"The Complicated Plot of Piracy": Aspects of English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe
1985; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sec.1985.0001
ISSN1938-6133
Autores Tópico(s)Law, logistics, and international trade
Resumo"The Complicated Plot of Piracy": Aspects of English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe JOELH. BAER The ocean is not only a place of venture, suffering, and achieve ment for Defoe, it is also a place of crime. Long before Pope, he had examined man's paradoxical nature and found in his actions at sea an emblem for his "dark" side: What strange, what inconsistent thing's a man! Who shall his nature search, his life explain? If in the ocean of his crimes we sail, Satire, our navigation all will fail; Shipwreck'd in dark absurdities of crime.1 He would have thought of a very specific set of crimes, knowledge able as he was of merchant shipping, naval warfare, and colonial his tory. But throughout his lifetime, piracy, which flourished along all the European trade routes, was the most flagrant crime of all. Pirates suited him well as subjects, not only because they were in the news but also because their stories brought together so many of his favorite topics—travel, trade, crime, colonization, the national security, and This essay won the ASECS James Clifford Essay Prize for 1983. It is reprinted with permission from The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, ed. Robert M. Markley , Jeffrey R. Smitten, and Joel C. Weinsheimer (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1982). 3 4 / BAER the isolation of the human soul. His stories of Singleton, Avery, Gow, and the others in the General History of the Pyrates (1724-28) may, in the widest sense, be motivated by the urge to see pirates as symbols of Satan's temptations and of our own spiritual weaknesses;2 in the words of John Durant, "(O my soul) thou carryest petty pirates within thee, that will never fight for thee (flesh will not fight against the world and Satan) nay which war against thy soul. Look to it therefore to watch against those within, that thou mayest the better maintaine thy fight without."3 Or, as the Mariner's Divine Mate exclaims, "The Sea hath strange Monsters, but mans heart far stranger then they."4 In Popular Fiction Before Richardson, John J. Richetti identifies the appeal of the pirate stories as that of the "daemonic" and concludes that the pirate embodied for the age that "radical individualism which summarizes the totally secular view of experience," or, in other words, "the uncommitted and disengaged modern personality."5 But before we can fully understand the symbol, it will be helpful to know what sort of literal criminal Defoe took the pirate to be. In the legal litera ture and the reports of trials which he studied while compiling the General History, Defoe learned that the crime of piracy was unique, complex, and ambiguous as well as hateful. I would like to outline in this essay what he learned and how he used his knowledge in a va riety of fictional and journalistic works. If this study does not rescue the unity of the novels, it may sharpen our awareness of the strange condition in which Defoe, his characters, and his age found the hu man heart and reveal the basis upon which Defoe and others were to erect the "imposing and terrifying heroic statuary" of the pirate.6 I Defoe was justly proud of his knowledge of marine commerce and the legal terms relating to it. At times this pride appears as conde scension to the gentlemen who will have nothing to do with the world of business, those who, reading his Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, will have become confused by the discussion of Thames ship ping practices: "But I must land, lest this part of the account seems to smell of the tarr, and I should tire the gentlemen with leading them out of their knowledge."7 At other times, he seems genuinely dis turbed by the ignorance of the "experts," especially Britain's lawyers, half of whose cases involved commercial law: "How do they mumble The Image of the Pirate in Defoe I 5 and chew the Sea Phrases, Merchants Language, and Terms of For eign Negoce; like the Ass chewing of Thistles: When they come to Argue about...
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