#Pirate utopia book free

Piracy itself has a history that goes back to whenever the first group of sea-faring bandits absconded with goods that weren’t properly theirs a millennium-and-a-half before Christ, and both Greek and Phoenician sailors were known to work as brigands.

#Pirate utopia book free

Like the imagined cowboy and Indian, or the gypsy and bohemian, pirates have long been configured as living in thrall to their own code, free of magistrate and minister, privy only to the demands of the high sea. Since the seventeenth-century, even while the Barbary Coast pirates terrorized Europeans with the threat of enslavement, piracy has still offered an idealized version of prosperity and freedom. Indeed, he’d live for another decade after the play’s staging, not violently upon the sea, but rather “in a most princely and magnificent state,” wearing “curious and costly clothing,” within his Tunisian pleasure palace, surrounded by riches and women-still an Englishman, still a Muslim, and still very much a pirate. Pirates have long been configured as living in thrall to their own code, free of magistrate and minister, privy only to the demands of the high sea.Īny audience awkwardness of rooting for a Muslim was placated when Daborne had Ward violently die in the last act, though the real pirate celebrated in pamphlet and ballad was still alive. The English professor Laurie Ellinghausen explains in her book Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates that such pamphlets and plays, broadsheets and ballads imagined “Ward as a figure of masculine bravado, even a hero.” Of course, as the title, A Christian Turn’d Turk, indicates, Ward’s tremendous wealth was made possible by a willing conversion to Islam a few years before the staging of Daborne’s play, when he took the name Yusuf Raïs. A popular ballad of the time celebrates the corsair’s victories: In 1605, Ward sailed to the Mediterranean, eventually establishing Tunis as his base while harassing Dutch, Venetian, and English ships. Pirates, explain the anthropologists Shannon Lee Dawdy and Joe Bonni in Anthropological Quarterly, have been “characterized as predators, parasites, criminals, outlaws, rebels, heroes, heroines, evildoers, buffoons, opportunists, armed robbers, raiders, plunderers, bandits, brigands, liberators, rogues, robin hoods, rapscallions, and bloodthirsty killers.” For seventeenth-century audiences, smarting at their own oppressions, Ward may have fit a few of those descriptions, some of them contradictory.ĭaborne had the actual Jack Ward to draw inspiration from: a former privateer who’d gone rogue, having supposedly speechified in a Plymouth tavern that ours is a “scurvy world, as scurvily we live in’t, we feed here upon the water, on the King’s salt beef, without ere a pence to buy us a Bissell when we come ashore,” according to Andrew Barker, author of a pamphlet about the pirate. In the play, Ward intones, “So that I rise, let the world sink, and heaven fall.”Īs with contemporary anti-heroes, audiences may have received a vicarious thrill watching Ward. For London audiences, Ward was an evocative anti-hero, a working-class Englishman punishing spoiled aristocrats, an embodiment of the promise that the world shall be turned upside down. The protagonist is Captain Jack Ward-a rogue, criminal, pirate-who terrorizes English ships and grows rich off their stolen treasure.

And the Prophet, a seductive warrior-poet who leads via free love and military ruthlessness.Included on the 1612 listing of sanctioned plays known as the English Stationers Register, there is a work by Robert Daborne with the evocative title of A Christian Turn’d Turk. The Ace of Hearts, a dashing Milanese aristocrat, spymaster, and tactical savant. Frau Piffer, Syndicalist manufacturer of torpedos at a factory run by and for women. Lorenzo Secondari, World War I veteran, engineering genius, and leader of Croatian raiders. The ambitious Soldier-Citizens of Carnaro are led by a brilliant and passionate coterie of the perhaps insane. Mortal enemies of communists, capitalists, and even fascists (to whom they are not entirely unsympathetic). Original introduction by Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan and Gun Machine Who are these bold rebels pillaging their European neighbors in the name of revolution? The Futurists! Utopian pirate warriors of the diminutive Regency of Carnaro, scourge of the Adriatic Sea.