For all their pillaging and plundering, however, pirates were not all bad. Believe it or not, long before the Age of Revolution dawned in the late 1700s, pirates were pioneers of democracy. They had formal written rules that were agreed upon by all members of the crew and, although these laws varied from ship to ship, they typically followed similar lines.
Pirate Democracy
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all PIRATES are created equal!
Aboard infamous pirate Bartholomew Roberts’ ship, the articles dictated that “every man has a vote in affairs of moment”; it took until the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed to ensure the same in the USA. Pirates voted for who should be the captain, the destination of each voyage, and whether to attack a ship or town. Captains only had absolute power during times of conflict — the rest of the time the ship was governed by the majority wishes of the crew, and if the captain was considered to be doing a bad job, he could be voted out.
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Other rules set out how plunder should be fairly distributed, how the crew should conduct themselves onboard, and even when they had to put out their lights at night. They even outlined a primitive sort of medical insurance, meaning pirates could claim compensation for injuries sustained in battle. The loss of a right arm could be worth up to 600 pieces of eight, whilst the loss of a finger or an eye was rewarded with a smaller payment of 100. The articles also decreed punishments for those who broke the laws, which included marooning, maiming, and death.
The Declaration of Independence, on display at the National Archives in Washington, DC.
Pirates were quite groundbreaking in taking power out of the hands of one man and distributing it amongst the people. Remember, this was at a time when the world was still largely ruled by kings and queens. Indeed, one hundred years before Thomas Jefferson held these truths to be self-evident, pirates had already declared themselves to be equals, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of any merchant ship that tickled their fancy. Despite them being “really bad eggs”, when it comes to democracy, the pirates of the Caribbean were truly ahead of their time.
