(Disclaimer: I have a minor (research) role in a Haxan Films project and the Haxan/Dynamite Entertainment comic book series Blackbeard: The Legend of the Pyrate King, set for release Oct. 1.)
For me, liberal democracy is less a cause than a product of civilization, inevitable as plate tectonics. That makes me an optimist, and that makes me a Democrat. Tyrants and demagogues who interfere are detritus.
Blackbeard The Pirate is a more memorable character. On November 22, 1718, he was assassinated by a covert gang of Blackwater-style contractors in the secret employ of the Royal Governor of Virginia Plantation’s ambitious majordomo.
Blackbeard’s legend is about to take an interesting turn. He wasn't a founding father of liberal democracy, but his initials are carved deep in the trunk of our family tree.
His name was probably Edward Teach---or maybe Thatch or Tach, no definitive record survives. He was born about 1677, probably near Bristol, the notorious English seaport and epicenter of the original Pitchfork Rebellion.
His formative memories may have been shaped by a professional terrorist---George Jeffreys, the original "Hanging Judge" who condemned an elderly Dame Alice Lyle to be burned alive at the onset of his "Bloody Assizes."
Before it was over, more than 1,000 English souls had been were sentenced to death and more than 300 hanged, drawn and quartered, their body parts displayed throughout England’s Westcountry to demoralize any remaining aspirants of liberal democracy. Almost 1,000 men, women and children were enslaved and sent to plantations in "the Indies."
This is speculation: Teach may have been among them.
This is not: 30 years later, a top-secret government report warned of a growing "Nest of Rogues" at Providence---now Freeport in the Bahamas.
The record shows no indictment or bill of attainder was ever brought against Teach, or Thatch, or Tach, or Blackbeard the Pyrate.
The most damning accusation---that his "Gang at Providence" threatened the profits of a global slave-trading corporation backed by the wealth of a nation---was probably true.
The most salacious---that he wed a 16-year old virgin, bedded her and then turned her over to his seconds to gang rape---comes from the man who ordered his assassination.
He was officially declared hostis humani generis, ‘enemy of all mankind.’ That distinction---a cornerstone of maritime law since the time of Julius Caesar---was the slipperiest rock on which John Yoo tried to build his justification of torture at Guantanamo.
For three centuries, the truth about Blackbeard has been obscured by remota erroris nebula---roughly, the thick cloud of propaganda.
During his lifetime, a long list of epochal eruptions rattled the foundations of western society: publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica and the birth of classical mechanics; Salem witch trials; the first daily newspaper; the journalism profession; the first bloggers; the English novel; the end of the Stuart dynasty and Divine Right of Kings; central banking and paper currency; the costliest war in European history; unprecedented corruption and war profiteering; the emergence of a global corporate slave trade; and two words that still infect our language: bubble, as it applies to stock market scams, and millionaire.
For most of that lifetime all Europe was at war---Queen Anne’s War to American historians, though Anne was not yet queen when it started, the War of Spanish Succession to Europeans, though the one great prize of the conflict had nothing to do with the Spanish throne and everything to do with slave trade profits.
England, Spain, France and the Netherlands were the main protagonists, but before it was over more than two dozen armies, navies and treasuries were invested in its outcome.
England---by then, Great Britain---vanquished its foes and then betrayed its allies to gain the biggest advantage: a 30-year contract worth more than £2.4 million to sell African slaves in the New World.
Projected profits from the contract---known as the Asiento---exceeded the net worth of the British treasury. It was a scam from the start, an artificial economic expansion designed to erase Britain’s massive wartime debt and distract all memory of the hubris and corruption that created it.
With the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714, more than 1,000 Indies privateers---some of whom had spent their entire adult lives fighting for Britain---were abandoned. The only occupation they knew---maritime labor---was dominated by slave traders and slavery corporations, and conditions were almost universally abominable.
By 1720, when the South Sea Bubble popped, wrecking the global economy and bringing down the British government, Blackbeard the Pirate was legend, his violent end chronicled in a poem by a 12-year old printer’s apprentice who peddled copies on the streets of Boston for a penny apiece.
Half a century later the boy---Benjamin Franklin---would follow Blackbeard’s path to a decidedly different destination.
I’m remembering the importance of this Labor Day by re-reading a book, Villains of All Nations, by Marcus Rediker, currently Professor and Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh.
This novel interpretation shows how sailors emerged from deadly working conditions on merchant and naval ships, turned pirate, and created a starkly different reality aboard their own vessels. At their best, pirates constructed their own distinctive egalitarian society, as they elected their officers, divided their booty equitably, and maintained a multinational social order.
This unprecedented social and cultural history of pirates proves that the real lives of this motley crew - which included cross-dressing women, people of color, and the "outcasts of all nations" - are far more compelling than contemporary myth. Pirates challenged and subverted prevailing conventions of race, class, gender, and nation, posing a radical democratic challenge to the society they left behind.
Rediker and a handful of historians have lately begun to reexamine maritime labor conditions and early 18th century cultural responses to find primitive, practical expressions of humanity preserved more eloquently in the language of the American Declaration of Independence and the Unites States Constitution.
Principles that form the foundations of liberal democracy---liberty, equality, justice and "fair trade" among them---were in many surprising ways part and parcel of the culture that took shape during Blackbeard’s brief career.
Blackbeard’s only contemporaneous account comes from A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, published in 1724 by "Captain Charles Johnson." "Johnson" may be the nom-de-plume of Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe (1719), is cited by some as the first English novel.
Seven years earlier a "Capt. Johnson" published The Successful Pyrate, a play widely panned as a paean to immorality and since linked as progenitor of popular ‘crime exposes’ that titillated 18th century readers the way Reality TV does today.
Almost every historical and literary account of Blackbeard since that time starts with his General History description, which was drawn from a handful of known secondary sources.
Defoe, more hack than journalist in the modern sense, often worked---usually secretly---for Robert Harley, Lord Oxford, Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasurer) and then Prime Minister of Great Britain during Queen Anne’s War.
Harley was the brains behind the South Sea Company, chartered in 1711 with royal authorization to trade African men, women and children for money in the Indies and kill or capture anyone who got in their way.
That’s about what we’d have if Enron and Blackwater had merged back in the Bush era.
Blackbeard’s sensational end made above-the-fold news on both sides of the Atlantic. In London, the share price of South Sea stock ballooned---the best-known threat to its corporate profit projections was no more.
Two years later everyone who was anyone in London owned shares of the South Sea, along with their butlers, coachmen and scullery maids. There were more coffee houses than taverns, and fast-talking stock jobbers darted along the back rows whispering ever-expanding offers to buy or sell.
The most detailed allegations leveled against Blackbeard were made after his assassination, by the man who ordered the covert mission and secretly funded it with his own money: Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Plantation.
Royal Navy Lt. Robert Maynard, the sometime slave trader credited with killing Blackbeard (10 of Maynard’s men and nine of Blackbeard’s were killed during the day-long fight), later charged that Spotswood sought Blackbeard’s treasure---said to be worth about £2,000 at a time when £100 would comfortably support a gentleman and his butler in London for a year.
Was Blackbeard the Pirate a monster? Probably not. Accounts of his ‘piratical acts’ claim he spared the lives of crew members captured aboard prize ships, and no account accuses him of murder.
At the height of his power, Blackbeard’s fleet blockaded Charleston Port---then the leading slave market of the British plantations---and held some of the city’s most prominent citizens for ransom.
Two and possibly three of the five ships in his fleet were commanded by former slaves---Caesar and Israel Hands, his two most trusted lieutenants.
Was he a hero of liberal democracy? Maybe, if by accident, but no one knows---his journal, his pardon, and all his possessions were destroyed or confiscated by his enemies.
Legend has it Blackbeard’s headless body circled Maynard’s sloop three times before it finally sunk beneath the waters of Ocracoke Inlet.
Half a dozen sources claim Blackbeard’s skull was preserved, dipped in silver and used as a drinking cup. His men were all killed in battle or executed save one, Israel Hands, whom "Johnson" claims died years later a beggar on the streets of London, or maybe a one-legged poet in a coffee house.
One last twist to end this with a contemporary lesson: remota erroris nebula---the "thick cloud of propaganda..."
The phrase comes from Juvenal’s 10th Satire, written about 100 CE and a favorite of Latin-learning Catholic schoolboys in the 18th century for its naughty allusions and sensational revelations.
The opening line from Juv. X is enshrined by the Royal College of Heralds, official guardians of the official Coat of Arms assigned to the South Sea Company along with its "license to kill" Royal Charter.
Heralds at the Royal College like to boast of their reputation for obscure scholarly irony. Whoever designed the South Sea’s Coat of Arms was working overtime.
The South Sea’s motto---a gadibus usque auroram---means, literally, "from Cadiz [the westernmost outpost of Spain] toward the rising sun." The South Sea’s Royal Charter specifically confines all its trade to the west, the Indies, America.
The onerous forces that affect our lives are almost never what they claim. Sometimes, they are almost precisely the opposite.