Boston Globe on "Villains" Book Release

BOSTON GLOBE, June 13, 2004: “The Examined Life”: Swashbuckle while you work
By Joshua Glenn, Globe Staff

THE STRUGGLE FOR workplace rights today often concerns such important but prosaic issues as overtime pay and jobs going overseas. Drama was the rule, however, in a labor movement of sorts that transpired three centuries ago not overseas, but on the high seas. "Sailing ships required all sorts of labor -- they were like floating factories," says University of Pittsburgh labor historian Marcus Rediker, author of "Villains of All Nations," a lively account of Atlantic pirates just published by Beacon Press. "Pirates utterly transformed such workplaces." Ideas telephoned Rediker at home in Pittsburgh.

IDEAS: Why is a labor historian writing about pirates?
REDIKER: During the golden age of piracy, from 1716-26, pirates were heroes to common sailors. When I was in grad school 30 years ago, I discovered this was because pirate ships were democratic, egalitarian workplaces. I've been fascinated ever since.
IDEAS: Your book opens with a face-off between the pirate William Fly and the famous Boston cleric Cotton Mather.
REDIKER: Fly and his crew were captured and brought into Boston Harbor to be tried for piracy in 1726. Mather vowed to bring the former bosun to salvation. But Fly went to the gallows showing no contrition -- and he won the argument with Mather. During his execution sermon, Mather addressed the ship captains in the crowd about working conditions at sea, telling them that their "barbarous usage" of sailors exposed men to the temptation to turn pirate.
IDEAS: You suggest pirates took vengeance against ship captains and merchants in the name of an alternative social order.
REDIKER: Sailors usually joined pirate ships after laboring on merchant and naval ships, where they suffered from poor food, brutal discipline, low wages, and premature death. Pirates elected their officers, divided their loot more or less equally, limited the authority of their captains, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, and multinational -- even anti-national -- society. This was as close to utopia as working people could get.
IDEAS: You make pirates sound like Yippies -- wild-haired radicals using theatrical means to subvert the dominant paradigm.
REDIKER: There was certainly an aspect of guerrilla theater to what pirates did. They produced a fascinating drama -- about class, race, gender, and nation -- that was full of larger-than-life characters. Even when they were captured, tried, and executed, they spoke truth to power. Pirate ships gave hope to the oppressed -- when pirates anchored near islands like Jamaica and Barbados, escaping slaves were welcomed aboard.
IDEAS: Elsewhere, you've argued that the subversive practices of sailors were transmitted into later revolutionary movements.
REDIKER: Pirates helped foster a culture of resistance among sailors, and sailors influenced later labor movements -- the term "strike," for example, refers to the way sailors would strike, or furl up, the sails of every ship in a harbor if they were unhappy with their lot. . .. During the Knowles Riot of 1747 in Boston, slaves and sailors battled the King's press gangs, influencing Sam Adams to articulate ideas about the right to resist unjust authority. These became some of America's founding ideals.

Marcus Rediker will lecture on piracy at the Old South Meeting House, 310 Washington St., on June 25 at 12:15 p.m. Free with $5 museum admission.