Skip to main content

Pirate Motives

In Under the Black Flag, David Cordingly explains the motives of men who became pirates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.* The hunger for riches was the most important motive, he explains, but there was also a desire to travel. Importantly, some men felt compelled to become pirates. Cordingly explains that peace between England and Spain in 1603 left former navy and privateering sailors unemployed, which led them into piracy; and those alive after the 1717 Treaty of Utrecht brought peace to England, Spain, and France believed that unemployed sailors were to blame for an increase in piracy.** A further motive was alcohol. Some pirates, in speeches they gave before they were executed, stated that alcoholism drove them to piracy and other crimes.

According to a January 15th, 2014, report from the International Chamber of Commerce International Maritime Bureau, piracy at sea is at its lowest since 2011, in large part because of the deterrence of Somali pirates off the coast of east Africa.*** A United Nations spokesperson, as reported by the Congressional Research Service, has stated that Somali pirates felt compelled into that lifestyle because illegal fishing and toxic waste dumping in Somali waters have ruined the livelihoods of Somali fishermen.****

This is simply to show that European pirates sometimes had the same motives of today's Somali pirates. Like them, some European pirates felt forced to become pirates because there was no economic alternative.

*Cordingly, David. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates. Pages 192-193. Random House Publishers, 2006. Print.
**Cordingly notes that there were 40,000 unemployed men after the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession.
***"Somali pirate clampdown caused drop in global piracy, IMB reveals." Commercial Crime Service, a division of the ICC. 15 January 2014. Web. 22 July 2014.
****Dagne, Ted. "Somalia: Current Conditions and Prospects for a Lasting Peace," page 15. Congressional Research Service. 31 August 2011. Web. 22 July 2014.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...
Post a Comment
Read more

Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar). One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball). Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important. There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Noise

I started writing this on Friday. It's far from perfect, and I might change things around, but it's done for now. It's a narrative poem whose main character loses hope, hears a familiar sound from heaven, and finds himself alive again. It's a spin off of a poem I wrote on as part of another post in January. In any case, I hope you like it. Noise Silent songs stop playing Through chambers cupped and curved Through insides of once softened space Through dreams once less deserved Familiar sound pours forth past gates Past sentries long in dream Reaching ears that long went deaf To roar its endless theme Piercing past the sound of noise Through whispers breathed for free Booming, distant, fast-felt sky Makes its quiet mark on me On again, and up to play Songs come from deep below May not be played for list’ning ears Still thunder soft and slow Mirroring their master’s tune With awkward tarnished rings Played through doubt on hopeful frets Play sile...
Post a Comment
Read more