Pirate Lords

[Mission]

I had always thought the term Pirate Lords was a reference to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies who stole it from some other pop-pirate source. However, as I was reading The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 by George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds, I came across this in their chapter that attempts to explain every day pirate life:

"The captain had usually a sort of privy council which was composed of certain of the officers and older and more experienced sailors and these were sometimes distinguished by the title of 'Lord.'" (Dow and Edmonds, p. 355)

It is interesting to me that this is almost nothing like what was presented in the POTC movies or popular culture - in fact, it is almost the opposite: Pirate Lords were not ruling pirate captains, they were the wizened sailors who advised the captain when he asked for it.

At the same time, I began to wonder where this idea came from. Dow and Edmonds often cite sources for their statements, but they don't do so for much of this chapter. In the next paragraph they explain that the Quartermaster was second to the captain, something Foxe has shown us may not have been the case on most ships. It's possible I may have missed something about Pirate 'Lords' in a period source, but nothing springs to mind.

Has anyone seen a period reference for this idea in conjunction with that particular term?

[Fox]

The source for this is Johnson's chapter on Bart Roberts.

[Mission]

Ah, thanks. It's funny how a lot of stuff Roberts did becomes "usually." I can see it in the groups of pirates he was associated with, but it seems a bit overreaching to say that this was usual.

[Captain Jim]

I saw this topic and thought, "Here we go again."

Then I saw that the good Doctor had started the thread and I thought, "Mission's been out in the sun without his hat again."

Then Mission quoted a source and I thought, "Really? Now we'll never be able to shut down this argument from folks that think POTC is real history. Then again, maybe I'll become a Pyrate Lord!"

And then the source is traced to Johnson on Bart Roberts...

Never mind...Shortest. Thread. Ever.

[HBlackthorne]

I always kind of suspected the whole "Pirate Lord" thing, but honestly I (before any deep research) kind of figured it was more a term that stemmed from two possible ideas. One, being the idea that very successful pirates were "Lord of the Sea" or the creme of the crop compared to other pirates. Two, those Pirates who were successful enough to have large homes and/or country estates such as Blackbeard or Jean Lafitte (both of which had power and lands to a point) who were "country Lords" and Pirates therefor "Pirate Lords" would fit as a moniker. I always considered the "Pirate King" something similar to the "King of the Gypsies" , basically a story told to gullible merchants or city elders to make them believe the Pirate in front of them had power to make deals (like sparing the ship from further attack that voyage), lend weight to their claims (I am the Pirate Lord X and my ship will sink you easily,...why not give up without a fight, give up your cargo, and I will let you and your men live), or strike extra fear into the people (thats Pirate Lord X, you may only see one ship but he is bound to have more hidden around the point out there). That being said I, in my reading, have not come across the term in any other situation other than fiction,...though admittedly I have not done "deep research" into it.

[Mission]

I doubt a pirate would have the need to declare himself a pirate lord or pirate king or such to his prey. From my understanding, the purpose of the flag was to declare themselves a pirate and that was more than enough to scare them. If you spotted such a thing and heard some of the many stories about the pirates abusing their captives or read about them in the local press, would you care what title they claimed? You might care if learned you were facing a particularly vicious pirate (like Roberts), but you could often tell that from the flag.

It would be a pain to even get into position to ask such a thing if they were moving. We see ships making repeated passes within spitting distance of each other in Hollywood movies, but if you listen to director's commentaries, it takes them hours to get the ships into position and then hours more to do it again. Predator/prey chases sometimes lasted days.

Reading the period literature you do find a ship encountering another one at rest and then stopping though. They would then ask one another where they were from. (If they weren't trying to fool the prey ship into thinking they were a merchant ship, the pirate response was often "From the sea" or something equally vague.)

As for the Pirate King moniker, I suspect that is a more modern convention. Isn't it from a novel or a play or some such thing?

[Fox]

'King of the Pirates' was used as the title of a (largely fictional) biography of Henry Every in 1720, by (maybe) Daniel Defoe - and more recently as the title of a somewhat more reliable biography.

I suspect that the whole 'pirate lords' thing, if it was not an invention of Johnson's, was not really intended for victims or other outsiders, so much as for the pirates themselves, and more specifically, the Lords themselves. They weren't bigging themselves up in order to impress their victims, they were doing it in order to impress their inferiors within the pirate company, and to make themselves feel like big men.