Hurrah for a Pirate King!
Jan. 13th, 2023 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickAs you know, Bob (among you there must be one Bob, right? All... six of you? Bob? Are you there, Bob, it's me, Marga... wait, no that's not right.) I've been watching Black Sails, which is a television from the Before Times involving Nassau. Nassau is a British colony at the time of the show. It's a real place about a hundred and eighty miles off the coast of Miami, on New Providence Island in the Caribbean north of Cuba.
Anyway, in my watching of Black Sails, I'm to season 4, wherein, well, there's been some efforts at legend-building by Billy Bones to create a space into which our man of the brilliant blue eyes and opportunistic opportunism, John Silver, can step as the Pirate King of Nassau. Okay, fine.
What is a pirate king anyway? That sounds familiar. Where have I heard that term before? Ah, yes. Here it is. Meditations on Being A Pirate King (not the actual title) by noted pirate scholars Gilbert and Sullivan, 1880.
Oh better far to Live or Die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part,
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Pirates at least are not fucking hypocrites.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I’ll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
Pirates live their truth.
(I have removed some celebratory lyrics that do not add to our understanding of what Pirate Kings do and are and think.)
When I sally forth to seek my prey
I help myself in a royal way.
I sink a few more ships, it’s true,
Than a well-bred monarch ought to do;
But many a king on a first-class throne,
If he wants to call his crown his own,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than ever I do
Oh? Oh. That's interesting. That's... really kind of interesting.
Gilbert and Sullivan's pirate king feels he's not any worse than an ordinary king. Points out that actual real kings with actual real political power are murdering bastards and quite possibly even more so than actual pirates.
Now, I know, I know, Gilbert and Sullivan were WRITING A COMEDIC MUSICAL (g'wan, spoil all my fun) and not an actual treatise on Being A Pirate King. But... They are making a point, here, and I think it's the same one being made in Black Sails, in S4x03, when Teach, captain of the Revenge, is captured (along with his ship and crew) by Woodes Rogers.
With Teach and the other pirates secured, Rogers (he's the governor of the colony, the official face of British rule) sends Teach under the hull. Three times. This is some seriously brutal television.
We kinda know it's coming. In a conversation with one of his underlings, before he goes out to chase the pirates, the underling asks Roberts what he'll do if he actually manages to capture the pirates. He says, "I will show them what the consequences are to threatening that which I hold most dear. I will leave no doubt about it." He also discusses an incident from his past where his brother was killed in the moments before the opposing ship surrendered and then Rogers... accepted the surrender and then slaughtered all but one of the captives in vengeance. (One alone left to tell the tale...) He seems kinda on board with this sort of thing going forward, but as we see, that's not how it turns out.
What Roberts does to Teach is called keelhauling, in case you are somehow interested in me talking about a pirate show WITHOUT ANY UNDERSTANDING OF PIRATE STUFF, and this keelhauling sequence is filmed in excruciating detail expressly for the purpose of hammering home exactly what Woodes Rogers is willing to do from a position of power. By the time it's over, we have no doubt about that and neither does anyone else. More dirty work than ever I'd do, for sure.
I'm not kidding about how brutal this thing is. There's no score for the first go. It's dead background, with only the appropriate atmospheric sounds. It's heavy and unpleasant. The time drags and it's supposed to. I guess maybe some folks could be, going into this scene, unaware of the mechanics and consequences of keelhauling but demonstrating the actual activity is not what this is for. This is not a documentary, it's a polemic. Afterwards, they fetch Teach out the water and plop him on the deck so that they can... inspect their work? So that we can inspect their work? Probably both. Anyway, he looks like hell. You think he's maybe dead. He's not dead.
"Again" says Woodes Rogers.
The second go-round has string accompaniment, low and mournful, along with horrible barnacle scrape-y noises that, I must say, DO NOT HELP THINGS. This is not for the squeamish. And they fetch him out the water and plop him on the deck again. And he's... (lengthy pause)... not dead. You kind of hope that he is, tbh, but he is not.
And the third, if you are still watching by then, continues, with more kinda scrape-y noises that we get to hear from ABOVE THE DECK with reactions from our peeps the pirates. They fish Teach out and plop him on the deck, a shredded and bloody rag of a man. You really start to hope he's dead at this point. The camera lingers on him, so you get to look more'n you likely want. He looks more dead than alive, but ... again, he's not dead.
At this point Woodes Rogers shoots him to the great relief of everyone watching (including us). Also, Rogers then and there tables his intent to do the rest of the pirates the same. He was all "You're next" to Rackham before the third go at Teach but he has apparently... lost his appetite for that by the time he shoots Teach. I think maybe slaughtering an entire ship's crew in the rage and misery of losing your brother is a DIFFERENT THING than ordering the cold-blooded shredding of a man when your emotions are not that involved. Rogers' turn away from doing the rest of the captured pirates could be seen as redeeming, I guess. Maybe.
Now, if you have not watched it, this is a show with a solid sex-gore-and-violence approach to entertainment. Most of the gore and violence is from willing-ish souls DOING THAT TO EACH OTHER of their own free wills for... plunder or conquest or because it's their job or whatever. Pirates fighting British Soldiers. Pirates fighting pirates. Pirates fighting Merchants. Pirates fighting colonials. Fwiw, I am pretty solidly on board with that stuff. I like fighting, it's exciting. Most of this sort of fighting is emotionally charged and fast-paced and comes with a musical score to clarify for us that this is the entertainment sort of gore and violence and not the despicable brutality kind.
What Rogers does to Teach is not exciting. It's not even REMOTELY exciting. Rogers tortures a bound and captive Teach to make a point. It's deliberate and impersonal. When it has a score, said score is NOT FUN. It's a super flat scene. Rogers doesn't do more than stand there and give fairly terse orders like, "Do it." and "Again." and his subordinates (also government employees like he himself is) follow his fucking orders and do it. Nobody is yelling. Nobody is in the heat of any moment. It's brutal violence stripped of all the fun parts ON PURPOSE.
It's important to point out that Teach is not an innocent. When we meet him, in his very first scene on the show, he murders his three brothers-in-law in short order. He thinks of Charles Vane as his heir apparent. Probably in a civilized world, Teach shouldn't be running around loose... but what Rogers does to him is not portrayed as a heroic or just punishment of the thoroughly guilty. It's not even portrayed neutrally. At all. It's portrayed in a way that condemns Rogers.
If this were a show where the colonial governor person was the hero, we'd be hearing a fuck of a lot more Rule Britannia! in the score. (For what it's worth, I did not know FOR SURE before, well, before youtuber Abigail Thorn's wonderful Catch-22 episode -- it's a tiny clip in the Unequal Treatment segment, but also apparently enough for me to go What The Hell Is That Riff That Means ENGLAND, THEY USE IT ALL THE TIME -- that this song, which YOU PROBABLY KNOW from hearing it in musical scores and stuff anytime the composer would like to indicate ENGLAND!, was called Rule Britannia. On subsequent googling, I learned that Rule Britannia has words. Words that, damn England, maybe check yo privilege? Anyway, if you are unclear about the song Rule Britannia, today is your lucky day and maybe you have gotten unexpected of value from this post.) But anyway, the colonial governor is not the hero here. He's not. However, he IS the public face of the legitimate government and when he acts, we are stuck assuming that what he does, he is doing with the endorsement of the crown.
This is what the legitimate government of the times does to people to attain power and also (we may assume) to stay in power.
But... but... howzabout all the Bad Things that our man Flint does? 'Cause he does A LOT of Bad Things en route to Season 4. Hell, he probably also does Bad Things in Season 4 that you don't even know about yet because you are too busy wanting to process/discuss/rewatch the existing stuff to consume any new stuff.
I promise I will pick out and discuss all the instances of Flint doing his full measure of Bad Things. And it's not like there's a shortage of those instances. THERE ARE SO MANY. SO MANY. I do feel, though, that the show treats Flint's actions as (largely but not entirely) heroic-ish. He's the HERO of the show. He has a ... well, it's not a greatcoat, but it's a great coat just the same. I am planning to have a go at what I think of as Flint's Expedience Problem here in a bit, but today is not that day. Today is Rogers.
For Black Sails, we're in 1715 or thereabouts. Now, I've lately been reading The Better Angels of our Nature. It's a nonfiction book about the overall decline of violence (and state-sanctioned violence in particular) throughout history to the now. As of 1715, the world is a pretty violent and brutal place. (It is entirely possible that I am seeing The Pirates through a lens of The Better Angels of our Nature. I'm OK with this.)
In 1715, governance is still by divine right of kings.
The death penalty is A-OK. Lots of reasons to put people to death. Hundreds of reasons.
Drop-hanging isn't in vogue yet and hangings are still public, people go to see'um. (Drop-hanging is where they hang you so that your neck snaps and you get a relatively quicker, better death than the slow-hanging like Charles Vane got in the show. BAooN says that England got drop-hanging in 1783 which is also when it says they abolished public hangings.)
At this time, slavery is not only OK, it's fucking profitable. (Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, so abolition is 90 years away for our pirates in Nassau.)
All was not lost, though. In the 1715 times, Louis-the-asshole14th, the sun king, L'etat c'est moi, that guy? He died that year. (Him and his fucking Versailles. Fucking epitome of excess by rulers. There's a limit to how much gold leaf you can get away with, is all I'm sayin'.) Some folks count this as the start of the Enlightenment and wow, it says A LOT about your influence on the world when people pick your demise as "When things started to improve for normal people".
Anyway, people were just about ready to start thinking about and test-marketing democracy, rule by voting, that whole of the people, by the people, for the people shebang. Preliminary efforts (speeches and whatnot from 1793-1797 by Charles Grey) in England didn't change anything much but by 1832, the country was more-or-less "a democracy" with a limited electorate. In the interim, people had died (notably at the Peterloo massacre of 1819, an event I learned about from a porn novel) for it.
However, an upstart bunch of British colonies *much closer* to Nassau rebelled a bit in 1773, did it With Guns in 1776, had a little war, won their little war, and then installed a somewhat buggy beta version of Democracy 1.0 in 1781 (Articles of Confederation). In 1789, they installed the developer's official release of Democracy 3.11 which has been more-or-less working (plus or minus a few patches) for them since then despite better, more stable and fuller-featured versions of the software that are available these days. Real, actual democracy is not super duper far off. It's... just over the horizon for our Nassau of 1715. It's as far away from our pirates as the 1950's is from us today... the span of a person's adult life, pretty much.
But... democracy does not arise from nothing. You don't generally leap from Divine Right Of Kings directly into full blown Democracy. There are some intermediate steps. The whole thing in Black Sails with Thomas Hamilton and his salon people discussing self-governance and rights of man and whatnot, that was A Real Thing that some folks did. And from those salons, from those thinkers and readers and writers, came enlightenment and also The Enlightenment and a more general acceptance of newfangled ideas like The Rights Of Man and stuff. The guy writing the BAooN book says that the 'democracy' movement arose from and kinda as a result of all that Enlightenment stuff.
The pirate ships, what with their shares and their voting -- they're a kinda egalitarian democratic situation there. Not 100% because it is a fucking boat and there are wartime actions (it is a bad idea to change captains IN THE MIDDLE OF COMBAT MANEUVERS), but when there is breathing room, the pirates can change leadership if they can get the votes. The pirate ships in Black Sails are very much depicted as mostly governing-with-the-consent-of-the-governed and there's a certain amount of political maneuvering required on the part of the captains in order to GET TO BE captain and to KEEP BEING captain.
Also (thank you, wikipedia!) New Providence Island (where Nassau is) was more-or-less out of the control of England and... ruled by pirates from about 1706 to 1718 when Woodes Rogers (his real name, he was a real person really appointed to the job he is shown as having in the tv show) executed a bunch of pirates by hanging and effectively ended the pirate republic thing. (In real life, Woodes Rogers 'wins'. But this is a television show and in the television show, Woodes Rogers is the bad guy.) So, the pirates in our show ARE FAMILIAR with the notion of self-rule. Like, that's what they've got going on already. When the other guy tells John in the first episode that Nassau belongs to the pirates, he is not lying.
So we're here, not quite at the dawning of democracy but we're at, like, the 3 AM bathroom trip BEFORE the dawning of democracy. It's still dark out, a couple of hours until dawn, but the night is on the wane and the dawn is coming. This is when Woodes Rogers tortures a very symbolic pirate. It's a very symbolic pirate for both the show and for the television audience because it's fucking Blackbeard. If you know one damn pirate name, it's probably that one. What you MIGHT NOT know is that in the show's narrative, Teach was the founder of the pirate republic in Nassau, the leader who ousted the previous governor of the island, the guy who BROUGHT ABOUT the era of self-rule for the pirates. He's like the George Washington of the pirates and all the pirates know it.
When Rogers is torturing Teach, he's not doing it for intelligence or to find a treasure, not to rescue a hostage or anything like that. He's doing it solely to raise the black. (In our pirate show, raise the black is the phrase used when the hunting pirate ship has closed with a target prey ship and hoists her "real" colors (the black pirate flag) to show that she is a pirate ship and not an innocent merchant or whatever. Pirates do not sail about with the black up all the time because then all the other ships would know that the black-flag-flying ship was full of pirates and they would steer clear to avoid being robbed. Since the pirate ship has to get pretty close to the prey ship before an attack is possible, they 'sneak up' by flying a false flag that makes them look non-pirate. But, they'd also like to have the merchant ship surrender and hand over the goods without a fight, so when they get close enough, they raise the black to declare by flag that they are brutal and bloodthirsty pirates.) He's saying, in effect, In doing this unto the greatest of you, unto the one who led the revolt against legitimate governance, unto the one who dared to set you on this path, I show you what becomes of those who go against the state. If I can do this to Blackbeard, imagine what I can do to you all, who are most certainly not Blackbeards.
It's fucking posturing, what Rogers is doing. He does this, this really quite horrible thing, this thing polemically staged and filmed and scored (so that we viewers are cringing uncomfortably and 100% not cheering Rogers on) IN ORDER TO DISPLAY HIS (and the state's) POWER. It's a Show of Force. Geez, Rogers, I did not think it was possible for me to like you less, but... wow. Way to overachieve, there, buddy.
In Black Sails, Rogers is come to the Bahamas to bring the colony to heel. Clear out the fucking rat's nest of pirates, make shipping in the Caribbean safer and more reliable, generate some revenue for the crown, and, though this is not discussed much in the show, PROVIDE BRITAIN WITH SUGAR. "English sugar imports (from the Caribbean) increased sevenfold from 430,000 cwt. in 1700 to over 3,000,000 cwt. in 1800." (quote from online summary of Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century by Kenneth Morgan) (At this time sugar was produced with slave labor. Sugar, itself, was one of the corners of the triangle trade and it's ... problematic. But this is not the time. Focus.) Anyway, especially for the times, these are not bad aims. Like, I don't think Rogers is GOING FOR brutality just for brutality's sake. He's trying (from his perspective) to bring order from disorder, to return a colony to productivity, to civilize the fucking place and bring it back into the fold.
Rogers has limited resources and a VERY laggy chain of command. He doesn't have endless manpower or endless ships. He can't phone a friend for advice or help or even conformation that his orders are backed by the crown. He's ... an island. On an island. He's going to have to get it done pretty much on his own and using his own judgment. There is no backup for him. Probably England will send another guy with more ships to try again if he fails but the odds are good that Rogers won't be there to see his replacement arrive. The last failed governor was... well... that guy that Blackbeard killed. The stakes are pretty high for Rogers and he's going to have to get it right on the first try or Nassau will eat him alive as it has done previous colonial authorities.
Interestingly, Rogers is come to do the job that Thomas Hamilton & Flint (pre-pirate Flint) were wanting to do before shit went all sideways. Also, he comes WITH SHEAVES OF PARDONS and navy ships. Like, he has almost exactly the same kit and the same plan that Thomas Hamilton proposed using to fix things in Nassau. (He does have to find and return Spain's gold, like, that's an issue, but otherwise? He's basically the Thomas Hamilton Plan 2.0.) This was, we recall, a plan that was endorsed and supported by Flint when he was the guy gonna go along with Hamilton and do it. Rogers says, straight up to Flint, that he doesn't want to go the violent brutality route but that "If you (Flint) insist on making me your villain, I will play the part."
Anyway, Rogers winds up standing on the deck giving the orders to shred a man alive while everybody else either watches him doing it or follows his orders to accomplish it. Play the part he does.
(Again, some of this is narrative exigency. If the pirates are your heroes... somebody has to be the bad guy and the colonial powers are a convenient and modern-times "acceptable" bad guy. In these our modern times, we've been cleaning up colonialism for quite some time and we're pretty on board with a colonialism is bad viewpoint.)
I do not like Rogers. I am vested in the pirates are the good guys narrative, here, even though they do awful things and are, in large part, awful people.
But... if Rogers was a pirate in this show, would we excuse his actions? Pretend for a moment that Rogers isn't the official representative of the crown. Pretend he's another pirate, trying to take a fat prize with insufficient men and arms. He's within reach of his prey. He'd like them to surrender with minimal fighting. So he does what pirates do. He raises the black.
This is who I am.
This is what I do.
Surrender.
Tbh, I do not like Rogers and I didn't want to be all apologist for him when I started this post. I really didn't. I don't believe in state-sanctioned violence against its ... citizens. I think consent of the ruled is the way to go. But Rogers is pulling a pretty fucking pirate move, here. It's not fun or pretty to watch. It's not filmed or treated like most of the other acts of violence in the show. We're NOT SUPPOSED TO LIKE IT. But, what Rogers does is 100% undeniably a pirate move.
And if what he does to Teach is wrong... which I think we're all pretty fucking sure it is, then probably all the stuff that the other pirates do, that stuff is also wrong. It works the same way. It has the same underpinnings.
If you'd fuck someone for a million dollars, you don't get to be mortally offended when they try to negotiate downward with "How about fifty bucks?" You've already established what you are -- they're just haggling over the price.
Good job, pirate show! Bring the pain. :) I am here for it.
Oh, and back to the beginning, which I almost forgot. What is a pirate king?
A pirate king is a king who personally commits fairly straightforward and personal atrocities, operating on a relatively small scale. His kingdom is, at most, a few hundred men and a handful of ships. The people who feel his wrath or vengeance probably see his face as the Bad Things happen to them, frequently by his own hand or in-person order.
Regular kings commit atrocities at arm's length, on a wholesale scale. Their kingdoms number citizens in the tens or hundreds of thousands, even the millions. The people who feel his wrath or vengeance likely never see his face nor does he personally witness the things done to them. Additionally, regular kings have so many people under them that the chance of unobserved knock-on effects from policies or officials that LOOK OK AT FIRST GLANCE but do negatively impact citizens of the crown further down the line is definitely NONZERO.
Gilbert and Sullivan are correct. Regular kings do (and have to do, since they rule by "divine right" rather than "consent of the governed") more atrocity stuff than pirate kings. A lot more. It's easier when you don't have to look at it up close but also as the size of your area of responsibility/control grows and you have to delegate more stuff... you don't get to see everything that is done in your name and what you don't see is very difficult to be aware of, very difficult to police, very difficult indeed.
Anyway, in my watching of Black Sails, I'm to season 4, wherein, well, there's been some efforts at legend-building by Billy Bones to create a space into which our man of the brilliant blue eyes and opportunistic opportunism, John Silver, can step as the Pirate King of Nassau. Okay, fine.
What is a pirate king anyway? That sounds familiar. Where have I heard that term before? Ah, yes. Here it is. Meditations on Being A Pirate King (not the actual title) by noted pirate scholars Gilbert and Sullivan, 1880.
Oh better far to Live or Die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part,
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Pirates at least are not fucking hypocrites.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I’ll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
Pirates live their truth.
(I have removed some celebratory lyrics that do not add to our understanding of what Pirate Kings do and are and think.)
When I sally forth to seek my prey
I help myself in a royal way.
I sink a few more ships, it’s true,
Than a well-bred monarch ought to do;
But many a king on a first-class throne,
If he wants to call his crown his own,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than ever I do
Oh? Oh. That's interesting. That's... really kind of interesting.
Gilbert and Sullivan's pirate king feels he's not any worse than an ordinary king. Points out that actual real kings with actual real political power are murdering bastards and quite possibly even more so than actual pirates.
Now, I know, I know, Gilbert and Sullivan were WRITING A COMEDIC MUSICAL (g'wan, spoil all my fun) and not an actual treatise on Being A Pirate King. But... They are making a point, here, and I think it's the same one being made in Black Sails, in S4x03, when Teach, captain of the Revenge, is captured (along with his ship and crew) by Woodes Rogers.
With Teach and the other pirates secured, Rogers (he's the governor of the colony, the official face of British rule) sends Teach under the hull. Three times. This is some seriously brutal television.
We kinda know it's coming. In a conversation with one of his underlings, before he goes out to chase the pirates, the underling asks Roberts what he'll do if he actually manages to capture the pirates. He says, "I will show them what the consequences are to threatening that which I hold most dear. I will leave no doubt about it." He also discusses an incident from his past where his brother was killed in the moments before the opposing ship surrendered and then Rogers... accepted the surrender and then slaughtered all but one of the captives in vengeance. (One alone left to tell the tale...) He seems kinda on board with this sort of thing going forward, but as we see, that's not how it turns out.
What Roberts does to Teach is called keelhauling, in case you are somehow interested in me talking about a pirate show WITHOUT ANY UNDERSTANDING OF PIRATE STUFF, and this keelhauling sequence is filmed in excruciating detail expressly for the purpose of hammering home exactly what Woodes Rogers is willing to do from a position of power. By the time it's over, we have no doubt about that and neither does anyone else. More dirty work than ever I'd do, for sure.
I'm not kidding about how brutal this thing is. There's no score for the first go. It's dead background, with only the appropriate atmospheric sounds. It's heavy and unpleasant. The time drags and it's supposed to. I guess maybe some folks could be, going into this scene, unaware of the mechanics and consequences of keelhauling but demonstrating the actual activity is not what this is for. This is not a documentary, it's a polemic. Afterwards, they fetch Teach out the water and plop him on the deck so that they can... inspect their work? So that we can inspect their work? Probably both. Anyway, he looks like hell. You think he's maybe dead. He's not dead.
"Again" says Woodes Rogers.
The second go-round has string accompaniment, low and mournful, along with horrible barnacle scrape-y noises that, I must say, DO NOT HELP THINGS. This is not for the squeamish. And they fetch him out the water and plop him on the deck again. And he's... (lengthy pause)... not dead. You kind of hope that he is, tbh, but he is not.
And the third, if you are still watching by then, continues, with more kinda scrape-y noises that we get to hear from ABOVE THE DECK with reactions from our peeps the pirates. They fish Teach out and plop him on the deck, a shredded and bloody rag of a man. You really start to hope he's dead at this point. The camera lingers on him, so you get to look more'n you likely want. He looks more dead than alive, but ... again, he's not dead.
At this point Woodes Rogers shoots him to the great relief of everyone watching (including us). Also, Rogers then and there tables his intent to do the rest of the pirates the same. He was all "You're next" to Rackham before the third go at Teach but he has apparently... lost his appetite for that by the time he shoots Teach. I think maybe slaughtering an entire ship's crew in the rage and misery of losing your brother is a DIFFERENT THING than ordering the cold-blooded shredding of a man when your emotions are not that involved. Rogers' turn away from doing the rest of the captured pirates could be seen as redeeming, I guess. Maybe.
Now, if you have not watched it, this is a show with a solid sex-gore-and-violence approach to entertainment. Most of the gore and violence is from willing-ish souls DOING THAT TO EACH OTHER of their own free wills for... plunder or conquest or because it's their job or whatever. Pirates fighting British Soldiers. Pirates fighting pirates. Pirates fighting Merchants. Pirates fighting colonials. Fwiw, I am pretty solidly on board with that stuff. I like fighting, it's exciting. Most of this sort of fighting is emotionally charged and fast-paced and comes with a musical score to clarify for us that this is the entertainment sort of gore and violence and not the despicable brutality kind.
What Rogers does to Teach is not exciting. It's not even REMOTELY exciting. Rogers tortures a bound and captive Teach to make a point. It's deliberate and impersonal. When it has a score, said score is NOT FUN. It's a super flat scene. Rogers doesn't do more than stand there and give fairly terse orders like, "Do it." and "Again." and his subordinates (also government employees like he himself is) follow his fucking orders and do it. Nobody is yelling. Nobody is in the heat of any moment. It's brutal violence stripped of all the fun parts ON PURPOSE.
It's important to point out that Teach is not an innocent. When we meet him, in his very first scene on the show, he murders his three brothers-in-law in short order. He thinks of Charles Vane as his heir apparent. Probably in a civilized world, Teach shouldn't be running around loose... but what Rogers does to him is not portrayed as a heroic or just punishment of the thoroughly guilty. It's not even portrayed neutrally. At all. It's portrayed in a way that condemns Rogers.
If this were a show where the colonial governor person was the hero, we'd be hearing a fuck of a lot more Rule Britannia! in the score. (For what it's worth, I did not know FOR SURE before, well, before youtuber Abigail Thorn's wonderful Catch-22 episode -- it's a tiny clip in the Unequal Treatment segment, but also apparently enough for me to go What The Hell Is That Riff That Means ENGLAND, THEY USE IT ALL THE TIME -- that this song, which YOU PROBABLY KNOW from hearing it in musical scores and stuff anytime the composer would like to indicate ENGLAND!, was called Rule Britannia. On subsequent googling, I learned that Rule Britannia has words. Words that, damn England, maybe check yo privilege? Anyway, if you are unclear about the song Rule Britannia, today is your lucky day and maybe you have gotten unexpected of value from this post.) But anyway, the colonial governor is not the hero here. He's not. However, he IS the public face of the legitimate government and when he acts, we are stuck assuming that what he does, he is doing with the endorsement of the crown.
This is what the legitimate government of the times does to people to attain power and also (we may assume) to stay in power.
But... but... howzabout all the Bad Things that our man Flint does? 'Cause he does A LOT of Bad Things en route to Season 4. Hell, he probably also does Bad Things in Season 4 that you don't even know about yet because you are too busy wanting to process/discuss/rewatch the existing stuff to consume any new stuff.
I promise I will pick out and discuss all the instances of Flint doing his full measure of Bad Things. And it's not like there's a shortage of those instances. THERE ARE SO MANY. SO MANY. I do feel, though, that the show treats Flint's actions as (largely but not entirely) heroic-ish. He's the HERO of the show. He has a ... well, it's not a greatcoat, but it's a great coat just the same. I am planning to have a go at what I think of as Flint's Expedience Problem here in a bit, but today is not that day. Today is Rogers.
For Black Sails, we're in 1715 or thereabouts. Now, I've lately been reading The Better Angels of our Nature. It's a nonfiction book about the overall decline of violence (and state-sanctioned violence in particular) throughout history to the now. As of 1715, the world is a pretty violent and brutal place. (It is entirely possible that I am seeing The Pirates through a lens of The Better Angels of our Nature. I'm OK with this.)
In 1715, governance is still by divine right of kings.
The death penalty is A-OK. Lots of reasons to put people to death. Hundreds of reasons.
Drop-hanging isn't in vogue yet and hangings are still public, people go to see'um. (Drop-hanging is where they hang you so that your neck snaps and you get a relatively quicker, better death than the slow-hanging like Charles Vane got in the show. BAooN says that England got drop-hanging in 1783 which is also when it says they abolished public hangings.)
At this time, slavery is not only OK, it's fucking profitable. (Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, so abolition is 90 years away for our pirates in Nassau.)
All was not lost, though. In the 1715 times, Louis-the-
Anyway, people were just about ready to start thinking about and test-marketing democracy, rule by voting, that whole of the people, by the people, for the people shebang. Preliminary efforts (speeches and whatnot from 1793-1797 by Charles Grey) in England didn't change anything much but by 1832, the country was more-or-less "a democracy" with a limited electorate. In the interim, people had died (notably at the Peterloo massacre of 1819, an event I learned about from a porn novel) for it.
However, an upstart bunch of British colonies *much closer* to Nassau rebelled a bit in 1773, did it With Guns in 1776, had a little war, won their little war, and then installed a somewhat buggy beta version of Democracy 1.0 in 1781 (Articles of Confederation). In 1789, they installed the developer's official release of Democracy 3.11 which has been more-or-less working (plus or minus a few patches) for them since then despite better, more stable and fuller-featured versions of the software that are available these days. Real, actual democracy is not super duper far off. It's... just over the horizon for our Nassau of 1715. It's as far away from our pirates as the 1950's is from us today... the span of a person's adult life, pretty much.
But... democracy does not arise from nothing. You don't generally leap from Divine Right Of Kings directly into full blown Democracy. There are some intermediate steps. The whole thing in Black Sails with Thomas Hamilton and his salon people discussing self-governance and rights of man and whatnot, that was A Real Thing that some folks did. And from those salons, from those thinkers and readers and writers, came enlightenment and also The Enlightenment and a more general acceptance of newfangled ideas like The Rights Of Man and stuff. The guy writing the BAooN book says that the 'democracy' movement arose from and kinda as a result of all that Enlightenment stuff.
The pirate ships, what with their shares and their voting -- they're a kinda egalitarian democratic situation there. Not 100% because it is a fucking boat and there are wartime actions (it is a bad idea to change captains IN THE MIDDLE OF COMBAT MANEUVERS), but when there is breathing room, the pirates can change leadership if they can get the votes. The pirate ships in Black Sails are very much depicted as mostly governing-with-the-consent-of-the-governed and there's a certain amount of political maneuvering required on the part of the captains in order to GET TO BE captain and to KEEP BEING captain.
Also (thank you, wikipedia!) New Providence Island (where Nassau is) was more-or-less out of the control of England and... ruled by pirates from about 1706 to 1718 when Woodes Rogers (his real name, he was a real person really appointed to the job he is shown as having in the tv show) executed a bunch of pirates by hanging and effectively ended the pirate republic thing. (In real life, Woodes Rogers 'wins'. But this is a television show and in the television show, Woodes Rogers is the bad guy.) So, the pirates in our show ARE FAMILIAR with the notion of self-rule. Like, that's what they've got going on already. When the other guy tells John in the first episode that Nassau belongs to the pirates, he is not lying.
So we're here, not quite at the dawning of democracy but we're at, like, the 3 AM bathroom trip BEFORE the dawning of democracy. It's still dark out, a couple of hours until dawn, but the night is on the wane and the dawn is coming. This is when Woodes Rogers tortures a very symbolic pirate. It's a very symbolic pirate for both the show and for the television audience because it's fucking Blackbeard. If you know one damn pirate name, it's probably that one. What you MIGHT NOT know is that in the show's narrative, Teach was the founder of the pirate republic in Nassau, the leader who ousted the previous governor of the island, the guy who BROUGHT ABOUT the era of self-rule for the pirates. He's like the George Washington of the pirates and all the pirates know it.
When Rogers is torturing Teach, he's not doing it for intelligence or to find a treasure, not to rescue a hostage or anything like that. He's doing it solely to raise the black. (In our pirate show, raise the black is the phrase used when the hunting pirate ship has closed with a target prey ship and hoists her "real" colors (the black pirate flag) to show that she is a pirate ship and not an innocent merchant or whatever. Pirates do not sail about with the black up all the time because then all the other ships would know that the black-flag-flying ship was full of pirates and they would steer clear to avoid being robbed. Since the pirate ship has to get pretty close to the prey ship before an attack is possible, they 'sneak up' by flying a false flag that makes them look non-pirate. But, they'd also like to have the merchant ship surrender and hand over the goods without a fight, so when they get close enough, they raise the black to declare by flag that they are brutal and bloodthirsty pirates.) He's saying, in effect, In doing this unto the greatest of you, unto the one who led the revolt against legitimate governance, unto the one who dared to set you on this path, I show you what becomes of those who go against the state. If I can do this to Blackbeard, imagine what I can do to you all, who are most certainly not Blackbeards.
It's fucking posturing, what Rogers is doing. He does this, this really quite horrible thing, this thing polemically staged and filmed and scored (so that we viewers are cringing uncomfortably and 100% not cheering Rogers on) IN ORDER TO DISPLAY HIS (and the state's) POWER. It's a Show of Force. Geez, Rogers, I did not think it was possible for me to like you less, but... wow. Way to overachieve, there, buddy.
In Black Sails, Rogers is come to the Bahamas to bring the colony to heel. Clear out the fucking rat's nest of pirates, make shipping in the Caribbean safer and more reliable, generate some revenue for the crown, and, though this is not discussed much in the show, PROVIDE BRITAIN WITH SUGAR. "English sugar imports (from the Caribbean) increased sevenfold from 430,000 cwt. in 1700 to over 3,000,000 cwt. in 1800." (quote from online summary of Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century by Kenneth Morgan) (At this time sugar was produced with slave labor. Sugar, itself, was one of the corners of the triangle trade and it's ... problematic. But this is not the time. Focus.) Anyway, especially for the times, these are not bad aims. Like, I don't think Rogers is GOING FOR brutality just for brutality's sake. He's trying (from his perspective) to bring order from disorder, to return a colony to productivity, to civilize the fucking place and bring it back into the fold.
Rogers has limited resources and a VERY laggy chain of command. He doesn't have endless manpower or endless ships. He can't phone a friend for advice or help or even conformation that his orders are backed by the crown. He's ... an island. On an island. He's going to have to get it done pretty much on his own and using his own judgment. There is no backup for him. Probably England will send another guy with more ships to try again if he fails but the odds are good that Rogers won't be there to see his replacement arrive. The last failed governor was... well... that guy that Blackbeard killed. The stakes are pretty high for Rogers and he's going to have to get it right on the first try or Nassau will eat him alive as it has done previous colonial authorities.
Interestingly, Rogers is come to do the job that Thomas Hamilton & Flint (pre-pirate Flint) were wanting to do before shit went all sideways. Also, he comes WITH SHEAVES OF PARDONS and navy ships. Like, he has almost exactly the same kit and the same plan that Thomas Hamilton proposed using to fix things in Nassau. (He does have to find and return Spain's gold, like, that's an issue, but otherwise? He's basically the Thomas Hamilton Plan 2.0.) This was, we recall, a plan that was endorsed and supported by Flint when he was the guy gonna go along with Hamilton and do it. Rogers says, straight up to Flint, that he doesn't want to go the violent brutality route but that "If you (Flint) insist on making me your villain, I will play the part."
Anyway, Rogers winds up standing on the deck giving the orders to shred a man alive while everybody else either watches him doing it or follows his orders to accomplish it. Play the part he does.
(Again, some of this is narrative exigency. If the pirates are your heroes... somebody has to be the bad guy and the colonial powers are a convenient and modern-times "acceptable" bad guy. In these our modern times, we've been cleaning up colonialism for quite some time and we're pretty on board with a colonialism is bad viewpoint.)
I do not like Rogers. I am vested in the pirates are the good guys narrative, here, even though they do awful things and are, in large part, awful people.
But... if Rogers was a pirate in this show, would we excuse his actions? Pretend for a moment that Rogers isn't the official representative of the crown. Pretend he's another pirate, trying to take a fat prize with insufficient men and arms. He's within reach of his prey. He'd like them to surrender with minimal fighting. So he does what pirates do. He raises the black.
This is who I am.
This is what I do.
Surrender.
Tbh, I do not like Rogers and I didn't want to be all apologist for him when I started this post. I really didn't. I don't believe in state-sanctioned violence against its ... citizens. I think consent of the ruled is the way to go. But Rogers is pulling a pretty fucking pirate move, here. It's not fun or pretty to watch. It's not filmed or treated like most of the other acts of violence in the show. We're NOT SUPPOSED TO LIKE IT. But, what Rogers does is 100% undeniably a pirate move.
And if what he does to Teach is wrong... which I think we're all pretty fucking sure it is, then probably all the stuff that the other pirates do, that stuff is also wrong. It works the same way. It has the same underpinnings.
If you'd fuck someone for a million dollars, you don't get to be mortally offended when they try to negotiate downward with "How about fifty bucks?" You've already established what you are -- they're just haggling over the price.
Good job, pirate show! Bring the pain. :) I am here for it.
Oh, and back to the beginning, which I almost forgot. What is a pirate king?
A pirate king is a king who personally commits fairly straightforward and personal atrocities, operating on a relatively small scale. His kingdom is, at most, a few hundred men and a handful of ships. The people who feel his wrath or vengeance probably see his face as the Bad Things happen to them, frequently by his own hand or in-person order.
Regular kings commit atrocities at arm's length, on a wholesale scale. Their kingdoms number citizens in the tens or hundreds of thousands, even the millions. The people who feel his wrath or vengeance likely never see his face nor does he personally witness the things done to them. Additionally, regular kings have so many people under them that the chance of unobserved knock-on effects from policies or officials that LOOK OK AT FIRST GLANCE but do negatively impact citizens of the crown further down the line is definitely NONZERO.
Gilbert and Sullivan are correct. Regular kings do (and have to do, since they rule by "divine right" rather than "consent of the governed") more atrocity stuff than pirate kings. A lot more. It's easier when you don't have to look at it up close but also as the size of your area of responsibility/control grows and you have to delegate more stuff... you don't get to see everything that is done in your name and what you don't see is very difficult to be aware of, very difficult to police, very difficult indeed.
