2. Enemies of Humanity

There are pirates, and there are Golden-Age pirates

To reap the many benefits of being more pirate, first you need to know more pirate. The true nature of the mischief and disruption they caused was deliberately distorted by those it threatened most. It’s time to uncover their hidden history, so you can use it to your advantage. It’s time to explore the Golden-Age pirates’ real achievements so that you can follow in their footsteps and create similar change in your world.

If we are going to understand how these pirates reshaped their world, we first need to understand how their world shaped them. This exceptional bunch of men and women didn’t spring from nowhere; they were products of their turbulent times and they were defined by what they fought for and stood against.

The Golden Age of Piracy is broadly understood to be the time between 1690 and 1725, with a particularly intense phase occurring in the 1710s that culminated in the creation of the Republic of Pirates on the Caribbean island of Nassau, where around 1,500 pirates were involved in a pioneering experiment in democracy that some argue was more participatory and representative than anywhere else on earth. In Nassau, right at the geographical epicentre of the slave trade, black people lived in freedom alongside all other colours with broadly equal rights. Nearly eighty years before the French Revolution demanded liberté, égalité and fraternité, before Thomas Paine wrote his book The Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, men and women, rich and poor, had a more equal say and enjoyed more equal rights than any other society in the world at the time. Golden-Age pirates were not just individualistic fighters with a reputation for violence, out to get rich quick (although they were certainly this as well); they were also pioneers of collective action and social, political, racial and almost every other kind of equality. The Golden Age of Piracy arose in response to a series of monumental man-made clusterfucks that came to define the early 1700s. The previous century had seen the world’s empires binge on war like we do on box sets. Years of episodic conflicts created interconnected wars so long and complicated they killed, outlasted or confused to death anyone who’d been around when they had begun.

To give you a fast flavour of the intermingling mess of all these melees, here are the top international battles that occurred in the build-up to the Golden Age of Piracy:

  1. Dutch-Portuguese War; England and Holland vs Portugal. Round one. Ding Ding.
  2. Anglo-Spanish War; England vs Spain. For England, for glory, for the first of many.
  3. Anglo-French War; England vs France. For good balance.
  4. The Portuguese Restoration War; England, France and Portugal vs Spain. Just to mix it up a bit.
  5. First Anglo-Dutch War; England vs Holland. The clue is in the name.
  6. Second Anglo-Spanish War; England vs Spain. Again.
  7. Second Anglo-Dutch War; England vs France and Holland. Because one is never enough.
  8. Anglo-Siamese War; England vs Siam, a threat more than a full war, to teach poor old Siam a lesson for forcing the East India Company to close a factory.
  9. The Third Anglo-Dutch War; England vs Holland. Third time lucky, for the Dutch.
  10. The Franco-Dutch War; England and France vs. Holland, Spain, Norway, Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire. Forgive me Father for I have lost count of all these wars.
  11. The Nine Years War: England, Holland, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (all the guys back together again as if all the above never happened) vs France. Of course.

And right in the middle of all that – because eleven international conflicts in a hundred years just wasn’t enough for the bloodthirsty Brits – England fought a major war with itself, in three parts.

There was nothing civil about the English Civil War. A greater percentage of the country’s male population perished in this domestic conflict than during the Second World War. Quite frankly, it’s a mystery how there was anyone left to fight all the other wars taking place. What’s less mysterious is why a life of bloody violence, conflict and attacking Spain (or was that France?) might have seemed relatively normal by the turn of the eighteenth century. This culture of conflict and the interlinking political and theological puzzles that came alongside each alliance created the conditions in which the pirates could thrive.

The Spanish War of Succession from 1710 to 1716 further developed the rise of the final and most famous and influential stage of the Golden Age of Piracy, not least because the end of the war meant nearly two-thirds of the enormous Royal Navy was now redundant. The scale of redundancy these career sailors faced forced them to seek new alternative employment, much as mass automation will force thousands if not millions of people to find new jobs in the next ten years.

Unlike today’s taxi drivers, retail assistants, office clerks, call-centre staff and pizza delivery guys, all of whom might soon be given the chop by a robot hand, the sailors of the seventeenth century were fortunate enough to have already learned a trade they could utilize in a new, self-employed format. They were experts in sailing, fighting and stealing, they were well schooled in ambiguous morals and fluctuating allegiances and, after years of always exploitative and sometimes brutal working conditions, they were ready for a career change. They were precariously open minded to the promise of pirates who were offering not only wealth but also the chance of fair pay, fair treatment and the opportunity to give the self-serving system a cutlass-sharp poke in the eye.

And what did they have to lose? The political leaders of the time were conspicuously interested in preserving their own power rather than trying to empower those they led. The ruling class was made up of international elites who were not averse to reinventing democracies, theocracies and any other-ocracy they could lay their creepy gloved hands on if it gained them a scrap of advantage in what seemed to be a never-ending fight for dominance. Generations had lived and died in back-and-forth fights between ideologies, where yesterday’s heroes were tomorrow’s villains. And, as we will soon be asking ourselves, what is a huge diaspora of despondent and redundant workers seeking meaning but without opportunity meant to do with itself?

The times were gloomy and people were anxious and exhausted. The only new opportunity promising adventure and financial reward was, quite literally, off the chart and very far from home. With the world powers of the time in decline, all eyes were on the wealth of the ‘New World’. (Though, of course, the New World wasn’t so new for the sophisticated Inca, Aztec and Mayan populations whose millennia of civilization were set to be nonchalantly annihilated as a by-product of being ‘discovered’.)

The Spanish Empire was just about clinging on to its global chokehold thanks to the unprecedented wealth it had stolen from territories in what are now Mexico and Peru using a lethal cocktail of bribes, lies, germs, guns and God. As mankind took its formative steps in state-sanctioned corporate asset-stripping of the world’s natural resources, the Spanish created the legendary pieces-of-eight system, primarily as a way of improving the stackable ship-homeability of their stolen silver and gold. A legendary emblem of pirate obsession was born.

All the Spanish Empire needed to do to thrive was subdue the natives with the blunt end of their Christian mercy, talk them out of their own heritage, steal their riches and get safely back to Europe in their state-of-the-art, purpose-built transatlantic treasure-stealing fleets.

In turn, all the pirates had to do to thrive was be smart enough and fast enough to resteal the plunder of the world’s foremost superpower right out from under their moustaches without getting hanged. This is what they set out to do, but when there’s only about 1,500 on your team and you’re taking on a sovereign nation, its empire and armada, you’d better bring your A game. (Or, in this instance, your P game.) To succeed against odds like that, the pirates had to rely on techniques that would give them a competitive advantage. Namely, a fearsome reputation, applied imagination, creative strategy, a responsive network, a shared motivation for success and a defining set of values and principles.

Pirates vs Civilization match report

To bring home the case for pirates as rebels who make good role models, we’re going to look more closely at how they operated and at the culture they created. We’re going head-to-head as we put their innovations in the areas of fair pay, organizational structures and equality to the test with the rest of civilization.

Pre-match prediction: an easy win for the pirates. They got more done in thirty years or so than most of us do in a lifetime. (Although to be fair, if you were a pirate in the Golden Age, thirty years probably was your expected lifetime.)

NO PREY, NO PAY IN THE FIGHT FOR FAIRNESS

One of the pirates’ earliest innovations, which is mentioned in historical records as far back as the 1690s, was the concept of a fair ratio of pay amongst crew members. Aboard a pirate ship, the captain and quartermaster took three or four shares of any loot, other essential or high-risk roles such as doctors and gunners received two shares, and all the other crew received one share, right down to the cabin boy.

It’s not hard to imagine why the fair shares would have been a top priority for men fleeing the naval life. The navies, both Merchant and Royal, paid their crews very little, if they paid them at all. Wages were often late or less than the sum promised and sailors received no written contract on signing up. Some of them weren’t even there voluntarily. Press ganging, when men were either knocked unconscious or drugged and dragged aboard to work, was common. All too often, sailors in the navy were closer to indentured labourers than anything else.

Compare the pirates’ fair and open systems with our current economic climate and rules on pay ratios and you’ll start to get an immediate sense of just how radical the pirates really were. In the wake of the 2008/09 financial collapse, commentators and critics from all over the world cited the enormous and unchecked gulf between the highest and lowest wages within certain businesses as a contributory factor to near economic Armageddon. Ahead of the collapse, in 2002 the CEO to average salary ratio stood at 384 to 1, its all-time high.1 The creation of a fair pay ratio has been much discussed but rarely tested within mainstream business, except some Scandinavian countries (who else?) that have passed policies to limit CEO pay by linking it to the average workforce salary. This is already standard practice around the world within Social Enterprises (whose members run their businesses not for the profit of their shareholders but for a defined social good), where a 1 to 10 ratio is seen as a healthy scale between the lowest paid employee and the highest paid. That said, even this generous ratio results in much greater discrepancy between earnings than the one the pirates used.

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At the time, the pirates’ policy on fair pay ratios was revolutionary and had the far less fair but very well-paid powers that be shaking in their boots. Today, it’s still way ahead of anything that contemporary organizations have managed to implement.

CHECKS AND BALANCES, PROTECT WHAT’S PRECIOUS

Non-hierarchical structures were even more fundamental to the pirates’ mission than the concept of fair pay. Around the 1680s the pirates came up with a robust system of checks and balances by elevating the existing seafaring role of quartermaster to the same status as captain. This simple but sophisticated move effectively created a two-house system, a non-executive or a second umpire. The captain remained responsible for strategy whilst the quartermaster was fully responsible for culture and the way the ship was run on a day-to-day basis, as well as representing the voice of the crew.

Naval captains had a deservedly bad reputation. They were virtual dictators on board and operated without fear of rebuke by their superiors back on land. Many used brutal corporal punishment to keep order. As a result, they were often hated by their crews, who were only too keen to jump at the offer of a way of life a little less medieval. The promotion of the quartermaster to balance a captain was a simple but sophisticated move to protect against any return to an abuse of power.

On this score, the pirates were not so much pioneering as embodying the spirit of the times. The English had been killing themselves, literally, over this point throughout the trilogy of the English Civil War until the 1689 Bill of Rights institutionalized formal powers of a second house of government in a move soon followed by the US, then replicated in most democracies. Soon after, the Bank of England Act of 1695 created the first effective ‘board’ and began a similar dual executive system of checks and balances that can now be found the world over in nearly all organizations from charity to big business.

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The pirates were only a few years in front of the rest of civilization on this one but they still managed to peacefully implement and sustain an idea that mainstream society had to have a long and bloody fight with itself to come up with. As the pirates joined working-class heroes like the Levellers who had gone before them, their practices pioneered a new degree of expectation for universal working conditions.

ONE PIRATE ONE VOTE: MORE PARTICIPATIVE THAN PERICLES

Surviving records from the 1690s onwards illustrate that all members of pirate crews were given a say, and a vote. That’s everyone, including women (yes, there were a few) and non-whites.

Universal suffrage, like dual governance and fair pay, was a response to the brutal experiences many had suffered at the hand of dictatorial captains in the Royal and Merchant navies. But it’s one thing to decide that the leadership should be a little less savage and quite another to shift the power totally by giving every single member of the crew a vote on major decisions.

It wasn’t until 1928, some 240 years after the pirates had embraced the concept, that women gained the vote in the UK and universal suffrage was achieved. In the States, women gained the vote a little earlier (in 1920), but for non-white citizens the story was more complex. Despite an 1870 amendment to the Constitution that forbade any withholding of the vote on the grounds of race, the fight for fair and equal voting rights wasn’t won until the 1950s.

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Collective decision-making was a radical act, but a system that included female and non-white voices was revolutionary, and the first major upgrade to classic Athenian democracy in which only a third of society (all the white men, of course) had the vote.

PAYOUTS AND PEG-LEGS, NO PIRATE LEFT BEHIND

So I asked you to unlearn all you knew about pirates, but this is where I have to admit there is some truth to the stereotypical peg-legged and eyepatched pastiche. Piracy was a dangerous line of work; violence was commonplace, and one bad injury could mean the end of your career. In either navy a mortal wound would have been considered bad luck and a hazard of the workplace. An unlucky ordinary sailor could become a swivel-eyed peg-legged drunk begging for change outside a rowdy tavern before he could say Billy Bones, but records show that Golden-Age pirates routinely set aside a portion of everything they stole to serve as compensation when comrades were wounded. Payments included the aforementioned 800 pieces of eight for a lost leg through to 100 for a lost eye. Injured pirates were often even given the option to stay aboard a boat and continue contributing to the community by taking on a new role as cook or something else more suited to their new situation.

Two hundred years later the UK became the first developed economy to pass workplace compensation into law, due largely to the fact that it was the first fully industrial economy. Most major economies and democracies followed suit over the following century until social insurance was eventually recognized within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

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There’s a pattern emerging here, isn’t there? Pirates come up with a great idea that the Establishment try to dismiss but which then becomes so popular amongst the people that eventually said Establishment has no choice but to embrace it, and then pretend it was their idea. The pirates’ ideas can be more innovative because they start on the edges, and through being well tested they evolve to become popular and end up influencing the mainstream. These stages of change are something we’ll build upon later in Part Two.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY COCKTAIL, ANYONE?

Cocktails? You never mentioned cocktails! Well, yes. The pirates invented the cocktail way back in the 1560s. Sir Francis Drake, the grandfather of the Golden Age of Piracy, is known to have developed the first blended alcoholic beverage mixed with juice, sweeteners and flavouring.

Drake’s proto-cocktail was known as El Draque (The Dragon) after the Spanish nickname for Drake, the Englishman they most loved to hate. An El Draque included lime juice (for scurvy), rum (for reward), sugar (for energy) and a certain type of tree bark (for ‘medicinal’ qualities). It’s unlikely it was served over ice, but nonetheless doesn’t sound altogether bad (or unlike a mojito, just without the ice).

It took the non-pirate world nearly three hundred years to wake up to the magic of cocktails. The first recorded cocktail was the Old Fashioned, which made its appearance in 1860 in New York’s high-society circles. Cocktail parties quickly became all the rage and the very first cocktail list was published as The Bon Vivant’s Companion in 1862.

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Conclusion: It’s a landslide victory for the pirates!

How you doing? I know it’s a lot to take in. Previously, pirates were borderline comedy children’s characters with a slightly shady past, and now look! The world’s greatest innovators of social justice! Who knew?

Just for the record, it’s highly unlikely that the pirates were the conscious architects of all this innovation and it’s important to remember this before we get carried away rebalancing their reputation. The pirates weren’t secret sweeties blessed with lovely liberal values actively designing new social structures for the benefit of all of humanity. They were trying to fix the problems they saw in front of them, make their lives better and, let’s not forget, amass great fortunes by aiming to steal other people’s great stolen fortunes. They broke old rules, made new ones and in the process came up with some prescient and progressive ideas by default.

But even if they were just out to change their world rather than the world, their record is impressive. Rarely has the world seen such an intense period of innovation, imagination and achievement, or has such a lasting positive impact been created by so few. The Second World War with all its radars, jet engines and atomic bombs could be comparable for productivity. Or maybe the turn of the nineteenth century, when you couldn’t move for stepping on a lightbulb, some radium or a telephone. Perhaps the first few decades of Silicon Valley, when frighteningly prolific nerds in awful sweaters created technology that would exponentially speed up human evolution, is up there too. These are all moments when humankind quickened its step and produced huge growth spurts of thought that compounded imagination.

In each of these ages of advancement, the protagonists were products of their environment. The pirates had been pushed to the edges of society and the fringes of capitalism. And there in the shadows, outside society’s gaze, beyond the rules, they were free to innovate and create their own methods. Being unconstrained by the way things should be allowed the pirates to experiment with the way things could be.

Brave new worlds

Whenever new worlds are discovered, whether these worlds are what we now call North, Central or South America or the vast digital new world, competition tends to arise between state-backed players (who seek to establish order) and those we call pirates (who seize treasure and opportunity).

Rather than write this off as the age-old battle of bad vs good, it’s possible to see this competitive relationship as one of creative evolution. Both sides represent a different approach to progress and ultimately help drive their opponent forward faster. Whether it’s Apple and Microsoft, Jay Z and Kanye or even Woody and Buzz, rivalry can play a positive role in the development of ideas as two competitors can achieve more, go further and act braver through conflict than they might have done through cooperation. Each learns from the other’s successes as much as their failings.

We’ve touched on how the stratified world of the Establishment pushed the pirates to search for an alternative way of life which resulted in the creation of a progressive proto-democratic republic in the Bahamas. But the Establishment also learned a great deal from the pirates and were driven to innovate technology, weapons, strategy and even the social welfare of ordinary sailors as a result of the pirates’ actions.

In The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism, economists Rodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Vergne explain that ‘the pirate organization is the necessary counterpart to capitalism … [and] determines the pace of capitalist evolution’.2 They argue that capitalism creates normal ways to generate scale and industry, and that pirates force innovation, invention and alternative methods of value creation. They conclude that the role of the pirate organization in exploring and understanding new worlds has always been essential, but it’s also often been overlooked.

It’s not hard to see how piracy has played this role and improved many inventions we all love. Apple gave the world iTunes because it was responding to music piracy, not because the music industry itself was actively looking for a new way to present music. Netflix defined the future of video with on-demand subscription models not because of a failed attempt at a partnership with Blockbuster Video but in response to early file-sharing pirates. In any industry, when a new territory is created, the threat of pirates drives forward the Establishment’s endeavours, until the Establishment is eventually overtaken. The threat of piracy is behind the truism that you have to innovate faster than others can imitate.

It is the piratical mindset, methods and achievements that drive change in all areas of society and always have. As Durand and Vergne put it:

The pirate organization breaks the existing codes and creates new ones, which will later be appropriated by legitimate governments and organizations … This explains why the Pentagon and Microsoft track hackers in cyberspace to offer them a job, or why Francis Drake became a corsair before being knighted by the Queen of England.

Piracy is still on the whole regarded by the Establishment as a bad thing even whilst it scrambles to adopt the successful innovations pirates created. It’s safe to say that the positive output of the relationship with pirates is widely misunderstood in our day and age. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX, is one of the few mainstream business figureheads with a proactive plan to deal with piracy, even if at first it seems a counter-intuitive one. As Musk explained in an interview with Chris Anderson at Wired: ‘We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.’3 Elon Musk’s insightful understanding into how pirates work may just be because he’s such a pirate paragon himself, but more on him and how he might fit the definition of a modern pirate later.

Pirate state of mind

Now you know more about the kind of revolutionary changes the Golden Age pirates were able to initiate – from inventing the cocktail to surprisingly progressive workplace culture and pay – any of your old preconceptions about pirates should have been consigned to the deep. Hopefully your mind is cooking up ideas and questions about how you can use pirate innovations to challenge and change your own environment. Just before we move into the specific strategies you can adopt, here is how we’re defining pirates and what it means to be more pirate.

Essentially, pirates trouble the edges of society and make enough shock waves to influence the middle ground. Trouble is their tool, although within a Be More Pirate state of mind, it’s more accurate to call it good trouble.

The concept of ‘good trouble’ is, for me, the absolute core of what it means to be more pirate. The term was coined by legendary civil rights activist and campaigner John Lewis, a US Congressman. He has been using this term for years, drawing on his own experience that dates back to a famous bridge in Selma at the height of the Civil Rights movement in America. As a term, good trouble went viral in June 2016 when he staged a sit-in on the floor of the US House of Representatives calling for change to the laws that govern gun sales in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting in which fifty people were killed. A couple of months later he gave a commencement speech to the graduating students of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in which he urged them:

Go out there, get in the way, get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble, and make some noise. Our country needs you now more than ever before. When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation, a mission and a mandate to do something about it. Stand up, speak up and speak out. Be brave. Be bold. Be courageous … And never, ever let anything get you down.4

Being a troublemaker, even a good troublemaker, doesn’t automatically make you a pirate, but I really believe that you can’t be a pirate without the intention of making some good trouble.

Remember, pirates didn’t set out to change the world, they just wanted to change their world. Pirates didn’t intend to push forward democracy, they just wanted to make their own decisions. Pirates didn’t mean to advance social policy, they just wanted to be treated fairly. Sometimes, imagination compounds and good ideas that are formed at the edges find their way to the centre and change everything. They didn’t just cause trouble, they caused good trouble.