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Podcast Host
You're listening to A Book with Legs, a podcast presented by Smead Capital Management. At Smead Capital Management, we advise investors who fear stock market failure. You can learn more@smeadcap.com or by calling your financial advisor.
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Cole Smead
Welcome to A Book with Legs podcast. I'm Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager here at Smead Capital Management. At our firm, we are readers and we believe in the power of books to help shape informed investors. In this podcast we speak to great authors about their writing. The late, great Charlie Munger prescribed using multiple mental models and analysis. We analyze their work through the lens of business markets and people From a young age, I loved the idea of pirates. My favorite Legos were the pirate Legos. My favorite ride at Disneyland was Pirates of the Caribbean. I romanticize about the Caribbean and today I may have found a kindred spirit. Richard Blakemore is joining us to discuss his newly published book, Enemies of the Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy. I want to make sure to give our listeners a little background on Richard. He is an Associate professor in Social and Maritime History at the University of Reading. Richard has been writing and teaching about historical piracy and maritime empire over a decade, Starting with his PhD at Cambridge University, continuing with his postdoctoral work at Oxford University. Richard, thank you for joining me. I think I kind of have to kick it to you after I spilled my beans and told everybody and bared my soul about piracy, what began as a child for you to draw you into this subject matter.
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Richard Blakemore
Thanks Cole for inviting me to be here. And I also loved Lego pirates and in fact my 6 year old son now loves the very same Lego pirates that have passed on down to him and books and films about piracy. So I guess there's always been that interest. I came into maritime history more broadly and especially the social history of maritime communities. So I'm very interested in people's lives and how ordinary people, if we can use that phrase, sort of lived, traveled around the world, were involved in economics, were involved in bigger politics like the growth of empires and warfare and things like that. And so I guess I'd already had that interest in piracy. But then going into maritime history, it becomes a really key theme, particularly for the period I work on, which is the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. This is the growth of maritime empire in particular in this period and piracy is a really big part of that story. But then also specifically for this book, it comes out of a module that I've been teaching at the University of Reading for a few years now. And so it was really the opportunity to discuss these histories with my students in that module. That kind of provided the beginning for a lot of the ideas that come through in the book. It's dedicated to those students. And originally I thought I'd use pirates as a sort of snazzy way to get them into serious history about, you know, empire and economics. But in characteristic fashion, the pirates took over the module because they're just so fascinating. And so it's still about those bigger themes, but we spend a lot more time on pirates than perhaps I'd originally intended.
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Cole Smead
Gotcha. That's great. So since we're. Since you mentioned the module and your academic background, can we just start out by defining plunder or plundering? You kind of give various forms of it early in the book, and I think it's a good definition for thinking about why this is going on. Not that it's going on.
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah. And I think that's a great place to start because legal classifications and also kind of cultural ideas are so associated with all of these different words. It's probably why there's all these associations around the word pirate. And I think we have to disentangle those to some extent. So I try to use plundering as a more general term. Plundering is seizing stuff violently at sea. I suppose you can also do plundering on land, armies plundered for most of this period as well. But I focus on plunder taking place at sea. And I think the key issue to raise is that plunder as an activity is not automatically piracy, it's not automatically illegal. There are many totally legal ways to plunder, to seize other people's goods at sea. You can do that as part of warfare. So if you're the subject of a sovereign who's at war with another sovereign, then as part of that legally declared war, you are entitled to plunder your sovereign's enemies. There are also legal systems whereby merchants who have suffered losses can try to recoup those losses by plundering, usually ships of the same nationality on the basis that they'll then go and sort it out for themselves. So if you've been attacked by French ships, you get permission to go and attack French ships, and then they have to sort of resolve it. So there are these mechanisms for legal plundering. And I think the key point to raise about the period that we're particularly talking about in the book in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, is there is a distinctive developments in these laws of plunder, or laws of prize, as they're often called, because legal Plundering is called prize. A ship that you've seized, that's legal is your prize. And so the kind of category of piracy, which is illegal plunder remains relatively clear. If you're doing plundering without permission, that's piracy. But actually, very few people do that. Most people claim some kind of association with a sovereign or warfare or something like that. And then the debate becomes, well, is this legal, is it piracy, is it legal kinds of plundering? And the laws that apply to those activities are developing and changing across this period. They're changing in school scope, they're changing in process, in the kinds of legal jurisdiction. And that's a really essential part in the rise of international law. In fact, kind of modern international law is coming into being very much through these process of disagreements between different monarchs. Usually you call your own plunderers privateers, or there are other terms in other languages as well. In fact, the word privateer appears for the first time in this period. And I think that's a kind of signal that something's going on. They need new words to talk about these things. And you tend to call your enemies pirates. Right. That's the sort of basic distinction. So the arguments between different lawyers, different monarchs, about who is a pirate, who is a privateer are a key part of the emergence of systems of international law that's going on through these. Through these centuries.
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Cole Smead
Sure. Well, so the other thing that comes to mind from your book is in some respects, there were parts of this idea of privateering or piracy where I actually was thinking, well, if the monarch gives you a charter or a blessing or a letter of mark, as they might have to go out and attack Spanish ships and investors in London are willing to back you for a take of the profits. And I thought, well, they're just. The plunder is just performance fees like a hedge fund would collect nowadays after taking capital from wealthy investors. I mean, in reality, wasn't that the upside for some parties to be involved financially in these operations?
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Richard Blakemore
Definitely. The incentive is there. It's a very profitable business, and it is a business. And several historians have talked about the economics of it as a business. It's not about destroying commodities, it's about rerouting commodities. And so usually one of the kind of aspects of plunder is the incentive arises where you can't access it through legitimate trade. So a good example is the Spanish Empire. The Spanish Empire tries to exclude competitors from the Americas. And so those competitors, such as Dutch merchants, English merchants, French merchants, who aren't able to trade legally, will smuggle and they will support plundering voyages. You see similar situations with the East India Company having a monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean. And then merchants in the American colonies are happy to support plundering voyages because it means they don't have to pay the high prices that the East India Company is supporting. So there are some instances where the plundering is so profitable that it sort of exceeds Crown income in England at this time. It's a big business and it is clearly considered to be a worthwhile and legal investment by enough people. Obviously there are variations. If you knowingly invest in something that is piracy, you could well get in trouble. And one of those changes in law actually is to make it easier to prosecute backers as well as pirates themselves.
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Cole Smead
Sure, Follow the money.
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Richard Blakemore
Absolutely right. Try and disencourage. Because the government in London is really worried about colonial merchants in New York and Carolina and Rhode island who are deeply involved in these voyages. So the kind of relationship does change at times. But at no point is plundering itself entirely illegal at this time. So investors can find ways.
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Cole Smead
So since we talked about some of the financial backing of this really early in the book for our listeners to make a note of, you talk about labor supply and you bring that up as an idea of piracy or these kind of open sea activities against various nations. If I had to. You're the labor economist analyzing the pirate economy of the 17th century, or even earlier than that, what would you lay out as the optimal situations to cause privateering, piracy, plundering to pick up? Was it because, to your point, there were a lot of goods, or was it because there weren't enough jobs? Or what would be those factors you'd want?
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Richard Blakemore
I think it's the balance between exactly those two factors that you've just highlighted. And this is a topic that several economic historians have talked about in some detail. It's not a coincidence that there are major surges of piracy after conflicts, so particularly the War of the Spanish Succession that ends in around 1713. Although there's long peace negotiations.
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Cole Smead
Sure.
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Richard Blakemore
During warfare you get a spike in the maritime labor market because trade becomes more profitable because of the kind of pressure through blockades and things like this. But also the net navy increases in size and you have the employment of those privateers, so legal plundering during wartime. And in fact, most people who become involved in piracy or accused of piracy, because as we talking about, it's a. It's a legal term, but most people who are accused of piracy have at some point been Involved in the navy or in legal plundering. Right. So the end of a war as labor surplus, you've got all these people who have spent sometimes a decade or more fighting at sea, plundering, doing it totally legally. All of a sudden they have no job. So that's kind of the main surge and the peace time labor market. The navy gets reduced in size, privateering is not happening. So there simply isn't the kind of capacity to absorb this surplus.
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Cole Smead
Sure.
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Richard Blakemore
And often these spikes in piracy seem to last a similar amount of time, again around a decade, possibly, as this surplus is kind of worked out in the labor market. But then there are other factors as well. And so the presence of trade routes is really crucial. But you also need commodities and goods to plunder. If there's no trade routes, then you can't have piracy.
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Cole Smead
You need a good economy.
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Richard Blakemore
Absolutely. You have a concentration of plundering, particularly when trade increases. You sometimes see piracy increasing as well. But also, even at the end of a war, when you have that labor surplus, you also see plundering concentrated in regions like the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean between India and Mecca, where you have a major pilgrimage route which is also very lucrative trade routes. Sure, these are the kind of areas that plunderers are sort of drawn to. But then there are other factors as well. Besides those, you have material factors. We often think of pirate ships, to go back to that Lego, as this sort of isolated, you know, vessel sailing across the sea. But ships fall apart constantly, they don't last very long. So you need capital of some kind to replenish, to repair. You need support and help assure for provisions, for fences to actually sell your plunder or merchants to trade with. And you often need political, if not backing, then sort of permission or even just tacit kind of non intervention. Right.
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Cole Smead
Blessing.
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah, yeah, right. So you see those combinations where you have a lack of direct kind of police control or political control, local communities willing to trade and support and provide resources, good trade routes that give you things to steal. And then the labor surplus is also really key. And I agree with a particular historian called David J. Starkey, who argues that labor surplus is the biggest factor here. Because I think it's also really important to highlight that seafaring is very skilled occupation. You can't, not anybody can go on a ship and sail across the Atlantic Ocean, not, not successfully anyway. Right. You can do that and get into trouble. So the surplus of skilled, experienced laborers and fighters is a really key factor here.
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Cole Smead
When I think that point is driven home by situations where pirates come in, capture a ship, and they choose to now use that ship because it's a better base of capital. To your point, it's a better ship. And I think you point out that the pirates weren't very at upgrading ships, they were just good at capturing ships. And they would take the crew on and the crew would stay on for the piracy, because to your point, they probably can't locate their following employment. And therefore it plays at this idea that there were jobs, but those had trouble finding people and therefore piracy found people jobs, in effect.
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah. Seafaring is a highly unpredictable career path. Even if you're not captured by pirates, you're usually signed on for one voyage. At the end of that voyage, you're in a port, you need to find a new ship, you don't know what's coming up next, so maybe being taken on by another ship. And this is happening in the navy, this is happening in other ships as well. When navy ships, capture of all empires, capture other ships, they often force sailors to kind of switch sides and things like this. So in many ways, what's going on in pirate ships is very similar to patterns going on in maritime life more broadly. But you do see a slight distinction arise in particular cases. So particularly the period of the 1710s and 20s, the period following the War of the Spanish Succession, that's the moment that most resembles the stereotype of piracy that we have. That's the moment.
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Cole Smead
That's where the line was drawn between what's a pirate and what's not.
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah. Or certainly that's when the government is trying to draw that line most forcefully. Because in previous years, previous decades, the expansion of empire had relied much more heavily on plundering. And by the start of the 1700s, you've got the change in economics, you've got changes in law, you've got change relationships where there is a much clearer statement of what is piracy and what is not a piracy. So that is the moment in which plunderers who had been totally legal during the war become pirates, but they are actually now being kind of accused and treated as pirates much more systematically and forcefully than they have been previously. And that leads to an interesting dynamic, because in previous centuries, really, only pirate captains got into trouble if ship was captured.
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Cole Smead
The leader of the ship, in effect.
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Richard Blakemore
That's right, yep. So there's a similar surge in the early 1600s, again after the end of a war. But there are various accounts saying that sailors are quite happy to get involved in piracy at that time, because they know that if they get captured by the authorities. They'll just say, oh, well, I was forced to join the captain. It's the captain's fault. And only the captain will get punished. And even the captains sometimes get pardoned or acquitted because, again, they're very skilled fighters, very skilled sailors. The government often wants to employ them themselves. Sometimes, interestingly, merchants are more interested in recovering their lost goods. So they will try to get a captain pardoned who had stolen from them because they don't really want him executed because then they have no chance of getting their goods back. So the merchants are actually more interested in kind of economic recovery. But by the early 1700s, this has changed. You've got much more prosecution of sailors of all kinds on these ships. So actually, then you do get people who are not volunteering but who are being violently forced. And there's quite a lot of evidence of real brutality being exercised against these people, particularly carpenters, navigators, sail makers, musicians, in fact, as well, people who are still.
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Cole Smead
This is a practice that we, we've had later. I mean, the term shanghaiing came about many years later to, you know, effectively forced in service on a ship.
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah, exactly. And that is, I mean, the navy is impressing people and doing that perfectly legally at the same time. But the. What you get is you get pirate trials where people who are accused of piracy are making a case that they are not actually a pirate. They're not guilty because they were forced. Now, I mean, you're on trial for piracy. What else are you going to say? It's about the only defense that works.
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Cole Smead
Yeah. Or like you say, well, I'm going to, you know, and I got my, my friend Bobby over here who's, you know, a member of parliament that, you know, might be able to get me off because we're good old chaps, you know what I mean? You get that kind of thing. I was going to ask you just to, you know, we all know Sir Francis Drake, we all know he circumvented the globe. Could we, under certain definitions call him a pirate, even though he was knighted and considered to be, you know, one of the true benefactors of, I'll call it, the sciences of that time.
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Richard Blakemore
Well, the Spanish were under no illusion at all that he was a caillio, a pirate, or parata. You know, the Spanish law stated that anyone who wasn't authorized, including unauthorized Spanish ships. Right. Only authorized Spanish ships were allowed to sail to the Spanish Empire. Anybody else was illegal. So very clearly the. The Spanish government considered him a pirate. The situation in England is more complex, because for some of his voyages, he has, at best, tacit consent from the Queen, although it does seem quite clear that the Queen is willing to support him, especially once he comes back from the circumnavigation with a massive haul of silver and she gets her cut of that. And so that's when he gets knighted. That's when he's kind of being brought in. And later on, the Queen gives much more explicit support. But again, this is one of those interesting dimensions of pirate law at this time. I said earlier about the law of reprisal, which is where you are allowed to kind of fight back against people who've been plundering you. Now, Queen Elizabeth never actually declared war on Spain in the 1580s and 1590s. She just gave lots of authorizations of reprisal. And it's quite clear that this was a legal fiction to allow her ships to attack Spanish ships without actually declaring war. And the justification was that Spain had been seizing English ships and that the Spanish fleet had attacked Francis Drake first. But of course, they considered themselves justified because he'd been penetrating their empire and their markets.
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Cole Smead
Hi, I'm Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager here at Smead Capital Management and.
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Host of this podcast.
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If you enjoy this podcast, I'd like to invite you to check out smeadcap.com at our firm, we are stock market investors. We advise investors who fear stock market failure with a discipline that has proven success over long periods of time. Learn more about our funds@smeadcap.com past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principal. Please refer of the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Speed. Funds distributed by UMB Distribution Services llc.
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Not affiliated. I thought a lot about this in light of, you know, again, what she was using, these pirate or pirate ships or privateers, whatever we want to call it, these were proxy wars. That's what they were. It's a proxy war. So everyone thinks about, you know, what is Ukraine and Russia? Well, it. It's a direct war on Russia's part, but for the west, it's a proxy war. We're using Ukraine as a proxy of our political will and interests without being directly involved. And she was doing nothing different.
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Richard Blakemore
And I think the privatized form of violence is the kind of distinctive analogy there. You know, private mercenary groups being employed, private security companies also carrying out warfare in various regions of the. Of the globe. The key point here is that most governments in the early modern period did not have the military naval resources to carry out these wars for themselves. The navy at this time was really small. It's one of the things that again affects the changes in the 1700s when they start pursuing pirates much more rigorously because they have a much bigger navy because it's grown through warfare. But in the Elizabethan period, there isn't that resource available. So relying on kind of private actors. It's also the distinction between public and private is perhaps not understood in the same way at that time. I mean, Francis Drake is a subject of the Queen. He is expected to serve the Queen, as are all subjects, right?
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Cole Smead
Well, sure. And the Royal charter was the only way to grant authorization for a company or an enterprise or, you know, whatever that may be in the llc. You know, wasn't going to come limited liability companies. And the idea of a, you know, corporate protection wasn't going to come for couple centuries. So the crane's grant was your ultimate protection.
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah. But it was also, I think, a widely understood way to exercise power at that time. Right. There wasn't the distinction between the private market and kind of public sector that we have nowadays. Sure. So all of these aspects of warfare were in line with all of those developments.
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Cole Smead
Sure. I was going to ask you, like during the 16th century, if you're Spain, what would be a typical trade route that these ships would be trafficking? You know, what port would they start at, what port would they end up? And was that fairly normal for them?
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Richard Blakemore
In the Spanish Atlantic network is one of the most controlled. So they're supposed to sail from Seville in Spain and across the Atlantic Caribbean. And there the sort of major fleet would split into one fleet would go to the Isthmus of Panama, where they would collect silver that had been mined in South America and shipped up the South Pacific coast of America and then ported across land to Portobello. The other would go to Veracruz in Mexico, and again, there were mining operations in Mexico. And then these two fleets would join up in Havana, they would sail out past Florida and they would sail back across the Atlantic Ocean. This is an effort to protect the trade. This is a measure that's introduced. That regulation isn't there at the start, but it's introduced by the Spanish Crown once they begin to see their fleets attacked by raiders, mostly from northern Europe. And it's actually very effective. I think only one fleet is ever actually substantially a large part of the fleet captured by raiders, which is Pete Hayne, a Dutch raider who captures an enormous fleet in the 1620s. A lot of them sink, a lot of them are lost at sea. But this kind of concentration of those resources is quite effective. But it means that there are holes elsewhere in the system.
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Cole Smead
Sure.
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Richard Blakemore
So the investment is concentrated in the major ports, the investment is concentrated in the fleets. And the rest of the Spanish empire is very poorly defended. And so lots of raids are attacking other Spanish towns which are kind of part of this network, but not so central to the network.
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Cole Smead
Sure. So I loved in your book where you're telling the story of Spain and really the clash of the sovereigns, including where the Dutch were involved, but then you're also kind of talking about this little infant over here, the Americas, and what's happening. So in the early 17th century, thinking like 1620s, give us a picture of where was what we know as America in the eastern seaboard at. At that time, you know, how grown were the colonies, how sustainable were the colonies, and what were the pirates interaction with that eastern seaboard of the the US and you know, what's now the US in say, 1620, 1630, etc.
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Richard Blakemore
Well, those are the very early days of the colonies that go on to survive and become the thirteen colonies. And I think at that point there's really no guarantee that any of them are going to survive. You know, these are places like New England, Maryland, Virginia. They're sparsely populated by English colonists. They are territorially limited to very close to the seaboard. You know, most of the North American continent belongs to indigenous powers at this time. And the local communities in these English colonies are heavily dependent on indigenous communities nearby for kind of help in trade and food. There's also a lot of violence and warfare going on between colonists communities as part of that development. But so I think that there's a real uncertainty about whether any of these are going to pan out. Everyone's looking for a staple crop like tobacco. Tobacco is the big production in the northern seaboard, particularly in Virginia and Maryland, around the Chesapeake. And that's hugely profitable for some people, but it's also highly precarious. The Virginia Company actually goes bankrupt within its first couple of decades, which is why it's taken over as a crown colony, because the company can't keep running it. You've also got the Caribbean, where again, Dutch, French, English colonies being established, many of them engaged in attempts at trade, beginning to try and do plunder. And in the north of the North American continent, you also have a lot of trade in furs, particularly Dutch and French, in what is now Canada or New York, trading again with indigenous trappers for furs, which are very, very valuable. But there's a sort of. There's a precarity. Some of these colonies are destroyed, some of these colonies collapse. None of them. With hindsight, we know that many of them go on to continue, but it's not necessarily clear at the time. There also seems to be a reluctance to invest because they're such risky prospects. And the role of plunderers is therefore really crucial in a number of ways, particularly in the Caribbean, where you are attacking the Spanish Empire. Plunder and the trade that arises from it is one of the biggest economic incentives. And since people from England. England are reluctant to invest, that's where kind of merchants are getting their profits, through this trade. And then that's being invested in the colonies, supplying colonies with provisions and also with defense, which is very important. So often they also are relying. There are no military resources sent by the state to these colonies, so they are relying upon privateers or private forces to defend themselves, militia, things like this. And this relationship continues through those first decades, leading to increased investment, particularly in the Caribbean. And everything really orientates around the Caribbean, especially once you introduce sugar. Sugar had been introduced to Brazil by Portuguese and Dutch colonists, and then was shifted to the Caribbean by Dutch colonists. And it becomes enormously profitable very, very quickly in the 1650s and onwards. And so investment from plunder is part of what's driving the rapid growth of the sugar economy. And then northern American colonies like New England become involved in shipping what they are growing foodstuffs to the Caribbean to feed Caribbean populations. And so this kind of intricate network of exchanges around the Atlantic and with Europe kind of grows. But plunder has a key role as an early kind of spark to that by providing quick returns, which you don't get from the investment in tobacco or sugar, because it takes a long time for those returns to come back. And, of course, there are two kind of dimensions that come out of this. One, which I haven't mentioned yet, is slavery. All of sugar is based on slavery. And the investment from plundering is clearly going into the growth of the slave economy in the Caribbean. Many plunderers, Henry Morgan, who you may know from Captain Morgan's rum, he becomes a slaveholder himself. Many other plunderers also invest in slavery. And that, ironically, then actually shifts attitudes, because as you get the growth of this enormous majority in every Caribbean island, enslaved people are the majority. That leads to real concerns about security and stability. And so piracy becomes to look a lot less appealing when it looks like it might destabilize this brutal slavery regime. So although plundering plays this really key role in the early investment that leads into the growth of these transatlantic economies, as they become more secure, as they become. Become more stable, but also as they become more dependent on slavery, then you have these sorts of shift that drives the government response against piracy more intensely in the later 1600s, the early 1700s.
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Cole Smead
So let me ask you, I want to come back to the slavery, because I have a particular question with that. But just to come back again, and I think this is a very, you know, you're a language person. I like winning spelling bees. I really like this part of your book. Where does the term pirate come from? And then also, can you teach us how we got the word buccaneer?
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah. So as you said, I'm obsessed with language. I'm upfront about that in the book, and my students have dealt with that for many years. All these different terms. Pirate comes from Latin and Greek pirata. And it's clearly being used in Roman times. And even in Roman times, it has a kind of derogatory connotation. So again, a pirate is an enemy of Rome. Right. It's being used by Roman speakers like Cicero, but explicitly to mean enemies of Rome. It then seems to acquire more specific legal meaning through the medieval period and into the period we're talking about, the 1600s. And I think this is. It kind of has a double life. It has this legal definition which, as we've talked about earlier, is trying to distinguish whether plunder is authorized or not. And in that case, I kind of think it has quite a specific meaning. But it also clearly has this broader cultural life which starts in the Roman period and carries on where, you know, accusing someone of being a pirate is a really strong accusation. It has all of these associations. It becomes more sensationalized, which is maybe something we might talk about a bit later.
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Cole Smead
Well, I was going to say also I think you comment in the book, and I hope I get extra credit for remembering this. But outside my notes, you discuss St. Augustine's comments about a pirate talking to Alexander the Great, where it's. And I don't remember the exact quote, but he pretty much says, like, this is the life I live. This is who I am. And kind of gets to that kind of cultural trope, if you will.
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Richard Blakemore
Yeah, exactly. So Augustine, one of the church fathers in the medieval period, writes this story about Alexander capturing a pirate and saying, how dare you infest the sea? And the pirate says, well, how dare you infest the world? But you've got a Big army. You're called an emperor. I've got one ship. I'm called. Although I'm not sure if the original Latin actually uses pirata. I think he might use thief in the original Latin. So.
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Cole Smead
Well, not. Not. Not that this ever happened, because obviously Augustine came many, many centuries later after absolutely the Great.
- [31:16]
Richard Blakemore
But the story gets recycled, right. Even into the 20th century. I think it's. Noam Chomsky uses it as a book title. Right. So the story gets translated as pirates in the period we're talking about. So it shows that, you know, I'm also interested in how kind of words develop and change and also interaction between different languages, because pirates exist in a lot of European languages. It doesn't exist in the same way in other languages. And so, again, we talked about different concepts of plundering. I was talking about European international law. But Indian Ocean empires also are using plundering, and they don't have a word pirate. And when you translate their words with pirate, you're kind of layering on a load of assumptions that we have in European culture that might not be there in the original languages. So this kind of cultural meaning, which, again, I think becomes really developed in this period through some of the publications and the theater and the songs that I think might come up a bit later in this podcast. You mentioned buccaneer as well. And again, that's a really curious example because it comes from probably a Taino or Arawak, an indigenous Caribbean word, bukan or mukan, which means to grill meat. It's a way of cooking meat. And the first people to use the word bukan are French writers talking about boucanier, which means people who are cooking meat, who are hunting in the Caribbean. So you have these kind of hunters who are living outside of colonial settlements, who are basically roaming wild in less heavily populated regions and who are famous for hunting, cooking the meat, trading the meat. And that word buccaneer means hunters for several decades. And it still means that in French. Bouquen is not a word French people use for pirates, sure. But it becomes in English the word for raiders. Probably in the 1670s, when you start again, you get books published. There's a particularly famous book called Buccaneers of America, which is a Dutch book, and in Dutch, it's called Zee Rovers, which. Which means sea robbers. But when it's translated into English, he uses the word buccaneers. And so that seems to be the point at which the word shifts to meaning sea plundering. But again, it has this very interesting dynamic because it's used in a pejorative way by some writers. But some buccaneers who are themselves writing use the term. And some people seem to use it in a positive way. And I think it still has that ambiguity. Right. It kind of, when I talk to my students about it, we're talking specifically about the Caribbean, also some voyages into the Pacific. We're talking specifically about a phase in the 1660s, 70s, 80s, that group of people who are called buccaneers. But it seems to have this flamboyance to it. It seems to have this kind of.
- [34:06]
Cole Smead
But swashbuckling is the term that also comes to mind. Like, in other words, if you look and say, gosh, you're having to break the law for a living, well, that. That would be unenjoyable. Now, then again, you have quite a bit of autonomy and freedom. Well, that's a very positive thing in comparison, definitely.
- [34:22]
Richard Blakemore
And, I mean, there are British politicians who not long ago suggested that this country ought to recover its buccaneering spirit. I'm not sure that's necessarily the way we want to go. But again, I think the fact that this word appears in exactly this period in the 1650s and 60s and 70s, like privateer, which appears at the same time, these are new concepts. These are new issues. Piracy has existed for a long time. The idea of piracy, but the emergence of these words tells us quite a lot about how people are thinking about it, how people are trying to pin it down. And I think that really then comes to a head in the early 1700s with that most famous moment in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession. That's the moment when you get people like Blackbeard, Anne Bonny and Mary Reed, Calico, Jack, Steve Monet, all the really famous pirates are happening at that time. And they are also then being immortalized in popular culture at that time as well. And I think that's such a big part of why this moment has come to signify pirate. Because when you think of the word pirate, that's who you think of, right?
- [35:25]
Cole Smead
Yeah, those are the tales I was going to. Also, you did a really good job explaining who's king or queen can really decide who's a pirate or not. And you kept mentioning the Jacobite pirates, for example, explain how the changes the monarchy seat would affect who was a privateer versus a pirate from that view.
- [35:49]
Richard Blakemore
So because there is a lot of political turmoil in this period, you have it in the late 1500s with the wars of religion in France, the Dutch revolts, changing the political landscape of Europe. You have civil wars in Britain in the 1640s and 50s, and civil conflict in France in the 1650s as well. And then you have this change of government in the 1690s, 1680s and 90s, when William III becomes who is the ruler of the Netherlands, becomes ruler of England as well. And the Stuart, the old Stuart line, are trying to reclaim their throne and are sort of authorizing privateers. What that does is it destabilizes the sort of the system based on sovereigns authorizing violence. Because if you don't know who your sovereign is or if you have multiple people claiming to be sovereign. So, for example, the Dutch are provinces belonging to the Spanish crown, but when they declare independence, they authorize raiders that are called the waterfusen or sea beggars. The Spanish do not recognize this as legitimate. Right. Because they don't recognize the legitimate existence for something like 80 years. So it's. That turmoil, I think, is a key element. It raises these questions about who actually has the authority to decide what is piracy and what is not piracy. And then the other dimension of that, as well as the political turmoil, is this question of imperial expansion. Because as European regimes come into contact with other rulers, other empires, people like the Mughal Empire or the Maratha Confederacy in India, China.
- [37:24]
Cole Smead
Well, you should talk about the Ming and then the Qing Empire and like the trade off of Taiwan. I was sitting there thinking, gosh, man, you just taught me that Taiwan has always been a trouble spot for whatever, you know, seat of power in China.
- [37:39]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah, absolutely. So you have these, these rival dynasties fighting in China. You have indigenous communities in the Americas. Apparently some buccaneers claim that they are serving the ruler Oguna ruler in the Isthmus of Darien, although some of them admit that they're basically just saying that because they want to go and get lots of plunder. You also have plundering in the Mediterranean, where you have the kind of conflict between Islam and Christianity which have been going on from the medieval period. And in theory, you have this big raiding conflict along religious lines, although in practice, everyone is capturing everybody else. And the religious justification seems to be just a veneer spirit. Yeah, you get these debates both internally and externally about who has the authority to declare piracy, because that's, you know, who is a sovereign, who is a legitimate sovereign. So places like Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, which are authorizing raiders, European monarchs don't recognize them because they're regencies under the Ottoman Sultan. And there's a sort of interesting relationship where the Ottoman Empire is sort of allowing them to kind of act or they are acting autonomously because the Ottomans can't necessarily control or find it beneficial to let them do all this raiding, but the Europeans think of them as pirates. So that question of who is a legal sovereign, who has the right to authorize piracy, what plundering is legitimate is a debate that goes on. I mean, it goes on from the Roman era, but it really intensifies with all of these circumstances in the 17th and 18th centuries. And various writers sort of say, oh, well, if you're plundered because a sovereign has authorized you and you're doing that to defend the rights of your state, then you're not a pirate. If you're a robber band who's just plundering for the sake of it, then you're pirates. But then some of them say, but if you're a rubber band who exists for a while, maybe you can acquire legitimacy and actually become a sovereign state. So there's a very blurred categories that are really causing a lot of complexity and trouble at this time.
- [39:45]
Cole Smead
You mentioned Tripoli and Tunis for the hotspots in the Mediterranean. We mentioned Madagascar earlier as kind of a hotspot in Indian Ocean to Mediterranean route in the Caribbean at the time in the 17th century. What would be like your top three, top four ports that would be really, you know, where the pirates were?
- [40:07]
Richard Blakemore
Well, it shifts over time in accordance with who sort of who the dominant raiding group is. So in the early 1600s, the Dutch West Indies Company are the main raiders, and they're based out of places like Curacao. Later, though, Jamaica and Tortuga off the coast of Hispaniola or the French colony of Santa Mangas as the western part of the island becomes, those really become the key centers of raiding in the 1650s, 60s and 70s. Also petit guav in Santo man. And that's linked to those economic issues we were talking about earlier. These are places where merchants are interested in acquiring plunder. So Port Royal in Jamaica goes from, you know, a tiny fort to one of the largest towns in the English colonies. In the space of a couple of decades, because of the influx through plunder, Tortuga and Petigo as well kind of become these centers. But as we've been talking about, these imperial governments start to sort of try to crack down on that as the economic situation changes, as the political situation changes. So Jamaica introduces stricter laws from 1680, the French government is trying to stop Saint Domingue and Petit Guav again around the same time. So then it shifts further to the Bahamas and also to Florida and the North American colonies, Rhode Island, Charleston, New York. And again, it's it's some of those circumstances, the general circumstances we talked about earlier. The Bahamas is hard to police because there are so many islands, tons of islands.
- [41:39]
Cole Smead
Impossible. As you explain that in your book, I thought it's tough to figure out where you want a vacation on the Bahamas, let alone where you'd hide out as a pirate.
- [41:47]
Richard Blakemore
There are probably still some pirates hiding out right there island. And you know, there's not that many, there's not that big a settler population there. You also with the Bahamas and Charleston, you're very close to San Augustine in Florida, which is a Spanish base at this time. So the proximity of enemies, again, that kind of risk of attack. San Augustine and Charleston just seem to keep attacking each other over and over and over again. And sort of you're you did it first so we'll come and attack you kind of way.
- [42:16]
Cole Smead
Sure.
- [42:16]
Richard Blakemore
So the kind of locust changes and the Bahamas I think are the last main center. And then even they are captured by again a private fleet authorized by the British government to go out and deal with these pirates. But it's not the Navy, it's a private expertise, a private expedition that actually recaptures the Bahamas from a group of pirates.
- [42:36]
Cole Smead
We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at SMEAD Capital Management. At smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the SMEAD funds have a proven track record of long term outperformance. If you're an investor who fears stock market failure like I do and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit smeadcap.com Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principal. Please refer to the Brain Prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. SMEAD Funds distributed by UMB Distribution Services llc.
- [43:19]
Not affiliated so you mentioned Port Royal as an example. This town grew up pretty quickly. What was entertainment like in the town? You know, was there gambling? What was the bar scene like? You know, also you know what, this is a very uninhabited part of the world. As you mentioned a few minutes ago. Were there a lot of ladies around? Were those ladies choice? Were they just needed? How did all that go?
- [43:47]
Richard Blakemore
So it depends a little bit how much you believe the reputation that Port Royal acquired because it acquires reputation as the worst place, as Sodom and Gomorrah as a den of sin and iniquity.
- [43:58]
Cole Smead
Gambling like Las Vegas today.
- [44:00]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah, you know it's got that sense of kind of, you know, illegal things become legal there. There's various stories about the kind of drunken routes and fighting and prostitution on the street and all sorts of flamboyant behaviors. And there is probably some truth in that. You know, there are records of punishment and some people are being punished for some of these things. It certainly is. Rapidly grows. I think it's the second biggest town after Boston in the English Atlantic Empire or the Atlantic Seaboard in the space of a few decades. It also, interestingly, has a much more balanced population of men and women than you find in many other colonies where you have many more young male settlers, which again suggests the sort of influx of people traveling there. But I think it's also a bit more complicated. I mean, there is some truth in that image, and it's certainly a well known image at the time. It's destroyed by an earthquake in 1692. And everyone sees that as a providential punishment. Right. Everyone says, well, of course, this was wrath of God. Yeah, absolutely. But it's also, like I said, more complicated. It's definitely very heavily involved in maritime trade. You've got a lot of craftsmen working for maritime trade, provisions, surgeons, things like that. Silversmiths, interestingly, even though they don't produce any silver in Port Royal or Jamaica, so we can probably guess where the silver is coming from, that they are working with silversmiths in the. In the town.
- [45:23]
Cole Smead
I think you mentioned, like cockfighting would have been a normal practice at that time.
- [45:26]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah.
- [45:27]
Cole Smead
And then there were five or six well known taverns in town.
- [45:30]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah. Although, I mean, East London at the time is probably fairly similar in many regards. Cockfighting is a big thing everywhere in English culture at that time. And you also have, you know, other kinds of artisans who are making things. You have more children in that town, actually, than you have in many other regions of the British Empire at that time. You have synagogue and different churches of different denominations, which is quite unusual. Quite a lot of these colonies in North America are settled by specific religious groups and are quite specifically focused, whereas Port Royal seems to be much more open in that regard. You have a bookseller, you have a teacher, you have quite a complexity. So I think downtown on a Saturday night would probably have looked pretty much like it's being described in some of these accounts. But I don't think that's the entire story of life in Port Royal.
- [46:24]
Cole Smead
And also the fact that there were so many women there would say that it had to be more settled than just roving men in other Words. There was a reason why those ladies would go there and not other places.
- [46:36]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah. I think there are definitely. There's families, you know, there's. There's settling of some kind. It's worth adding that some of these people, men and women, are convict who are being transported. This is the sort of origin of the transportation of people who are convicted in England. Some of them are also that the word kidnapping comes from this period, and a kidnapper was someone who tricked someone or captured someone in London or wherever and transported them forcibly to the Caribbean. So there are people there who don't want to be there, who've been forced to be there. I don't want to make it a cute or cuddly image, but I also think it's very easy, particularly with the history of piracy, to fall into these images and these reputations that are very alluring. And we find some evidence for that. Definitely. But I think it's not the whole story.
- [47:24]
Cole Smead
Sure. And piracy changes over time because to your point, the goods, the commerce, et cetera. I think you note in your book that slavery was different under what I'll call Spanish or Dutch rule of the seas versus what came later under a more, you know, dominant British rule of the high seas. Can you explain, you know, how those were different?
- [47:47]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah. So there are different legal traditions at play in these different empires. And so Spanish and French colonies, and indeed Spanish and French law more broadly, are kind of more drawn on Roman legal models.
- [48:00]
Cole Smead
Sure.
- [48:01]
Richard Blakemore
Whereas the English law is more based on the common law. So the kind of major. All of them. I mean, all of these empires have extremely brutal slave codes by middle of or the end of the 17th century.
- [48:13]
Cole Smead
And indentured servants on top of that.
- [48:14]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah, absolutely. And it's really important that we distinguish. So indentured servants are where people enter a contract which pays for their passage to the Americas, but then they have to work off, usually for seven years that passage, and they are treated very, very badly as well. But they are not legally slaves. Right. If you kill an indentured servant, it is still murder, whereas enslaved people do not have those legal rights according to the legal codes. And that is true in the Spanish Empire, it's true in the French Empire, it's true in the Dutch Empire. But you do see distinctions in the Spanish and French empires. The Church is much more involved. The Catholic Church is a presence in those empires and seems to influence thinking on some principles around slavery. There are much larger free communities of color in these Caribbean and American colonies. In the French and the Spanish Empire, far Fewer than in the the English Empire. And so that seems to be related to kind of roots of manumission that exist for enslaved people, which really don't exist very much at all. There are free people of color in the English Empire, but in much, much smaller numbers. And one dynamic of how this kind of relates with piracy is when people like Henry Morgan are plundering Spanish colonies. Any person of color who is captured is going to be enslaved and taken back to Jamaica, even if they were actually free in the Spanish colonies. Right. So you get this increasing racialization of slavery, which is not initially defined on those terms. You also have enslaved indigenous people. So it's sort of racialized in some ways. But the concept of race is also developing at this time. Right. The way people think about these concepts is changing at this time. What are the things that slavery and the slave laws do in the British Empire, but also in the other empires is increasingly develop this equation between the color of someone's skin and their legal status. And that becomes really heavily embedded by the end of the. While going into the 18th century.
- [50:17]
Cole Smead
Well, I think the other thing that comes with that too is the flow of commerce is also evolving because obviously the slave trade greatly changes trade from east to west because obviously goods are, know, goods, at least in the form of cargo of slaves is also moving heavily east to west, going from obviously Africa. So it's where you start to see it wasn't just Sir Francis Drake, you know, going around the world. It's now you have pirates going around South America, going to the Pacific and doing like a circumvented loop on these trade routes to effectively arbitrage these markets. And slaves being part of the market that moves from, you know, obviously Africa to the Caribbean in.
- [50:56]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's really. Francis Drake, curiously, was also involved in slave voyages early in his career. Like some of the first voyages to the Caribbean by Francis Drake and others were to try to sell enslaved people to the Spanish market because it was seen as a really lucrative market. And then because the Spanish empire closes them out, they kind of turn to piracy. So actually slavery is part of this story, but it from the very beginning, but it becomes a much bigger part. But as you said, with the growth of these economies, with the growth of the sugar economy especially, although also tobacco in the North American colonies, rice in the Carolinas, which is introduced as a crop by enslaved people, as a food crop, but then becomes a really profitable crop. And like you said, it kind of reorientates the connections between different parts of the world. So connections between Africa and the Americas. A lot of the wealth, wealth in the Americas picking from the Spanish Empire was also traveling across the Pacific to China to Indian Ocean markets. About half of what's being mined in the Spanish Americas, which is also using slavery for the mining operations in South America and in Mexico. Right. So slavery is part of that extraction of mineral wealth as well, and that's being shipped to the Pacific. So the kind of interconnection of different regions, I think, is the big story of these economic developments. And the profits in that from slavery are just enormous. Saint Domingue becomes the most valuable colony in the world. I think by the 18th century, Jamaica is one of Britain's most valuable colonies. The North American colonies are nowhere near as valuable economically as the Caribbean colonies in this period. They are supplying the Caribbean colonies, and then that's also why they become involved in plundering in the sort of 1690s where they're trying to break into Indian Ocean markets, because merchants in the North American colonies are then looking for those sorts of opportunities as well.
- [52:48]
Cole Smead
Sure. I want to hit at a couple names because there's also some great stories with these. Can you mention to our listeners who was William Dampier? I have a great line that I'm going to pull up from William Dampier, but I'd love to just to kind of use him as a picture of what's his pirate story.
- [53:03]
Richard Blakemore
So William Dampier is a fascinating individual who starts out trying various kinds of legitimate trades as a sailor. He seems to have been a very skilled navigator. And he becomes involved in his own account by accident, in a voyage, the first voyage for a long time from the Caribbean into the Pacific Ocean in the 1680s. The first major raid of a wave of raids through the 1680s down the South American Pacific coast. And these are sort of a moment when buccaneers have been raiding in the Caribbean for a couple of decades. And as I said, Jamaica is changing its policy. Other places are sort of trying to prevent it. So they seem to be expanding their horizons. And one place that goes across the isthmus of Panama and into the Pacific Ocean, Dampier spends, I think it's 12 or 13 years at sea without going back to England, where he has a wife. I mean, it must have been quite a shock when he comes.
- [53:54]
Cole Smead
They wrote letters back and forth, too.
- [53:56]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah, they were in communication, as many of these sailors were. We think of them as distinct, distant and isolated. And obviously in some ways they were. It would take months for your letters to get to get around the world but they were in communication. So he sort of cruises up and down the Pacific American coast. He then goes across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. He wanders through the Indian Ocean, seeming to just pick up opportunities for trade or whatever he can, wherever he goes, eventually ends up back in England, and he writes this bestselling book, Voyage around the World, which is an account of his travels, of his long voyage. He is surprised. Well, not surprisingly. He is very reticent about the amount of plundering that he was involved in. And he actually spends a lot of time describing flora and fauna. He's kind of been described as an almost kind of early scientist, or at least that's how he is trying to fashion himself as a sort of respectable gentleman, a man with interest in what would then be called natural philosophy. And I think one of the really curious aspects about that moment of the 1680s of these voyages is we have many accounts written by people involved in those voyages themselves, which I think tells us two things. One is that there's this real appetite for these stories of traveling around the world. And a lot of them say a lot more about plunder than Dampier does. But also, the people involved are trying to tell their own stories, right? They are trying to shape their own. And so they always justify themselves. None of them ever call themselves a pirate. That's a key point. It's part of. And some of them do get tried for piracy. And actually those who get tried in that episode. Episode are often acquitted or pardoned or let off. Partially perhaps because they're spinning this reputation, partially also because they're bringing back valuable knowledge. Some of them steal Spanish chart books, which are very, very valuable for navigating.
- [55:44]
Cole Smead
In the Pacific, and gives them to the king or queen at the time, I think, was an example also, I think. I mean, in some respects, these are epitaph exercises, right? You know, we think of this nowadays like, you know, billionaire comes out. You know, we. You might look and say, I don't know if I totally agree with how they made their money, but they gave the billionaire pledge and, you know, so it reshapes the story later in life and how benevolent they were to society. And again, to your point, the goods they were bringing to all, you know, in comparison, that was the older Dampier. The two things that came to mind with him was the old term is that I married you for life, but not for lunch. And that's what I think about his relationship with his wife. He didn't see her for years, obviously. Yeah.
- [56:24]
Richard Blakemore
Henry Avery, again, is a really Interesting figure and in some ways resembles Dampier in that he had legitimate service in the navy and seems to become involved by accident, although we don't have many accounts from himself like we do with Dampier. But Henry Avery, he's on a legitimate plundering voyage that stalls before it's even begun. The men are waiting on ships. They're not being paid any wages because the voyage doesn't seem to have started yet. They're getting increasingly frustrated. So he is encouraged by his shipmates to lead a mutiny and they sail off and they go to the Indian Ocean, attack a massively wealthy Mughal ship, which really, unsurprisingly angers the Mughal Emperor, who then threatens to wipe out the East India Company, which at this time only really has a precarious foothold on trade in India. And it's well within his power to destroy the East India Company. They'd actually been at war. The company in the Mughlempa had been war only a few years earlier. And the company had had to admit defeat and sort of negotiate a peace treaty because they couldn't fight against the enormous armies of the Mughal emperor. And. But that creates this incredible. This incredible pressure on the government back home to do something, because the Mughal Emperor is saying, these are English pirates. Your English. This is your problem. I'm not going to trade with you. I'm not going to allow you to trade here in India. And so that leads to Avery and then William Kidd, who sort of comes a couple of years later and is actually sent out to capture pirates, but seems to turn pirate himself, although again, he denies it at his own trial. But they cause this crisis with the Mughal emperor and that creates this enormous. Again, that's one of the turning points where new legislation comes in. Not long afterwards, public opinion seems to change. These really high profile trials of some of Avery's crew. Kid. And so I think it's really interesting how Avery himself, that quote of I'm a man of fortune, I must seek my fortune, I think that sums up for many of these people. I think it could apply to Dampier easily as well. These are people in this very unpredictable labor market, as we've been talking about. They are going to take opportunities, they are going to try to keep those opportunities legal if they can. But I think it's also worth noting that sometimes news travels slowly. You could be attacking a ship and peace has actually been declared three months earlier, but the peace treaty hasn't reached. Right?
- [58:48]
Cole Smead
Yeah.
- [58:49]
Richard Blakemore
So it's. People tend to see these guys as really disingenuous as knowingly breaking the rules. But I think more now historians are kind of saying, well, actually it may not have been clear at the moment when they attacked the ship.
- [59:05]
Cole Smead
Hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on the show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 investing podcasts on Apple podcast and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smead Capital Management. Smead Capital Management understands how frustrating and illogical the stock market can be. If you are searching for funds with a proven track record, give the Smead funds a look. Or better yet, reach out@smeadcap.com and don't forget to mention that you're a fan of the podcast. Past performance is not indicative of futuristic results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principal. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing Smead funds Distributed by UMB Distribution Services, llc.
- [59:57]
Not affiliated. The other thing about Kid that I wanted to ask you because I think you. You kind of, you put some breadcrumbs out there that I want to see if I was following your hint in the book is William Kidd the reason why we actually think about treasure maps and kind of hidden treasure. I also think of if you've ever seen the movie the Goonies, which is kind of a cult classic. It has this whole idea of like, there's a hidden treasure on the Oregon coast. Would he be really the origin of that? While he's sitting there about to die, and he says, you know, he kind of has this cryptogramic plunder out there. And they end up finding later that there wasn't as much, you know, money sitting out there. But the question is, did someone already get it?
- [60:41]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah, I think Kid is certainly one of the big ones to associate with that myth. Henry Avery is also reported to have got. Well, he did capture a fabulously wealthy ship, so he must have got fabulous wealth. And Avery. The difference is that Avery himself disappears. Some of his crew are captured and arrested, executed, but he escapes and presumably takes plunder with him. Kid is interesting because there are all these points in the story. He captures ships. He's in Madagascar. He leaves one ship in Madagascar, although it's probably, probably doesn't leave any treasure on it. But people have looked in Madagascar to see if there was any treasure left behind. He gets to the Caribbean. There's some time before he then is arrested in the North American Colonies later. He goes on up to New York and Boston later, but he's in the Caribbean. He's sort of trading with people illegally. He sort of puts out feelers. He has contacts in the Caribbean. He sort of sets up shop and people come to him. He seems to be trying to. What he's captured in the. In the Indian Ocean are commodities like silks and things like that. And he seems to be trying to transmit it into movable wealth. So he's getting bills of exchange for merchants, he's getting gold and silver. He may be sending quite a lot of this to his wife in New York, who is arrested herself for a while, but then released and may have got her hands on the fortune, we don't know. But the really crucial moment, by the time he comes to England for trial, there are already these stories in the newspapers going around about his massive hall. And then after he is condemned, but before he's executed, he starts making promises, saying, if you let me off, I will go and get all the treasure that I have stashed somewhere. So he's one of the few people to actually explicitly say, I have stashed some treasure, and if you let me off, I will give it to you. There are other pirates who are rumored to have buried their treasure, but those rumors don't tend to appear until much, much later. So we have no actual proof. I think he was probably lying. I think he was probably, you know, just saying anything he could to get out of jail. But it's definitely generated a lot of stories, as you say, about the east coast in the US Around New York and places elsewhere, about Madagascar. There are people in the last 10, 20 years who claimed to have found silver in Madagascar, and then it turned out to be lead, which must have been a huge disappointment for them.
- [62:57]
Cole Smead
Sure. Because the other person that kind of falls into this story is Olivier Levasseur, who. Who obviously, you know, he was very kind of throughout this. Like, I have this treasure that you can find. And he kind of plays on that as well. I was also the other name we have to mention, obviously, Blackbeard. Edmund Teach, you know, was. Was he just a political refugee who was misunderstood?
- [63:22]
Richard Blakemore
I don't think we know enough about his political views. He does name his ship Queen Anne's Revenge. Yeah.
- [63:28]
Cole Smead
Which is a way of taking a shot at, obviously, the monarch in power at the time.
- [63:31]
Richard Blakemore
Exactly. And there are apparently even possible schemes by the Jacobites. This is the stewards trying to retake the throne in England, as we talked about, to. To kind of recruit some of these pirates, although they never came to anything. And other pirate ships actually also seem to have had Jacobite names. But whether that means that the pirates were committed political figures or whether they were just choosing names that they knew.
- [63:57]
Cole Smead
Would annoy was a renegade name, it.
- [64:00]
Richard Blakemore
Could just be a gesture of defiance. It suggests they're pretty well politically informed because some of these names are like leading lords in England or leading Jacobite lords. So it kind of suggests that they know who these figures are. But I don't think we have any real evidence of Blackbeard's, and he's almost certainly served as a privateer in the War of the Spanish Succession, which would suggest that he's not that anti monarchy if he's willing to serve them, even if he's doing it for his own profit. Right. He doesn't seem to be fighting.
- [64:28]
Cole Smead
Was it true that the Queen Anne's Revenge, like when they ate, they really were eating off silver platters.
- [64:34]
Richard Blakemore
So that's one of the stories that when the archaeologists dug the Queen down revenge, they found lots of silver tableware in the ship. So I think that is one of the stories that I'm really willing to believe they may have.
- [64:45]
Cole Smead
That would have been what they already stolen from, say, a Spanish fleet or something like that.
- [64:49]
Richard Blakemore
Exactly. And maybe they were holding onto it as loot, but I am drawn to the idea that they had this kind of extravagant lifestyle. Again, there are a lot of these myths that we have to be quite careful with, and I think I probably spend too long in the book saying I'm not sure I believe this because. Because the evidence is dubious. But the fact that that material is found on the archaeological. On the wreck by the archaeologists, I think is very interesting.
- [65:10]
Cole Smead
I think you also, you'll point out there's, you know, there's really a change between 17th century and 18th century pirating. In other words, the claims of the pirate get more fantastical. To your point, the silver platters are a big departure from prior. It even gets down to how they treat their fellow, you know, pirates becomes much more harsh as the laws harden around them. Is that a fair statement?
- [65:36]
Richard Blakemore
Yes. Yes, I think it is. I think everything becomes much more extreme in that period of 1710, 1720s, principally because earlier generations had connections ashore, which in some cases were with English society or the colonial society. But, for example, in Madagascar, you have this interesting dynamic where pirates are often allying and even marrying local elites in Madagascar, and that happens elsewhere as well. And so you have these sort of connections. You have a base, you have a society with whom you can trade and have these sorts of interactions. And that does happen in the Bahamas to a degree in the late 1710s, but it's quite short. Before the Bahamas are recaptured, there is some smuggling. I mean, Blackbeard takes a pardon from a colonial governor and other pirates also take pardons from colonial governors. So these connections don't disappear entirely. But it becomes much harder, I think, to operate in that way. It becomes much harder for pirates to operate or plunderers to operate in the way that they had previously. It becomes much harder to argue that you're acting in a legit, legitimate fashion. So, for example, the Dampier and others who plundered in the Pacific Ocean, they did so without any legal authorization from England, but they were attacking Spanish ships, which were kind of the traditional enemy. And there was some doubt as to which law applied in different places. Right. So it wasn't even clear if peace treaties agreed in Europe stopped the war in the Americas. So they can at least make a case. They might not get away with it, but they can make a case. And so not having those connections, not having the political opportunities, I think you do get this more extreme, more desperate characteristic, particularly in the sort of early 1720s. So I would divide that episode of roughly 1716-26 into kind of two halves. The first half being around the Bahamas, which looks a lot like previous episodes of piracy. And some of these people, like Calico Jack at his trial, even claims that he's sailing against the Spanish because there is a war with Spain going on at this time. Right. So it doesn't change entirely. But then after the Bahamas is recaptured by Woodes Rogers, who had himself served as a privateer with William Dampier, after that, they haven't got a base. It becomes more rootless, it becomes more roaming. And I think the best example of this is Bartholomew Roberts, who's at sea for several years, just going round around the Atlantic, like we said earlier, seizing a new ship, moving on to that, attacking, capturing, and not really seeming to be doing it in order to then retire. I mean, some people are doing that like Henry Avery had done, Big score, go and disappear into the colonies somewhere. That's still happens to some pirates, but people like Bartholomew Roberts and possibly Blackbeard seem to just be kind of in it, to be in it and to just keep going.
- [68:28]
Cole Smead
Well, that made desolate places like the Bahamas more valuable because there's more places to hide. As we talked about earlier, a couple of things I want to mention on your book. You obviously explain, in the late 17th century, the East India Company, as well as, like Lloyds of London developing. So there's also very. A commercialized maritime system picking up not only for the companies that are being, being chartered, but also, hey, great, you're going to take this investment risk on your cargo, on your pirate, and Lloyds will insure it, which is still, you know, the largest reinsurance market in the world today. So those institutions have their backbone, you know, at that time, because of these activities.
- [69:07]
Richard Blakemore
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things I really want to draw out in the book is that we think of piracy in these sort of stories that we've been talking about. But it has a huge impact on world history. It has a huge impact on the political formation of empires as we've been talking about. The law that's imposed on piracy is a big part of the process of the British Empire trying to exert control over colonies in a way that it hadn't before, but also economically. So marine insurance is, I think, the first major insurance market to develop in a major commercialized way. It originates in the medieval period in the Mediterranean, but from the beginning, piracy is one of the things that you are insuring against. Although also people like the Singer company finance their own privateers in wars in the Indian Ocean. So many of these merchants are involved in both sides. They may be taking investments and risks, investments and insurance against piracy, but they might also be investing in plunder in other ways. But the growth of London as an insurance market is a direct consequence of the trade coming into London. And that's not just piracy. I am a maritime historian more generally, so I have to make a bid for the broader context of maritime trade and smuggling and all of these other dimensions. What's going on with piracy is also playing out in other aspects as well. And piracy, as we've said, is sort of symbiotic with the rise of trade.
- [70:30]
Cole Smead
Well, the other thing off maritime, too, is, I mean, you talk a lot about the flags. The flag you flew determined who you were, were pirates got more interesting than that. They started flying, you know, Spanish flags to come up close to the Spanish ships, and obviously we're not Spanish at all. And then you end up all the way out to kind of questioning, is the Jolly Roger flag real or was it just a black flag or was it fantasized or, you know, so I, I guess, like using the Jolly Roger, was it real? And then how cryptic do you think flags ended up becoming?
- [71:03]
Richard Blakemore
So I didn't think the Jolly Roger was real. And then there is actually an Account from a pirates trial of a, of a skull and crossbones flack.
- [71:11]
Cole Smead
Okay.
- [71:12]
Richard Blakemore
Whether the pirates themselves called it the Jolly Roger is a different question.
- [71:16]
Cole Smead
Sure.
- [71:16]
Richard Blakemore
But at least some of these pirates were flying it. What we do know, as you said, that again, legitimate plunderers, privateers, the navy sometimes are also using flag ruses, right? And merchant ships will carry multiple sets of papers and multiple, multiple sets of flags. Because if you're stopped by a Dutch ship, you send up the sailor who speaks Dutch, you give him your Dutch papers, you carry on sailing, you stop by a French ship, you run up your French flag. And that can be a way of navigating these international conflicts we've been talking about. Although also it can kind of be a trap because if you get caught carrying the wrong papers, then you can get into trouble and be prosecuted. But these are very common dimensions. Everyone is using these techniques. Pirates do seem to have used different flags. But simply not flying a national flag is itself threatening. Because by flying a national flag, you're declaring who you are, you're declaring you're legitimate. So simply not flying a flag would be sort of a telltale sign. It seems that for much of the period we're talking about, red flags were actually more common. Certainly into the 1690s and possibly even into the 1700s. Red was also a flag that legitimate plunderers would fly when going into battle to try and intimidate their enemies. But you'd fly your red penance alongside your national flags, whereas if you've just got red, then that's a warning sign. And we have accounts of like William Kidd. One of the kind of accusations against him made by some of the sailors who were in the Indian Ocean was that he flew a red flag and no national flag. In the 70s, tens and 20s, we talk about this more extreme phase. We get a lot of counts of pirates flying black flags, which again would have been certainly a deliberate move. Some pirates seem to have flown specific flags. This is mentioned in pirate trials, but the evidence is very unclear. The idea that each pirate had their own design is something that really comes along a bit later and is generated more in the popular culture and is not really mentioned in a lot of the trials of these pirates or specific details or newspaper reports which are going on. So I think there are clearly some pirates using signals like the skull and crossbones. There are also some pirates who are flying black flags as a deliberate message that they are a pirate. Following me. Roberts is recorded doing that. But the idea that there's this sort of iconography of piracy that individuals will have their own flag that you'd recognize. I am not quite convinced by that. And I think it's a really ironic flip because nowadays if you see a gravestone, everyone thinks, oh, it's a pirate gravestone. But actually pirates were taking these symbols because they were on all the gravestones. Right. A skull and crossbones is a sign of death. So these skull symbols were everywhere as a sign of mortality. They're very common on all sorts of art and gravestones. At the time, if you saw a skull and crossbones, you'd probably think death, not pirate in the 18th century. And now we are so, you know, so deeply associated piracy with these symbols that in fact, when, you know, I was on holiday recently, my son saw a gravestone with a skull and crossbow. I was like, ah, it must have been a pirate. And I didn't want to break it to him. That actually probably, probably wasn't nice.
- [74:29]
Cole Smead
Well, on that now you've disclosed you haven't taken him to Pirates of the Caribbean. I think I have a punch list for you there. Let's see. I was going to go over some of the things we didn't talk about today. We didn't talk about cross dressing pirates and Calico Jack's possible relationships with these ladies that were sexualized in much of the writing on the subject with Bonnie and Reed. There were a lot of other things I had here in my notes. We didn't talk about, to your point, about the plays. The Fair Maid of the west was one of the fantastic plays of the day. Also Fortune by Land and Sea. So this kind of mythical buildup in popular culture and the legend that grew with it. We also didn't talk about Parliament in 1683 and tightening the laws and how long that would take to kind of roll through society. So of kind of the, you know, the subjects that we didn't touch didn't really go at including, you know, talking more specifically about the book that you reference a lot later in the book, which is A General History of the Pirates, which was a very popular book. What do you think should be mentioned to our listeners to kind of either bring this together or point out something that we haven't addressed.
- [75:36]
Richard Blakemore
I think the general history of the pirates is the most important. I think I deserve a medal for getting this far through without mentioning the phrase general history of the pirates because I think I've never in my life happened before.
- [75:45]
Cole Smead
Right, okay.
- [75:47]
Richard Blakemore
And this book was published in May 1724, so it was extremely satisfying that the UK edition of the book came out in May 2024. 300th year anniversaries don't come around all that often.
- [75:58]
Cole Smead
Sure.
- [75:59]
Richard Blakemore
And it's a publishing sensation. It's enormously successful. It goes through multiple editions in the first couple of years. It's translated into lots of languages. It's one of the big books of the time. And this book, more than anything else, fixes the image of piracy. And so a big part of what I'm trying to tell in my book is not just kind of what happened, but where does the image of piracy come from that we have in our heads today? And that obviously relates to all the things we've been talking about. The growth of piracy, the economic influence, the actual phenomenon of piracy, as it happens, happens. But it's equally about the stories people are telling. We've talked about William Dampier, we've talked about other books where people are writing stories about piracy. This is something like you've said, the plays, the stories developing. It's continuous throughout this period. But it really, along with the extreme nature of piracy in the 1710s and 20s, you get extreme media coverage of piracy in that moment. And the general history sort of seems to epitomize that. It brings the stories together from trials, from newspaper records. It tells the story of all of the most famous pirates. Blackbeard, Bonnie and Reed, Calico Jack, Steve Bonnet, Bartholomew Roberts. And then it kind of increases, expands, includes. Henry Avery, adds in other pirates as these versions go on. And the key message I kind of want to get across is that that book has defined how we've seen piracy ever since historians are still using it today. It inspires Treasure Island. And actually there's probably more films, plays and games about Treasure island than they have been about any historical pirate. So that too is a really key landmark. But the general history has just kind of set that image. It's where a lot of the illustrations come from, the pictures, the stories. And yet it's totally unreliable. It's anonymous. There's been lots of debates about authorship. They're clearly getting information from somewhere. But for example, with Bonnie and Reed especially, they seems to me that they're fabricating a lot of it and it's written with a satirical purpose. It's written about contemporary politics, contemporary religion, and that seems to have got lost in the way people think about the book outside of particular literary scholars in recent years. So these stories have been recycled, but the reasons behind the story seem to have been forgotten. So things like pirates being democratic, the author is writing about that. Not to make pirates to look good, but to make democracy look bad. So we need to take all of these stories very critically, very skeptically, while understanding that this has just has such a huge impact in the kind of culture around piracy.
- [78:28]
Cole Smead
So where can our listeners follow you going forward? You mentioned, you know, obviously you're, you're teaching courses. Are you active on social media? Do you have any courses out there that they can check out?
- [78:38]
Richard Blakemore
I'm on Twitter, sorry X I suppose they call it these X marks the spot, right? You can find information at the University of Reading websites about me and the teaching that I do. There's TV show that was on National Geographic in the US recently which is coming out in the UK soon about pirates and I am alongside many other scholars was involved in that. There are some other podcasts and things coming out. So the University of Reading website and Twitter, which I persist in calling it, are probably the places that you can find out most. Also of course the publishers websites as well.
- [79:10]
Cole Smead
Awesome. Well this is a lot of fun, Richard. Your book reminds me that throughout time people and capital like we talked about will flow to where it is treated best, which was true of even the regulations pirates had to deal with. If you want to go from fantasy land to the reality of plunder, politics and piracy, go buy a copy of Enemies of All. You may find out that your favorite pirate wasn't much more than his most closely aligned politician like we were mentioning a second ago. If you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to A Book with Legs, give us a review, tell others about the books and great authors like Richard Blakemore that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through for our tribe. If you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcastmeadcap.com that's podcast meadcap.com you can also send your suggestions to us on X. Our handle is Meadcap. Thank you for listening to A Book with Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode.
- [80:12]
Podcast Host
Thank you for listening to A Book with Legs, a podcast brought to you by Smead Capital Management. The material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice. You can learn more about Smead Capital Management and its products@smeadcap.com or by calling your financial advisor.