Barbara Tenenbaum: Good afternoon. Would everybody take his or her seat, please? We're ready to start the second half of the program. In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm Barbara Tenenbaum. I'm the Specialist in Mexican Culture here in the Hispanic Division of the Library, a great job. Now that the people from the hierarchy of the Library aren't here, I can say that this is a job I would do for free. [ laughter ] Don't want to let the higher-ups know that. I'm wearing my pirate hat, which was graciously loaned to me by Arthur Dunkelman, who is the Curator of the Kislak Collection, and this is a Kislak symposium on the 13th of this month, i.e. next Thursday. The ongoing Kislak exhibit will be opening in the Library. It's going to knock your socks off. It's going to be wonderful. I can't wait to see it. The pieces in it are extraordinary. Mr. Kislak is extraordinary and, I don't think he would mind if I said, something of a pirate himself. What is it about pirates? What it is? I mean, why should there be little caps like this that say, "Surrender the booty"? All right, all right, we won't go into the various meanings of that. [ laughter ] Male Speaker: Too bad. [ laughter ] Barbara Tenenbaum: It was funny, because Peter Earle mentioned to me that his family says that he does boys' own history, which confirms something I'd been thinking, which is that I think that thinking about pirates is a gender thing. I think that men think about pirates differently from the way women think about pirates. I mean, for example, when you go to look up pirates on the Web, you find out that Pittsburgh's got a baseball team called the Pittsburgh Pirates. And you find out that East Carolina has got a basketball team called The Pirates. And you find out that there are three, count them, three football teams that reflect pirate legacy; there is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there's the Seattle Seahawks, and there's the Oakland Raiders. So, that tells you that pirates play a big part in a male imagination. But what do they do for a female imagination? And that's an interesting question that I thought about, and I remembered that George Plimpton had written about one of the most famous women in the world in the 20th Century and her love of pirates. That is, of course, Jacquelyn Kennedy Onassis. He was one of 12 people who wrote pieces for The New Yorker magazine on Jacquelyn Kennedy Onassis, and he recalled that he always identified Jackie with pirates. Her father looked like a pirate, she married a pirate. In fact, if you want my opinion, she married two pirates and -- [ laughter ] -- and she lived with the third. He said Ari Onassis was the pirate. We can discuss that at length later. She gave a pirate party for her children at Hammersmith Farms in the autumn of 1965. The young guests included the Pells, the Grosvenors, the Drexels, the Warrens, and Gardiners, to name a few. And Jackie went shopping for the contents of the treasure chest with George Plimpton. She nearly cleaned out one shop, according to him, with buying strings of fake pearls, brass ashtrays, key chains. The children were read to from a pirate diary written by Mr. Plimpton the night before to give the children clues as to the whereabouts of the hidden treasure. The adults, including -- get this -- Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, were enlisted as pirates. Jackie arranged for a longboat from the Coast Guard -- you could do this if you were Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis -- to appear. And, at an appropriate time, the pirates appeared to reclaim their treasure. On seeing Mr. Plimpton dressed as a pirate, Caroline Kennedy, who was about eight, remarked, "Well, I know who you are," and she stamped her foot. Jackie then persuaded the Secret Service -- get this -- to walk the plank. [ laughter ] And, at the end of the day, she read the pirates diary once more to the children. Pirates not only figure heavily in male imagination, they also figure heavily in female imagination. And I think that once we dispense with the historical role of pirates, which Professor Lane is going to talk about, with the exception, of course, of Professor Guerra, all of the people talking about the history of pirates have been guys. Then, we're going to talk about pirates in literature and then we'll hear some more about what females think about pirates. At least, I hope so anyway. So, why don't we get started? And, thank goodness our -- the skipper of the ship has arrived, so can we give a round of applause to the person who worked the hardest on this, Georgette Dorn? [ applause ] So, I call to the podium -- you want to speak here, Kris? -- Professor Kris Lane of William and Mary. He's now working on mining in Colombia, but he wrote a very important book on pirates. Kris. Kris Lane: I'll have to say, it wasn't a very important book on pirates, but a very short book on pirates in any case. Thank you all for coming, and thank you especially Barbara and Georgette for your invitation and hospitality. It's a great honor to be here and a pleasure to celebrate the Library's acquisition of the treasured Kislak Collection. Pirates tales, thankfully, are an important part of it. Please don't take this demand seriously. Although, if there are any pirates in the audience, I want to ask your forgiveness in advance if I don't present you in the best possible light. I'm following somewhat in the tradition established by Peter Earle to talk a little bit about perspectives on piracy. My talk explores piracy and world history by focusing on the linked problems of context and perspective. I argue that although acts of piracy dot the historical record around the world, actual pirates remain hard to find. Pirates, it seems, have never had much of an image problem. Even when the most maligned ones were tracked down in the early 18th Century, as Peter Earle described in this war against them, they were far more fascinating than they were repellant. Puritan sermons meant to scare young people straight only tempted them to run off and join, or at least imagine themselves running off and joining, the terrors of the Spanish Main, boys and girls alike. English literature got a great boost from pirates at this moment too, and they've been a mainstay of novels, plays, and poems, and now films, ever since. Even if he didn't publish the bestselling General History of the Pirates in 1724 under a pseudonym, Daniel Dafoe did weave scores of sea robbers into Robinson Crusoe and other novels. My favorite, if I can insert a plug, is Captain Singleton. Captain Bob gets a whole strange book to himself. The attraction of pirates to poets is, of course, far, far older. In Homer's Odyssey, one finds half fearful, half admiring phrases, almost a standard refrain or greeting to the unknown mariner asking Odysseus, almost with a wink, if he is not a pirate come to pillage and destroy. If resourceful Odysseus was a part-time pirate, or didn't mind being thought of as one, it's safe to say that pirate chic is much older than Johnny Depp. The problem pirates have had, aside from appointments with Captain Swing, is one of identity. No matter how hard one looks in the historical record, it is awfully hard to find a pirate in the strict "I'm a pirate and that's okay" sense of the term. Francis Drake, who hated the word, would've hated this book. I happen to like it and recommend it, but the problem of identity is an old one. The historian of ancient piracy, Philip de Sousa, has recently put it this way for his era: "All evidence of piracy in the Greco-Roman world is textual." What does he mean? For starters, the Greek term peirates is one of several words for bandit that was used in the time of Homer and afterwards, but eventually it came to stick to bandits at sea. In later years, the term was used almost universally by the enemies of pirates, but was universally rejected by those being called pirates. Even in antiquity then, pirates was what you called your vicious, barbaric, thieving neighbors. It appears peirates eventually became a four-letter word; that is, with time and the rise of legally bound civilization, it came to be stripped of its Homeric ambivalence. What pirates or sea bandits called themselves depended on whom they were talking to. But in the early record, we almost never hear their voices. As de Sousa and others have lamented, the oldest inscriptions and papyri were written not by pirates but by pirate victims and pirate hunters. Some of the predators appear to have been hardscrabble tribal folk living at the margins of subsistence on rocky shores, but handy with small watercraft and weapons. Some stole to live, perhaps only seasonally. Others probably lived to steal, perhaps year round. Historian J.L. Anderson has called such people intrinsic pirates, shark-like cultures inhabiting the water's edge. William McNeil might have called them macro-parasites. Historians of the early Mediterranean note frequent mention in the written and pictorial records of Ancient Egypt of anonymous sea peoples, whole cultures that seemed to survive through piracy, even in these early times when trading vessels were probably barely seaworthy outside river deltas. Other early sea raiders organized criminal bands that spun off from naval expeditions, like Odysseus's to Troy. Armed men in ships, no matter what the circumstances, couldn't resist when booty called. Following Philip Goss's notion of the pirate cycle, these veterans on the loose could grow in power and compass until they broke apart into factions or faced suppression by some newly organized and armed state. Some, like Odysseus, had trouble finding their way home and got absorbed into new adventures. Athens claimed to suppress piracy, but the record again is ambivalent. Even the histories of Philip and Alexander don't clarify who the pirates were and how it was that they were suppressed. Success against pirates was something aspiring politicians were starting to claim, as if everybody already knew who they were and that they were enemies of mankind. From the perspective of Imperial Rome, probably the first great state to engage the problem of piracy head on, and certainly to memorialize it at length, identity didn't matter. Pirates were what pirates did; they robbed at sea. Yet even here, the extent of these robberies made the pirates of our authoritative texts beg to be known by almost any other name. The alleged pirate haven of [ unintelligible ] Cilicia on the south coast of Anatolia was just that, an alleged pirate haven. Despite voluminous speeches and musings by Cicero and Strabo, most of the Emperor of Pompeii's glorious 1st Century B.C. campaign against the Cilician pirates doesn't tell us much about what the Cilician pirates were doing, much less what they thought they were doing. Were these rebels, rivals, or criminal subjects of the empire? What we do know is that they were suppressed only after it became clear that their depredations exceeded their value as slave traders to the empire. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the shift to early medieval times, Mediterranean pirates adapted to new openings, and probably also reduced pickings. Pirates now included Vandals and Vikings, but even the rich trade of Byzantium was but a shrunken rivulet compared to the massive flow of luxuries to Rome. Historians of this period are divided, following the 19th Century thesis of Henri Pirenne, as to whether piracy grew or diminished in the centuries leading up to about 1000 A.D. Pirenne argued for a gradual decline, broken only by the Islamic eruption into the Mediterranean beginning in the early 8th Century. However it went, the next wave included crusaders and their Islamic foes, and thus piracy was fueled more than ever by religious animosity. But it was only after the Black Death in the mid-14th Century, and much more so with the rise of inter-oceanic shipping in the 16th Century, that piracy seems to have returned in force to the Mediterranean, approaching the scale that it had seen in Roman times. Before discussing the Barbary's corsairs and their foes, and I don't have much to say, but they range from the Knights of Malta to the U.S. Marines, I hope you'll allow me to take a look at piracy in a broader world historical context. The South China Sea was likely to have been a hotbed of piracy since pre-history -- on the far right of this screen, just north of Borneo there and west of the Philippines -- but sea robbing only became a recorded problem of state in the late 4th Century A.D. Court chroniclers in China claim that the Taoist rebel, Sun En, was violently put down in the year 402 only after he had absorbed local pirates as henchmen and had nearly taken Beijing. Rather than face execution, many of these -- Oh, I'm sorry, Nanjing. Rather than face execution, many of these so-called "sea daemons," to use the literal translation, were said to have killed themselves. The next wave were Arab and Iranian pirates, who obviously got around, and quickly. They were the next recorded pillagers of Canton, in 758. Much later, in the early 15th Century, the Muslim eunuch [ unintelligible ] was credited with suppressing piracy in the China seas as well as voyaging as far as East Africa. The most famous of China's early modern pirates, roughly contemporary with the early Barbary corsairs and even the first French pirates, or corsairs active in the Caribbean, were the Wako, or Woku, some of them Japanese and some homegrown. The term means dwarf outlaws, which sort of cuts pirates down to size. Their bases, in any case, were in southwest Japan, and most historians agree that they grew in power following the Ming withdrawal from overseas engagement in favor of internal consolidation after about 1440. In the 16th Century, the Wako were kept busy by the steady influx of Japanese and then Spanish-American silver, and the considerable outflow and growing outflow of silk, porcelain, and other luxury commodities. Before long, the Wako pirate gangs pillaged coastal cities from Hainan to the Korean peninsula. The problem only subsided after massive campaigns were organized by the Ming in the 1560s, and also with Tokugawa unification in Japan, just about 1600, which closed off many of the former bases. Chinese and Japanese from the period suggest that the Wako were not above organizing large expeditions with no greater aim than enriching themselves through pillage, that is, that they were really pirates. Ransoming kidnapped victims was common and some victims were sold into slavery. But this kind of raiding for people was not sustainable, or didn't seem to be, and historians of the region suggest that Ming attempts at monopoly trade restrictions had as much to do as any other causal factor with creating the Wako monster, that is, aside from letting down their guard. Smuggling, as we have heard from other presenters today, was always closely related to piracy, even outside the west, and the problem was clear in the case of Rome's dependency on Cilician slave raiders who grew too big for their britches. But this complicated the matter of self-identity. Were pirates merchants just working outside the legal monopoly? Monopolies and other forms of state intervention in overseas trade had a way in any case of creating whole groups of spurned businessmen who felt they had no choice, and even a right, to turn corporate raider. Next came the half Japanese, half Chinese pirate king Ching Chelong [ spelled phonetically ] , known to Europeans as Koshinga [ spelled phonetically ] . He menaced the commerce and also engaged in commerce in the South China Sea from the 1640s until his death in 1662. Like other so-called sea rebels, or hai-ni [ spelled phonetically ] of this era, Koshinga took advantage of China's lack of naval power and weak control over the coastal cities to extort safe passage fees and also to raid as far inland as Nanjing. He benefited directly from the political instability that followed the Ching takeover of the capital of China in 1644. Koshinga even allied with the fleeing Ming and defended them on Taiwan, which he seized from the Dutch, who were already actively engaged in what some people called piracy in the region at this time. His son took up the banner after his death and held out on Taiwan until the Ching finally annexed it with a military expedition in 1683. China's reluctant return to the sea was, in part at least, done in the name of suppressing piracy. Koshinga appears to have considered himself a businessman, was quite proud to bear the name Quo Shing Ye [ spelled phonetically ] from which Koshinga comes, meaning excellency with the royal family's name. The Ming had granted him the honorific Imperial name Chu. He is what J.L. Anderson might have called an episodic pirate. We might just call him a wartime opportunist. So-called Morrow [ spelled phonetically ] pirates, especially those subject to the Sulu Sultan, remained active throughout early modern times in the Southern Philippines, much to Spanish chagrin. And there were a variety of other coast and island dwelling sea raiders scattered all over Southeast Asia. The Sea Dayaks, or Ebon of Borneo, were another kind of seemingly intrinsic pirates, a culture that valued pillaging raids as male rights of passage and means of promotion. These were pirates happy enough to come home with your head, if not the contents of your purse. Vietnam produced a major outbreak in a period of political instability after 1787 that lasted into the first decades of the 19th Century. This was the era of Jing Ye [ spelled phonetically ] , a man who ran a vast criminal syndicate that was taken over by his wife known as, Jing Ye Sao [ spelled phonetically ] in 1807. She was probably the largest, most commanding, that is, female pirate in history. From humble starts -- she came initially to this trade as a Cantonese prostitute -- she was the boss at the end of her times of six pirate fleets and perhaps 40 thousand followers. But by 1810, the operation was starting to collapse. It was too big to manage. And she and her second in command, Won Jing Bao [ spelled phonetically ] , made a deal with the Ching government, very much like the amnesty that Peter Earle was describing as a kind of cheap way of fighting pirates by different empires, and they became pirate hunters. Even here, the cycle had begun with paramilitary assistance to Vietnamese rebels. These pirates had not always been pirates; they weren't intrinsically attached to this trade, but they had spun off from another conflict. Jing Ye Sao appears never to have considered herself a pirate queen, although that's what we call her today. Perhaps she was. But her petition, which does survive and is translated, thankfully for me, and she and others claimed that they were forced, much as some of the 18th Century pirates who were brought before justice did. She didn't quite blame society, but she referred to a common refrain. The other main pirate hotspots were India's Malabar Coast, the South and East Coasts of Madagascar, and the Persian Gulf, The Malabar pirates, perhaps as old as the Monsoon Trade with gold-rich Africa -- you can see Cochin and Calaquelan here near Cape Comorin in Southern India; they're just a little north of that -- they seem to have thrived, despite ample competition from newer pirates on the scene after 1500, such as the Portuguese and later the Dutch, French, and English. Intrinsic pirates, once again, as J.L. Anderson might label them. The Malabaris lived to pillage and pillaged to live. They were quite famous for this. Were the Portuguese pirates when they entered these seas after 1500? Certainly, they didn't think so. But even sympathetic historians of the Portuguese Empire nowadays, such as Maylin Neuett [ spelled phonetically ] , admit that that's how they got their start. They established themselves violently, despite a lack of goods to offer in a fiercely competitive and almost saturated market. The pirates of Madagascar were, for the most part, not locals, but rather European buccaneers that, as we've heard, were flushed out of the Caribbean as a result of crackdowns beginning in the mid-1680s. Some were French, some were English, and there were some others of different background. More than a few of them came into these seas only temporarily as part of the pirate round. Perhaps the most revealing of the early modern pirates' identity crisis was Captain William Kidd, who went from privateer to pirate hunter to pirate, all while maintaining that only the times had changed; he hadn't changed at all. Held up as an archetype by the court, says an example, I guess, of Hostis Humani Generis, Kidd went to the scaffold still saying that he was certainly not a pirate, but rather an honorable but much misunderstood man. It was a bad moment, as we've heard, to be accused of interfering with the business of the English East India Company. The so-called Qasimi pirates of what are today the United Arab Emirates, who I'm told now operate an airline boasting private bedrooms, also became a problem for English East India companies officials, but about a century after Kidd. According to the Barrister historian Charles Davies, the Qasimi were like their Barbary brethren, more likely warriors of the faith, or Ghazis, in this case, influenced by the newly emergent Mohabi Revivalism sweeping the peninsula. Ghazis or not, the Qasimi were violently suppressed during and shortly after the era of Napoleonic wars. Getting back to the Barbary corsairs then, or pirates of North Africa, their rise and long life has been attributed to a number of factors. One, as already noted, was the huge rise in inter-oceanic commerce following the voyages of Columbus and Tekamah. The treasures of the Indies, East and West, had to be redistributed, and this drew predators. Corsairs were aided by religious intolerance in Iberia on the one hand, which produced a number of Morisco rebels, and tolerance and even embrace on the side of the Ottomans. Muslim and Jewish refugees swelled the ranks of corsairs who set out to harass Christian shippers and Hapsburg imperialists under the Barbarossa brothers and their successors. Refugees, warriors of the faith, pirates. Mediterranean piracy, perhaps for geographical reasons as much as any other, had since ancient times always been more interested in people than any other type of plunder. Roman plays often had characters who were reunited victims of pirate kidnapping and sale. Pirates were slave raiders and, true to form, the Barbary corsairs soon set up holding areas, the infamous baos, in cities such as Algiers and Tunis, allowing their prisoners to send letters to relatives in Spain or Italy or even England to collect ransom to be delivered by neutral representatives, often the redemptionist orders, such as the Mercidarians and Trinitarians. Some recent studies in Mexico have shown that Mexican parishioners produced a whole lot of revenue for these redemptionist orders to try to free the captives of Barbary. Cervantes was a lucky survivor and wove his experiences as a captive in Barbary into Don Quixote and other writings. Interestingly, he seems not to have been that bitter. This and other pirate heretic experiences had, in fact, been rich for him as a writer. Other Spanish sources, not literary so much, from Cervantes's time, such as those of the historian of the Marisco rebellion, Marmol Carvajal [ spelled phonetically ] , are also ambivalent in their depictions of the Barbary corsairs. For them, the great Turk himself, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, might have been an outsized, almost inhuman menace. But the corsairs themselves were an intimate enemy. Among them were many renegados, or renegades. With the decline of the Ottomans after Lepanto, this piracy became a steady business, first in kidnapping and ransoming and then in extortion, promising safe passage to European and eventually American trading vessels in exchange for cash payments, as well as the most up to date arms and ships. For the cash-strapped early U.S. republic, paying protection money to the bays of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli seemed both expensive and wrong, but mostly expensive. The British were initially happy to watch their poor Americans, ex-colonial Americans, get caught in the Barbary net. And, as we've heard, the British had some agreements already to be left alone. But after Napoleon was out of the way, the British, the Dutch, and eventually the French joined in to suppress the Barbary corsairs forever. The French seized Algiers in 1830. Some recent commentators have likened a so-called Barbary Wars to America's first war on terror, but more careful researchers have had trouble backing this assertion up. Nearly all of the arguments leading to the war, including those of its earliest promoter, Thomas Jefferson, were couched in the language of free trade, not religious disagreement. These were mostly Muslims who used terror at sea to make a good living, but it is probably anachronistic to call them Islamic terrorists. From their own perspective, they were not engaged in piracy at all, but rather taxation. Ships that passed through what they regarded as their territory paid taxes or paid the consequences. This was, of course, too much for the disciples of Hugo Grotius, whose religion included fundamental belief in the freedom of the seas. Letters sent by emissaries in Algiers and Tunis to the English court in fact reversed the charges quite often, noting how they themselves had been the victims of vicious attacks by Spaniards, Englishmen, and worst of all, the crusading Knights of Malta. These international businessmen ran a slave bizarre of their own on La Valetta, and raided as far as the Levante and Anatolia. Just who was calling whom a pirate, when it seemed that Mammon had seized the most pious hearts? My own interest in piracy did not grow out of a study of maritime history or even global history, although I had excellent mentors in this at the University of Minnesota, a notably landlocked place. [ laughter ] There was Lake Superior, but it even froze over in the wintertime [ laughs ] , and hard to imagine pirates on Lake Superior. Instead, it was while tracking gold and other treasures, some of which are part of the Kislak Collection, I understand, some pieces of gold and silver bullion exported from the 16th, 17th Centuries, in my case from Spanish South America. And I came across documents while researching this relating to pirate attacks, alleged, feared a,nd real, along the Pacific Coast of what are today Ecuador and Colombia, the region described by Sabrina Guerra this morning. What the Spanish called piracy was a periodic problem in this region, of course, from the 1570s onward. This is a document from the notary books of Quito that relates -- it's a little bit difficult to read, I'm afraid -- that relates to the attack of John Oxnam on a cargo vessel carrying gold from Quito. It was one of the plundered vessels. And this is an attempt by a merchant to pay back the gold, which was recaptured by the Panamanian Audiencia, or high court, and he had trouble getting the money back. After the pirates had taken his money, then the officials had taken it and he couldn't get it. I did not know anything about piracy beyond Treasure Island at the time, but I quickly discovered the rich literature that documents it in English and, to a lesser extent, in Spanish and French. What became evident right away, aside from the boyish bias perhaps, was that most of the English scholarship was built around two sources, Exquemelin's 1678 Buccaneers of America, which is beautifully displayed on the Web site of the Library of Congress right now on the Kislak -- it's a page turner. You can actually turn the pages virtually. It's quite beautiful. And the other source was, of course, Johnson's -- Captain Johnson's 1724 General History of the Pirates. There were some exceptions to this, of course, and Peter Earle is one of the great ones. There have been several others. All of these authors have made extensive use of Spanish records, of which there are in fact mountains, especially in Spain but also in the former colonies, to offset the Anglo-centrism typical of the best known literature on piracy. Irene Wright many years ago translated key Spanish documents from the era of Drake through the taking of Jamaica. The work of Engle Sluiter and Cornelius Goslinga and several others on Dutch sources have also enlightened us. And there have been some recent works by French historians, such as Jean-Paul Moreau, to give us a sense of the French angle. Even so, the problem of pirate self-identity has remained. Jaquiers [ spelled phonetically ] admitted as much about the Barbary corsairs at the end of what otherwise feels like a definitive book, calling them corsairs and pirates all throughout. Having spent so much time and energy getting to know these types of subjects, I at first sympathized with the colonial victims. And my first presentations about piracy were in the tone, "Hey everybody, your lovely Buccaneers were in fact greedy murders, bad guys!" This didn't go over well, as I would subsequently discover with other attempts to label the pirates as criminals. So I backed off and went back to the books, the archives, and whatever else there was. In fact, a growing secondary literature was worthwhile. Although they did use the term Corsadio in much of the colonial era, the pirates did refer, as early as the 16th Century, to their seaborne enemies as pieratas. They used this term at the last word on this document. And they always added these other adjectives, "Lutheran heretics" -- [ laughter ] -- and other such things to be hurtful when they thought that it was applicable. Whether sanctioned by some prince or some queen or not, the idea was early on to condemn foreign sea raiders as vermin, that is, to identify them as a kind of insect or animal that should be done away with, exterminated. The idea that pirates infested seas, this is the common language of the 16th and 17th Centuries, was repeated and circulated widely throughout the colonies, even far away from the vulnerable coast. The notion of the pirate as a monster, at least in Spanish eyes, became clearest with the rise of Francis Drake. There is a new edition available of Lope de Vega's Dragontea from 1597 and the title doesn't even need explanation. [ laughter ] It's a pirate epic in the form of a dragon tale. But the other side of Drake's story, of course as we have seen, suggests an alternative, that of the roguish corsair or, as in the film last night, kind of heroic underdog. And Drake's own self-fashioning, a positive self-fashioning that he had much to do with, was successful enough to win him a knighthood, in his own lifetime, of course. And he was greatly enabled, I think, by the circumstances of the moment as much for getting along within the English court as getting demonized in the Spanish one. As Nina Gerassi-Nevarro has brilliantly shown, Drake's image in Hispanic literature has proved extraordinarily plastic over the years. Certainly, he himself was touchy about being called a pirate, but he wouldn't have minded being called a maverick. [ laughter ] Dutch privateers, such as Piet Hein, offer the same Janus-faced image of the pirate across the centuries, nationalist heroes worthy of a soccer chant on the one hand -- I won't try to chant that in Dutch -- [ laughter ] -- scourges sent by an angry god on the other hand. But it was with the rise of Caribbean buccaneers, some would say the true pirates of the Caribbean, that a new image of the pirate as marginal survivor, the blood-soaked, stinking, nameless, wretch comes into play. Who were these men swept up into the ranks of Francois Lu-Linay [ spelled phonetically ] and Henry Morgan and Laurent de Graph? Were they runaway indentured servants or slaves? Refugees from civil wars? Outcast seamen? Presumably, many were desperados in the true desperately poor and hungry sense of the term. And for them, perhaps, piracy was one of few options. Reading Richard Dunn's Sugar and Slaves, a seminal work on the Caribbean, made me less sympathetic once again, as it painted men like Morgan as nasty, grasping creatures with no interest beyond setting up nice, like a law-abiding planter. The idea of pirates as slave owners, even if only aspiring ones, seemed to go against the literature that soon followed that painted pirates as a breed of pre-industrial working class heroes. I had always liked this idea, and was almost convinced there might be some truth to it, especially when I read Marcus Rediker's arguments about the lust for revenge, coming from especially a sadistic form of class oppression before the mast on certain types of vessels. But I still remained skeptical of the possibility of a sustaining honor amongst thieves, however motivated, and I still, I guess, felt rather bad for the Spanish victims who had detailed their mistreatment at the hands of such men in excruciating detail in so many archives. With the literature on pirates as primitive rebels came a number of books and articles on pirates as women. Certainly, there were many, and more than we know, but only two or three in the record. Anne Bonny is perhaps best known, and Mary Reid, as you've already seen, and Captain Johnson gave them to us in however mutated form. At least as interesting to me, was the Basque pirate fighter Catalina de Erauso [ spelled phonetically ] , who won special dispensation from the Pope in the mid-17th Century that allowed her to go on living in the guise of a man for the first half of that time. Women pirates in disguise have made it to the big screen, of course, but their existence raises more questions, in fact, than it answers, I think, about shipboard camaraderie and the importance of costume in signifying identity. Suggestions of homosexual intimacy among pirates in the golden age has generated yet another scholarly literature that paints the Atlantic's most infamous rogues as gay blades. [ laughter ] The problem here has also been evidence, and perhaps even more so than with female pirates; regardless of their own or their comrades' inclinations, the pirates who wrote for us -- the Dampier's, Exquemelin's, Lucan's, and Ringrose's -- remain silent on this matter. They barely offer sexual innuendos of any kind, although there are a few. I have searched hard for them. [ laughter ] Still, it is this literature that has helped to inspire Mr. Depp's disarmingly androgynous screen character. Identity politics, I think, allows us to project modern selves onto the anti-heroes of the past. Others have taken less controversial approaches in presenting the pirates of the golden age, or at least some of them, as highly competent geographers and naturalists, even ethnographers. William Dampier certainly fits the pirate-as-pioneer-scientist mold, as do Basil Ringrose, Lionel Wafer, and several others. It is pleasant to think, perhaps, that the pirates were all as fascinated by the mating habits of capuchin monkeys as they were by the comings and goings of treasure fleets, but a handful of participant observers does not add up to a general trend. If the documents again are any suggestion, and this includes the journals of these men themselves, the stereotypes of pirates as violent drunks, who were often lost and misguided and desperate and very rarely well-fed and poorly informed, were true. Most recently, my colleague, Peter Earle, whose knowledge of this field is vastly deeper than my own, has compared a number of early modern pirates to terrorists. To be more precise, if I understand him correctly, he has likened England's successful war against piracy that began in the early 18th Century -- now we see earlier than that -- to a kind of war on terror. In this case, the pirates represented not a nation-state or even proxied navy, but rather a relatively small group of mostly Anglo-American criminals whose use of terror to advance their aims had to be stopped by a strong state, in this case their imperial parent. Although I don't doubt the wisdom of this argument, I have a sense that the image of pirates as terrorists will be extremely disappointing to my 10-year-old daughter. I found in a recent talk in Ecuador that even in what I thought was pirate unfriendly country, comparing pirates to paramilitaries of the sort now plaguing Colombia went over like a lead balloon. It is probably just as inadvisable to argue that many pirates were something like early modern versions of military subcontractors, private outfits assigned a particular job or two and allowed to roam with little oversight. I'll try not to repeat my mistakes in Quito by going even further in comparing pirates to narco traffickers, which was even less popular, but I'll try to ask you to consider this. If Max Weber was right in defining the state as bona fide and capable only inasmuch as it was able to exert a monopoly on violence, what did it mean for the state when it allowed subjects to subcontract pillage? Is the state still in charge, or has it in fact shed a piece of its sovereignty that might not be retrieved? I ask because the documents from the early modern period overwhelmingly suggest that the people the Spanish and we today call pirates were acting with one or another form of state license almost always in-hand. Despite cynical uses of these so-called letters of mark and reprisal, most seaborne raiders seem to have believed in these documents, that they meant that they were acting legally, that they were not pirates. Well, I've dragged you around the world and across the centuries in search of real pirates, only to suggest that none, or almost none, will stand up. The documentary record east and west is full of references to pirates, but self-defined pirates, also there were some, remain extremely rare. It is not unusual, of course, for criminals to claim they were doing right by someone or thought they were, or at the scaffold many went through logical and verbal gymnastics to justify their worst deeds. Some, like Zheng Yi Sao and many of the pirates hanged by the English in the early 18th Century, claimed to be following orders or to be pressed into service, to be robbing against their will. It's easy in retrospect to claim that there's really no mystery here, just lies on the part of generations of seaborne criminals. Several factors complicate this picture when we survey sea raiding over the long term and in varying global contexts. One factor might be labeled cultural differences at what constitutes war or just war. Were the Sea Dayaks pirates in the eyes of their neighbors, or just fearless warriors who happened to carry out their attacks in canoes? Was the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands an act of piracy, or just another step toward empire? It's hard to say, perhaps, but these were acts carried out with a license. This brings up the problem that is perspective, troublesome even in more familiar waters where capitalism and the rule of law were established across cultures. Were the Barbarossa brothers ambitious businessmen, provincial governors, or Jihadist Ghazis? Or were they all of these things and pirates, too? It is difficult for me to offer a definitive answer without letting the pirates off the hook. I will simply reiterate that I believe the study of piracy, more than most topics, demands extremely close attention to context and perspective. That piracy, or larceny at sea, is a genuine and ancient phenomenon is not in question, yet despite all of the evidence, it seems that pirate identities in the conman criminal spirit of "catch me if you can," remain as fluid as the Gulf Stream. Thank you. [ applause ] Barbara Tenenbaum: Thanks very much, Professor Lane, for that very interesting world-view of pirates. You've also alerted me not to speak of Drake, as I usually do, as a state-supported terrorist. [ laughter ] Well, you know, we in the Hispanic Division have our own point of view. [ laughter ] It is now my pleasure to introduce to you and to bring her to the podium Carmen Boullosa, a very well-known and well-loved Mexican novelist and poet who has written on pirates and who has a special relationship with Exquemelin, I think. And she is currently the distinguished lecturer at the City University of New York. Professor Boullosa. Carmen Boullosa: Hello. I am here not as a historian that I'm not, but as a novelist. I wrote two novels on pirates. This is one translated into English, They're Cows, We're Pigs. Excuse me, but I am a cow. Here, the pigs are the pirates. And, honestly, I have more the soul of a cow than the soul of a pig. I'm going to talk to you why did I love, or loved, pirates? As I was telling you, I wrote this novel, then a second novel called El Medico de los Piratas, and then I wrote a radio piece on the two women pirates that have been already been mentioned here. That was produced by Radio [ Spanish ] in Mexico and I had -- I really tried hard to make out a fit, a novel, but I couldn't make it. I just -- they didn't work for a novel. They were perfect for a radio play, but they couldn't hold inside a novel. Later, also [ unintelligible ] Valdez, the Cuban novelist, has written a novel about them, Lovas del Mar [ spelled phonetically ] . Maybe Gina Gerassi has read it, I haven't. I confess my sin. Okay. So, why I love pirates -- or honestly, why I love my pirates? I don't love all pirates. I have my attachment for certain group of pirates, not all of them. It all started when I was writing a novel on Moctezuma in 1990. I was finishing a novel on Moctezuma, our last Aztec Emperor, or the last one that was in fact the whole emperor; not the one that was fighting to keep the empire going. And I was about to finish it and I said in an interview I was finishing the novel and a young, energetic editor of [ Spanish ] was building a collection for young readers, and he phoned me and told me, "I have to speak with you." And he explained he wanted to do a collection for young readers on historical characters of Mexico and he wanted me to write a novel on Moctezuma for young readers. I couldn't do it. I knew I couldn't do it. First of all, because in the novel I wrote on Moctezuma that is called [ Spanish ] -- it's never been translated into English -- I saw how I couldn't make Moctezuma a real character of the kind of novels I write. I couldn't really get into his world. Yes, I am a Mexican, yes my nanny's a new [ Spanish ] , hardly Spanish. Yes, they told me in the night when they put me to sleep their tales. Yes, I do understand a lot of their world, but yes, their world is not precisely the world that Moctezuma lived in. A world that ignored Europe existed, that considered itself the center of the world, that was totally organized in a very strong and strict way, considering religion a fundamental part with their Gods. I mean, that world, the way it was, no longer exists and it's a world where the novel wasn't -- isn't possible as the novel is. Meaning, Moctezuma was not an isolated character, was not somebody totally separate from his community. He belonged to this world. My novel was not a real, real novel. What I did is I grabbed Moctezuma from the past, I made him appear in Mexico City in the present. I traveled him around the streets. I related him to women of my generation. And he, again, disappeared. It's [ Spanish ] . So I knew I couldn't write that novel. But they paid very well. [ laughter ] And he had other themes in front of him and he said, "Well, Carmen, you have written already two novels with children as characters. I know you will be able to write a historical novel for young readers. Why don't you try other of my themes?" And he browsed in front of me the papers and my eye fell on the word "pirates," because of Moctezuma. Because I had read -- when I was writing my not-novel on Moctezuma that the treasure of Moctezuma when traveling to Spain as a gift to the king had been stolen by pirates. And that [ Spanish ] had seen one of these pieces and had been astonished at the beauty of these miniature of [ Spanish ] -- I don't know how you say that in English -- feather? Feather art. And he had said, "Oh, this comes from a world of artists. These humans are better than us." And I wanted to tell the story of that gold that survived and had ended in the hands of pirates. I thought I could write that novel. That novel meant my Moctezuma wasn't going to be he himself, but pirates were going to give me a Moctezuma that could belong to the occidental world. So, irresponsibly enough, I accepted the money they paid. I spent it very quickly -- [ laughter ] -- and I started to work on pirates. But my soul was not where my pocket was. What I wanted more than anything was to return to my world. That was, in reality, my world. And that was also the world of my nannies. My nannies understood perfectly well this cosmo vision where we have that God and we have Hell and we have Heaven. And I wanted again to belong to that world over there. So, I thought, okay, I'm going to do a pirate's novel but let's go to the devil's territory. And I went to Lope de Vega and La Dragontea, that has already been here spoken. So, I went to La Dragontea, but I imagined that that character was so incredibly boring. Why I was going to write a novel on a character seen really as a devil. There was no complexity there. So I started looking more and, luckily for me, I found Exquemelin's book. And luckily, I say, because yes I feel tempted to return to that world, yes I feel tempted to return to my cosmo vision, but I did not want to return to the girl's territory. After trying my Moctezuma novel, I did not want again to go inside the household, as I had done with my earlier novels. I thought of women's world and I thought, oh no, I don't want to be where those girls are. I really don't. I couldn't care less. I didn't even care about that kind of men, the men that are looking inside the household. All those men that are so well-dressed and are attending what happens inside the house. No, no, no. I wanted to be outside. Outside where the action was happening. So yes, I had the Exquemelin book on my head, but mostly what I had was this fantasy. I thought of pirates and I remembered [ Spanish ] and those pirates that were pure freedom, that where, yes, there are some weapons around, but there somebody seen. I was that boy. I wanted to be their musician. Or, that's what I thought. Of course, if one pays a little bit more attention to that frame, of that depiction -- that romantic depiction of pirates, we find a girl, a nude girl, backwards. I wasn't interested in her. I really didn't want that. What I wanted was this. That's what I wanted to enter. That's what I wanted to inhabit. That was my original to say, so not where my wallet was, not where my head was, because my head was already searching and trying to figure out how was the community of the brothers of the coast, but where my heart was. And if I was going to fill that little gap that I had already torn out, what I wanted was a woman pirate, like the one we have here. Finally, in my novel, I did. I dressed the girl as a boy. Later on, using Catalina de Erauso, of course, I wrote another novel, that time in the colony inside Mexico City she arrives dressed as a man. But I won't go into that other story. Well -- so Exquemelin. The Caribbean. As I had done with my Moctezuma novel, I needed to know how the Europeans had built the imaginary Moctezuma. So I had been looking at images, reading what the chronicles, the Spaniards, had written about Moctezuma, as well as I had been reading [ unintelligible ] and knowing the insides. But I needed -- I wanted to know how was seeing the Caribbean, this ideal Caribbean when we see this happy community enjoying a generous nature. As I said, I had been looking at [ unintelligible ] , how [ unintelligible ] had depicted the Indians and how he got re-colonized, to say so, the Mezzo-American world. And also I went into these Greco-Italinization of the Caribbean, not because I wanted to use their version, but because I needed to see the whole frame, how those times had been seen, and Exquemelin did help, because Exquemelin is a great liar. First of all, he's a major liar because his book changed in each translation, as Nina Gerassi very well knows. In the Dutch version, we have some people are the evil ones. In the English version, when Morgan appeared being the real evil, he sued them, so they had to change the version. So it changed language and it changed version, so much so that some people think that the real author is the publisher, Dr. [ unintelligible ] , is the one who re-wrote the book according to what the market demanded, the local market demanded. We have here the first version, and the book gave me something that's very treasurable for a novelist, a lot of details. Immense amount of details, crabs, plants, not a scientific eye. He was just providing information, most of it probably totally wrong, but that helped me imagine more, together with the iconography I was collecting together with the books about piracy I was reading, I was building that imaginary world I needed. And I went into others of the time looking and at maps. I've never been to Tortuga. My German translator, when she translated the book into German, she received a grant to go visit the scenes of action. Well, the author never saw the scenes of action. I've never seen them, so I had to build my how were the scenes where my novel was going to happen. I searched in the different editions of Exquemelin, I went to the John Carter Brown Library, and luckily there was no Web there, because now I went into the Web and I went crazy. There's so much material now there. But when I went to the National Library of Mexico, the books lacked the illustrations. They had been already seen by somebody else who had put them in their pocket, so I had to go abroad to look at the illustrations that my eyes needed. Because I needed that kind of information that for you historians and academics isn't that serious and important and that I know is not reliable, but I badly needed to get into the characters, into the characters. The bad guys, the real pirates, like Morgan, and my pirates, my pirates, the brothers of the coast that were building, in fact, a utopic community. They wanted everybody that belonged to their community to be totally the same, not regarding where had they been born, what was their religion, what was their race. They were all totally equal in that utopic community. They were building and, yes, they were at the same time, as you see here, being extremely violent with the ones that weren't themselves. Their only common enemy were the Spaniards, whom they considered robbers because they had stolen from the aboriginals, from the Indians, what legitimately belonged to them. So their only common hatred was one that, I am sorry to say so that me as a Mexican I partially shared, especially after writing a novel on Moctezuma, I was in really an anti-Hispanic mood. So I kind of understood their cruelty -- or, not understood, not really, but I suddenly was also attracted by their violence. And their violence shouldn't have surprised me, because the character, the main character, the narrator, Exquemelin, was nicknamed by Carpentier, who guided me to him by the way, as El Medico de los Piratas, the surgeon of the pirates. Here we have a scene that even in peaceful times being a surgeon wasn't precisely a beautiful, peaceful, out of violence profession. But the mood of -- the way I started falling into my pirates, those men that were trying to build the first socialist community of the Americans, to say it in a little pompous way, because my main character was the surgeon, the principal character of my book was going to be the body. So the book starts saying, "With my eyes, with my ears, I feel" -- all the novel is told through his bodily impressions. So, in reality my main character in my pirates novel is the body. And it's a body that's forced to an unnatural position, as we see here in this wonderful lesson of the time on learning how to swim. This is a manual showing us how to swim. Well, from the body to the violence, to these characters like [ unintelligible ] , some of which, by the way, I remember I had to go -- I went to give a reading to [ unintelligible ] them, a poetry reading to the International Poetry Festival. And I was surprised to find some of the evil pirates of Exquemelin and the Hispanic tradition as national heroes. They had their statues and there was Rackham and there was [ unintelligible ] . Well, so I wrote the book mainly, as you have seen here, through books and mainly through that book that now in fact we can browse in the Web, thanks to the generosity of the Library of Congress. And because I went to my pirates through books and, yes, also through what I had felt about it, this was not my pirate. Yes, maybe some of my pirates lacked a leg -- in fact, they did. We know how much a leg was paid and an eye was paid when they lost it in battle. Many of -- and we saw our surgeon cutting a leg and in my novel the surgeon is in fact -- sometimes they have to cut a leg. But it's not this commonplace of a pirate, but this specific community of pirates, nor this was the flag I used. They were deep into violence, my pirates, a violence that is permeating their community because, yes, they were all equal, yes they wanted to build a society that was fair for everybody, yes they had total freedom of thought and religion, but us women were forbidden. No women could be part of the community of the brothers of the coast. But they didn't use this flag. That was not their flag. Their flag was more like this. You've already seen this image, and the image also chose. Maybe that's how we can explain partially the nature of this community of pirates, here is a buccaneer, he's into hunting, he's into salting meat, yes, but mostly into treasuring leather. They needed the skins of the animals. That was very, very valuable in those times, and let's think that it was the oil of those times. They used leather to do absolutely everything: to build a carriage they needed, to their clothing they needed, to their machinery they needed. Leather was something very precious, very valuable. So they stopped in the islands. They were stranded there during months. They were hunting and buying from the people that were living there leather and meat, but meat was most -- it was [ Spanish ] compared to the valuable thing they were collecting. So, yes they started being buccaneers, they were in groups of two, that's why probably the legend of their homosexuality starts. I believe in it, by the way, because a community where girls are forbidden, and, not only that, in their contracts is written that they cannot board with a woman but they can board with a male friend. It's said clearly and I imagine it started like they are here hunting, they are thereby pairs protecting one another, and then suddenly they turn into pirates. They are forced to turn into pirates. They have to protect themselves from the empire that's not going to allow them the free trade of that valuable thing. Besides, they are Dutch, most of them. Yes, there are some French too, but in any case, they do not trust the Pope, meaning they are our enemies. I mean, the Hispanics enemies -- I'm meaning ha, ha, ha, poor me. That's my tradition. But they are outside there, so they are those runaways of the Catholic Empire. Here we have another scene. You've seen all of these images already. And, as I was telling you, I wrote this book inside libraries. As you see very well in this illustration of the library, libraries have much more to do with this than with pirates. So, honestly I asked myself many times, am I an anto-filiac [ spelled phonetically ] person or am I a pirate-filiac [ spelled phonetically ] person? Well, I am both. Yes, here I am with the [ unintelligible ] , with the bees. I am there, I am working, I am looking, but I'm looking at that universe of pirates and without the library I would have been unable to touch that territory out of law that pirates are. Of course, as I started talking, I showed you my cosmology, the world where I was raised, that world where law, of course, exists. This is more my universe, but the advantage that pirates gave to me is that though I didn't have to remain in the devil's side, I didn't have to remain on the angel's side, they gave me the chance -- and I didn't have to remain in the girl's side -- they gave me the chance to do a wonderful trip to another universe that was in the borders of my cosmo vision and the borders of my culture that related to it very violently, but that gave me the chance to write some novels. They have been reappearing in my other novels, not then only my pirates, but in the novel I wrote on the Battle of Lepanto. Of course, I have Cervantes being kidnapped by the pirates. And in the novel I just gave my publisher that will be out next June, [ Spanish ] , the Renaissance artist, that woman artist that was in the court of Philip II. It is a fact, it's pure history that her first husband was kidnapped and killed, murdered, by the pirates in Sicily. So, pirates seem to hound me too, though, I assure to you I am more into the anto-filia and that's it. Thank you very much for your attention. [ applause ] [ end of transcript ]