ABSTRACT Title of Document: WRITING at THE
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: WRITING AT THE EDGE OF THE EMPIRE: THE POETICS OF PIRACY IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC WORLD Jason M. Payton, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Directed By: Professor Ralph Bauer, Department of English and Comparative Literature My dissertation examines four pirate-authored texts from the early modern period, each of which centers on the development of piracy in the Atlantic world. Contrary to popular opinion, not all pirates were illiterate thugs. Many wrote about their experiences, and their narratives were immensely popular among early modern readers. I focus on the generic choices pirate-authors made as they crafted their narratives for popular consumption, particularly their use of chivalric romance, which they drew on to present “enchanted” histories of the Atlantic world. By representing themselves as chivalric knights-errant, pirate-authors transformed themselves from thieves to gallant knights, they recast their raids as knightly quests, and they re-imagined their gruesome acts of violence as heroic feats of daring at arms. The romance form thus allowed pirate-authors to create modern spaces of agency within empire that resembled the mythical landscapes of the medieval chivalric tradition. It also allowed them to fashion critiques of empire, which increasingly limited the social mobility of the lower social strata from which most pirates hailed. Pirates’ reflections on the violence of empire offer a disenchanting picture of the development of imperialism during the colonial American period. My dissertation begins with Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1596 Discovery of Guiana, which narrates the author’s voyage to Guiana simultaneously as a knightly quest for the mythical city of El Dorado and as a mercantilist voyage for England. Raleigh was met with severe criticism for his decision to frame the history of his voyage as a romance quest because the notion of the adventure-quest celebrated the freedom of the individual apart from the power of the state. The conflict between the interests of the pirate-as- knight-errant and the aims of the state became even more pronounced during the seventeenth century. I trace the evolution this conflict in three narratives written by Caribbean pirates—also known as buccaneers—during the late seventeenth century: Alexander Oliver Exquemelin’s 1678 Buccaneers of America, Raveneau de Lussan’s 1689 Journal of a Voyage Made into the South Sea, and William Dampier’s 1697 New Voyage Round the World. Whereas Raleigh could envision his adventure-quest as part of a larger narrative of English imperial expansion, buccaneer authors understood piracy as a utopian escape from the hegemony of empire. For Exqmemelin and de Lussan, piracy represents an alternative to their lives as servants. The chivalric ethos that Exquemelin and de Lussan projected onto pirate society allows them to level a devastating critique of the debasing nature of empire. For Dampier, representing his circumnavigation of the globe as the adventure-quest of a troupe of knights-errant allows him to imagine a global space in which pirates could create a society completely free from constraints of imperial governance. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrates that the most unlikely band of literati in the Atlantic world made significant contributions to the development of American literary forms. By adopting the Old World form of the chivalric romance to New World contexts, pirate-authors created spaces of individual agency at the edge of the imperial domain, which allowed them to offer sharp critiques of the systems of exploitation and subjugation that structured imperial culture. The narratives I treat here reveal that the history of early America cannot simply be told as the history of states and empires. Rather, my research shows that early American scholars must broaden their disciplinary horizons to include the literary contributions of trans-national, trans-Atlantic subjects whose lives at the edge of empire allowed them to pursue lives of political transgression and fashion narratives that challenged progressivist narratives of imperial history. WRITING AT THE EDGE OF THE EMPIRE: THE POETICS OF PIRACY IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC WORLD By Jason M. Payton Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Advisory Committee: Professor Ralph Bauer, Chair Professor Vincent Carretta Professor Robert S. Levine Professor Andrea Marie Frisch Professor Eyda Merediz © Copyright by Jason M. Payton 2102 Table of Contents Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1 The New Sciences and the Romance Form ................................................................ 8 The Ambivalent Romance: Imperial Critique and Utopianism in Pirate Literature. 16 Pirate Romances and the Atlantic Baroque .............................................................. 22 Chapter One: The Romance of the Self and the Rottenness of Empire in Sir Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1597) .......................................................................... 33 The Discoverie in Contemporary Scholarship........................................................... 35 Raleigh, Cecil, and the Imperialist Agenda in the Discoverie................................... 43 Raleigh, the Eloquent Conquistador .......................................................................... 53 Raleigh, Topiawari, and the Deferral of the Conqueror’s Desire.............................. 61 The “Rottenness of Empire”: Disenchantment in the Discoverie and Beyond ......... 74 Chapter Two: The Disenchantment of History in Alexander Oliver Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678)........................................................................................ 83 “Merchants of Light”: The Science of Empire and the Production of History.......... 88 Romance and Utopia in Buccaneers........................................................................ 102 The Failure of Romance and the Disenchantment of History.................................. 107 Chapter Three: Romance, Anti-Romance, and the Tragedy of Empire in Raveneau de Lussan’s Journal of a Voyage into the South Seas (1689)............................................ 121 The Knighting of de Lussan..................................................................................... 123 The Epic of Empire and the Quest of Romance…………………………………...128 The Ideology of Adventure and the Romance of the Self ....................................... 138 Utopia and Dystopia in the Journal......................................................................... 144 The Journal as a Counter-Genre.............................................................................. 151 Chapter Four: “Golden Dreams”: Science, Empire, and Romance in William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697) .......................................................................... 162 Romance and the Science of Empire: The Problem of Genre in the New Voyage .. 167 Ethnography, Natural Law, and the Geography of Empire ..................................... 176 The Hydraulic Web: Global Economy and the Space of the State.......................... 185 “Golden Dreams”: The Romance Chronotope in the New Voyage ......................... 194 Conclusion: Toward a Negative Hermeneutics of Romance................................... 205 Notes ............................................................................................................................. 212 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………...232 ii Introduction Early modern maritime literature, while popular among late-sixteenth and seventeenth century readers, has nevertheless failed to receive adequate attention from literary historians of early America, historians of colonial America, and historians of the Atlantic world. The trend of scholarly neglect of the social and cultural history of the early modern maritime world is a long one.1 Thanks to the pioneering social history of maritime cultures produced by Marcus Rediker, this trend is changing and scholars are looking with increasing interest toward the Atlantic world for new archives capable of enriching our understanding of the generic forms used to make the New World intelligible in the colonial American period. By drawing attention to the harsh conditions most mariners faced while working in the merchant marine and the royal navy, Rediker has shown that the maritime sphere was defined by the same kinds of social conflicts between the ruling and the laboring classes that wracked landed society. As Rediker demonstrates in Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, pirates did not buck authority with the kind of cheeky irreverence that one finds in Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean. Rather, the choice to become a pirate was a very serious act of political rebellion against the twin terrors that haunted the typical maritime worker: the increasing power of the state to force its lower-classes into oppressive labor systems, and the nearly unchecked power of ships’ captains to subject their workers to physical abuse for even the slightest infractions. Rediker’s emphasis on the connections between shipboard life and the larger processes of state formation, imperial expansion, and economic development, has energized historians by encouraging them to look to the world of