Who Were the Real Pirates of the Caribbean?
Beyond Hollywood
Pirates are everywhere in pop culture these days. Appearing most prominently in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series of movies, pirates have been showing up in children’s toys (as exciting adventurers) and academic writings (as proto-socialists) for several years now. Disney itself based its fanciful series on Disneyland rides dating to the 1950s.
Beyond Hollywood, several professional- and college-sports teams are named for Pirates (or buccaneers). As early as the late 1800s, when Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island, a sizeable market has existed for pirate fancies.
Sea-borne piracy, of course, is as old as sea-borne commerce. St. Patrick was a victim of piracy, kidnapped as a young man in England by Irish Pirates, and sold as a slave. Even in today’s world of GPS navigation, parts of Southeast Asia remain hotbeds of violence. Still, most pop-culture references to piracy focus on a very brief period in the West Indies—the early 1700s.
Piracy is a violent and awful practice. Hollywood’s glamorized version depicts pirates as proud and fiercely independent men (and occasionally, women). But like gangsters and bandits of any era, they for the most part occupied the lowest rungs on the social totem pole—outsiders in every way. The very few who lived to become famous usually died young and died violently. They were lost souls in need of a savior.
The age of Caribbean piracy was a complex time, involving dozens of people groups and mixes thereof, several nation-states in various stages of ascent and decline, and uncontrolled economic growth. In many respects, the pirates of the Caribbean were little more than froth at the edges of Europe’s even deeper transformations.
Between 1492, when Europeans first made contact with Caribbean peoples, and the age of revolutions, Europe had undergone a major religious schism (the various changes collectively called the Reformation), had suffered a series of devastating wars, and had begun to evolve into commercial societies. (A subplot of Disney’s movies is the conflict between English trading companies and English provincial government. This is a small window on the geopolitics behind the stories.)
European involvement in the Caribbean was nearly 250 years old by the time Caribbean piracy declined—250 years of conquest and commerce. Native civilizations had been suppressed, and several European powers had fought each other to control the transatlantic trade. Sugar had been planted throughout the islands, and hundreds of thousands of African slaves had been transported across the seas to harvest it.
The word piracy describes violence and theft, but pirates were a diverse group, with widely divergent goals. Some were petty crooks; some were quasi-state tolerated terrorists (tolerated as long as they restricted their piracy to ships of rival nations); and some were a combination between the two. Piracy flourished only as long as the European powers tolerated it, and it began to decline whenever the great powers (principally, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England) made peace with each other.
Today’s Caribbean is a multi-national, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic archipelago, including some of the poorest (Haiti) and wealthiest (Cayman Islands) nations in the western hemisphere. For such a small region, the Caribbean remains a fertile garden for cultural creativity. For all the swashbuckling adventures, piracy figures only as a minor blip on the long-term history of the region, more a reflection of our dreams and desires than any substantial movement.
Students from colleges and universities across the Caribbean are hard at work trying to reach their schools with the good news of Jesus Christ. Through the IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students), they are related to North American students in Inter-Varsity Canada and InterVarsity/USA. These students are served by two different world regions of the IFES—Caribbean and Latin America.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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