[NP] deviant identities

[Richard Fiero]

http://www.wickedness.net/ejv1n2/ejv1n2_teorey.pdf
Pirates and State Sponsored Terrorism in Eighteenth Century England

The political, economic, and social elites in England attempted 
to distinguish pirates from imperialists during the early 
decades of the eighteenth-century. Only a few decades earlier, 
the state appreciated the terror that pirates spread throughout 
the Spanish-controlled, Caribbean and South Sea islands and 
settlements, but as the English began to colonize some of these 
territories for themselves, they used laws, propaganda, and 
popular literature to vilify piracy and glorify imperial trade 
and colonial occupation. However, the moral and social 
differences between pirates and imperialists were much less 
clear. England's rigid, hierarchical social structure 
encouraged marginalized people to leave and become pirates so 
they might discover and foster their "deviant" identities . . .

Many buccaneer societies established and maintained "civilized" 
attitudes and practices. Dampier explains the written contract 
each crewmember entered into and the solemn oath each took when 
joining a pirate captain. Esquemeling (1695, p. 1.41) writes 
that among the responsibilities were an egalitarian split of 
the booty, faithfulness to each other, equal participation in 
making decisions, not fighting with each other, and equal 
distribution of food. Also, captains were elected and could be 
removed by consensus vote. These pirates followed laws, 
respected justice with trials, and accepted punishment, or they 
joined a different crew, a different society. Frank Sherry 
(1986, p. 122) argues that during the "buccaneer era" there was 
"only one true democracy on earth: the pirate brotherhood 
forged in Madagascar" in the seventeenth-century and 
transferred to the Caribbean in the eighteenth-century. The 
pirates wanted a community that respected an individual's 
rights, that allowed free mobility from one crew to another 
without class distinctions, that encouraged a collective 
ownership of their ships, that rejected political, social, 
economic, or cultural tyranny. For all their brutality and 
thievery, the pirates did maintain many of England's military 
and social codes of honorable behavior. Pirate Henry Mainwaring 
explains that as early as the sixteenth-century "whole towns" 
in the Caribbean subsisted by trading with the pirates, buying 
their stolen goods and selling them provisions. Because such 
trade was obviously illegal, the pirates and their suppliers 
creatively staged a non-exchange: the pirates pretended to 
'steal' goods for which they were in fact paying double in 
order to compensate the sellers for their risk in dealing with 
pirates, or they "found" goods conveniently placed by the 
locals on some desolate shore. (Fuchs 2000, p. 48) . . .