>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Today's lecture is presented by the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
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Excuse me.
Today's lecture is titled English Colonialism and Piracy
from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
and our speaker is Dr. Patricia O'Brien.
Dr. O'Brien is concluding her tenure here at the Kluge Center
as a Kislak Fellow for the study of the history
and cultures of the early Americas.
Her research focuses upon Australian history, in particular,
Australian cultural and political history.
She also specializes in the colonial history of the Pacific,
race relations, indigenous histories,
British Imperial history, and mining in Melanesia.
Currently, she's working on histories
of Australian Imperial relations in the colonies of Papua
and New Guinea, New Zealand colonial relations with Samoa
and British Colonies, Colonialism, privateers,
and indigenous contact in the Caribbean.
She has authored numerous publications
and received several prestigious awards
and appointments including JD Stout Fellow in New Zealand Studies
at the Stout Center, Victoria University, Wellington,
New Zealand for 2012, the first Australian
to be awarded this prestigious fellowship.
She is the first full time faculty member for the Center of Australian
and New Zealand Studies, where she has been teaching since 2001,
and is also a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University.
She also knows a lot about pirates and that is
where I am very excited to hear her speak.
So, without further ado, please welcome Dr. Patty O'Brien.
[Applause]
>> Thank you very much, Jason, for that very generous introduction.
I would like to begin by saying thank you.
I would like to start by thanking the Kluge Center team,
headed by Carol Brown, Carolyn Brown, sorry, Mary Lou Reker,
JoAnne Kitching, and I'd also like to say a special thank you to the,
to Travis Hensley and Jason Steinhauer for all their work
in accommodating me over the time that I have been here.
I also had a bit of a break in my Kislak tenure.
I had a, a, a, as Jason mentioned, I lived in New Zealand last year,
so I had my own Pacific journey, but now I'm back in, in the Americas,
and this of course has brought out a lot of things
about this relationship between the Americas and the Pacific
that I'm gonna talk about today.
I've also been very blessed in recent weeks
by having a very gifted summer intern work with me, Ariana Arias.
Is she here?
No, not yet.
Anyway, I, I have really put Ari through her paces
with numerous research tasks, and she's really impressed me
with the standard of her work, so I think Ari very, very much.
I also want to say thank you to the many librarians
that I've encountered during my time here at the LOC,
and also to acknowledge the very rich intellectual community
that I have been a part of.
As I wrote up this lecture, it reminded me of the many,
many scholars that I have met here
and the various conversations we've had,
the various references they've given me, or various aspects
of history that they led me to.
And so they, so this community has greatly enriched my work.
I also very much need to acknowledge the Jay I Kislak Foundation,
who found, who has funded my fellowship,
and also the Kluge Endowment for their support of the Kluge Center.
So you might wonder what business does a Pacific historian have doing
a fellowship in American Studies, but I hope the answer
to that question will be answered by the end of this lecture.
So to begin.
Three hundred and thirty years ago, a ship named Revenge set
out from Cape Charles, Virginia,
and the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay not far
from here, in August, 8, 1683.
On board were English buccaneers.
According to one of the voyage's chroniclers,
William M. Brosey Cowley, he was lured on the eight-gun Revenge
to be its master and pilot on the false pretext that it was heading
for his desired destination of Hispaniola, in the Caribbean.
Cowley found out instead that the Revenge was heading
for the Cape Verde Islands, which would be the first,
be his first port of call
on what would eventually be a circumnavigation
of the world by the Englishmen.
Also on board the Revenge was a man who would go
on to considerable fame, William Dampier.
This is a voyage of Cowley's expedition,
very faintly outlined here.
I will return to this in a moment.
Also on board was William Dampier.
He already had experience as a buccaneer, having participated
in a mass crossing of buccaneers over the Isthmus of Panama in 1679
to terrorize the Pacific Coast, sacking
and burning Spanish Colonial towns in Central America in a series
of attacks unprecedented in their brutality.
After living a pirate's life, Dampier lived quietly
in Accomack County on Virginia's eastern shore
for about a year before joining the Revenge along with 53 other men.
After provisioning at Cape Verde Islands, the officers decided
against sailing into the South Seas in the Revenge.
Instead they sailed to the coast of Guinea in search of a better vessel.
They found one off the coast of Sierra Leone.
She had 40 guns, was w, and in the words of Cowley, was well stored
with good brandy, water, provisions,
and other necessities by her Danish crew.
This prize was taken and was renamed the Bachelor's Delight,
and the crew made for Cape Horn and then the Pacific.
I've been extraordinarily fortunate during my time here
at the Kluge Center to have been able to dive into the immense
and fascinating literature on piracy.
It's a literature filled with epic stories and events, improbable feats
and experiences, and a historiography that spans a spectrum
from admiration to revulsion for piratical,
historical figures and their deeds.
But what was piracy?
The label pirate relates to alternatives like buccaneer,
freebooter, privateers, sea rovers, swashbuckler, maroon, and corsair,
all of which assign different nationality and status to the men,
for the most part, who undertook robbery at sea.
Being a buccaneer gained cache and currency after the publication
of John Exquemelin's Buccaneers of America in 1678 that was translated
into English in 1684, the same year
that the Bachelor's Delight entered the Pacific.
The term buccaneer was most closely aligned with privateer
and freebooter, indicating that a buccaneer was an Englishman
who attacks Spanish ships, towns, and settlers with
or without official sanction.
Though they may not have held letters of mark or reprisal,
or papers that gave government endorsement
to their anti-Spanish activities, buccaneers were accepted
by some English authorities in a number of instances
for performing patriotic activities that benefited the English nation.
Being described as a buccaneer, which was problematic of course
for the individual, helped some of these seafarers,
most notably the educated ones, from being, allowing them to cash
in twice, on the high seas and then in sales of their published accounts
of their adventures, so great was the intrigue
with buccaneers and their deeds.
As historian Oskar Spate so richly put it,
'late 17th century buccaneer accounts were part
of a massive publicity in which solid,
strategic commercial information was spicily garnished with tales
of derring-do and atrocity.'
Despite attempts to blur the lines of English pirates between debonair,
buccaneers, and hyper-violent desperados on the other,
the Spanish were always clear about who were pirates.
The application of that term
of course always depended on your perspective.
These portrayals of the great English navigator, a towering figure
in Pacific history, Captain James Cook,
by indigenous Australian artist Daniel Boyd, attests to this,
this point about perspective.
This is Captain No Beard, and then this picture here,
which is a depiction of Cook's landing at Botany Bay,
south of Sydney, entitled 'We Call Them Pirates Out Here'.
As does this take on a well-known map
of Australian indigenous language groups that tr -
that Boyd entitled Treasure Island.
I want to emphasize that I'm talking today
about pirates of Atlantic ancestry.
As buccaneer crews, though captained by Englishmen,
were also a complex mix of nationalities and cultures.
Pirates in the Pacific also had a very long history
that pre-dates European incursions into the ocean.
In this history, Wako pirates from Japan are most prominent,
having raided the coasts of China and Korea for centuries,
and profoundly shaped East Asian history, but that is a history
that is beyond what I'm gonna discuss today.
As it's most popularly known, buccaneering is entwined
with the history of the Atlantic,
and most particularly with the Caribbean.
Look at any, virtually any pirate film
or any kid's book on the subject.
But the story is a more geographically complex one.
There is a substantial and quite brilliant literature
that transgresses Atlantic and Pacific history,
depicting a more accurate story of the vast and complex one of piracy
that did encompass the world.
Monumental works by Oskar Spate and Rodrique Levesque,
and important works by Glenda Williams, and historians
of Micronesia such as Robert Rob, Rogers,
have presented a more expansive view of piracy.
Studies of individuals, most notably William Dampier, also shed light
on the larger story of which they are a part.
Indeed, Oskar Spate has described Dampier
as the most weighty observer amongst a cadre of contemporaries,
and the historical attention he has received duly recognizes his
historical con, contribution.
Joyce Chaplin's recent work on the history
of circumnavigation likewise underscores the expansive terrain
in which the piracy story played out.
It is one of the purposes of this lecture to recollect
that English piracy was also a Pacific story,
but what I'm presenting today is but a sliver of that immense history.
It adds new twists and complexities to that story
of buccaneering in the New World.
And I should add at this point that growing up Australian,
that I first met William Dampier as about a seven year old,
as most Australian kids did when they were given their first dose
of Australian history in the seventh decade of the 20th century.
William Dampier was very much introduced to us as a man
who basically turned the lights of history on in Australia,
because he was the first Englishman to set foot on the continent.
He has gone through many revisions since that time.
So the stories of the buccaneers that started
out on the Bachelor's Delight, and the histories that they made
and witnessed, stand out in the histories that I've been reading.
They provide deeper, unusual,
and troubling insights into buccaneering.
I am particularly intrigued with the delineations
of indigenous worlds encountered in the expanse
of travels of buccaneers.
And the accounts from the Bachelor's Delight crew are particularly
interesting for this purpose.
They not only acknowledged indigenous historical actors
to be critical to their activities, they focused on the state
of indigenous worlds they encountered.
In the case of Guam, which I will be focusing on today, it was impossible
to ignore the desperate struggle of Chamorro people
against Spanish col, colonialism.
But the buccaneers had no sympathy for their plight and contributed
to the dire situation, as we will see.
Any discussion of New World indigenes circa 1680 is,
by definition, also a study of European colonial contact.
I'll come back to this map, sorry.
It's also a map of, study of, it's a discussion about the extent
of European colonial contact.
And in this case, the, I'm talking about the Spanish Empire.
The buccaneers were focused upon Spanish Empire
in its fullest extent, in the Caribbean, the Atlantic,
the Pacific coasts of the Americas, and to the western extremities
in the Isles of the West, as they were termed.
The Isles of the West, lying over eight thousand miles
across the Pacific, encompassed the Filipino Islands,
and from here Spanish power moved eastwards into what we describe
as Micronesia, islands in the Northern Hemisphere,
standing in immense area of the Pacific Ocean,
comparable to the land mass of the 48 states of the United States.
In the history of the Spanish Pacific,
1565 is the year of possession.
It was in this year that Cap, General,
Captain General Miguel Lopez de Legazpi made his Pacific,
his legendary voyage across the Pacific and founded a Spanish base
in the far west, and extended New Spain
across eight thousand miles of ocean.
In 1565 the Spanish base was on Sabu.
Then in 1571 Manila was founded.
In 1565 Legazpi also dispatched the first trading galleons from,
the first trading galleon from Sabu bound for New Spain.
Once Manila was secured, it became the western base
for the epic galleon routes that shipped,
the shipped Chinese luxury goods east to the Americas,
overland in Panama, and then across the Atlantic to Spain.
The Acapulco galleons returned enroute to Manila laden with goods,
people, some of who were enslaved, and most importantly
with silver needed to buy into the Chinese markets.
This extraordinary trade was conducted over a span of more
than 200 years with seasonal regularity.
It transferred vast amounts of wealth across the Pacific and is
of course what attracted buccaneers to the far side
of the world in the first instance.
The first English circumnavigation by the sea-hawk Francis Drake,
in the Golden Hind, and his capture of the Spanish galleon
that was colorfully named Cacafuego, off the Pacific coast
of Central America in 1578, became the stuff of legend.
Legazpi' s contribution to expanding Spanish Empire included more
possessions taken in 1565.
He declared possession of the Marshall Islands on their island
of Mejit, which the Spanish named Barbudos.
He then took possession of the Ladrones Islands from Guam,
a declaration of possession he enacted when he took out his sword
and cut tree branches, pulled out grasses, threw stones,
and cut crosses into trees.
But making a claim and actually possessing a territory were two very
different things.
One of the myths of Spanish Empire was that the desolation
of indigenes happened expeditiously, due to the deployment
of extreme violence and disease.
Though historian Matthew Restall has challenged this myth regarding the
Americas, the case of Guam really calls this historical myth
into question.
We will see this from Cowley's account of Guam from 120 years
after Spanish possession was proclaimed.
Popular renditions of buccaneering activities often portray it
as a two-way contest between European rivals.
However, the accounts of Cowley
and Dampier make quite clear how critical indigenous people
and their knowledge was to this history.
They both acknowledge the role of indigenous actors as conduits
of information about fortifications of Spanish towns, ship movements,
and geography, acting as pilots on water and guides on land.
Some indigenous people were allied with the Spanish,
and they were termed 'Spanish Indians' by the buccaneers.
Some indigenous peoples were mentioned in accounts because,
due to the fact that they came into conflict with the pirates,
resenting their presence or mistaking them for, for the Spanish
who had carried out previous degradations.
Or indigenous people were reacting to violence meted
out by the buccaneers themselves.
Dampier's account of his first navig - circumnavigation, in particular,
gives a heavy emphasis to the role of Indians
in the buccaneer enterprise in the Spanish Empire.
Dampier, his first circumnavigation
in the Bachelor's Delight was only one part of it.
It took twelve years, in many stages.
As I mentioned earlier, Dampier crossed between oceans
by the Isthmus of Panama during the raids
on central Pacific towns in 1675, 79.
At this time he noted, 'I must confess
that the Indians assisted us very much,
and he doubted whether the buccaneers would have been able
to make the crossing without the help of local Kuna people.
Indeed, Dampier went further
to acknowledge the extreme vulnerability
of the buccaneers during his journey.
This was most apparent when they tried to befriend one Kuna man,
but he would have none of it, and he answered them
in such a very, angry tone.
Dampier wrote, 'We were forced to make a virtue of necessity
and humor him, for it was now neither the time nor place
to be angry with the Indians.
All our lives lying in their hands'.
Buccaneers tempted him with beads, money, hatchets, and machetes,
but he was unmoved until one of the men pulled out a colorful petticoat
for the man's wife, which caused great delight,
and the buccaneers could finally get what they wanted
out of the this man, information.
So appreciative were the English of their good relations
with local people on the Isthmus that Dampier further noted
that rewarding them with toys of beads, looking glasses, scissors
and knives, as well as half a dollar per man from each privateer,
was the first order of business at the journey's end,
that they hoped would ensure that good relations would continue
to the next group of English privateers.
As well as these Kuna Indians in Darien, Miskito Indians
who inhabited the coast from Honduras to Nicaragua, here,
were particularly noted for aiding English privateers.
Dampier went so far as to say, 'It is very rare
to find privateers destitute of one or more of them when the commander
and most of the men are English.
They do not love the French, and most,
and the Spaniards they hate mortally'.
The English so highly prized Miskito Indians for their exceptional skills
at hunting fish, turtle, and manatees, for their courage,
and also for having such extraordinary good eyes
that they could 'decry a sail further
or see anything better than we'.
Though Dampier tried to promote the idea
that various indigenous peoples allied themselves with buccaneers
through their better judgment, closer readings of his account hint
at the role of coercion and the role of superior arms.
It's also clear from Dampier and Cowley's accounts
that indigenous people differed in their strategic importance,
value to their enterprise, and to their relative power.
And the buccaneers' behavior towards them altered accordingly.
Iberian Imperial expansion, buccaneering, and indigenous contact
and conquest of their land and resources,
were all inextricably bound together by the time of Elizabethan sea dogs.
The time, the timing of the emergence of English piracy is
of course linked with the Spanish expansion and dominance
in the Philippines, and the commencement
of the galleon route in 1565.
This in turn accelerated contact and attempts
to conquer more indigenous peoples across the Caribbean, the Americas,
and the northern Pacific islands.
Securing the galleon routes in the Pacific and the Atlantic hastened,
hastened this contact after Drake's audacious
and completely unanticipated attacks.
After this, Spain expended immense resources to arm
and secure its ships and colonial outposts.
English pirates could be kept out of the Atlantic,
but some Spanish thought they could prevent them
from sneaking into the Castilian Sea.
And this gave rise to the scheme of settling the Magellan Straits,
but I'm gonna have to set that aside and if anyone wants to ans -
ask me any questions about that, I'll talk about that at the end.
So, but the Spanish were unable to keep the English out of the Pacific,
but the extremities of Pacific voyaging did reduce buccaneer
presence there.
When the Bachelor's Delight sailed into the Pacific in 1684,
it was part of the surge in Pacific buc - buccaneering activity.
Oskar Spate explains the uptick in presence of buccaneers as a result
of the treaty of Madrid of 1671.
The treaty ceded Jamaica to the British Crown,
along with other English holdings in the Americas and provided
for the quite mutual oblivion of all hostile acts.
And eventually what this meant was that buccaneers had
to move their activities and disassociate themselves
with British colonial outposts or English colonial outposts
in the Caribbean, and this is what pushed them
into more outlying areas of the Spanish Empire.
And it was in these conditions
that spurred the English buccaneers into the Pacific.
People like John Narbor [phonetic], Bartholomew Sharpe, and others.
They rounded the horn and tried to follow the shining example
that Francis Drake had set 100 years earlier.
When the Bachelor's Delight entered the Pacific in 1684,
they met up with another buccaneer ship, the Nicholas,
and together the ships sailed in consort-ship to the lonely island
of Juan Fernandez, which is here.
Key members of the Bachelor's Delight crew, who had sailed
in the area with Bartholomew Sharpe, which included Dampier,
went to shore to look for a Miskito Indian
who had been left there unintentionally three years earlier
by the buccaneers, 'when we were chased
by three Spanish ships in the year 1681'.
Dampier, and more particularly another Miskito man amongst the crew
who had been named Robin, were ecstatic to found,
to find the marooned man who had survived alone all those years,
underscoring the Miskito hunting skills that Dampier so admired.
Dampier described the exceedingly affectionate reunion of the two men.
The marooned man, who the English named Will,
would inspire Daniel Defoe's man-Friday character
in Robinson Caruso.
Whilst another marooned seaman, Alexander Selkirk,
who was reputedly left on Juan Fernandez on purpose,
and was found there by buccaneer Woodes Rogers in 1709,
became the basis of the title character of that book
that first appeared in 1719, though of course Defoe shifted the location
of the deserted island from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
From Juan Fernandez, the Nicholas and Bachelor's Delight hal -
headed for Arica, in present day Chile, and held councils to work
out where they should wait
for the Spanish plate fleet coming towards Panama.
They had little luck, only taking a ship laden with timber,
bound for Peru, which they felt compelled to do
so she would not discover us, which burdened the English ships
with 30 more mouths to feed and water.
The buccaneers had another council and planned to attack the port
of Trujillo, in present day Peru, but the men were weak
and their numbers depleted and instead tool three ships laden
with provisions, but no silver, as the Spanish had heard
of the buccaneers and put their treasures ashore.
The buccaneers were so pleased, were pleased enough with the provisions
and decided to lie still in the Galapagos Islands for a number
of months to refresh and hopefully give the impression to the Spanish
that they had left the Pacific.
Cowley was captivated with the natural world
of the Galapagos Islands, and this chart is drawn
from a description of, of the islands, and he spent a lot
of time describing the many wonders he saw there.
'Here there was excellent, good, sweet water and the abundant of bird
and sea life made excellent, good food,' Cowley enthused.
After their time of respite, they headed back to Cape Tres Pontas
on the Gulf of Nicoya, Costa Rica.
Here they planned to raid the town of Yajure in Nicaragua,
and tried to glean information from three Spanish Indians,
possibly people of the Pueblo,
of Nicaraos who came aboard the Bachelor's Delight thinking it was a
Spanish vessel.
According to Cowley, once these men realized that they were not Spanish,
these, these indigenes set a long boat on fire.
The three men were captured and led by the neck, but they escaped
and gave notice the, to the town of Realejo in the buc - and of,
of the buccaneers' presence.
'This made our men very much discouraged
that they were decried,' Cowley reported.
The buccaneers instead took islands in the Gulf of San Miguel,
which was inhabited by Indians, and another was well stored
with cache-all [phonetic], 'but for gold and silver we got little.'
It was here that Cowley departed the Bachelor's Delight and Dampier,
and joined the Nicholas as the master.
Without the element of surprise along the Pacific coast
of the Spanish Empire, or even the ability to wring a ransom
for two ships taken at Inca [phonetic], from the authorities
at Pieta [phonetic], an enraged John Eaton, the Nicholas' captain,
decided to head west to what Cowley describes as the East Indies,
by which he meant the Spanish Isles of the West.
And this is where his account becomes particularly interesting.
The Nicholas arrived in Guam in March, 1685,
after a long trans-Pacific voyage.
The Nicholas was by now a very sick ship, no man being free of scurvy
and in a very consuming condition.
Conditions on board the ship were serious enough,
but what the Nicholas crew did not know was that they were sailing
into the middle of an insurrection by Chamorro people
against Spanish colonialism that had got so bad that most of the people
of the island had fled north to other islands.
Tensions were so great between the Spanish, the Nicholas crew,
and Chamorros that here the Europeans, the pirates
and their prey who should have been archenemies, actually allied
against the indigenes who were doing their best to repel the intruders.
By the time Cowley appeared in 1685, the Chamorros had over 160 years
of contact experience, giving them some of the longest exposure
to European colonialism in the New World.
The Magellan voyage, like the Nicholas, arrived at Guam
with a very sick ship
when it finally made the first European voyage across the ocean
in 1521, which I should mention is hundreds, if not thousands,
of years after Pacific islanders had navigated
and settled the constellation of islands in the vast ocean.
This first encounter between Europeans and Chamorros was marred
by violence, the Spanish killing Chamorros after they became incensed
by what they perceived as constant theft of their possessions,
and this inspired Magellan's name for the group.
He called it the, the Ladrones Islands, the Islands of Thieves.
The contact history prior to 1565, the year of Spanish possession,
encompassed Spaniards living on the island amongst the Chamorros
for periods, also incidences of kidnapping and enslavement,
as well as more peaceful periods of contact with Spanish explorers.
When the great Spanish general Legazpi landed on Guam in 1565,
he tried to establish cordial relations based on an erasure
of the often-violent pre-history to his encounter.
His men were ordered to do no harm to the Chamorros,
or even threaten them with words, and the Spanish claim
to have endured many provocations by the locals.
But relations lurched towards violence
after the Spanish captured a woman, man,
and a boy with the Spanish reporting that the man hanged himself.
The Chamorros then attacked a Spanish deckhand.
In revenge, Legazpi unleashed an intense wave of violence,
burning villages, massacring, and kidnapping.
So, as Friar Martin Roda would report,
that the next time Spanish vessels of His Majesty came here,
they would receive them better and keep their word
when they promised to be friends.
But Chamorro disaffection continued after possession.
In contrast, this harmonious image
of Chamorro trading with a galleon in 1590.
Contact could be characterized as sporadic, excepting the regular
but brief galleon visits, until 1668.
In this year, Jesuit Diego Luis San Vitores came from New Spain
and landed on Guam accompanied by four other priests, a layman,
and three soldiers, and renamed the Ladrones Islands the Marianas
after Queen Mariana, wife of Philip the 4th.
Though the Jesuits initially claimed staggering success
in converting the Chamorros, their attempts to alter sexual cultures
and parental fears that baptisms often preceded infant mortality,
began to seriously strain relations.
By 1670, there was open rebellion, and San Vitores was killed in 1672
after he went ahead with a baby's christening
against the wishes of the father.
The father's name was Matapon [phonetic] and he became one
of Guam's resistance leaders.
The man who became governor of Guam in 1680, Jose Quiroga,
unleashed classic conquistador tactics prompting many Chamorros
to flee to northern islands.
The lack of people on Guam meant
that the galleons could not be resupplied, so the Spanish rounded
up Chamorros who had taken flight, and force them
to return to larger settlements.
Quiroga was relieved of his duties as governor in 1681 due
to the alarming reports of his actions reaching Spain,
but he returned to Guam in 1684, not as governor
but to lead a renewed military expedition against the Chamorros.
And this was the very tense situation
that the Nicholas sailed into in March, 1685.
As you will recall, the ship's crew were
in desperate need of fresh food and water.
They tried to make contact with the locals.
Cowley reported that their first attempt, when they rode ashore
with a flag of truce, they found that when they came near,
that the natives had burned their houses
and run away by the light of them.
The crew felled some coconut trees and took the fruit back to the ship.
They again encountered Indians armed with lances,
'seeming as if they were designed to attack us, but we called out to them
and told them that we were their friends'.
This seemed to work for a day, when Chamorros engaging,
with Chamorros engaging in free trade with the Nicholas crew.
When a longboat ventured on the other side of, on the west side
of Guam, 'the Indians fell upon our boat with stones and lances,
and the English responded by shooting at them, and kill,
and we killed and wounded some of them,' Cowley wrote, though he added
that no men of the Nicholas came to any harm.
Two days later the governor, Esplana, came down to the ship
and sent a letter on board in English, French, and Dutch,
demanding in the name of the King of Spain 'what we were, wither we,
where, wither we were bound, and from whence we came.
The answer was written in French and claimed that we were employed
by a gentleman of France upon the discovery of unknown parts
of the world', a deception that Cowley thought worked by the Spani,
though the Spanish were not so easily duped.
When the English met the governor, they apologized
that 'we had killed some of the Indians in our own defense'.
Governor Esplana responded, Cowley wrote, 'by giving us quote,
toleration to kill all of them if we would'.
Cowley recounted information about Guam, its location,
and for crews ravaged by deprivations
of the Pacific crossing, what food could be found.
He leaned [inaudible] visits of the galleons,
saying 'sometimes there arrived two from the south part of Mexico, or,
and eight from Manila, which do bring sugar
to buy [inaudible] silks and other commodities.
Also of high importance was the intelligence
that the Spanish had about 600 here.'
Although Cowley and others may have been assessing the odds
of a successful attack, the relations between the English
and the Spanish continued to be ever more extraordinary.
The Nicholas was brought an abundance of food on behalf
of the governor: ten pigs, potatoes, plantains, papayas, and red peppers.
In return, Captain Eaton sent the governor a diamond ring
that Cowley noted was worth 20 pounds,
and the captain also sent the Spanish swords.
The next day, the reason behind the governor's largesse became clear.
Again, emissaries came on board, including a Jesuit, a friar,
and a caption, and asked Captain Eaton if he could quote,
'spare some powder by reason that they had war with the Indians.
And out commander spared them three barrels of powder
and offered them four great guns'.
The Spanish accepted the powder but refused the guns.
In exchange for the gunpowder, they presented Eaton with 1,600 pieces
of eight in gold and silver, but Cowley wrote,
'our captain would not take a penny.'
And for his generosity, the captain was given a diamond ring worth
50 pounds.
The alliance against Chamorros, between the buccaneers
and the Spanish colonists, continued
with the English crew chasing some Chamorros
and making them forsake their boat.
The governor's boat came again, this time bringing coconuts, potatoes,
chocolate, a piece of plate, and six china cups.
A Jesuit who was French and surely able to discern
that the Nicholas crew was not,
taught them how to make coconut milk.
Cowley found out more about the revolt of the Chamorros
and the galleons, which he said had seven decks and about fif-ton,
fifteen hundred souls on board, of which 400 were crew.
And Cowley also seemed aware that the other,
some of the other passengers were enslaved, being transported
to plantations in the Philippine's.
He also suggested that Chamorros were at risk of being kidnapped too
for this purpose, saying that the ships struck a great dread upon
the Indians.
After some days, Cowley thought
that the Chamorros 'had forgotten our first saluting of them,
so they came frequently on board to trade.
They came with food, and the crews exchanged old nails and old iron',
though Cowley noted, 'we trusted them not,
for we always had our small arms ready, and great guns loaded
with round ball and cartridges.'
And he began to refer to the Chamorros as infidels.
Some of the Nickolas crew went ashore,
and the friendly relations quickly evaporated
when they thought they were being ambushed.
Cowley wrote that their men were armed 'and so let go
and amongst a thicket of them, and killed a great many
of their, of their number.'
Fleeing Chamorros were confronted by other buccaneers
who saluted them also by making holes in their hides.
Four Chamorros were taken prisoner
and with their hands tied behind their backs,
they were brought on board.
Three leapt overboard, and a boat was sent in pursuit.
So well built were the Chamorros, Cowley noted, 'that a strong man
at first blow could not penetrate their skins with a cutlass.
One of the escapees received, in my judgment,
forty shots in his body before he died, and the last one was killed
after swimming a mile not only with his hands behind him as before,
but also with his arms pinioned or amputated.'
Even if we discount some of Cowley's account
of Chamorro physical strength here, that he recounted
such grotesque levels of violence perpetrated
by the buccaneers is deeply revealing on many levels,
not least of which is that it was acceptable,
not only for the buccaneers but also his readership.
Cowley's account first, was first published in a collection
of four voyage narratives in 1699.
The unpublished manuscript of Cowley's account varies
from the published version when recounting the chase
of these three Chamorros.
In the original version, Cowley wrote, 'when the boat caught
up with them, our carpenter, a strong man,
tried to cut off the head of one of them with his sword.
He stuck twice before he could fetch blood,
their skins being harder than a bull.
One of the Indians had 40 shot holes in him when he was found.'
The violence meted out on the Chamorros continued to contrast
with the increasing generosity of the governor, bringing 30 hogs
and fruit and vegetables,
and Captain Eaton reciprocated with six more guns.
While some of the Nicholas crew were watering the sh - watering the ship
in preparation for departure, two,
two Filipinos from Manila approached.
They told the crew that the majority of the Indians were run away
to another island ten leagues off, insinuating the weakness
of the Spaniards in this island, and would have us cut them off
and plunder the island of its riches.
But Captain Eaton, the buccaneer, replied he would hear of no
such base action, according to Cowley.
Before the Nicholas departed Guam, after six weeks, anoth -
about a hundred Chamorros made their way to the ship with some coconuts,
but our people knowing their treach - knowing their treachery,
fired about 20 guns at them, not to hit them, which made them run away.
On sailing away from the Spanish, the Nicholas saluted the governor
with three guns, and the governor responded,
ending this fraught episode between Spanish colonists,
English buccaneers, and a defiant indigenous peoples.
By the time Cowley was enroute back to England,
Dampier had made the arduous voyage across the Pacific.
Now on board the ship the Signet,
Dampier wrote of the dread the crew had of the crossing,
but was encouraged by the captain who evoked the feats of Drake
and Cavendish, and estimated the time that it would take them
to cross would be less than 50 days.
He also promised that they would cruise off Manila,
awaiting a galleon, the argument
that convinced the crew to head for Guam.
They arrived after 52 days with barely any food remaining
and the crew was grumbling about mutiny and eating Captain Swan.
Once they anchored off Guam, the Signet was approached by a boat
with a priest and three Chamorros, who took them to be Spanish.
They came aboard the Signet
but realizing their mistake tried to get away.
With great civility, Captain Swan held the priest
and two Chamorros captain, captive in the great cabin,
and declared their purpose for being at Guam was
to get provisions in exchange for money.
The priest told them of the fair commerce and rich gifts exchanged
between the governor and Captain Eaton of the English ship Nicholas,
but since departed 14 months ago the situation had deteriorated,
the priest argued,
for the circumstances he recounted happened before the Nicholas
had arrived.
Captain Swan asked for three months' provisions for 200 men.
The priest responded that a month's supply would strain all the
resources they had remaining.
While the priest was held hostage, letters, and gifts were exchanged
with the governor, though Dampier wrote
that they would get provisions by fair means or force.
Some of the crew went ashore well armed in case of attack,
either by Chamorros or Spanish, and to shoot birds.
When they spied coconut trees, they cut them down
and gorged themselves on its milk and flesh.
Chamorros visited the Signet, and 'offered to carry us to the fort
and assist us in the conquest of the island, but Captain Swan was
for molesting the Spaniards here,' Dampier wrote.
The get, the governor began to send provisions; hogs, rice, fruit,
pickled fish, and accepted gifts of fabric and more importantly,
a barrel of gunpowder, a brace of pistols, and a dozen machetes.
Whist the Signet lay off Guam, the galleon The Santa Rosa came
into view, but the governor sent a Chamorro prow
with advice of our being here.
'The news of the galleon put our men in, in a great heat to go
out after her, but Captain Swan persuaded them out of this humor,
for he was now wholly adverse to any hostile action,' wrote Dampier.
Though Dampier does not offer a reason for this,
no doubt the poor health of the crew was a leading factor.
At the end of the Signet's weeklong stay off Guam,
the governor sent one last present of food to the ship,
and the captive priest returned ashore with the gifts
of a brass clock, an astrolabe, and a large telescope.
Dampier's observations of the fort's state of affairs on Guam,
and the more predictable pirate activities he took part in,
is a significant piece of this history.
However, it is arguably his observations of the natural world
of Guam that have had the most enduring significance,
especially for the new fruit he reported growing there - breadfruit.
Dampier's descriptions of this fruit, and the idea he posited
about its potential utility as a cheap source of food for slaves
in the British Caribbean, underpinned the scheme
to relocate breadfruit seedlings from Tahiti
to Jamaica 100 years later.
This was the mission of HMS Bounty, though this voyage descended
into a piratical seizure of the ship in 1789,
and another legendary episode of English piracy in the Pacific,
though this time against the British Navy by a mutinous crew.
But that is another story.
This journey into the Pacific
with these two English buccaneers brings another,
a number of important historical factors into sharp relief.
It sheds light on the triangular history of indigenous resistance,
Spanish colonialism, and buccaneering history,
and how relations between these three groups
of actors operated differently across the vast geography
of the Spanish Empire in the 1680s.
To the Spanish and buccaneers, Guam was a frontier
where their superior arms, or other relative technological advantages
against the Chamorros, were challenged by the rigors
of trans-Pacific travel and the accompanying deprivations
of the necessities of life.
The shared vulnerabilities of the Spanish
and the buccaneers forged unlikely alliances and the suspension
of the usual hostile relations and purposes.
To the Chamorros, they were fighting an epic struggle to repel intruders
who deployed the most violent means to bring them into submission.
The struggle between Chamorros and Spanish,
that these buccaneers witnessed and participated in,
did not end for another ten years when the Chamorros,
despite everything that the Spanish had already done, or in the words
of Micronesian historian Rodrigue Levesque, 'finally subdued in 1695.'
I hope that this look at buccaneers has challenged some of your thoughts
about these pirates, historical figures so often seen
in admiring stereotypes, and the worlds
in which they operated and impacted.
I also hope that this lecture helps you contemplate the issues related
to the projection of imperial power
across the Pacific, from America to Guam.
This is an interesting issue to think about from Washington, D.C.,
at this particular historical moment
as the US concentrates its military presence there
as part of its Pacific pivot.
And on that provocative note, I shall end.
Thank you.
>> You touched on it briefly in your talk, but I'm wondering
if you could share with us any particular challenges you had
with judging the veracity of the primary documents
that you were reading or researching,
knowing that the author may [inaudible]
to either embellish or might dis-embellish.
>> Well, what I was trying to, what I've been trying
to do is make comparisons between published versions of the story
and the unpublished versions.
And, and as I pointed out in that case, in that incidence
of that moment of violence that Cowley reported,
there is a significant difference.
So there are differences.
There was toning down of certain aspects, but I think particularly
in the case of Dampier and Cowley, that they were writing very much
with publication in mind.
So I think a lot of what they wrote was tempered by that.
So, so, so that's what we have to work with.
We do have what were unpublished manuscripts,
which have since been published and available, which I, I've been able
to read here, and then you have the, the, the publications
that were published at the time.
So we, so working through those, you know, we try, I've been trying
to arrive at a, a point where I can sort of evaluate what is, you know,
exaggeration or truth, which of course is the perennial problem
of doing any historical research.
>> And what about any cooperation with Spanish sources about,
about these journeys and, you know, what, you know,
would the Spanish sources have any indication?
>> About?
>> About [inaudible] two English ships showing up
and corroborating those, or the two English.
>> Yeah, I mean, there is some, so, so the question was
about whether Spanish sources have information about these voyages.
I have not done a whole lot of research on Spanish sources.
There is the, the Rodrigue Levesque, who I mentioned,
has published an immense, multi-volume of, on my shelf,
I've got, it takes about this much shelf space,
of volumes of primary documents about Micronesia,
most of which is Spanish sources.
But I have not been through all of those as I have with- I mean, he,
he includes the buccaneer accounts, published and unpublished,
but he doesn't - I haven't been through all those volumes
about these, these buccaneer accounts.
>> One more.
>> You mentioned the Miskito Indians,
and I wondered whether there are more people,
Chamorros going toward Nicaragua than Miskitos going toward Guam.
>> We know about the Miskitos going towards Guam, but with as far
as the Chamorros, that is something which I need to research more.
It is possible that they were picked up and taken
on galleons, and taken east.
But I mean, some of them were picked up and taken at var - various times
but I don't know of any particular individuals who are mentioned
as being in the Americas.
Enroute yes, but not actually residing.
But I imagine that there were a number of them
who did make that, that journey.
>> [Inaudible] Chamorro?
>> Chamorro.
Oh okay, right.
>> Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Thank you all again for coming.
If you wanna learn about future events that we're hosting here
at the center, please do sign our list.
I'll give you a teaser; coming up at the end of August we have a lecture
by one of our Kluge Fellows on diplomatic relations in Mongolia.
And then in September Chet Van Duzer, former Kislak Fellow,
will be giving a book talk about his latest book on sea monsters on maps.
And then in mid-September our resident astrobiologist,
David Grinspoon, will be leading a full-day seminar on the future
of human longevity on earth.
So those are some of our events coming up.
Please do sign our list, and thank you again so much.
[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
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