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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
25 February 2006
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However far we get from the early literature
of piracy, we still seem to find material preserved and handed
down from the early sources. For instance, the Walt Disney film,
Pirates of the Caribbean, may have a wild and ridiculous plot,
featuring a ship manned by the Undead (thereby borrowing from
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), but it still contains moments
that seem historically convincing - the conception, for instance,
of the riotous pirate community on Tortuga. That the pirates,
in between expeditions, squandered their booty on food and drink
and sex is perfectly well attested.
The authentic literature, conversely, is full
of details that seem (to this reader) derived from children's
television of the 1950s: ships do mysteriously blow up, trails
of powder are indeed laid, and lit with a match, and put out
by Captain Morgan; fire-ships are indeed sent against the Spanish.
And there are pieces of eight in plenty. But the pirates were
naturally cleaned up for the sake of the infant audience: L'Ollonais
was no longer allowed to rip the heart out of a Spanish prisoner
and gnaw on it as a warning to others; I don't remember seeing
prisoners tortured on the rack, or burned alive, or starved
to death.
The fictional pirates no longer had slaves, although in the
17th-century Caribbean there was slavery everywhere. The buccaneers
had slaves working on board ship, and they traded in slaves
as well. They also kept indentured servants, and Exquemelin
[in The Buccaneers of America, London 1684] tells us (having
been one himself) that these were treated by the local planters
worse than negro slaves; the slaves they "endeavour in
some manner to preserve, as being perpetual bondmen; but as
for their white servants, they care not whether they live or
die, seeing they are to continue no longer than three years
in their service".
Pirate society was known to be democratic in
character (to a degree sometimes alarming to the governments
that had to deal with it) and to include runaway servants who
had been tricked into signing up in England and France. But
it was a slave-owning democracy. Among the original boucaniers
- the men who lived by hunting wild cattle for their skins -
there existed a form of total servitude of one man to another,
voluntarily agreed. A witness to this is Louis le Golif, who,
having escaped one form of indentured service, enlisted with
a boucanier called Kulescher, and went hunting for skins in
his company.
He tells us that "this Kulescher was the
hairiest man that I have ever been near in my life, a filthy
person who stank worse than a dung-soiled ass. And when I say
near him, I do not speak figuratively, since I had to submit
to the habits and customs of these men, who have no women at
all within their reach." In other words, Le Golif was Kulescher's
sex slave.
In due course, Kulescher dies and Le Golif
buries him under a mound of stones, so that the animals will
not eat him. He also says a few prayers for him - a detail that
suggests at least a certain respect for this otherwise repulsive
character, so hairy that he looked like a bear, and with a green
complexion which had earned him the nickname Verdigris.
Le Golif returns to the coast with his load
of skins, and becomes a pirate. During a battle on the Lake
of Nicaragua, he has his left buttock shot off by a cannonball,
and acquires the name Borgnefesse (One-buttock) as a result.
Everyone on Tortuga now knows of his accident, but they are
so depraved, Le Golif tells us, that they see in it "only
an engaging peculiarity". He has to fight two duels in
order to ward off the unwanted sexual attentions of the men.
Le Golif acquires a younger matelot or companion
under the practice of matelotage, explained by Exquemelin as
a solemn custom, with articles drawn and signed on both sides,
whereby two men share their whole stock and agree in some cases
that if one of them dies the other inherits everything. This
practice of sharing extends to the favours of a woman if one
of them gets married.
Eventually Le Golif marries, and time-shares
his wife with his matelot. But one day the matelot returns to
find Le Golif's wife in flagrante with another man. He kills
them both and flees. Le Golif has no regrets about his whore
of a wife, but he never ceases to mourn the loss of his matelot.
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