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Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy 1678–1865 Alexandra Ganser Maritime Literature and Culture

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Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy 1678–1865 Alexandra Ganser Maritime Literature and Culture MARITIME LITERATURE AND CULTURE Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy 1678–1865 Alexandra Ganser Maritime Literature and Culture Series Editors Alexandra Ganser Department of English and American Studies University of Vienna Vienna, Austria Meg Samuelson University of Adelaide Adelaide, Australia Charne Lavery University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa This series offers new rubrics for literary and cultural studies by focusing on maritime and coastal regions, in contrast to nation, continent and area. In doing so, it engages with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization, and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. Broadly situated in the humanities and in rela- tion to critical theory, it invites contributions that focus particularly on cultural practices – predominantly literary scholarship, but potentially also performance studies, cultural histories and media and film studies. The geographical scope allows for enquiries into single maritime regions or coastal areas but also encourages inter-ocean perspectives. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15773 Alexandra Ganser Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy 1678–1865 Alexandra Ganser Department of English and American Studies University of Vienna Vienna, Austria Published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund Maritime Literature and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-43622-3 ISBN 978-3-030-43623-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43623-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa- tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Kerrick James/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Martin, Rio, and Elvira, my favorite time pirates: thank you for all the love. Acknowledgments This study, opening up the series “Maritime Literature and Culture” that my colleagues Charne Lavery and Meg Samuelson are co-editing with me at Palgrave Macmillan, has been generously supported by my family and friends as well as by a number of colleagues who have kindly shared their expertise and their suggestions with me and encouraged my work at various stages. First and foremost, I would like to thank Heike Paul for her unfailing, enthusiastic as well as critical support of this project—thank you through all the years we worked together! My heartfelt gratitude goes to all those colleagues, family, and friends who supported in so many ways, big and small, the project and the completion of this manuscript: Eugen Banauch, Ralph Bauer, Hester Blum, Michela Borzaga, Sabine Broeck, Barbara Buchenau, Daniel Cohen, Tim Conley, Tim Cresswell, Birgit Däwes, Michael Draxlbauer, the late Emory Elliott, Richard Frohock, Agnes and Josef Ganser, Bernd and Helga Ganser-Lion and my nephews Nils and Lars, Sun-Hee Geertz, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Ezra Greenspan, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Marcel Hartwig, Alexandra Hauke, April Haynes, Udo Hebel, Sean Hill, Karin Höpker, Peter Hulme, Tabea Kampf, Antje Kley, Wim Klooster, Christian Krug, Susanne Lachenicht, Klaus Lösch, Gesa Mackenthun, Thomas Massnick, Walter Mignolo, Meredith Newman, Helena Oberzaucher, Andrea Pagni, Nicole Poppenhagen, Julia Pühringer, Marcus Rediker, Stefanie Schäfer, Sonja Schillings, Eva Schör- genhuber, Monika Seidl, John David Smith, Heike Steinhoff, Michael Winship, Gretchen Woertendyke, Michael Zeuske, Cornel Zwierlein, my students at Erlangen and Vienna and my colleagues of the American vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Studies colloquia at the Universities of Erlangen and Regensburg, as well as Udo Hebel and Gesa Mackenthun, also for their willingness to write reviews (whose praise I can only hope this book deserves) for submitting this study as a Habilitation at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nuremberg, and the two anonymous reviewers for the Austrian Research Fund (FWF), whose Elise Richter Program I am indebted to for funding much of the research necessary for this study. My project research assis- tant, Eléonore Tarla, deserves special praise for her unfailingly dedicated, patient, and careful editorial assistance. A collective thank you goes to all the colleagues with whom I had the opportunity to meet and discuss my work at various conferences in Europe, the U.S., and Canada, and to all conference organizers who invited me to a number of inspiring scholarly events and cities. I am very grateful to various institutions that enabled me to present parts of my study and pursue my research in various contexts: the German Associa- tion for American Studies (DGfA) for granting me a Christoph Daniel Ebeling Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester; Paul Erickson and the staff and curators at the American Antiquarian Society, especially Elizabeth Pope and Ashley Cataldo; the New York Public Library Rare Books Division and its helpful staff; and Axel Schäfer and the Bruce Center for American Studies at Keele University, where I held the European fellowship in American Studies. The Austrian cultural association KonaK and its functionaries, Christian Cwik and Verena Muth, provided me with an opportunity to conduct research in the Caribbean: in the National Archives of Panama, Panama City; in Port-au-Prince, at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago (NATT), and among the Emberá and the Kuna islanders, to whom I am infinitely grateful for sharing their cultural memories about pirates along their coasts. Last but not least, I thank the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Rachel Jacobe, Thomas René, and Allie Troyanos for their continuous professional and friendly support throughout the various stages of this book, as well as my brilliant series co-editors Charne Lavery and Meg Samuelson. Parts of this study have been published in earlier and different essay versions: parts of 1.1. in Agents of Transculturation: Border Crossers, Medi- ators, Go-Betweens, ed. Gesa Mackenthun and Sebastian Jobs (Munster: Waxmann, 2013); parts of 1.2. in Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in the U.S. and Beyond, a collection I co-edited with Heike Paul and Katharina Gerund (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012); parts of 2.3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix in a German version in Populäre Piraten: Vermessung eines Feldes (ed. Irmtraud Hnilica and Marcel Lepper, Berlin: Kadmos, 2016); parts of 3.2 in Contact Spaces in American Culture: Globalizing Local Phenomena, ed. Petra Eckhard, Klaus Rieser, and Silvia Schultermandl (Vienna: LIT, 2012), and parts of 3.3. in Atlantic Studies: Global Currents (15.4, 2018). Contents 1 Introduction: The Pirate as a Figure of Crisis and Legitimacy 1 Works Cited 20 2 Pirate Narratives and the Colonial Atlantic 27 2.1 The Buccaneer-Pirates: Articulations of Cultural Contact and Crisis, 1678–1699 27 2.1.1 The Caribbean Scenario in the Late Seventeenth Century 27 2.1.2 The Buccaneer in Literature: Points and Counterpoints 31 2.1.3 The Caribbean Buccaneer-Pirate as an Embodiment of Crisis 35 2.1.4 Exquemelin’s Zee-Roovers/Buccaneers of America 41 2.1.5 Attempts at Consolidation: Pirate-Scientists’ Texts 52 2.1.6 The Creole Pirate 64 2.2 Puritans and Pirates: The New England Anti-Piracy Sermon, 1700–1730 65 2.2.1 Piracy in New England 65 2.2.2 Cotton Mather’s Anti-Piracy Sermons 67 2.2.3 “To Direct the Course of Sea-Men” 69 xi xii CONTENTS 2.2.4 (Re-)Anglicization, Puritan Exceptionalism, Conversion 75 2.2.5 Economies of Salvation 79 2.2.6 “The Complicated Plot of Piracy”: Hybridization, Resistance, Counterpoints 83 2.2.7 The Gallows Literature of Piracy: “Let Not the Lust of the Eye Poison & Pervert You!” 91 Works Cited 104 3 Pirate Narratives and the Revolutionary Atlantic in the Early Republic and the Antebellum Period 113 3.1 Pirate Narratives and the Romance of the Revolution 113 3.2 Crises of Authority and National Identity in
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