Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 09:51:36 -0400
From: Kit Mason <kit at hers.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Where Was This When Bucky Needed It?
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Strong, Lee wrote:
> 	Piracy as a way of life is distinctly overrated by those with
> selective memories.  Real pirates had all the disadvantages of sailors in
> the Royal Navy with few of the compensating protections.  Pirates worked
> hard, ate poorly, got "paid" at the point of a gun, and could expect to be
> hung by the neck until dead if they didn't die in battle with professionals
> or more "imaginatively" at the hands of a "creative" court.  Their peers,
> the merchant and military sailors, worked hard, but got regular food, drink,
> clothing and pay, and could expect to die in bed.

Not quite.  Pirates in the classical age of piracy, at least, were crew
members by contract, not by being press-ganged into service as in the
Navy.  Pirates elected their captains, earned specified percentages of
the take, and had the potential to live a better life in terms of food
and comfort than anyone Navy sailor ever did.  What we know of them
comes mostly from those who were too successful to avoid being noticed
and those who were caught.  The definition of 'piracy' also was one of
those things that was applied to the ships and crews of whoever the
speaker wasn't fond of at the time, often as not.  Sir Francis Drake was
a pirate to the Spanish, but a hero to the English.  Granuaille O'Malley
was the reigning queen of western Ireland in the time of Elizabeth I,
but was considered a pirate and the leader of pirates by Elizabeth
because Granuaille took Spanish sailors aboard and defended her part of
Ireland against the English who were intruding.  In the Caribbean, Anne
Bonney captained a pirate ship for a time, as the brains of the outfit,
and was respected for it.

I'm not saying the life overall wasn't brutal, but it was brutal
*everywhere*, not just because people were pirates.  The old saying of
'rum, sodomy and the lash' as the way of life for sailors was succinct;
but pirates could, if they wished, leave ship at the end of a voyage to
settle on land, while sailors who had 'taken the queen's shilling'
(usually by having it forced down their throats) were *never* allowed to
leave until they were so badly crippled that they were no use aboard
ship any more.

Kit
whose ancestors were sailors for four generations