
circumstances preclude his guilt. The “real” pirates who originally
stole the ship do not resemble Crusoe and his crew in the least
(246). But his imagined guilt is, I believe, a recognition of his
vulnerability. The sense of insecurity that enables him to imagine
he is a pirate ties into his reactions to cannibals and the massacre
of the Madagascar “Indians” by his own sailors. Indeed, his guilt at
being a pirate invades his dreams:

I . . . scarce slept a night without dreaming of halters and yardarms, that is to say,
gibbets; of ghting and being taken; of killing and being killed; and one night I was in
such a fury in my dreams, fancying the Dutchmen had boarded us, and I was
knocking one of their seamen down, that I struck my double st against the side of
the cabin . . . so that it not only waked me out of my sleep, but I was once afraid I
should have lost two of my ngers. (245–46)

Even though he and his crew are not pirates, they are forced to act
like pirates, to internalize their own presumed guilt. Not only is
Crusoe accused of piracy, he chooses to run away as if he were
guilty rather than risk the presumption of innocence. The lines
between legitimate trade and piracy are blurred when Crusoe is
mistaken for a pirate. When Singleton cries out, “I am a Thief, a
Pirate, a Murtherer, and ought to be hanged,” he is reliving his life of
crime through his dreams. Crusoe is only accused of piracy, yet in
his dreams he imagines himself a pirate. The legal representation
of the pirate—embodied by the criminals on Crusoe’s island—and
the piratical subject—a literary representation—suggest that
Crusoe’s “guilt” is not based on anything criminal he might have
done. Instead, his “guilt” is based on a recognition that his sense of
self is ambiguous and transgressive, a fact that he can admit only
in the repressed form of dreams. In order to assuage that guilt,
then, Crusoe allows newfound religious belief—even fanatic belief
compared to his “conversions” in Robinson Crusoe—to take over as
the driving force behind his actions.
Crusoe never establishes his innocence, although he and his
partner manage to get rid of their ship without being caught. “For
my part,” Crusoe says, “I had a weight taken o from my heart
that I was not any longer to bear; and . . . we resolved to go no
more to sea in that ship” (248). In fact, Crusoe never returns to sea
in the Farther Adventures. The sea has always been a representation
of Crusoe’s—and Singleton’s—wandering without particular aim;
now, however the journey “home” across China and Russia takes
over the novel, as it did for Captain Singleton when he and
William head back to England over land. Crusoe’s trek, then,
provides the narrative impetus that will close the book.
 Unlike Singleton, however, Crusoe has no companion or
partner with whom to share his life. Coupling provides closures for
certain other Defoe novels: think of Captain Singleton or Moll
Flanders. Like the open-ended novels Roxana and Colonel Jack, the
Farther Adventures ends ambiguously. Religion—what Crusoe calls
“true Christianity” in the Serious Re ections—accompanies all his
actions throughout the remainder of the Farther Adventures. This
religion becomes increasingly zealous, culminating in the
destruction of the Asian idol in the Farther Adventures and his call
for a holy war at the end of the Serious Re ections.
Crusoe breaks with his partner and becomes a traveler,
paradoxically with no particular interest in the sights he sees.
Crusoe is one of the most annoying tourists who ever traveled
around the world, unimpressed by anything that does not replicate
or try to imitate English and European custom.19 He is particularly
distraught by the paganism he discovers and the European
admiration of the “heathen’s” civilization:

It is very observable that we wonder at the grandeur, the riches, the pomp, the
ceremonies, the government, the manufactures, the commerce, and the conduct of
[the Chinese]; not that it is to be wondered at, or indeed, in the least to be regarded;
but because, having rst a true notion of the barbarity of these countries, the
rudeness and the ignorance that prevails there, we do not expect to nd any such
things so far o . (Farther Adventures, 256)

In other words, it is a wonder that these wretched heathens have

gone as far as they have, given their non-Christian ways. In fact,
the Chinese world cannot be compared to the European world.
“Where are their cities to ours,” Crusoe asks, “for wealth, strength,
gaiety of apparel, rich furniture, and an in nite variety?” (256–
57). As he joins a caravan and goes deeper into Asia, west toward
Russia and home, he becomes more and more appalled by what he
sees. The “heathens” begin to look as they act: dirty, ill-clothed,
belligerent—and Crusoe believes—ignorant and “stupid” (285).
The more heathenish these people are to Crusoe, the more angry
he becomes. His religious belief causes him to become more
intolerant. Finally, giving in to the kind of outrage shown by the
sailors who wipe out the Madagascar village, Crusoe decides that
something must be done to teach these “worst and most ignorant
pagans” a lesson (282). We see Crusoe’s beliefs evolve from a
providential reliance on the wisdom of God’s ways—“How do I
know what God himself judges in this particular case?” (Robinson
Crusoe 177)—to a conviction at the end of the second novel that
Crusoe himself is entitled to play God by asserting his faith and
resorting to violence.
Soon after Crusoe and his caravan cross into “the Muscovite
dominions,” they stop for the night in a village (Farther Adventures,
283). There Crusoe comes upon “an idol made of wood, frightful as
the devil, at least as anything we can think of to represent the
devil can be made” (284). For the rst time since he left his island
many years before, Crusoe has a profound and immediate
conversion; he decides he must do something about these heathens
and their “devil worship.” His behavior seems extreme because at
the same time that he spouts “Christianity” the reader sees Crusoe
behaving exactly the way his men in Madagascar did. This Crusoe
is not the man of the previous novel, who decides to spare the
cannibals. Nor is he the Crusoe who is able to repress his most
violent tendencies when even Friday is killed. Instead, this man is
a religious fanatic who “resolves” that a violent course of action is
necessary.
Crusoe sees no irony in his determination to destroy the
heathens’ idol. “So I related the story of our men at Madagascar”
to a Scotsman, Crusoe says, “and how they burnt and sacked the
village there, and killed man, woman, and child for their
murdering of one of our men, just as it is related before; and when
I had done, I added that I thought we ought to do so to this village”
(286). When Crusoe is confronted by heathenism, violence is a
logical action. Completely forgotten is Crusoe’s “pensive and sad”
reaction to his sailors’ horri c massacre of the Madagascar village.
Crusoe and the Scotsman creep into the village at night, pull some
of the “pagans” out of their huts, tie them up, and burn down the
idol. “We supposed,” Crusoe says, that they “had been about some
of their diabolic sacri ces” (292). Crusoe and his companions force
the “heathens” to watch their “monstrous idol” blow up, and
satis ed with a job well done, return to their encampment. In a
shift of belief confusing to the reader, Crusoe decides that he can
be judge and executioner against “heathens” who are ignorant of
Christianity. He has no island, no family, no friends; instead,
newfound religious belief, what he calls “true Christianity” in the
Serious Re ections, gives him a sense of identity.
 The destruction of the “idol” is the last major adventure in the
novel. He writes at the end of the Farther Adventures, “I am
preparing for a longer journey than all these, having lived
seventy-two years a life of in nite variety, and learnt su ciently
to know the value of retirement, and the blessing of ending our
days in peace” (323). As Crusoe got farther away from
“civilization,” the world became more and more dangerous, the
people more heathenish, and his own “true Christianity” more
important as the foundation for his identity. Now that he is nally
headed home, he no longer desires pro t or cares to wander,
because he believes he has found what he has been looking for
since he rst left home as a young man. The reader discovers that
“true Christianity” displaces all Crusoe’s unful lled economic and
sexual desires. Crusoe’s sense of identity—based on “true
Christianity”—enables him to return home with a newfound
purpose.
In the Serious Re ections Defoe nally demonstrates the
alarming repercussions of that purpose. Most of this little-read
book is lled with chapters such as “Of Solitude” or “Of Honesty in
Promises.”20 Defoe writes in the preface, “here is the just and only
good end of all parable or allegoric history brought to pass, viz.,
for moral and religious improvement” (xii). All Crusoe’s anecdotes
about spiritual improvement are conventional, until, as we have
seen, his chapter “Of Religion.” The distinctions he makes between
“negative religion” and “true Christianity” highlight Crusoe’s
change from wanderer and self-serving pro teer to religious
crusader. His religious identity at the end of both the Serious
Re ections and the Farther Adventures overwhelms any of the
“moderate” temperament he so admires in the Russian exile, that
“true Christian” whom he met on his nal journey “home” to
England.
Religion has been a part of Robinson Crusoe and the Farther
Adventures all along. As Defoe says in the preface to the Farther
Adventures, “The just application of every incidence, the religious
and useful inferences drawn from every part, are so many
testimonies to the good design of making it public, and must
legitimate all the part that may be called invention or parable in
the story” (vii). Whether or not one reads Defoe’s protestations as
a cynical attempt to justify the adventures in the novels, as Gildon
did, a pious reader will still look for “the religious and useful
inferences” in both Robinson Crusoe and its sequel. Crusoe brought
Christianity to Friday and his father, the pirates and their wives,
and he found it himself during his years alone on the island. But
what began as an intellectual and spiritual battle for “souls” in
Robinson Crusoe and the Farther Adventures turns into a plan for an
out-and-out war “against the kingdom of the devil” (Serious
Re ections, 239). In the midst of the common pieties Crusoe
repeats in the Serious Re ections comes a violent, narrowly de ned
Christianity that advocates killing and war “in behalf of the
Christian worship” (239). Crusoe asserts that if “talk” and
persuasion do not work, then force must be used. He advocates
burning temples and pagodas—which he has already done—and
“destroying” “priests and dedicated persons of every kind” (239).
In an understatement, Crusoe says, “This is all the coercion I
propose . . . yet I insist that we may by force . . . suppress
paganism, and the worship of God’s enemy the Devil” (239). By
destroying idols, places of worship, and the pagan spiritual
leaders, rm Christian leadership will carry the day against the
“in dels.” Christianity will be spread over the world, and Crusoe
himself—who never felt at home in England—will nally feel at
home in the world because all the world will be reconstructed in
the terms of his own religious beliefs, just as his time alone
reconstructed the island into his own “kingdom.”
In the Serious Re ections, Defoe suggests that religion displaces
all the masked emotions and desires that are implicit in Crusoe’s
character. “Pro t” and property as they de ne personal
psychological stability—in the terms that make Crusoe happy on
the island—are an ideal that eludes him when he returns to
England at the end of the rst novel. When he is traveling the
globe, both trying to get home and avoiding it, he is still searching
for something. Religion displaces his own desires, whatever they
may be. The displacement becomes clear in the nal lines of the
Serious Re ection:

All I can add is, I doubt no such zeal for the Christian religion will be found in our
days, or perhaps in any age of the world, till Heaven beats the drums itself, and the
glorious legions from above come down on purpose to propagate the work, and to
reduce the whole world to the obedience of King Jesus—a time which some tell us is
 not far o , but of which I heard nothing in all my travels and illuminations, no, not
one word. (243)

This is an extraordinary passage. Crusoe is skeptical that “man”

can do much good prior to the millennium, but he nds what
amounts to an apocalyptic identity. Even though he doubts that
anyone else will share his religious zeal, he still o ers suggestions
for converting the whole world to his Christian belief. In fact,
Crusoe tries to “play God” by waging war on the heathens; he has
become what Gildon—one of Defoe’s harshest contemporary critics
—accused Defoe of doing in Robinson Crusoe.21
Crusoe’s quest for identity is resolved, nally, by his newfound
zeal at the end of the Farther Adventures. The Serious Re ections is
the logical conclusion for a trilogy that tries to stabilize a sense of
self based on desire. Crusoe found peace of sorts on the island, but
that was an ideal. The island enabled him to construct a
homosocial world in which pro t and property were static. As
homo economicus he could not go anywhere because pro t itself
depends on the exchange of capital. He found some stability in his
relationship with Friday—a perhaps transgressive homoerotic
relationship—but that stability ended when Friday was killed.
Further e orts at pro t were undercut by his misidenti cation as a
pirate. The movement toward religious faith in both Robinson
Crusoe and the Farther Adventures is a logical progression because
assertions of faith, of giving oneself over to God’s purposes rather
than one’s own questioning or quest, becomes a narrative, as well
as a means of ensuring closure for that narrative. Religion for
Crusoe is, as Brown writes in arguing for “a way out of history,” a
way for him “to enter that state of Being which was the goal of his
Becoming”: to nd an identity for himself in a world from which
he is always alienated.22
All three Crusoe novels suggest that the only way to transcend
sexual and economic desire—to break away from any transgressive
position that questions normative heterocentric identity—is
through an unshaking belief in God and “true Christianity.” Crusoe
—after all his wandering— nds a kind of peace in his old age
when he believes that the millennium approaches. Writing his
Re ections—and granting that his persona is a character—gives
him the discursive means to assert an identity not dependent on
pro t or middle-class domesticity. Pro t—the accumulation of
property—as a means to justify Christian belief is transformed into
a belief in the apocalypse. Ironically, Gildon was right to be
“horribly shocked” by Robinson Crusoe (Gildon, 25). Crusoe found
“happiness” on the island: pro t and domesticity, resulted from
“conquering” and transforming the island into an ideal state.
Unfortunately, Crusoe is unable to “conquer” the world. In the
Serious Re ections, his belief transfers his resistant passion for
travel and dissatisfaction with middle-class domesticity into a
system that allows Crusoe to “play God” and impose his “true
Christianity” on the rest of the world. Sexuality and economy drop
out of Crusoe’s life, but religious passion—an obsession with
Christianizing the world—replaces those needs.
Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Captain Charles Johnson [Daniel Defoe?], A General History
of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London,
1724, 1728), 1:99–100. Cited parenthetically in the text by volume;
the second edition (also 1724) of volume 1 is noted where it is
used.
2. B. R. Burg looks at pirate sexuality in Sodomy and the Pirate
Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 1982); Marcus
Redicker and Robert C. Ritchie look at the economic and political
e ects of early-eighteenth-century piracy in, respectively, Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987) and Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). All cited
parenthetically in the text.
3. Indeed, this paucity of evidence undermines Burg’s popular
but historically awed Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.
4. John J. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon,
1975), 65; Joel H. Baer, “ ‘The Complicated Plot of Piracy’: Aspects
of English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe,”
Eighteenth Century Culture 14 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), 3–16. First published in Eighteenth Century Life, 23,
no.1 (winter 1982): 17.
5. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern
Sensibilities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Cited
parenthetically in the text.
6. Robert E. Lee, Blackbeard the Pirate: A Reappraisal of His Life
and Times (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1974), 24.
7. Robert C. Ritchie, “Samuel Burgess, Pirate,” in New
Approaches to the History of Colonial and Revolutionary New York, ed.
Conrad Wright and William Pencok (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1988), 115.
8. This introduction is the logical place to bring up the question
of authorship and Defoe. Since John Robert Moore published Defoe
in the Pillory in 1939, A General History of the . . . Pyrates has been
attributed to Defoe, usually without any questions. Indeed, when
Manuel Schonhorn published his edition of the General History in
1972, Defoe was given credit for the book on the title page. And so
it stood until 1988, when P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens
published The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe and devoted a chapter to
the question of whether Defoe wrote the General History. While
they do not completely demolish Moore’s attribution of the General
History to Defoe, they have very serious doubts that Defoe in fact
wrote the book. Indeed, Marcus Rediker, among the foremost
maritime historians, doubts very much that Defoe wrote the
General History. All this doubt and conjecture presupposes a kind of
authorship that twentieth-century critics grant writers. As Paula
Backscheider points out, Defoe had a very di erent idea of the
author’s role. In Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989), Backscheider writes that Defoe devised a
“method of publication . . . during the time of his greatest
productivity in the reign of Anne. He had divided the work and
begun to use both of his sons” (371). Despite the division of labor
devised by Defoe, he still had control of his product. Moreover, the
idea of the author was, as Backscheider implies, di erent in the
early eighteenth century. As Furbank and Owens demonstrate,
since few of Defoe’s writing came out under his own name, many
attributions made to Defoe rest on shaky evidence or shoddy
scholarship. See Furbank and Owen, The Canonisation of Daniel
Defoe; and idem, Defoe De-Attributions (London: Hambledon Press,
1994). We do not know who Johnson was, nor do we know
anything about the circumstances of the writing of the General
History.
9. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (London: Cassell and
Company, 1883).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. Unparallel’d Cruelty; or The Tryal of Capt. Jeane of Bristol
(London, 1726), 24. Cited parenthetically in the text.
2. Indeed, Captain Jeane had “punish’d several with a more
than ordinary Severity; and particularly, that he once cut a Piece
of Flesh out of the Inside of a Boy’s Thumb, making an Ori ce as
low as the Bone, and two Inches round, which he ll’d up with
Salt, to torture him for some very small O ence he was chargeable
with.”
3. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley
in collaboration with Abe Stein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977),
159.
4. William Funnel, A Voyage round the World Containing an
Account of Captain Dampier’s Expedition into the South-Seas in the Ship
St George, in the Years 1703 and 1704 (London, 1707).
5. Weekly-Journal, 9 July 1720.
6. Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage round the World (London,
1712). Cited parenthetically in the text.
7. See Pat Rogers, Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge, 1972); Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament,
Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim:
Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), among others.
8. George Shelvocke, A Voyage round the World by the Way of the
Great South Sea. . . . By. Capt. George Shelvocke, Commander of the
Speedwell, Recovery, &c. in this Expedition (London, 1726). Cited
parenthetically in the text.
9. John Dean, A True and Genuine Narrative of the Whole A air
Relating to the Ship Sussex, as Sent to the Directors of the Honourable
East India Company (London, 1740), 12. Also see An Authentick
Relation of the Many Hardships and Su erings of a Dutch Sailor, Who
Was Put on Shore on the Uninhabited Isle of Ascension, by Order of the
Commadore of a Squadron of Dutch Ships (London, 1728). In this
pamphlet, the narrator is forced by circumstance, as he says, “to
make water in my scoop and drink it, thinking it was better than
Salt Water” (24). Cited parenthetically in the text.
10. Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s
Ships, East and West Indiamen and Other Merchantmen from 1659 to
1703, transcribed by Basil Lubbock (London: Hurst and Blackett,
1934). Cited parenthetically in the text.
11. N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World (London: Fontana
Press, 1986), 126–27.
12. Page 134 of Kidd’s trial transcript.
13. See Rogers, A Cruising Voyage round the World, esp. 121–31;
and Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, and round the World
(London, 1712), 36–37. Several books and articles were written
about Selkirk, including Isaac James, Providence Displayed: or, The
Remarkable Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, of Largo, in Scotland
(Bristol: 1800); and the anonymous Crusoniana; or Truth versus
Fiction, Elucidated in a History of the Islands of Juan Fernandez
(Manchester, 1843); The Gentlemen’s Magazine, March 1788, 206–
8.
14. See, for example, Rogers, A Cruising Voyage round the World,
14, 34, 39, 234–36.
 15. William Betagh, A Voyage round the World. Being an Account
of a Remarkable Enterprize, Begun in the Year 1719, Chie y to Cruise
on the Spaniards in the Great South Ocean (London, 1728), 2. Cited
parenthetically in the text.
16. R. W., The Sailors Advocate (London, 1728), 4.
17. Plunder and Bribery Further Discover’d, in a Memorial Humbly
O er’d to the British Parliament (London, 1712), 44.
18. Rodger, The Wooden World, 164.
19. The Sailors Advocate, 34–35.
20. The Sailor’s Advocate II (London, 1728), 22, 23.
21. Observator 3, no. 5 (3 February 1705).
22. Barlow also has things to say about the press later in his
career. Barlow’s Journal, 405–6.
23. Weekly-Journal, 16 February 1717, 57.
24. Barbarian Cruelty; or, An Accurate and Impartial Narrative of
the Unparallel’d Su erings and Almost Incredible Hardships of the
British Captives (London, 1751), 32.
25. Domestick Intelligence: or News Both from City and Country
Impartially Related, 14 February 1681.
26. Rodger, The Wooden World, 126.
27. [Daniel Defoe], An Account of the Conduct and Proceedings of
the Late John Gow Alias Smith (London, 1725), 52–53.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
 1. An article in the Observator reverses Johnson’s logic: “But you
must not believe these Privateers are Mann’d all with Sailors, they
carry but one half or one third Sailors, and the rest are Landmen,
who, in two or three years time, become Sailors; and thus the
Privateers are made a Nursery for the Navy, which seldom or never
wants Men.” Observator 3, no. 52 (16 September 1704).
2. J. Cowley, The Sailor’s Companion, and Merchantman’s Convoy
(Dublin, 1741), 24.
3. William Hacke, A Collection of Original Voyages by Capt.
William Hacke (London, 1699), 6–7.
4. I do not mean to suggest that buccaneers only went after
Spanish ships. However, the buccaneers were best known for their
attacks on the Spaniards, thus they could be heroicized and tacitly
approved by non-Spanish governments.
5. Charles Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, from the Earliest
Accounts, to the Taking of Porto Bello by Vice-Admiral Vernon
(London, 1740), 100.
6. Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns:
State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 1. Every
European country had its privateers. Indeed, the United States was
among the last of the Western nations to outlaw privateering (in
the middle of the nineteenth century).
7. From The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, vol. 3, People
and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1986), 161–87. Cited parenthetically in the
text.
8. Hill assumes that Defoe wrote the General History. See also
Johnson, “Of Captain Misson,” in General History, 2:1–48.
9. Philip Gosse attempts (without success) a complete
bibliography of the many editions of the General History. He writes
in the preface, “In the following pages an attempt has been made
to describe and fully collate the various editions and reprints that
have appeared during the last two hundred years of the two works
attributed to Captain Charles Johnson” (ix).
Defoe was not given attribution “until 1932, when Professor
John Robert Moore recognized Defoe’s hand, [and it] was made
clear that Captain Johnson was but another mask of the
indefatigable Daniel Defoe.” Manuel Schonhorn, introduction to A
General History of the Pyrates (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1972), xxiii. See Philip Gosse, A Bibliography of the
Works of Capt. Charles Johnson (London: Dulau and Company,
1927).
10. Exquemelin’s volume was remarkably popular in
seventeenth-century Europe. First printed in Holland in 1677, it
has a complicated publishing history. It was translated into
Spanish in 1681, and then translated from Spanish into English,
and rst published in London in 1684. There were at least four
London printings in that year, the rst of which so outraged the
rehabilitated former buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan that he sued the
publisher for libel. In order to settle Morgan’s lawsuit, the
publisher added a preface to the subsequent printing that both
defended the book’s recounting of the Morgan story and
interpolated high praise for Morgan’s bravery. John Exquemelin,
Bucaniers of America: Or, A True Account of the Most Remarkable
Assaults Committed of Late Years upon the Coasts of the West-Indies
(London, 1684). Cited parenthetically in the text.
11. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, 22–23;
Frank Sherry, Raiders and Rebels (New York: Hearst Marine Books,
1986), 61–62. Also note that the pirates of the Caribbean di ered
from the buccaneers. Some buccaneers became pirates, and posed
enormous threats to northern European colonies in the Caribbean
and up and down the eastern seaboard of the North American
colonies. For lively descriptions, see Shelvocke, A Voyage round the
World, esp. 12, 13, 15, 34, 36, 117, 120, 126–27.
12. Clinton V. Black, Pirates of the West Indies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10.
13. In the section on the sacking of Puerto Bello, for example,
the English translation reads:

But Captain Morgan was fully deceived in his judgment of this designe. For the
Governour, who acted like a brave and courageous Souldier, refused not, in
performance of his duty, to use his utmost endeavours to destroy whoever came near
the Walls. The Religious Men and Women ceased not to cry unto him and beg of him
by all the Saints of Heaven, he would deliver the Castle, and hereby spare both his
and their own lives. But nothing could prevail with the obstinancy and erceness that
had possessed the Governour’s mind. Thus many of the Religious men and Nuns
were killed before they could x the ladders. (1:96–97)
 On the other hand, the Spanish version—Piratas de la america
(Colonia Agrippina, 1681)—goes like this:

Morgan engaged in this design; in the meantime the governor refused diligently to
allow anyone near the wall, making himself a brave soldier. The religious people
cried, and pleaded by all the saints of the heavens to give up the castle, in order to
save themselves, and the poor nuns’ lives; nothing could help them, by the
obstinance of the said governor. Finally, with the loss of many religious men and
nuns . . . the pirates entered, in many numbers, with great force. (My translation)

What is interesting to me is the way the Spanish governor is

foregrounded in the English version and the nuns and monks are
played down, whereas in the Spanish version, the nuns and monks
are foregrounded while the governor—“brave and courageous” in
the English version—is simply “obstinate” in the Spanish text. This
seems to suggest that bravery will out, but Catholicism is always
bad.
14. From the preface of an edition of Bucaniers of America
abridged from the 4th ed. (London, 1684).
15. Exquemelin, Bucaniers of America, 2d ed. (London, 1684),
preface.
16. Up to a point. By the 1660s and 1670s, policies were
changing, and the interests of the English did not lie in being at
constant war in the West Indies with the Spanish. Hence Morgan’s
rehabilitation. See, for example, Jenifer Marx, Pirates and
Privateeres of the Caribbean (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1992), 131–33.
17. Unsigned review from the New York Herald, 18 March 1915.
 18. Editions of Bucaniers of America were printed every twenty
years or so through the end of the eighteenth century. Editions
came out less frequently during the nineteenth century, and in the
twentieth century Exquemelin’s name was forgotten, except by
fans of the buccaneers. The latest edition is a facsimile from a
small press. Interestingly, though there are fewer “o cial” editions
of the General History, there are many books that plagiarize
Johnson without credit. The General History may itself be as
forgotten as Exquemelin’s book, but the exploits and characters
about whom Johnson writes are still in the public imagination.
19. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, 1–27;
Sherry, Raiders and Rebels, 22–51.
20. The political situation’s e ect on maritime employment can
be noted in the general proclamations of James II, William and
Mary, Anne, and George I. The proclamations include calls for
impressment by the government, and demands for “able-bodied”
seamen to present themselves are constant. See, for example,
proclamations of 27 February 1689, 29 April 1689, 15 January
1690, 10 February 1691, 5 July 1690, 20 November 1690, many
more through 1 February 1702, in British Library 21.h.3.
21. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 207–9,
212–15; The Sailors Advocate, 23.
22. I am discussing “privateers” only as I see the meaning
shifting after the Restoration, with the establishment of the Whig
and Tory political parties and the consolidation of the power of the
East India Company. This is because piracy itself, as we think of it,
represents the years 1695–1724, and this was also the great age of
the “privateer” as described by Dampier, Shelvocke, Phelps, Cooke,
and other famous privateer/authors.
23. Sometimes the government actively encouraged
privateering. See, for example, William R., “Their Majesties
Declaration for Encouragement of O cers, Sea-men and Mariners,
Employed in the Present Service” (London, 1689). Additionally,
countries recognized each others’ rights to plunder during times of
war.
24. Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, A8r. See too Shelvocke
and his “gentleman adventurers” in A Voyage round the World, xxi–
xxviii; or Bartholomew Sharpe, The Voyages and Adventures of Capt.
Barth. Sharp and Others (London, 1684), 3; among others.
25. Sharpe, Voyages and Adventures, 8; Shelvocke, A Voyage
round the World, 4, 10, 11, 12.
26. A Full Account of the Actions of the Late Famous Pyrate, Capt.
Kidd (Dublin, 1701), 38.
27. Much of this discussion is based on the trial records and
pamphlets published on Kidd, for example, A Full Account of the
Actions of the Late Famous Pyrate, Capt. Kidd; Paul Lorrain, The
Ordinary of Newgate His Account of the Behaviour, Confessions of
Captain William Kidd (London, 1701); as well as Ritchie, Captain
Kidd and the War against the Pirates, esp. 27–55; Dunbar Maury
Hinrichs, The Fateful Voyage of Captain Kidd (New York: Bookman
Associates, 1955); and A Fair and True Discovery of the Robberies,
Pyracies, and Other Notorious Actions, of That Famous English Pyrate,
Capt. James Kelly (London, 1700).
28. Kidd’s letter of marque showed up two hundred years later
in the London Public Record O ce, where it still is. Ritchie, Captain
Kidd and the War against the Pirates, 208. Kidd’s letter of marque
can be found at the PRO: HCA 1/15.108.
29. Captain Misson, in volume 2 of the General History, is a
notable exception. He was the second son of a French aristocrat.
Of course, Misson never existed either, being the product of
Captain Johnson’s imagination.
30. The Whole Tryal, Examination and Condemnation of All the
Pyrates, That Was Try’d and Condemn’d by the High Court of
Admiralty (London, 1725).
31. John Wilmot, The Poems of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed.
Keith Walker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 99.
32. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, trans.
Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1982), esp. 65–82.
33. Greimas’s square was introduced to me through Susan
Green’s essay “Semiotic Modalities of the Female Body in Aphra
Behn’s The Dutch Lover,” in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory,
and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1993), 121–47. See also N. Katherine Hayles,
“Constrained Constructivism: Locating Inquiry in the Theater of
Representation,” New Orleans Review 18, no. 1 (spring 1991): 76–
85. Ronald Schleifer, A. J. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning:
Linguistics, Semiotics, and Discourse Theory (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1987), 25–33, has a useful explanation of the
square.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag (New York: Random
House, 1996) is the only exception, and a fascinating book.
2. From an unpublished paper, which Professor Manuel
Schonhorn was kind enough to allow me to read.
3. Redicker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; Ritchie,
Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates; Baer, “ ‘The
Complicated Plot of Piracy’ ”; idem, “ ‘Captain John Avery’ and the
Anatomy of a Mutiny,” Eighteenth Century Life, February 1994. The
three books about “female pirates” are Margaret S. Creighton and
Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring
in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996); Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, and
Gabriel Kuhn, Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger, trans.
Tyler Austin and Nicholas Levis (Montreal: Black Rose Books,
1997); Jo Stanley, ed., Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across
the Ages (London: Pandora, 1995).
4. Hacke, A Collection of Original Voyages, 5.
 5. There are hundreds of references for trials in the ve decades
after the Restoration in the British Library catalog, and the
Huntington Library catalog, my two major sources for literary
artifacts in this book. These trials range from short descriptions to
detailed transcriptions that go on for several dozen pages. The
majority of the piracy trials tend to be fairly detailed. The trials for
sodomy, on the other hand, are far fewer in number, and tend to
be descriptions of the proceedings against the accused sodomites.
6. See Lincoln Faller, Crime and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 6, for a good discussion of the dying
confessions of the criminals.
7. Also see the trial records listed in the bibliography; the
General History lists trials in the biographies of the pirates,
particularly the trials of Roberts and Bonnet in volume 1. Ritchie
details the trial of the French crew (although some were English)
entitled The Proceedings of the Court of Admiralty, by a Special
Commission, Being the Tryals of All the French Pirates at the Old-Baily
(London, 1700). As Ritchie points out, this is a very important trial
because of the large number of pirates who were hanged on those
days. See London PRO HCA l/15.18.
8. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, 145–59;
also see Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 51.
9. For example, the notorious publisher Edmund Curll
republished Castlehaven’s trial as The Case of Sodomy, in the Tryall
of Mervin Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven, for Committing a Rape.
And Sodomy with Two of His Servants, viz. (Laurence Fitz Patrick and
Thomas Broadway) Who Was Try’d and Condemn’d by His Peers on
the 25th of April, and Beheaded on Tower-Hill, May 14th, 1631
(London, 1708).
10. The New Newgate Calendar; or, Malefactor’s Bloody Register
(London, 1795).
11. See the les on Kidd’s trial, particularly PRO HCA 1/15.3, 7,
13.
12. A few among several examples contemporary to Kidd’s
trial: A Full Account of the Actions of the Late Famous Pyrate, Capt.
Kidd; Paul Lorrain, The Ordinary of Newgate His Account of the
Behaviour, Confessions of Captain William Kidd, and Other Pirates,
That Were Executed at the Execution-Dock in Wapping, on Friday, May
23. 1701 (London, 1701); A True Account of the Behaviour,
Confession and Last Dying Speeches, of Captain William Kidd
(London, 1701).
13. This is based on my readings of not only pirate trials, but
other popular trials that were published in pamphlet form between
1680 and 1720.
14. Cited parenthetically in the text.
15. See, for example, The Tryals of Joseph Dawson (London,
1696); The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet (London, 1719); T. B.
Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1812); and
Captain Kidd’s trial, which we have looked at.
 16. From The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt.
John Quelch (London, 1705), 5.
17. See Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 46.
18. Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1720; New York: Jenson Society, 1905), 248. References to this
text cited parenthetically.
19. See, among other trials, Select Trials for Murder, Robbery,
Burglary, Rapes, Sodomy, Coining, Forgery, Pyracy, and Other
O ences and Misdemeanours . . . from the Year 1720 (London,
1764); The Tryal and Conviction of Several Reputed Sodomites
(London, 1707); A Full and True Account of the Discovery and
Apprehending a Notorious Gang of Sodomites (London, 1709).
20. An Account of the Proceedings against Capt. Edward Rigby
(London, 1698). Cited parenthetically in the text.
21. The Tryal and Conviction of Several Reputed Sodomites
(London, 1707).
22. Select Trials for Murder, Robbery, Burglary, Rapes, Sodomy,
Coining, Forgery, Pyracy, and Other O ences and Misdemeanours
(London, 1764).
23. Confessions of the condemned pirates were popular. Faller
details the confessions in Crime and Defoe (6). Kidd’s confession
was so popular that at least two versions were published at his
death.
24. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), 126–27; Faller, Crime and Defoe, 6.
 25. Lorrain, The Ordinary of Newgate.
26. A True Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Last Dying
Speeches, of Captain William Kidd.
27. See particularly Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
28. V. H. Bonner, Pirate Laureate: The Life and Legends of Captain
Kidd (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1947). This book is
a worthwhile attempt to nd the “truth” of Kidd’s story. Also see
Hinrichs, The Fateful Voyage of Captain Kidd.
29. In addition to the ballads, which probably were written
around the year of Kidd’s execution (1701), there are pamphlets
such as Dialogue between the Ghost of Captain Kidd and the Napper in
the Strand (London, 1702); two di erent versions of his last words,
the trial records, as I have noted, and John Corso, The Case of John
Corso, a Genoese Merchant (London, 1701). In this interesting
pamphlet, Corso attempts to get reparations for his losses from
Kidd’s piracy, even though Kidd has been hanged.
30. From Capt. Kidd, a Noted Pirate, Who Was Hanged at
Execution Dock, in England (Boston: L. Deming, 1840). See Bonner,
Pirate Laureate: The Life and Legends of Captain Kidd for a history of
the Kidd ballads. The version quoted is only one of many versions,
some of which have as many as thirty- ve verses.
31. For example, in The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, Bab’s Key is
talked about as an important pirate hangout. Further, in
proclamations that o ered general pardons to the pirates, Kidd
and Avery were the two exceptions. See PRO HCA 1/13.36.
32. [Charles Elms], The Pirates Own Book, or Authentic Narratives
of the Lives, Exploits, and Executions of the Most Celebrated Sea
Robbers (Portland: Francis Blake, 1855). Cited parenthetically in
the text.
33. Frank R. Stockton, Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts
(New York: Macmillan, 1898). Cited parenthetically in the text.
34. A Full Account of the Actions of the Late Famous Pyrate Capt.
Kidd, 38.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. See, for example, The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery;
the Famous English Pirate, (Rais’d from a Cabbin Boy, to a King) Now
in Possession of Madagascar (1709?), intr. Joel Baer (Los Angeles:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1980), cited
parenthetically in the text; and The Famous Adventures of Captain
John Avery of Plymouth: A Notorious Pirate (Falkirk, 1809). I am
indebted to Professor Baer’s introduction for much of the factual
information in this chapter.
2. See, for example, Johnson, 1:25–40; Dawson’s “trial”;
Charles Johnson’s play The Successful Pyrate (London, 1714). For a
full account of the legend, see Baer’s recent essay on Avery, “
‘Captain John Avery’ and the Anatomy of a Mutiny.”
 3. [Daniel Defoe?], The King of Pirates (London, 1720), iii. Cited
parenthetically in the text.
4. See Joel Baer, introduction to The Life and Adventures of Capt.
John Avery, iii. Baer also points out that when the privateer
Woodes Rogers published his travelogue, he “exploded” the myth of
a pirate commonwealth, describing the poverty of the men still on
Madagascar. Baer also argues that the myth of a strong pirate
colony was so entrenched that “even the usually skeptical were
eager to believe” in a forti ed commonwealth.
5. A Review of the State of the British Nation, vol. 4 (facsimile,
New York: AMS Press, 1965), 428.
6. See Baer, introduction to The Life and Adventures of Capt.
John Avery; and Furbank and Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel
Defoe, 106–7.
7. From Hans Turley, “Taming the Scourge of the Main: Charles
Johnson’s The Successful Pyrate and the Transgressive Hero”
(presented at South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
conference, Houston, February 1994).
8. See, for example, The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, and Johnson,
1:25–42.
9. See Defoe, Atlas Maritimus (London, 1728), 233–34.
10. See Johnson, The Successful Pyrate for the most extravagant
version of this tale. In Captain Singleton, Singleton and Avery meet
and discuss how to turn Madagascar into an outpost for the
pirates. See also Baer, “ ‘Captain John Avery’ and the Anatomy of
a Mutiny.”
11. Many books about Madagascar appeared in the early
eighteenth century. Most of the privateers mentioned Madagascar,
and many pamphlets decry the piracy in the area.
12. See The Tryals of Joseph Dawson; in addition to Baer, “
‘Captain John Avery’ and the Anatomy of a Mutiny.”
13. For example, Johnson, The Successful Pyrate; The Famous
Adventures of Captain John Avery, 12; see also later histories of
pirates, such as Philip Gosse, The Pirates’ Who’s Who (London:
Dulau and Company, 1924), 40–44; idem, The History of Piracy
(1932; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 178–79.
14. See The Famous Adventures of Captain John Avery, 23; Gosse,
Pirates’ Who’s Who, 43; Baer, “ ‘Captain John Avery’ and the
Anatomy of Mutiny.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. Gosse, Pirates’ Who’s Who, 7.
2. See Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, 64–65, 69–70, 76; see also
idem, Popular Fiction before Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969).
Faller in Crime and Defoe discusses piracy but only as it is another
form of “crime,” without noting the di erences between criminals
on land and maritime pirates that I discuss in chapter 1 (89–117,
192). Maximillian Novak discusses “Of Captain Misson” in his
introduction to the Augustan Society reprint (Los Angeles: William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1961), i–v; he also discusses
piracy brie y in Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 13, 32, 33, 37, 73,
126, 159. See also Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and
Innovation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 159,
174. No one else makes a distinction between piracy and crime in
general.
3. In 1724 two editions as well as another printing of each of
these editions appeared. The second edition had substantial
revisions. The third edition, which simply reprinted the second,
came out in 1725, and a fourth was published in 1726. The General
History was translated and published in Holland and Germany in
1725. Gosse’s Bibliography details the book’s printing history, but it
is by no means complete. The second volume, which Gosse dates at
1726, is now dated at 1728, according to the British Library. See
Gosse, A Bibliography of the Works of Capt. Charles Johnson.
4. For a good overview of the paucity of pirate historicity, see
Larry Schweikart and B. R. Burg, “Stand By to Repel Historians:
Modern Scholarship and Caribbean Pirates, 1650–1725,” Historian
46, no. 2 (1984): 219–34. My own research has shown that almost
all popular histories from the latter years of the eighteenth century
through the twentieth century are based on the General History,
usually without attribution. Some works, such as Elms’s Pirates Own
Book, are plagiarized directly from it. Others, such as C.
Whitehead, Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates, and
Robbers; Drawn from the Most Authentic Sources, are “Revised and
Continued to the Present Time” (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1842).
See also The Lives and Daring Deeds of the Most Celebrated Pirates
and Buccaneers, of All Countries (Philadelphia: Geo. G. Evans,
[1860?]); Stockton, Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts; The
Voyages and Adventures of Edward Teach (Newcastle, 1800); and
The Famous Adventures of Captain John Avery, among many others.
5. Besides the references to the General History in monographs
and articles on Defoe already mentioned, I can nd no other
references from the past fteen years to that work in literary
studies.
6. This is not to say that critics ignore “history” and its
relationship to ction. Watt, McKeon, Davis, Armstrong, Ballaster,
Faller, and most successfully Hunter all acknowledge the in uence
of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century “histories” on the
“rise” or “origins” of the novel. Besides the problems inherent in
the novel’s “rise,” or “origins,” which I’ll look at in more depth in
the chapters on Captain Singleton and Robinson Crusoe, the history
of the pirate has not been given its due as one of the literary
tropes that help to de ne the novel. Further, the pirates in the
General History have been taken at face value for many years.
Gosse, for example, writes in the preface to his Pirates’ Who’s Who,
“I believe that every man, or woman too . . . mentioned in this
volume actually existed” (7). Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms:
Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1992); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987); Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions;
Faller, Crime and Defoe; J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural
Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton,
1990); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Ian Watt, The Rise of the
Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
7. A few examples out of many include Blackbeard: A Page from
the Colonial History of Philadelphia (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1835); The Sailor Boy (New Haven, 1829); Henry Gringo, Captain
Brand, or the “Centipede” (New York: Harper, 1864); The Demon
Ship (Albany, 1831); The Cabin Boy’s Story (New York, 1854). One
of the few studies of early maritime ction is Harold Francis
Watson, The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama: 1550–1800 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1931).
8. For example, Hunter traces the relevance of travel literature
and didacticism for Robinson Crusoe (The Reluctant Pilgrim, 15–18,
35–46). In Crime and Defoe, Faller analyzes crime pamphlets to
demonstrate their signi cance to Defoe’s crime ction (1–32).
Richetti concentrates on the historiography of a few novels “to
watch the narratives at their various tasks” to go beyond “static
meaning” (Defoe’s Narratives, 8). More recently, Sandra Sherman
examines the theme of credit and how it “becomes a site for
enacting the limits of discursive integrity” in Finance and
Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13.
9. Foucault is, of course, the rst source, for a new
understanding of sexuality in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An
Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House,
1978), esp. 5–6, 114, 120–27. See also Armstrong, Desire and
Domestic Fiction, which discusses the domestic novel, esp. 59–95;
and Ballaster, Seductive Forms, which interrogates the novels of
Behn, Manley, and Haywood, esp. 152–95.
10. See, for example, David F. Greenberg, The Construction of
Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); G. S.
Rousseau, “The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth
Century: ‘Utterly Confused Category’ and/or Rich Repository?” in
’Tis Nature’s Fault, ed. Robert Purks Maccubin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985); Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma,
eds., The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and
Enlightenment Europe (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989);
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990); Claude Summers, ed.,
Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary
Representations in Historical Context (New York: Harrington Park
Press, 1992), among many others.
11. Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England: To Which
Is Added, the Petit Maitre, an Odd Sort of Unpoetical Poem in the
Trolly-Lolly Stile (London, 1720). Cited parenthetically in the text.
 12. See, for example, The Tryal and Conviction of Several Reputed
Sodomites; Account of the Proceedings against Capt. Edward Rigby; A
Full and True Account of the Discovery and Apprehending a Notorious
Gang of Sodomites.
13. The OED de nes “inhuman” as “not having the qualities
proper or natural to a human being; esp. destitute of natural
kindness or pity, brutal, unfeeling, cruel.” “Unhuman,” although
de ned as “inhuman,” is also de ned as “not pertaining to
mankind.” The sense I get from Plain Reasons is the latter.
14. Baer, “ ‘The Complicated Plot of Piracy,’ ” 7. Cited
parenthetically in the text.
15. For more on the history of Madagascar, See F. D. Arnold-
Forster, The Madagascar Pirates (New York: Lothrop, Lee and
Shepard, 1957); Defoe, Atlas Maritimus, esp. 233–34; Reasons for
Reducing the Pyrates at Madagascar (London, [1706 ?]); Ritchie,
Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, esp. 82–84, 112–13,
120, 162, 216; Johnson, General History, vol. 1, esp. 25–42; Defoe,
The King of Pirates, 28–64.
16. See Hill, “Radical Pirates?” 161–87. Although Rediker—with
Baer, Cordingly, and Ritchie—is by far the most sophisticated of
pirate historians, his is an overdetermined argument that, rst,
seamen are among the earliest proletariat; and second, their labor
class values demarcate their reasons for turning pirate. The
problem is that Rediker is so determined to prove his point, he is
unwilling to discuss the way pirates become represented both as
bloodthirsty ends and how their own cultural mores in addition to
the economic value they place on their lives can be heroicized. See
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 254–87.
17. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (1961; New York:
Norton, 1982), 257.
18. Bonnet was tried in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1718.
See The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet.
19. Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, as we have seen,
trivializes the sodomite. See also the “Trials” referred to earlier, as
well as most famously, Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick
Random (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), and his
description of Captain Whi e, which manages to merge both
sodomites and sailors in one of the funniest—if horribly
homophobic—scenes in mid-eighteenth-century literature.
20. Gosse, Pirates’ Who’s Who, 52.
21. Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 244. Cited
parenthetically in the text. Black, Pirates of the West Indies, 90.
22. See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, esp. 3–27.
23. For example, on 12 April 1718, the Weekly-Journal writes,
“The Pirate Bonnet of 36 Guns and 300 Men is still a cruizing”
(415). A pirate ship with thirty-six guns and three hundred men
could be a terrifying sight to a trading schooner.
24. See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 59–95; Ballaster,
Seductive Forms, esp. 100–113, 136–58.
 25. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 69. Cited parenthetically in the
text.
26. See proclamations at British Library: BL 21.h.3. Also King
William gave a proclamation “For Preventing and Punishing
Immorality and Prophaness” (A1r) in February 1697 in [Daniel
Defoe], An Account of the Societies for Reformation of Manners, in
London and Westminster, and Other Parts of the Kingdom. With a
Persuasive to Persons of All Ranks, to Be Zealous and Diligent in
Promoting the Execution of the Laws against Prophaneness and
Debauchery, for the E ecting a National Reformation. Published with
the Approbation of a Considerable Number of the Lords Spiritual and
Temporal (London, 1699).
27. See Edward Ward, The Wooden World Dissected, 3d ed.
(London, 1744), 41; in addition, see Rediker, Between the Devil and
the Deep Blue Sea, 162.
28. Edward Ward, The London-Spy Compleat, 4th ed. (London,
1719), 41–42.
29. The History of the Pirates Containing the Lives of These Noted
Pirates (Haverhill, MA, 1825), 133.
30. The Lives and Daring Deeds of the Most Celebrated Pirates and
Buccaneers.
31. At the end of volume 2 of the General History, several of the
pirates in the appendix are represented by “correspondents,”
writers who supposedly had rsthand experience with the pirates,
and whom Johnson reproduces verbatim in the chapters.
Schonhorn chooses to combine chapters from both volumes of the
General History in order to give the appearance of chronology.
32. Love Letters between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous
Mr. Wilson (1723), ed. Michael S. Kimmel (New York: Harrington
Park Press, 1990).
33. See Gosse, Pirates’ Who’s Who, for example, 252–54.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

1. In the rst edition of the General History, Roberts’s story runs

from page 161 through page 260. The biographies of other pirates
are no more than half that length.
2. For other works that allude to pirate and privateer articles,
see Shelvocke, A Voyage round the World, 34–36; Philip Ashton,
Ashton’s Memorial (London, 1726), 11–22; An Account of the
Conduct and Proceedings of the Late John Gow Alias Smith, 53;
“Articles of Agreement, Made This 10th Day of October in the Year
of Our Lord 1695” (London, 1700).
3. See Randolph Trumbach, “Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role,
and Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London,” in The
Pursuit of Sodomy, ed. Gerard and Hekma, 407–32; and idem,
“Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender
Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography,”
in ’Tis Nature’s Fault, ed. Maccubin, 109–21.
 4. See, among other sources, Plain Reasons for the Growth of
Sodomy; Britannicus [Thomas Gordon], The Conspirators; or, The
Case of Catiline (London, 1721); and Love Letters between a Certain
Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson.
5. “Brittanicus,” The Conspirators, 24–25.
6. Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 254; Sherry,
Raiders and Rebels, 135.
7. Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 251.
8. Trial transcript quoted in Stanley, ed. Bold in Her Breeches,
179. See PRO CO 137/14/XC18757.
9. Notable exceptions are Julie Wheelwright, in Bold in Her
Breeches, ed. Stanley, 176–201, and several essays in Creighton
and Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women.
10. See, for example, Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 241; Ballaster,
Seductive Forms, 34–35, 164–65; and McKeon, Origins of the English
Novel, 100.
11. Novak, introduction to the Augustan Society reprint of
Captain Misson. Cited parenthetically in the text.
12. “Of Captain Misson” opens volume 2 of the General History.
Misson’s career is interrupted by the lives of Captain Bowen and
Captain Kidd before it is picked up again in “Of Captain Tew, and
His Crew.”
13. Hill has made the most signi cant gestures toward
rereading “Of Captain Misson” in his essay “Radical Pirates?”.
Novak edited the Augustan Reprint Society’s facsimile of one half
of Misson’s story. Unfortunately, he does not include the second
half—called “Of Captain Tew” in volume 2 of the General History—
in either his discussion in the introduction or the facsimile itself.
“Of Captain Misson” has been overlooked by Richetti, Hunter, and
Backscheider.
14. Hill, “Radical Pirates?”; and Rediker, Between the Devil and
the Deep Blue Sea.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
1. Most notably Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 60–93; McKeon,
too, ends his Origins of the English Novel with Defoe, Fielding, and
Richardson. See also Pat Rogers, ed., Defoe: The Critical Heritage
(London: Routledge, 1972) for an overview of Defoe criticism.
2. See critics such as Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 16,
19, 106; McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 315–37; Watt, The
Rise of the Novel, 63–72, 76–83, 85–89. Davis, Factual Fictions, 161–
75, makes compelling arguments based on an understanding of
Foucault; Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim, 90–110, makes coherent,
logical arguments about puritanism’s e ect on Defoe’s writing.
3. Other works with pirate characters, settings, or descriptions
by or attributed to Defoe include Charles Johnson [Daniel Defoe?],
A General History of the . . . Pyrates, and Atlas Maritimus, The King of
Pirates, Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719), The Farther Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe (London, 1720), The History and Remarkable Life of
the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque Commonly Call’d Jack (London,
1722), and A New Voyage round the World (London, 1724).
4. Goldberg, Sodometries, 20.
5. I base this on the status of Singleton in Defoe monographs by
authors such as Faller, Novak, Backscheider, and Richetti. Faller,
for example, in his book Crime and Defoe, is unable to do much
with Captain Singleton because piracy and felony are di erent kinds
of crime. Richetti in Defoe’s Narratives and Popular Fiction does
discuss piracy, but he does not de ne piracy as speci cally as I do,
and his discussion of Captain Singleton does not go as far as he
could take it. In the few articles published on Captain Singleton,
Singleton’s journey across Africa is the most compelling aspect of
the book. See, for example, Michael Seidel, “Defoe in Conrad’s
Africa,” Conradiana 17, no. 2 (1985): 145–46; Pat Rogers,
“Speaking within Compass: The Ground Covered in Two Works by
Defoe,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15, no. 2 (fall 1982): 103–
13.
6. These observations have been pointed out by Hunter, The
Reluctant Pilgrim, ix–x; and by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor,
and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992), 189–91.
7. For more on these points, see Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 70–
91; McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 315–37; Armstrong and
Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan, 184–95; Rogers, Defoe: The
Critical Heritage, 52–53 166–68.
8. Even Lincoln Faller, in his otherwise important corrective to
the critical misunderstanding of Defoe’s other crimes novels
(Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana), does not know quite
what to do with Captain Singleton. Faller, Crime and Defoe, xii.
9. In addition to the works cited in note 3, only a few other
articles focus on Captain Singleton: Timothy C. Blackburn, “The
Coherence of Defoe’s Captain Singleton,” Huntington Library
Quarterly 41 (1978) is the most notable of the essays, along with
Manuel Schonhorn’s article. Blackburn, who discusses Defoe’s use
of Locke’s ideas, argues for the “coherence” of the book as a whole.
However, he does not really suggest what “home” means to
Singleton, and further, is puzzled, as are many of these writers, by
the seemingly “strange” compact between Singleton and William
at the end of the novel (119–36). Other works that focus on Captain
Singleton include Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Identity
in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993); Jonathan E. Hill, “Defoe’s Singleton,” Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America 84, no. 3 (September 1990): 286–
96; Virgil Nemoianu, “Picaresque Retreat: From Xenophon’s
Anabasis to Defoe’s Singleton,” Comparative Literature Studies 23, no.
2 (summer 1986): 91–102; Manuel Schonhorn, “Defoe’s Captain
Singleton: A Reassessment with Observations,” Papers on Language
and Literature 7 (1971): 38–51; Gary J. Scrimgeour, “The Problem
of Realism in Defoe’s Captain Singleton,” Huntington Library
Quarterly 27 (1963): 21–37.
10. The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col.
Jacque Commonly Call’d Jack (1722), ed. Samuel Holt Monk
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 308–9; The Fortunes and
Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722), ed. Juliet Mitchell
(London: Penguin English Library, 1978), 315.
11. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, 88.
12. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 264–66,
analyzes how the share system for pirates di ers from that of
ordinary seamen or privateers on more legitimate ships.
13. Faller makes distinctions between the “morally serious”
criminal tract and the “frivolous” crime novels in Turned to
Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late
Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4–31. Both tracts and novels
serve a function to dissuade citizens from criminal behavior. The
only pirate books from the early eighteenth century that I have
found are “morally serious.” Even balladry serves a moral purpose,
as Joel H. Baer argues in “Bold Captain Avery in the Privy Council:
Early Variants of a Broadside Ballad from the Pepys Collection,”
Folk Music Journal 7, no. 1 (1995): 4–26.
14. In addition to their appearances as advertisements in early
newspapers, proclamations can be found in the British Library
(21.h.3) and in the London Public Record O ce (HCA 1/15.11, 24,
25, 36).
15. [Daniel Defoe?], A True Account of the Design, and
Advantages of the South-Sea Trade (London 1705), 20. Furbank and
Owens neither attribute nor de-attribute this pamphlet to Defoe.
They point out that the arguments put forward here are similar to
arguments made by Defoe in his Review. See The Canonisation of
Daniel Defoe, 108. However, in Defoe De-Attributions, Furbank and
Owens consider that an attribution to Defoe is “in a certain
amount of doubt” (49).
16. A Review of the State of the British Nation, vol. 4, 428.
17. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 74–92; Hunter, The Reluctant
Pilgrim, particularly the introduction.
18. In a well-known passage at the end of Robinson Crusoe
when Crusoe returns to England, he tells the reader,

rst of all I marry’d, and that not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction, and
had three children, two sons and one daughter: but my wife dying, and my nephew
coming home with good success from a voyage to Spain, my inclination to go abroad,
and his importunity, prevailed and engaged me to go in his ship, as a private trader
to the East Indies.

Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin Books, 1965),

298.
19. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, 93.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8
 1. Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim, x; Watt, The Rise of the Novel,
60–92. Backscheider, Novak, and Richetti, among others, all tend
to focus on the island, just as Singleton’s journey across Africa
becomes the focus of that novel for most criticism.
2. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, 21.
3. From Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 64.
4. For a discussion of Defoe’s pen-for-hire reputation, see
Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, 139–94. Gildon satirizes
Defoe’s reputation as a pen-for-hire.
5. See Henry Clinton Hutchins, Robinson Crusoe and Its Printing
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), 52–128. The
popularity of the Farther Adventures has been seriously
underestimated over the years; critical evaluation has not taken
into account the number of editions that were published
throughout the eighteenth century.
6. For a good discussion of Defoe’s prefaces, see Faller, Crime
and Defoe, 76–109.
7. See Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan, 185–
90.
8. Charles Gildon, The Life and Surprizing Adventure of Mr. D -----
De F-- (London, 1719), 25. Cited parenthetically in the text.
9. Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction, notes that the
Edgeworths “began to endorse the reading of ction that made
social conformity seem necessary, if not entirely desirable.” She
goes on to point out that Robinson Crusoe was used to teach young
girls the need to stay at home, and in fact, learn to be “domestic”
through the “female” character of Crusoe (16). Note, too, it is
Robinson Crusoe that Armstrong talks about, not the Farther
Adventures or the Serious Re ections.
10. Hunter argues that “objectivity of tone and style
characterizes the tradition as a whole. An important aspect of this
objectivity is the absence of any informing idea or theme:
chronology, replaced by topicality when the narrative is
interrupted to describe a particular place, is the only organizing
force in the books, thematic considerations being inappropriate to
the ‘pose’ or conventions of the form.” The Reluctant Pilgrim, 16.
11. Privateers and sailors feared falling into Spanish hands
more than being marooned or being captured by Indians.
Spaniards are often portrayed as an example of how not to treat
indigenous people, not only by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, but in
almost all English travel literature of the period. Dryden is a
notable exception to this portrayal of the Spaniards in his tragedies
The Indian Queen (1663) and The Indian Emperour, or, The Conquest
of Mexico by the Spanish, Being the Sequel of the Indian Queen
(1665).
12. “Liberty of Conscience” was an important political concept
both at the turn of the eighteenth century and again around 1715.
In addition to The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (London, 1702),
which resulted in a stay in the stocks, see the dialogue between
Defoe and opponents to the dissenters from 1713 to 1715 and
Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, esp. 87, 94, 100, 103, 130,
133–34.
13. See Crusoe’s list of inhabitants, Farther Adventures, 94.
14. See Christopher Flint, “Orphaning the Family,” English
Literary History 55, no. 2 (summer 1988): 381–419; Timothy
Blackburn, “Friday’s Religion,” Eighteenth Century Studies 18, no. 3
(spring 1985): 360–82; Richard Braverman, “Crusoe’s Legacy,”
Studies in the Novel 18, no. 1 (spring 1986): 1–28 for recent work
on the relationship between Friday and Crusoe.
15. Humphrey Richardson, The Secret Life of Robinson Crusoe
(Covina, CA: Collectors Publications, 1967), 9. I thank Professor
Alexander Pettit for alerting me to this reference.
16. Richardson, Secret Life, 176. By the end of the novel, the
two are rescued and return to England. The rst thing they do is
“make contact with two ladies out of London who were waiting on
the quay” for the ship to come in. However, “the two men proved
so awkward, so uncouth, so demanding that the women were
obliged to summon the police . . . . When the police arrived,
manacled the two rascals, and led them o to jail. A new life was
beginning for them” (188).
17. J. M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Penguin, 1986); Maurice
Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1967), 166.
 18. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary
Dalwood (1962; San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986), 23, 35.
19. Crusoe’s opinion of the Great Wall of China is particularly
choice:

I say, I stood still an hour to look at [the Great Wall] on every side, near and far o ; I
mean, that was within my view; and the guide of our caravan, who had been
extolling it for the wonder of the world, was mighty eager to hear my opinion of it. I
told him it was a most excellent thing to keep o the Tartars, which he happened not
to understand as I meant it, and so took it for a compliment. (Farther Adventures,
270–71)

20. Isobel Grundy, in “Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,”

Scriblerian 14, no. 2 (1982): 122–24, uses the title and references
the Serious Re ections to discuss China Moon by Maxine Hong
Kingston. Fakrul Alam, “Religious and Linguistic Colonialism in
Defoe’s Fiction,” North Dakota Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1987), 116–23,
discusses “religion” in the Crusoe novels, but without any of the
historical context I am trying to provide. Otherwise, in books about
Defoe such as Backscheider’s, Novak’s, or Hunter’s, the Serious
Re ections is noted as one of Defoe’s works, but never commented
on except as subordinate to Robinson Crusoe.
21. Davis notes this in Factual Fictions. For Davis, however, the
point is Defoe’s ability to construct a “reality” based on accretion
of detail, thus creating a new kind of “novel” that imitates
“reality” in ways that frighten Gildon (152–75). “Defoe’s works
seem still plainly to bear the marks,” Davis argues, “of their
intimate connection with the news/novels discourse” (155).
22. Brown, Life against Death, 19.
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Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Ed. Paul-
Gabriel Bouce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Stanley, Jo, ed. Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the
Ages. London: Pandora, 1995.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. London: Cassell and
Company, 1883.
Stockton, Frank R. Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts. New York:
Macmillan, 1898.
Summers, Claude, ed. Homosexuality in Renaissance and
Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical
Context. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1992.
Thompson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-
Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Tournier, Maurice. Friday. Trans. Norman Denny. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
Trial of Captain Thomas Vaughan for High Treason in the High Seas.
London, 1696.
The True Account of the Behaviour and Confession of the Criminals,
Condemned on Thursday the 15th. Day of April, 1686 . . .
Executed at Tyburn, and the Other Five Repriev’d. London, 1686.
A True Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Last Dying
Speeches, of Captain William Kidd, and the Rest of the Pirates,
That Were Executed at Execution Dock in Wapping, on Friday the
23d of May. 1701. London, 1701.
A True Account of a Fight between Captain John Leech, Commander
of the Ship Ann of London, of 14 Guns, and 19 Men, from
Jamaica, and a French Privateer of 24 Guns, and Some
Petteraroes: As It Came in a Letter to his Owners from Plymouth,
Dated the Second of This Instant January, 1689. London, 1689–
90.
The True Account of the Proceedings at the Tryal Held at the
Marshalseas, on Friday, the 17th. of the Instant February, 1680,
by Vertue of a Special Commission Granted by the King, out of the
Admiralty, for Trying of Captain Crompton Guyther, and 7 of His
Men, viz. William Coles, Joseph Bullivant, Joh. Baxter, Francis
Wansell, Francis Martyn, John Gibson, and William Jones, for
Piracy by Them Committed on a Ship Belonging to the Dutch, on
the 3d. of December last, Who Were All Taken and Pinioned
Together, and Brought before the King and Council, Who
Committed Them to the Marshalseas. London, 1681.
A True Account of the Voyage of the Nottingham Galley. London,
1711.
A True Relation of a Most Horrid Conspiracy and Running Away with
the Ship Adventure Having on Board Forty Thousand Pieces of
Eight, and Other Goods to a Great Value. Together with the Cruel
and Barbarous Leaving and Turning Ashore upon the Island Naias,
in the East-Indies, the Captain, and Three Merchants Which Were
Passengers, and Sixteen Honest and Able Seamen, Eight Whereof
Miserably Perished by Hunger and Hardship, and But Four of the
Remainder Yet Come to England. London, 1700.
Trumbach, Randolph. “Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and
Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London.” In The
Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and
Enlightenment Europe, eds. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma. New
York: Harrington Park Press, 1989.
———. “Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the
Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent
Historiography.” In ’Tis Nature’s Fault, ed. R. P. Maccubbin.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
The Tryal and Conviction of Several Reputed Sodomites, before the
Right Honourable the Lord Mayor and Recorder of London.
London, 1707.
The Tryal, Examination and Condemnation, of Captain Green of the
Worcester, and his whole Ships Crew, for the Murther of Captain
Dummond, and all his Scots Ships Crew, near Malabar; Before the
 high Court of Admiralty in Scotland on the 14th of March 1705.
London, 1705.
The Tryal of Capt. Thomas Green and his Crew, Before the Judge of
the High Court of Admiralty of Scotland; And the Assessors
appointed by the Lords of Privy Council. At the Instance of Mr.
Alexander Higgins Advocate, Procurator-Fiscal to the said Court,
for Piracy, Robbery, and Murder. Edinburgh, 1705.
The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William May, William
Bishop, James Lewis, and John Sparkes for Several Piracies and
Robberies by Them Committed, in the Company of Every the
Grand Pirate, Near the Coasts of the East-Indies; and Several Other
Places on the Seas. Giving an Account of Their Villainous
Robberies and Barbarities. At the Admiralty Sessions, Begun at the
Old-Baily on the 29th of October, 1696. and Ended on the 6th. of
November. London, 1696.
The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet, and Other Pirates . . . Who Were
All Condemn’d for Piracy, as Also the Tryals of Thomas Nichols,
Rowland Sharp, Jonathan Clarke, and Thomas Gerrat, for Piracy,
Who Were Acquitted. London, 1719.
Turley, Hans. “Taming the Scourge of the Main: Charles Johnson’s
The Successful Pyrate and the Transgressive Hero.” Paper
presented at South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies, Houston, February 1994.
United Kingdom. Public Record O ce. High Court of the
Admiralty (13/1; 15/1).
Unparallel’d Cruelty; or The Tryal of Capt. Jeane of Bristol. London,
1726.
Visiak, E. H. Buccaneer Ballads. London: Elkin Matthews, 1910.
The Voyages and Adventures of Edward Teach, Commonly Called
Black Beard, the Notorious Pirate. Newcastle, 1800.
Ward, Edward. The London-Spy Compleat, in Eighteen Parts. The
First Volume of the Author’s Writings. 4th ed. London, 1719.
———. The Rambling Rakes: Or, London Libertines. London, 1700.
———. The Wooden World Dissected, in the Character of a Ship of
War. 3d ed. London, 1744.
Watson, Harold Francis. The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama:
1550–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1957
White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1975.
The Whole Tryal, Examination, and Condemnation of all the Pirates,
That was Try’d and Condemn’d by the High Court of Admiralty, at
the Session-House in the Old Bailey; on Wednesday and Thursday,
the 26. and 27. of this instant May, 1725. For several Inhumane
Murders and Notorious Pyracies, by them committed on the High
Seas. London, 1725.
Wiegman, Robyn. “Economics and the Body: Gendered Sites in
Robinson Crusoe and Roxana.” Criticism 31, no. 1 (1989): 33–
51.
William R. [William I]. “Their Majesties Declaration for
Encouragement of O cers, Seamen and Mariners, Employed
in the Present Service.” London, 1689.
Wilmot, John. The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Ed.
Keith Walker. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.
Zahedieh, Nuala. “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the
Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692.” William and Mary
Quarterly 43 (October 1986): 570–93.
Index

Account of the Proceedings against Captain Rigby, An, 50–52

Admiralty, Court of, 45–46, 57–58
Armstrong, Nancy, 77, 176–77n. 9
Articles: of Captain Gow, 16
of Captain Roberts, 40, 92, 93–97
of the pirates, 25–26, 116, 120
Avery, Capt. John (pirate), 7, 39, 44, 46–49, 52, 62–72, 73, 80,
103, 109, 113, 116n. 13.
See also Tryals of Joseph Dawson . . . on the 6th. of November, The
(1696)

Baer, Joel, 78–79, 168n. 4, 171–72n. 16

Ballads, 56, 58, 62
Barbarian Cruelty, 23–24
Barlow, Edward, 17–18, 19
on bad food, 17
on disease, 18
on impressment, 22
on mutiny, 29
on pay, 18
Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea. See Barlow, Edward
Bataille, Georges, 147
Behn, Aphra, 51
Bellomont, earl of, 37–38, 59. See also Kidd, Capt. William
(pirate)
Betagh, William, 20
Black, Clinton, 82–83
Blackbeard (pirate), 1, 3–6, 29, 36, 63, 73, 80, 84, 97, 108, 109,
116
cruelty of, 13–14
and homoeroticism, 4–5
masculinity of, 3–6
physical descriptions of, 1, 3–4
Bonnet, Maj. Stede (pirate), 63, 73, 80, 81–85
Bonny, Anne. See Female pirates
Brown, Norman O., 86, 95, 131, 158
Bucaniers of America. See Exquemelin, John [A. O.]
Buccaneers, 7, 24–25, 30–37, 40, 79
de nition of, 28–29, 32, 33
masculinity of, 35
relationships of, with European governments, 33–4, 35
threat of, to Spanish empire, 24. See also Exquemelin, John [A.
O.]
Buccaneers of America. See Exquemelin, John [A. O.]
Buccaneers and Pirates of our Coasts (Stockton), 59–61
Burg, B. R., 45

Capital. See Defoe, Daniel, and economy; Pirates, and economy

Captain Singleton (Defoe), 8–9, 20, 39–40, 42, 72, 74, 96, 102,
104, 106, 109–28, 129, 133, 140, 144, 153
and a ection, between men, 116, 124–27
and articles, 116, 120
and Capt. John Avery, 116n. 13
and colonialism, 112
and earl of Rochester, 114–16
and economy, 116–18, 122, 124
and home, 112–13, 120–21, 123, 124–27
and homoeroticism, 109–10, 113, 116–17, 120–28
and libertinism, 114–18, 125
and masculinity, 110–12, 113, 116–17, 120–21, 122–27, 133,
139
and piracy, 110–27
and Robinson Crusoe, 129, 130, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144,
153;. See also Defoe, Daniel
Castlehaven, earl of, 46
Clastre, Pierre, 13
Coetzee, J. M., 147
Collection of Original Voyages, A (Hacke). See Hacke, Capt. William
Confessions of the pirates, 45, 53–55. See also Lorrain, Paul
Conspirators, The (“Britannicus”), 96
Cooke, Capt. Edward, 17, 37, 120, 136
Cordingly, David, 165n. 1, 171–72n. 16
Court of Admiralty. See Admiralty, Court of
Cruising Voyage round the World, A. See Rogers, Capt. Woodes

Dampier, Capt. William, 17, 44, 118, 120, 136

Davis, Capt. (pirate), 85–86
Davis, Lennard, 49, 89, 178n. 21
Dawson, Joseph (pirate), 46–50. See also Avery, Capt. John
(pirate); Trials, piracy
Dean, John, 16. See also Madagascar
Defoe, Daniel, 7, 8–9, 20, 61, 62, 63, 65–72, 72–75, 86–87, 102,
111, 129–30, 132–33, 135
and economy, 104–8, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115–20, 121, 129,
130, 145, 158
and A General History of the . . . Pyrates, 7–8, 74, 103–4, 106–7
and homoeroticism, 109–10, 113, 115, 116, 124–26, 127, 146–
48
and pirates, 30–31, 40–41, 64–65, 93, 109, 115–17, 117–20,
141–42
Titles: Colonel Jack, 74, 113, 121, 133, 154
 A Journal of the Plague Year, 74
The King of Pirates, 62, 63–72, 92, 109, 120, 121, 126, 140, 141
Memoirs of a Cavalier, 74
Moll Flanders, 67–68, 72, 74, 113, 121, 126, 127, 133, 153
A New Voyage round the World, 74
Review of the State of the British Nation, 64–65
Roxana, 67, 74, 127, 133, 154
Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 140–41. See also Captain
Singleton
Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The
Robinson Crusoe
Serious Re ections of Robinson Crusoe, The
Discipline, on board ship, 10–13
Domestick Intelligence, 24

Economy and capital. See Defoe, Daniel, and economy

Pirates, and economy
Elms, Charles, 58–59
England, Capt. (pirate), 63, 75–76, 108
Every, Capt. Henry or John. See Avery, Capt. John (pirate)
Exquemelin, John [A. O.]: Bucaniers of America, 29–36, 33, 79–80,
162–63n. 10, 164n. 18
Piratas de la america, 33, 163–64n. 13
Faller, Lincoln, 116, 175n. 13
Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (Defoe), 8–9, 48, 74,
104–6, 177–78n. 19
and Christian zeal, 130–34, 149
and Friday, 144–48
and homoeroticism, 144–48, 157–58
and liberty, 140–41
and moral instruction, 129–32
and pirates, 139–40, 142–43, 148, 152–53
and plot structure, 137–38
and popularity, 133, 176n. 5
and religion, 139, 142–43, 148. See also Defoe, Daniel
Female pirates, 44, 90, 97–101
Fly, Capt. (pirate), 86–88, 90
Foucault, Michel, 54, 77, 123
Funnel, William (privateer), 14, 120
Furbank, P. N., and W. R. Owens, 159–60n. 8, 175–76n. 15

Gardiner’s Island, New York, 60

General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious
Pyrates, A, 13, 36, 62, 73–108, 119–20. See also Johnson, Capt.
Charles
Gildon, Charles, 130, 134, 156, 157–58
Goldberg, Jonathan, 4, 43, 75
Gosse, Philip, 73, 82–83, 103–4, 162n. 9
Gow, Capt. (pirate), 26
Greimas’s square, 41–43, 165n. 33

Hacke, Capt. William, 45

Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 112
Hill, Christopher, 30–31, 80, 104
Homoeroticism, 2–3, 8–9, 12, 29, 40–43, 68–69, 75–79, 95–96,
109–10, 113, 116–17, 120–28, 144–48, 157–58. See also Defoe,
Daniel, and homoeroticism
Pirates, and homo-eroticism
Sodomites
Hunter, J. Paul, 49, 128–29, 177n. 10

Impressment, 21–22, 37, 164n. 20

Johnson, Capt. Charles: and articles, 93–97

attribution as author of A General History of the . . . Pyrates, 7–8,
141–42, 159–60n. 8, 162n. 9
and Blackbeard, 1, 3–6, 13–14, 84, 97
and Maj. Stede Bonnet, 81–85
and female pirates, 97–101
and homoeroticism, 74–78, 83–86, 86–88, 88–91, 93–97, 101,
105–8, 109–10, 141–42, 144
 and Capt. Kidd, 56–57, 58–59, 61
and liberty, 79–80, 102–8
and masculinity, 81–85, 86, 88–91, 97–101
and Capt. Misson, 79–80, 92, 101–8, 120, 142
and piracy, defense of, 101–2
and piratical subject, 61, 77–80, 81–85, 97–101, 101–8, 109–10,
139
and publishing history of, 31–32, 74, 162n. 9, 169n. 3
and Capt. Roberts, 90–91, 92–97
and signi cance of, 31–32, 44, 73–75, 92–93, 103
Johnson, Charles (playwright), 62, 65, 70
Juan Fernandez Islands, 19

Kidd, Capt. William (pirate), 17, 46, 49, 61, 80, 109, 116, 167n.
29
and ballads about, 56, 58
and confession of, 53–55
and earl of Bellomont, 38–39
and mutiny, 19
and trial of, 55–59
King of Pirates, The (Defoe[–]). See Defoe, Daniel

Leslie, Charles, 29
Libertine and pirate, di erences of and similarities to, 39–40, 85
 and Captain Singleton, 115–16, 117, 118, 125. See also Rochester,
earl of (John Wilmot)
Liberty, eighteenth-century notions of, 21–23, 79–80, 101–2, 140–
42, 177n. 12
Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery, The, 63–65, 70
Lorrain, Paul, 45, 53–55. See also Confessions of the pirates
Love Letters between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr.
Wilson, 89
Low, Capt. (pirate), 78, 79, 80

Madagascar, 16, 31, 38, 62–72, 103, 149–52, 155

as commonwealth of pirates, 64, 68–69, 79–80, 103–4, 110–11,
118–20, 149. See also Avery, Capt. John (pirate)
Liberty, eighteenth-century notions of
Misson, Capt.
Utopias
Manley, Delarivier, 51
Martel, Capt. (pirate), 88–92
Marx, Jenifer, 82–83
Marx, Karl, 131–32
Masculinity and masculine desire, 1–3, 4–7, 8, 35, 41–43, 60–61,
71–72, 77–78, 88–90, 94–96, 102, 109–10, 112. See also Homo-
eroticism
Pirates, and homoeroticism
 Pirates, and masculinity
Sodomites
Misson, Capt., 4, 31, 79–80, 81, 85, 92, 93, 101–8, 113, 120. See
also Avery, Capt. John (pirate)
Madagascar
Utopias
Mist’s Weekly-Journal. See Weekly-Journal (Mist)
Moll Flanders (Defoe). See Defoe, Daniel
Morgan, Sir Henry, 32, 34, 36, 163n. 13
Mullins, Darby (pirate), 53–54
Mutiny, 12–13, 19–21, 25–27, 37–38, 66, 112, 114

Newgate Calendar, 46
New Voyage round the World, A (Dampier).
See Dampier, Capt. William
Novak, Maximillian, 103–7
Observator, and impressment, 23, 162n. 1
Ordinary of Newgate, Paul Lorrain. See Lorrain, Paul
Owens, W. R. See Furbank, P. N., and W. R. Owens

Piracy trials. See Trials, piracy

Pirates: as antiheroes, 1–2, 3, 4, 7–9, 32, 35, 42–43, 49–50, 62–
72, 74, 75–77, 81, 91, 118, 140
articles of, 25–26, 40, 92, 93–97, 116, 120
 confessions of, 45, 53–55
costume and dress of, 88–92, 94
de nition of, 36–37, 48
and economy, 1–2, 37–42, 51–52, 65–71, 75–81, 83–85, 93–96,
104–8, 114, 117–120
and homoeroticism, 2, 4–6, 9, 29, 39–43, 45, 48, 60–72, 75–79,
83–86, 93–98
language of, 87–89
and masculinity, 1–3, 4–7, 60–61, 71–72, 77–78, 81, 84–86, 88–
91, 94–96, 98, 101, 102, 106
and profanity, 54–55, 86–88
social history of, 6–7
and sodomy, 2, 6, 40–3, 45, 112
trials of (see trials, piracy). See also Buccaneers
Defoe, Daniel
Female pirates
Johnson, Capt. Charles
Piratical subject
Privateers
Sodomites
Pirates, Algerian, 23–24
Pirates Own Book, The (Elms), 58–59
Piratical subject, 7, 29, 48–49, 55–61, 62–63, 66–70, 74–75, 76–
81, 82, 84, 85–86, 88, 102–8, 109–10, 133, 139, 140, 153
de nition of, 36, 41–43
Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, 75–78, 81, 84–85, 87, 89
Plunder and Bribery Further Discover’d, 22
Press, the. See Impressment
Privateers, 7, 13–17, 20–21, 25, 28–29, 44, 45, 49, 55, 56–57, 66–
67, 93, 118–20, 134–36
de nition of, 29–30, 37–39, 40, 41–43. See also Betagh, William
Buccaneers
Cooke, Capt. Edward
Dampier, Capt. William
Funnel, William (privateer)
Hacke, Capt. William
Rogers, Capt. Woodes
Shelvocke, Capt. George

Quelch, John (pirate), 47–48

Rackham, Capt. “Calico Jack” (pirate), 90, 99–100. See also

Female pirates
Read, Mary. See Female pirates
Rediker, Marcus, 9, 24, 26, 30, 93, 104, 116, 171–72n. 16
Richardson, Humphrey, 146–47, 177n. 16
Richetti, John J., 113, 127
Ritchie, Robert C., 38, 45, 171–72n. 16
Roberts, Capt. Bartholomew (pirate), 40, 45–46, 90–91, 92–97,
108
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 8–9, 65–66, 74–75, 98, 102, 104–5, 106,
109, 110, 120, 121, 126, 128–58
and Christian zeal, 130–32
and Friday, 144–48
and home, 133
and homo-eroticism, 144–48
and liberty, 140–41
as moral instruction, 129–32
and pirates, 136–37
and plot structure, 137–38, 177n. 10
and religion, 134, 136, 139
and trade, 133–34. See also Defoe, Daniel
Rochester, earl of (John Wilmot), 39, 40, 85, 114–16. See also
Captain Singleton (Defoe)
Defoe, Daniel
Libertine and pirate, di erences of and similarities to
Roderick Random (Smollett), 172n. 19
Rodger, N. A. M., 22
Rogers, Capt. Woodes, 7, 15–16, 18, 19–20, 90, 118, 120, 136
Roxana (Defoe). See Defoe, Daniel

Sailors Advocate, The, 21–22, 23

Secret Life of Robinson Crusoe, The (Richardson), 146–47, 177n. 16
Selkirk, Alexander, 19
Serious Re ections of Robinson Crusoe, The (Defoe), 8–9, 74, 86,
128–30, 134
and Christian zeal, 130, 132, 154–58
and homo-eroticism, 157–58
as moral instruction, 129–32, 156
and religion, 154–58
and “true Christianity,” 131–32. See also Defoe, Daniel
Serres, Michel, 41, 81
Shelvocke, Capt. George, 16, 19–21, 25–26
Slavery, of sailors by Algerian pirates, 23–24
Sodomites, 2, 16–17, 46, 50–52, 66, 75–78, 81, 84–85, 87–89, 94–
95, 96–97, 123, 172n. 19
and piratical subject, 40–43, 68, 75–78. See also Homoeroticism
Masculinity and masculine desire
Pirates, and homoeroticism
Trials, sodomy
Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (Burg), 45
Spain, and control of the Caribbean, 24
Stockton, Frank R., 59–61
Successful Pyrate, The (Johnson), 65–66, 70

Teach, Edward. See Blackbeard (pirate)

Thatch, Edward. See Blackbeard (pirate)
Tournier, Maurice, 147
Treasure Island (Stevenson), 9
Treaty of Utrecht, 25
Trials, piracy, 45–46, 46–50, 54, 55–59, 83–84
Trials, sodomy, 46, 50–52, 166n. 5
True Account of the Design, and Advantages of the South-Sea Trade,
A (Defoe[–]), 118–19
Tryal of Captain Jeane, The. See Unparallel’d Cruelty
or the Tryal of Captain Jeane (1726)
Tryal and Conviction of Several Reputed Sodomites, The (1707), 50–
51
Tryals of Joseph Dawson . . . on the 6th. of November, The (1696),
46–49. See also Avery, Capt. John (pirate)

Unparallel’d Cruelty
or the Tryal of Captain Jeane (1726), 10–13, 16, 21, 160n. 2
Utopias, 79–80, 103–7. See also Avery, Capt. John (pirate);
Madagascar
Misson, Capt.
Vane, Capt., 85
Voyage round the World, A (Betagh). See Betagh, William
Voyage round the World, A (Funnel). See Funnel, William
(privateer)
Voyage round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea, A
(Shelvocke). See Shelvocke, Capt. George
Voyage to the South Sea, A (Cooke). See Cooke, Capt. Edward

Ward, Edward (Ned), 87–88

War of the Spanish Succession, 25
Watt, Ian, 129–30, 133
Weekly-Journal (Mist), 14–15, 84
Women at sea, 28–29, 97–101
About the Author

After working at ABC News for almost a decade, Hans

Turley moved from New York to Seattle, went back to school, and
received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1994. He
has received several predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from
such libraries as the Huntington in California, and the Ransom
Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published
articles and reviews in such journals as Radical Teacher, Eighteenth-
Century Studies, and Studies in the Novel. He is coeditor of the
journal The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation.
After two years as a tenure-track assistant professor at Texas
Tech University, Turley moved to the University of Connecticut at
Storrs in 1998 as a tenure-track assistant professor. He teaches the
Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, as well as
classes in short ction and gay and lesbian studies. He is
particularly interested in the novel. He is beginning research on a
long project that looks at the ction and primary texts surrounding
the 1688 abdication of James II. Turley lives in Willimantic,
Connecticut, with his partner and their dog.