Cultural Constructions of Piracy During the Crisis Over Slavery

Abstract

As early as 1700, Samuel Sewall, the renowned Boston judge and diarist, connected "the two most dominant moral questions of that moment: the rapid rise of the slave trade and the support of global piracy" in many American colonies (Hanna 2015, 292). In the course of the eighteenth century, three textual moments prepared the grounds for a major semantic shift in the trope of piracy in the Atlantic context, turning its primary connotations from exploration and adventure to slavery and exploitation. First, Daniel Defoe's popular 1720 pirate novel Captain Singleton depicted pirates who liberated slave-ships, implying that the real criminals were slave-traders rather than pirates while simultaneously emphasizing that pirates themselves often profited from the triangular trade. This picaresque novel follows its narrator-protagonist, who goes to sea at the age of twelve, makes a fortune, crosses Africa on foot, loses his money, and makes another gain as a pirate before he is ultimately reformed. Adventure story and travel narrative, it explores society from the point of view of its maritime outcasts with one exception: an African slave's perspective. The critique of slavery is a major issue in Singleton, yet is eventually contained by the economic system in which the pirates operate. The following episode is exemplary in the way the novel's discourse cannot but contain its critique. In it, Captain Singleton and his