Adrian Tinniswood on Pirates

Tell me about your first book.

It’s great fun. Peter Leeson bandies clichés around in a delightful way. He talks about the briny deep and walking the plank. But, essentially, it’s a book about economics in the world of the 17th-century pirates of the Caribbean. It’s a very good example of the way that pirates have been co-opted to different people’s needs. With Leeson, he sees them as proto-capitalists in a free market. Others see them as proto-Marxists, while the gay movement has decided that pirates were the pioneers of equal rights. The problem is that people get selective and start to pick out the elements which will support their thesis. Leeson picks up on the idea of a brotherhood, an early type of democracy. So, although I find his book interesting because of his new way of looking at things, I can’t say I really subscribe to all his views. My model of piracy is one of socialised crime. He sees them as a great example of privatised endeavour, where as I see them as instruments of the state.

What about your next book, Buccaneers of the Caribbean?

This book deals with the same pirates as Leeson does, but takes an entirely different approach. What Buccaneers of the Caribbean does is give us a more vivid glimpse of the reality of things. The Jack Sparrows, the Johnny Depps – the Pirates of the Caribbean – were engaged in a land war, fighting the Spanish. Jon Latimer suggests that fighting the Spanish in the New World made them frontline troops in British imperialism. And I find that argument a lot more convincing than the one made by Leeson. Of course, many of them were motivated by greed. All pirate activities are about making money, that’s why they do it.
But, Latimer also brings out the strong anti-Catholic strain in the pirates of the Caribbean. A lot of them were ardent Protestants from England and Holland who wanted to fight the Catholics. They may not even have realised it themselves, but the culture that produced them suggested that it’s OK to fight Spain. There were times in the 17th century when England was at war with Spain and times when it wasn’t but there is this feeling that, whether at war or not, it’s was always all right to attack the Spanish!

There’s this idea of the Age of the Buccaneer in the book. What does that means?

Well, we need to go back a bit. In the 1580s and 1590s England is at war with Spain and there were lots of privateers. Privateers are people working as mercenaries who have letters of commission which allow them to attack the merchant shipping of a hostile nation. In those days they didn’t have a very big navy so it was a way of getting adventurers to fight your war for you. People who do that aren’t pirates, they are privateers, and that means they’ve got a quasi-legal status and these were the buccaneers. There’s this great story in the book about a famous pirate, Henry Morgan, who was so outraged when a London pamphlet described him as a pirate that he sued them. He ended up winning the princely sum of £200. I find it incredible that he had a lawyer in London who could actually take out an action for libel. The distinction between privateer and pirate is one that the privateers clung to because pirates were criminals but in everyday life there really wasn’t much difference between them.

What kind of image did pirates have in those days?

It depends where you go in the world. The pirates of the Barbary Coast saw themselves as soldiers for Allah. They described themselves as mujahidin, on a sea jihad against encroaching Christians. The Barbary Coast was the interface between Christianity and Islam – where the two cultures meet.

So where does the idea of the Jack Sparrow swashbuckling-type pirate come from?

Even in the 17th and early 18th century, there is a sort of grudging admiration for pirates in literature. And later on in the 18th century you have more and more of a sense of the pirate as an outlaw, rather like the Robin Hood of society. They’re stealing from the wicked Spanish Conquistadors and the Ottoman Empire which makes them the good guys.

On to your next book, The Barbary Legend.

Fisher’s book is a wonderful corrective to the prejudice we have about the Barbary Coast pirates. It almost goes too far. It suggests that the West has approached the idea of North African pirates with a prejudiced eye, because they are Islamic. Fisher says: why don’t we look at how the West related to North Africa and particularly the four Barbary states. These were Morocco and the three Ottoman states of North Africa – Algiers, Tunisia and what we would call Libya.
I think that people still have that prejudice today. Just look at what’s going on in Somalia. It’s all part of a subconscious racism. These are black Muslims so we don’t romanticise them.
In the past slavery was central to Barbary Coast pirates. These pirates were much more considerate than the pirates of the Caribbean who were after loot. The Barbary pirates didn’t kill people because they wanted to sell them.