Why sailors became pirates

Pirates didn’t enjoy a great reputation among law-abiding society. They were violent, sacrilegious, and heedless of authority. They were known for torturing captured captains, sinking ships for the fun of it, and using language so foul it could spoil your appetite. They were, when caught, almost always hung from the gallows. Why, then, would a rational person ever choose to join the ranks of these floating, godless barbarians?

In the Golden Age of Piracy, more than 4,000 sailors decided to become pirates. This was a huge proportion of sailors, relatively speaking: the British Royal Navy had an average of 13,000 sailors between the years 1716 and 1726, with the pirate population sometimes exceeding 15% of its manpower. Surely, then, not all pirates were crazy, anarcho-sadists. There must be a social explanation for why so many men and women “jumped ship”.

As respected pirate historian Marcus Rediker explains, sailors “faced discipline from their officers that was brutal at best and often murderous. And they got small return for their death-defying labors, for peacetime wages were low and fraud in payment was frequent.”

Consider the “Cat o’ nine tails”, a multi-tail whip that was used to punish insubordinate sailors. Admiralty law meant officers could use corporal punishment; whips, tackle, bottles, canes, and other blunt instruments were put to creative use to maintain order on board. While sailors did enjoy some legal protection from abuse on naval and merchant marines, the law usually privileged officers. No wonder some sailors concluded “they had better be dead than live in Misery”.

Corporal punishment, combined with wage theft, bad food, cramped quarters, and long hours created an environment ripe for insurrection. While not all officers were bad, long trips at sea could turn otherwise reasonable people into crotchety despots. Labour relations on ships were thus unusually strained, with the first recorded “worker’s strike” occurring in London in 1768 when a “sailor and his mates went from ship to ship, striking — lowering — the sails in an effort to make merchants grant their demands.”

Strikes were just one of the strategies that sailors developed to prevent officer abuse. Others included “desertion, work stoppages, [and] mutinies.” But the most dramatic — and profitable — strategy for rebel sailors was to turn the vessel into a pirate ship.

Ships could spontaneously “go pirate” after a sailor insurrection, but more often than not, ships went pirate after being captured by other pirates. Once a vessel surrendered (sometimes without a fight), the attacking pirates would board it and take what they wanted — which sometimes included the ship itself. It is estimated that during the Golden Age of Piracy about 2,400 vessels were captured and plundered. Not a bad haul for the 4,000 people who “went pirating” during those years.

This was a crucial aspect of pirates’ social organization: start-up costs were incredibly low. Like today’s software companies, which don’t require large capital investments to get started, pirate ships could be “founded” on little more than a hope and a dream (and a couple shakes of a cutlass.) The relative ease with which vessels were captured meant pirates could split and form new “companies” whenever they wanted to — unlike a naval or merchant marine, which required big upfront capital investments. Dissent was thus much more acceptable if you were a pirate: you didn’t need to use violence to silence dissenters, you could just capture another ship and send the dissenting factions on their way.

But why were new ships so “easy” for pirates to capture?