The Pirate Round: Globalized Sea Robbery and Self-Organizing Trans-Maritime Networks Around 1700*

chapter 5 The Pirate Round: Globalized Sea Robbery and Self-Organizing Trans-Maritime Networks around 1700* Michael Kempe Introduction After he had seized control of the English privateer “Charles ii” as the leader of a mutiny, Henry Every defiantly and self-confidently declared in February 1695 on Johanna Island (Anjouan) northwest of Madagascar that he would put to sea with forty-six canons and 150 men on board – “bound to seek our Fortunes.”1 While Every’s proclamation was underway via Bombay to London, nobody there realized that the pirates would indeed make their fortunes. But a few months later one of the biggest treasures ever seized by sea robbers fell into their hands at the entrance to the Red Sea. Every’s marauding raids in the Indian Ocean were only one high watermark of the piracy which became an almost world-wide phenomenon in those years. This was the “Golden Age of Piracy”, which saw a networking of maritime robbery beyond empires and across the seas and continents. It started in Europe and the Caribbean, but the pirates found their main hunting grounds in the seas surrounding the Indian sub-continent.2 The participants in these marauding raids like Every, William Kidd or Bartholomew Roberts quickly became legends and mythically inflated figures. The romantic image of the pirate as an adventurer which dominates * For valuable suggestions and important comments I would like to thank Jürgen Osterhammel, Rudolf Schlögl and Michael Stolleis. For illuminating discussions I would also like to thank Hans W. Blom, Peter Borschberg, Daniel Damler, Dieter and Ruth Groh, Mark Häberlein, Wolfgang Kaiser, Thomas Maissen, Frank-Steffen Schmidt, Eberhard Schmitt and Rolf Peter Sieferle. Special thanks go to the Cluster of Excellence, “Cultural Foundations of Integration,” University of Konstanz, for the financial help for my research trips in European archives and the English translation. Last but not least, I would like to thank James Fearns for his elegant translation. 1 Henry Every, Johanna Island, 20.02.1694/5, in: British Library (=bl) London, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, India Office Records, Home Miscellaneous, IOR/H/36, fol. 191r. On the background to the mutiny see Joel H. Baer, “Captain John Avery and the Anatomy of a Mutiny”. Eighteenth Century Life 18 (1994): 1–26. 2 Hugh F. Rankin, The Golden Age of Piracy, Williamsburg va: Colonial Williamsburg, 1969. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi �0.��63/9789004304�54_007 <UN> The Pirate Round 139 popular literature and Hollywood cinema to this day can largely be traced back to this epoch.3 In the rest of the chapter, the cross-imperial and self-organizing network of pirates will be examined as a structural whole and set in relation to the forma- tion of transnational and transcontinental relationships. In other words: an account will be given of the patterns and contours of international relations as reflected in the mirror of international piracy between 1685 and 1725. A further question to be asked is how far the expansive piracy networks provided an impulse for an understanding of the world within an interactive global context. For although the brief blossoming of such widely ramified, inter-related piratic enterprises remained but one episode, from a global historical point of view, the distance between the West and East Indies, the two main targets of European expansion, had clearly shrunk from both a legal and a political perspective. While in Early Modern History the interest in institutional and corporate economic networks, especially the chartered companies like the East Indian companies of the European, is rising, research on non-corporate and self-organized economic networks are still neglected. This can also be said, as has been stated by Michael Mann recently, about the “round voyage” of the pirates at the turn of the seventeenth century connecting the maritime economies of the North Atlantic, the Caribbean and Arabian Sea.4 This chapter tries to fill the gap by reconstructing the illegal and contraband transactions of the cross-imperial networks of the European pirates in the Indian Ocean around 1700. Gold Rush in the Indian Ocean In the course of the seventeenth century European emigrants had formed pirate groups, known as buccaneers and filibusters, in the widely scattered islands of the Caribbean.5 They were issued with state licences to seize booty in the form of letters of marque by the governments in Paris, Amsterdam or London in order to involve them in the battle for colonies against Spain. After the English, French and Dutch had established themselves alongside the 3 On this process of literarization and popularization see above all Gérard A. Jaeger, Pirates, Flibustiers et Corsaires. Histoire et légendes d’une société d’exception. Avignon: Aubanel, 1987. 4 See Michael Mann, Review of: Bowen, Huw; McAleer, John; Blyth, Robert J.: Monsoon Traders. The Maritime World of the East India Company. London 2011, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 04.08.2012, <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2012-3-083>. 5 See C.H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the xvii Century. Hamden: Bookdepth, 1966. Paul Butel, Les Caraïbes au temps des flibustiers XVIe–XVIIe siècles. Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1982. <UN>.

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