Book Review: Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire by Mark G. Hanna

In the late seventeenth century, naval forces working out of the colony of Virginia found a handful of dudes in a boat offshore. The navy folks asked them what they were doing, and they said they were fishermen (even though there was no apparent fishing equipment to be seen). When the navy pressed, the men admitted they were pirates and had some treasure on board. The men were taken ashore and put before the magistrate. While the admission of guilt makes this seem like an open-and-hang case, things were a bit more complicated. First, there was a general pardon out for pirates, so even if they did something illegal they could be immediately absolved. Secondly (and most importantly for this book), the colony absolutely relied on pirates for coinage, goods, and protection, so a guilty verdict could produce a riot. With his back against the wall, the magistrate allowed the men to go, on the condition that the colony kept the treasure, which they put towards the creation of the colony's first college in Williamsburg.

So, the net net is I TOTALLY GRADUATED FROM PIRATE SCHOOL DUUUUUDE!!!

Okay, so that out of the way, this has been a weird reading experience. I picked up this book after seeing the author as a talking head on a pirate documentary on Netflix. What I didn't know when I picked it up was that this book wasn't a "popular" book but more of a college textbook (very hard to tell in advance when reading on a Kindle). There were no stories, no quotes, and tons and tons of endnotes. But on the other hand, it's a textbook on PIRATES! I want to be in that class! YARRRR!!!

If you've read the past few of these reviews (Note: Hi Mom!), you'll know that I read a book on pirates just a few months ago. That book asked the question of whether pirates were good guys or bad guys, tried to make the case for them being good guys, and forced me to call the bullsh*t police. This book poses a much more interesting question: Did people in the colonies LIKE pirates? The answer: If you were directly connected to the crown no, but if you were just about anyone else in the nascent British empire yes.

Important qualifier: This book spends almost all its time pre-Treaty of Utrecht, which means there's really only one chapter in this textbook to cover most of the early eighteenth century. For those that don't remember the dates, that means instead of talking about Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and Black Bart, you'll be hearing about Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, and Henry Every.

But there's a reason for that - the Golden Age of Piracy really only lasted about 15 years, while pre-Utrecht pirates kept the colonies afloat for around a century. The colonists had nothing, were fleeced in trading with England (which had their own problems with coinage), and were dangerously close to dangerous Spanish territory. The colonists had to rely on pirates to bring them gold and silver for coins and calico for respite from wool, as well as to keep the Spanish fleet in check. While the royals were making treaties with Spain and France, the pirates were plundering them at every opportunity, keeping them from attacking the vulnerable English settlements.

One of the interesting things about that crown/colonist dichotomy - it shows that the colonists' frustration with English government didn't start in the late eighteenth century - it was felt for as long as there were colonies (especially in charter and proprietary colonies).

Some of the other interesting nuggets I learned from the book:

• As someone who has spent an unusual amount of time so far this year getting called for jury duty, I've asked myself what the point of a jury trial actually is. A judge is someone who knows the ins and outs of the law, but at the end of the trial it's up to idiots like me to interpret a law and determine if a crime was committed. I never understood why juries were so important, but it turns out we're really bastardizing a legal system. Our legal system is a hybrid of civil law (based on written rules and decided by a learned judge) and common law (based on how people usually act and what people usually do, and decided by a jury of your peers). The reason this is important in this book is because piracy - and, just as importantly, fencing pirated goods - were not violations of common law, even though it was illegal under civil law. After reading about these different legal systems and thinking of ours, it seems like the best-case scenario for our system would have less to do with a dental assistant figuring out how to correctly apply statutes in a copyright infringement case and more to do with a jury deciding "Yes, the defendant broke the speed limit, but we all do it, so she's not guilty".

• What do you think of when you think of Puritans? Big hats with belt buckles, doilies around the neck, gobble gobbles? You know what else you should think of? Pirates! YARRR!!! Yes, a good amount of early pirates were Puritans. Also, Quakers! It seems counterintuitive until you remember what those groups were. Puritans and Quakers were pushed out of England because they were ultra-religious fanatics. They were so uber-Protestant that they ignored the crown's treaties with Spain, France, or any other Catholic nations and vowed to continue to fight wars that had already ended. When they were shuttled away to the colonies, they found a way to keep fighting - at sea.

• That being said, pre-Golden Age piracy had a lot less to do with the Caribbean, and a lot more to do with religious hotspots like Charles Town, Philadelphia, Providence, and...New Jersey! Yes, both East (pork roll) and West (taylor ham) Jersey had plenty of pirate action in the olden days, with a good amount of action in Perth Amboy, city of my birth! There were also riots when the crown tried to roll the governorship of the Jerseys into the governorship of New York - good on them!

I could go on and on, but this was a really fascinating book - very surprising for reading a textbook! Eight out of ten hot dogs. SCURRRRVY!!!