5 - Pirate Encounters and Perceptions of Southern-Netherlandish Sailors on the North Sea and the Indian Ocean, 1704–1781

Summary

Abstract This chapter investigates practices of piracy through the vantage point of previously unexplored shipboard documents, notarial archives, and testimonies from eighteenth-century Southern Netherlandish sailors. These sources reveal how Southern Netherlandish expeditions from the port of Ostend to the Indian Ocean perceived and encountered Angrian, Chinese, and Madagascar pirates. Surviving crewmembers reported on pirates’ tactics and their enabling conditions. However, Southern Netherlandish sailors would also engage in maritime predation themselves, during wartime on the North Sea and as renegade traders in the Indian Ocean. One may therefore contrast Southern Netherlandish sailors’ own shipboard perceptions and encounters with Indian Ocean piracy against their own practices of maritime predation, questioning the ambivalence between piracy as a practice and a label for condemnation.

Keywords: piracy; maritime history; Indian Ocean; Angria; Madagascar; China

Introduction: ‘Illegitimate’ Maritime Robbery as Piratical Practice

The 1696 Tryals of Joseph Dawson et al. for several Piracies and Robberies served as the British Admiralty court's attempt to define piracy in the Indian Ocean as “a sea term for Robbery […] the Mariners of any Ship that shall violently dispossess the Master, and afterwards carry away the Ship itself, or any of the Goods […] with a felonious Intention.” This definition was immediately linked to a notion of state jurisdiction, “because the King of England has an undoubted Jurisdiction, and Power, in concurrency with other Princes, and States for the punishment of all Piracies and Robberies at Sea, in the most remote parts of the World.” This claim invoked a statist perception and discourse which aimed to extend itself globally across the seas. As Lauren Benton has pointed out, defining piracy itself concerned differing understandings of sovereignty according to European legal traditions. As part of this legal discourse, Derek Elliott and Sebastian Prange have also stated that the indictment of piracy accompanied claims to legal and political sovereignty, which mostly resided in the eye of the beholder. Perceptions of piracy and sovereignty were steeped in specific categories of legal and political thought which historians have inadvertently replicated, whereby they affirmed the model of the European nation state as an implicit reference point for political legitimacy. For the Indian Ocean, David C. Kang would decry such discourse as founded upon a “Westphalian paradigm” neglecting different cultural or legal logics, while the “new thalassologists” studying history on the sea would emphasise the land-based component of such thinking.