6 - “A Fellow! I think, in all Respects, worthy your Esteem and Favour” : Fellowship and treachery in A General History of the Pyrates, 1724–1734

Summary

Abstract This chapter analyses the representation of the pirate in A General History of the Pyrates between 1724 and 1734. By examining a number of editions, it establishes that the co-operation of pirates of the General History is organised and maintained through fellowships. However, fellowship is most manifest in this text when it is broken, either by treachery or by the performance of bad fellowship. These broken fellowships demonstrate a tension between the values of fellowship and the way that the text hyper values venturesome behaviour. In reading across editions this chapter charts how iterations of the General History offer different profiles of fellowship in this ten-year period, thus changing the representation of the pirate imagined in this highly influential text.

Keywords: A General History of the Pyrates; Fellowship; Eighteenthcentury book

history; Pirate representations; Criminal Biography

Early eighteenth-century audiences who were more or less geographically distant from the depredations of Anglo-American pirates voraciously consumed material about individuals and crews, as they were mythologised and sensationalised in books and the periodical press. These factual and fictional figures prompted excitement and intrigue, and spawned fantastical tales about pirates thriving and failing in “exotic” locations. Our understanding of the eighteenth-century pirate is created as much by these tales as it is by the actions of thieves at sea. As Margarette Lincoln observes, “the history of piracy is as much about rhetoric as it is about actual events.”1 The so called “golden age” of piracy was also a “golden age” of pirate literature.

Published in 1724, as the “golden age” of piracy was coming to an end, A General History of the Pyrates is the most influential rendering of these seductive figures. The text is constituted by a series of interconnected chapters that each focus on a pirate captain and his crew. It purports to present the “truth” about the “authentick Relations” of a collection of pirates active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. However, between 1724 and 1734 the text was proliferated in a dozen different versions. It was published in octavo, serialised, translated, expanded into a second volume, collected together with other criminal lives, and abridged as The History and the Lives of the most Notorious Pirates. These editions differ in form, content, language, and thus produce differing representations of the pirate.