Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World

By Kevin P. McDonald

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than a thousand pirates poured from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. There, according to Kevin P. McDonald, they helped launch an informal trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, connecting the North American colonies with the rich markets of the East Indies. Rather than conducting their commerce through chartered companies based in London or Lisbon, colonial merchants in New York entered into an alliance with Euro-American pirates based in Madagascar. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves explores the resulting global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires and shows the illicit ways American colonists met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods. The book reveals that pirates played a significant yet misunderstood role in this period and that seafaring slaves were both commodities and essential components in the Indo-Atlantic maritime networks.

Enlivened by stories of Indo-Atlantic sailors and cargoes that included textiles, spices, jewels and precious metals, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, this book links previously isolated themes of piracy, colonialism, slavery, transoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions and extends the boundaries of traditional Atlantic, national, world, and colonial histories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9780520958784

Kevin P. McDonald

Kevin P. McDonald is Assistant Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. 

Book preview

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Fletcher Jones Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

PIRATES, MERCHANTS, SETTLERS, AND SLAVES

THE CALIFORNIA WORLD HISTORY LIBRARY

Edited by Edmund Burke III, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Patricia Seed

1. The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F. Richards

2. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian

3. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho

4. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 , by Thomas R. Metcalf

5. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker

6. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, by Jeremy Prestholdt

7. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall

8. Island World: A History of Hawai‘i and the United States, by Gary Y. Okihiro

9. The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz

10. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones, by Gary Y. Okihiro

11. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, by Robert Finlay

12. The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, by Sebastian Conrad; translated by Alan Nothnagle

13. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 , by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi

14. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, by Marcello Carmagnani

15. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 , by Julia A. Clancy-Smith

16. History and the Testimony of Language, by Christopher Ehret

17. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfs, by Sebouh David Aslanian

18. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route, by Steven E. Sidebotham

19. The Haj to Utopia: The Ghadar Movement and Its Transnational Connections, 1905–1930 , by Maia Ramnath

20. Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History, by Arash Khazeni

21. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World, by Kevin P. McDonald

PIRATES, MERCHANTS, SETTLERS, AND SLAVES

COLONIAL AMERICA AND THE INDO-ATLANTIC WORLD

Kevin P. McDonald

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    McDonald, Kevin P., 1972– author.

    Pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves : Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic world / Kevin P. McDonald.

        pages    cm.— (California World History Library ; 21)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28290-2 (cloth)—ISBN 978-0-520-95878-4 (ebook)

    1. Slave trade—United States—History—17th century.    2. Slave trade—United States—History—18th century.    3. Pirates—United States—History—17th century.    4. Pirates—United States—History—18th century.    5. North America—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775.    I. Title.

E446.M44    2015

    973.2—dc232014029707

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Indo-Atlantic World

1. The Spectrum of Piracy

2. New York Merchants and the Indo-Atlantic Trade

3. Utopian Dreamers and Colonial Disasters

4. Pirate-Settlers of Madagascar

5. Seafaring Slaves and Freedom in the Indo-Atlantic World

Conclusion: Specters of the Indo-Atlantic World

Appendix 1. Slave Trade Ships in Madagascar, 1663–1747

Appendix 2. Ships at Madagascar, 1689–1730

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Sutton Nicholls, A New Map of the Most Considerable Plantations of the English in America, 1700

2. Sir Francis Drake and William Dampier, prominent figures in the spectrum of piracy

3. Johannes Vingboons, View of New York, 1664

4. The earliest street plan of New York showing the crooked layout, 1660

5. A dark and stormy view of More’s Utopia, 1715

6. Emanuel Bowen’s map of Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century voyages and travels from Venice to China

7. Anthony Van Dyck’s Madagascar Portrait, depicting Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, alongside his wife, 1640

8. Title page of Hamond’s pamphlet promoting Madagascar, 1643

9. A contemporary closeup of Madagascar from Frederik de Wit’s Totius Africæ accuratissima tabula, ca. 1688

10. Nicolas de Larmessin’s engraved portrait of Aurangzeb, the powerful Mughal ruler

MAPS

1. The Indo-Atlantic World, ca. 1640–1730

2. The Atlantic Ocean

3. The Indian Ocean

4. The Greater New York Harbor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book, I have acquired innumerable debts of gratitude, both great and small. While I was at Rutgers/NJIT for my master’s degree, Laurie Benton helped launch this project, and she has been an exceptional mentor ever since. My expanding scholarly interest in Colonial America and world history found a fertile and nurturing environment at the University of California–Santa Cruz. Tremendous thanks to Lynn Westerkamp for being a considerate and judicious dissertation director; and Terry Burke, an encouraging guide in the world of world history and a gracious supporter in helping transform this project from dissertation to book.

There are likewise many institutions—and individuals within those institutions—to thank for providing research funding. My gratitude goes especially to the Huntington, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for providing short-term research grants. The University of California deserves singular praise for sponsoring this project from the outset, beginning with a Regents Fellowship in 2002 and continuing with numerous research and travel grants in the ensuing years, including a Doctoral Student Sabbatical Fellowship. The critical research phase in the British archives was made possible by a five-month Resident Assistantship with the University of California–London Study Abroad program. The Institute for Humanities Research within the UC system provided multiple travel grants. The Department of History at UC Santa Cruz was a vital and energetic place that helped nurture this project and provided funding, in addition to intellectual and emotional support, including an important Dissertation Research Fellowship.

Many libraries and archives deserve special thanks, including the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the British Library, the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the Guildhall Library, the Public Records Office at Kew—now known as the National Archives—the Huntington Library, and the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. At an early stage I received generous advice from Roy Ritchie (via Jan Lewis): to follow the sources as outlined in Roy’s landmark book, Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates. Roy’s footnotes became a map of sorts for my own research, and provided a foundation for much of what follows.

Early drafts of work in progress were presented at numerous conferences, including the UC Conference in World History at UCLA; the Graduate Student Forum in Early American History at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in Boston; the All-UC Multi Campus Research Group in World History at UC San Diego; the New Worlds Reflected: Representations of Utopia, the New World and Other Worlds, 1500–1800 conference at Birkbeck College, University of London; the Conference on New York State History at Columbia University in New York; the World History Association Annual Conference at Cal State University–Long Beach and at Queen Mary College, University of London; and the International Congress of Maritime History (IMEHA) at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England. Thanks to Huw Bowen for chairing my panel and inviting me to dine with his Welsh colleagues in the Painted Hall. Conrad Wright, Lynn Hunt, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Laura Mitchell also provided useful comments and suggestions along the way. I thank all the conference organizers, panel chairs, participants, and commenters for helping shape the rough edges of this project into a more polished product.

Many other individuals, friends, and colleagues from University of California Santa Cruz helped shape this project—Alan Christy, Chris Connery, Dana Frank, Gail Hershatter, Bruce Levine, Cindy Polecritti, Buck Sharp, and Alice Yang provided thoughtful comments and suggestions at various stages along the way. Anders Otterness, Maia Ramnath, and Nat Zappia deserve thanks as my cohorts; the Friday Forum at Santa Cruz was a valuable early sounding board; and the conversations that continued at the Red Room and the Poet & Patriot were equally rewarding.

For field research, I am indebted to my Malagasy guides, Manitra, Julian, Luc, and Andre Mabily of Île Sainte-Marie, for their generous assistance during my time spent in Madagascar.

At later stages, I was invited to present my work in progress at a number of important venues, including the Atlantic World Workshop at New York University, the Department of History at UC Santa Cruz, and the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. I would like to thank Karen Kupperman, Lynn Westerkamp, and Kate Lynch, respectively, for these invitations and for the invaluable comments and suggestions from the various participants. Special thanks also to Bill Germano at the Cooper Union; and David Christian, who provided a vital moment of encouragement and conversation toward the end of this long process.

The editing and final research phase was enormously assisted by an A.W. Mellon post-doctoral fellowship in the Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University. I thank especially Joe Trotter, Caroline Acker, Edda Fields-Black, Wendy Goldman, Kate Lynch, Scott Sandage, John Soluri, Donald Sutton, and Tim Haggerty for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Portions of this book have been published elsewhere. I thank Randy Head for his instructive comments on my Thomas Tew essay, which was published as a working paper in the California Digital Library. Special thanks to Chloë Houston, who helped edit previously published sections of chapter 3, and to Ashgate, the original publisher of portions of the same chapter.

I thank the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University for providing a generous first book subvention award. My colleagues at LMU have been extraordinarily gracious and supportive; special thanks go to Paul Zeleza, Amy Woodson-Boulton, Nick Rosenthal, and Carla Bittel. Andrew Devereux and Traci Voyles were instrumental in reading and commenting on final drafts. Cynthia Becht at the Hannon Library was extremely generous with her time in helping me gather images for production. My students at New York University and Loyola Marymount University deserve special recognition for compelling me to think systematically about pirates and piracy in my seminar and survey courses. My RAINS research assistants, Colin Arnold and RJ Larrieu, assisted in proofreading portions of the manuscript.

Without a publisher, this project would remain just that. I thank especially the University of California Press, including Niels Hooper, Dore Brown, Pamela Polk, Kim Hogeland, Elizabeth Berg, and Bradley Depew, for their assistance, and Bill Nelson for producing the maps. Thanks also to the National Portrait Gallery in England, the Library of Congress, Wikimedia, the Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University, and the Huntington Library for image reproduction rights. A special note of gratitude to Carla Pestana and the anonymous readers who provided critical feedback before publication. Any residual faults with the book remain solely my own.

The last and greatest plaudits are reserved for family and friends, too numerous to name—but I’ll single out a few. My father and brother have been especially inquisitive allies from the outset. Growing up in Belmar, New Jersey, established a deep and abiding interest in the Atlantic and all things oceanic. I am extremely fortunate to still live by the sea, which provides a continuing source of inspiration and energy. Despite our best efforts—or perhaps because of them—life goes on as we pursue our scholarly endeavors. I will remember with great joy that the writing was interposed by the birth of my first child, providing me with an amazingly fresh perspective and a new source of motivation (his brother should arrive before this book hits the shelves . . . ). The joy of new life has been tempered with the lingering sadness over the passing of my mother, and more recently, the unexpected departure of my father-in-law, Dr. Jae Ook Park, whose kindness and generosity knew no bounds. In the end, this book would never have been completed without all of the above, but most especially, the unending support of Dr. Park’s daughter, my wife and partner, JP. This book is dedicated to her.

Kevin P. McDonald

Manhattan Beach, California

September 2014

MAP 1. The Indo-Atlantic World, ca. 1640–1730

MAP 2. The Atlantic Ocean

MAP 3. The Indian Ocean

Introduction

The Indo-Atlantic World

In 1694, Captain Thomas Tew, an infamous Anglo-American pirate, was observed riding comfortably in the open coach of New York’s only six-horse carriage with Benjamin Fletcher, the colonel-governor of the colony. Captain Tew, a Rhode Island native, had recently returned from a profitable pirating venture based in Madagascar, ten thousand miles away in the Indian Ocean, and his appearance in New York should have raised some officials’ eyebrows. The pirate and the governor, cavorting through the crooked streets and exchanging gifts, were in fact keenly observed by many of the seaport’s inhabitants, including its numerous slaves. The pirate, later accompanied by his wife and daughter, both splendidly clad in Eastern silks and exotic jewels, was to be entertained by the governor and some of New York’s wealthiest merchants.¹

Captain Tew was the vanguard of some thousand Atlantic-born pirates who poured into the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tew and his crew helped launch an informal global trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, connecting the North American colonies with the rich trading world of the East Indies. This commerce was not directed from London or Lisbon by a chartered trade company or the state. Instead, colonial merchants in New York entered an informal alliance with Euro-American pirates, who functioned as cross-cultural brokers in settlements they founded in Madagascar. This book explores a global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires, exposing the ways informal networks created by pirates and merchants enabled American colonists to satisfy their consumer desires for East India goods—including slaves. Slaves functioned both as commodities and laborers in this network, some eventually obtaining their freedom as a result of their participation in the Indo-Atlantic maritime world.

The Indo-Atlantic world is both a conceptual framework and an interoceanic space that connected the North and South Atlantic basins with the Indian Ocean: an integrated circum-Atlantic/western Indian zone of cross-cultural, social, and economic exchanges.² The Atlantic world itself developed in the wake of the Columbian voyages, evolving by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a dynamic oceanic zone that connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as adjacent islands, into a coherent region of ever thickening demographic, economic, cultural, and social interactions and exchanges. The most notable development in the Atlantic world was the establishment of the plantation complex system, which integrated Euro-American capital, African slave laborers, long-distance trade networks, and specialized commodity markets.³

Though the Atlantic world emerged as a result of Columbus’s discovery, it should be remembered that his objective was to reach the East Indies and make a direct connection with rich markets in exotic goods, especially spices. Prior to the sixteenth century, luxury goods from the East—spices, silks, cotton textiles, porcelain, perfumes, jewels, and drugs—arrived in Europe only after a very long overland journey on the Silk Road and other Asian caravan routes, or via the Persian Gulf and Red Sea routes connecting to the eastern Mediterranean, which was dominated by Venetian merchants.⁴ To the dismay of Christian Europe, most of the circuits in these ancient trade networks were controlled by Muslims, as Islam came to culturally unify most of the Indian Ocean littoral and interior Asia, including the Red Sea region, by the eighth century.

The price of Eastern luxury items grew exponentially the farther one traveled from the points of production, and the Iberians wished to circumvent the Muslim brokers, as well as the Italian middlemen connecting the Levant to the western Mediterranean. While Columbus sailed west in this attempt, after nearly a century of piecemeal exploration along the coast of Atlantic Africa, the Portuguese established a more direct route by sailing east around the Cape of Storms (the Cape of Good Hope), reaching India in 1498—only to find the city of Calicut dominated by Muslim traders (though ruled by a Hindu zamorin).⁵ When the zamorin dismissed Vasco da Gama and his European trade goods as worthless, the Portuguese carracks departed Malabar with their bombards blazing, returning again in following years to inflict more significant damage. The traditional rhythms of nonviolent free trade in the Indian Ocean were ruptured, no doubt confirming in the minds of the Malabaris that the Portuguese were merely pirates, as one historian recently stated.⁶ The voyage of da Gama thus marked the beginnings of a nascent Indo-Atlantic world characterized by the armed European trading model, which merchants of the Indian Ocean world identified as piracy. The full blooming of this Indo-Atlantic world would arrive not just with the chartered Dutch, English, and French East India trading companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but with actual pirate settlements in Madagascar and the Atlantic-style sugar and slave plantation complex in the nearby western Indian Ocean islands by the eighteenth century.⁷

From the sixteenth-century Portuguese voyages on, European ships and sailors began making regular interoceanic connections in these regions, but until recently, academic historians, with some important exceptions, have been generally disinclined to systematically follow them.⁸ When they have followed in their wake, the historiography has tended to focus exclusively on the official state and monopoly trading companies.⁹ Illegal traders, or interlopers, have received far less attention.¹⁰

At the same time, most historians have tended to focus on discrete ocean regions, as if the ships, and the winds and currents that carried them, did not connect the seas.¹¹ Pirates remapped the oceans as interconnected, destabilizing any contemporary notions of oceans as isolated or separate. Later literary writers and scientists have arguably been more cognizant of the indivisibility of the oceans—most expressively in Melville’s Moby Dick, with its famous interoceanic search for the great white whale. The environmentalist and poet-scientist Rachel Carson, meanwhile, has admonished that there is . . . no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. . . . [I]t is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one.¹² Pirates were certainly active in the eastern Pacific along the Spanish American coast during the period under review, and among the first pirates to reach Madagascar were those who circumvented the globe via the vast Pacific Ocean in 1689.¹³ The Pacific, the largest of the world’s ocean basins, has many important global histories to reveal.¹⁴ But the South Sea, as it was known to contemporaries, did not develop a significant pirate slave-trading nexus, nor did pirates establish any lasting Pacific settlements during this period, and so the present study follows by charting the Indo-Atlantic movement of pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves in the deep, hidden currents of interoceanic history.

The traditional, localized parameters of colonial American history have expanded greatly in the past few decades in the wake of Atlantic world studies.¹⁵ But the boundaries of this field can and should be stretched even farther to encompass interoceanic and global historical narratives, patterns, and processes. The Indo-Atlantic framework provides an expanded historical perspective that goes beyond the limiting notions of Atlantic history that have become prevalent in Atlantic studies.¹⁶ This book begins to answer the challenge to avoid the interpretive and analytical constrictions that have bounded traditional Atlantic approaches, necessitating a more complex, nuanced, and global perspective than most present Atlantic frameworks allow.¹⁷

While the Atlantic and Indian Oceans form the broad canvas of this study, the sailing ships that traversed this maritime seascape are just as significant. The sailors themselves were an Indo-Atlantic hybrid, with Euro-American, African, and Malagasy laborers working on most voyages. In addition to the crews, the cargoes, such as cotton textiles, silks, spices, jewels, ivory, silver, gold, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, were likewise Indo-Atlantic in nature, as was the circulation of people, including not just sailors but adventurers, pirates, merchants, and slaves. The Indo-Atlantic trade world thus spans from South Asia via Madagascar and Africa to the Caribbean and North America (and vice versa). As a global network, the Indo-Atlantic flows were multidirectional, multidimensional, and multinational.

This global trade network took shape in an early modern maritime world of blurred boundaries, elastic edges, and shifting definitions that challenges our broader understanding of pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves. In this liminal world, these categories were not static and fixed but unstable and permeable, at times even interchangeable. Legitimate merchants could slip into piracy, while pirates could transition into merchants, settlers, and slave traders, occasionally finding themselves enslaved in the process. Perhaps most striking, slaves could gain incremental degrees of independence and through extraordinary efforts might actually become freemen. Much as these categories were fluid, so too was the watery realm in which they were encompassed: a maritime world of ships and shorelines, ports and docks, coves and inlets, mangroves and beaches—an amphibious environment connecting the sea and the seashore, and linking ocean to ocean.¹⁸

To understand this world in motion, this book combines a colonial American, maritime, and interoceanic approach that is not bound by national or local constraints. To follow Captain Tew and related pirates, merchants, settlers, and slaves, we need a world historical perspective focusing closely on colonial New York, then expanding outward from the local North American outpost and its neighboring colonies to a broader perspective beyond the geographic boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean. This book thus presents a complex interoceanic network of pirate activities above and beyond the numerous more limited portrayals of pirates as a local or regional phenomenon.

The major themes explored here—piracy, colonialism, slavery, interoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions—have been examined to some degree by historians in the past, but rarely have they been woven together in a single coherent monograph.¹⁹ By doing so, a hidden history of an Indo-Atlantic trade world is uncovered, showing that pirates were deeply entrenched and played multifaceted roles in the overall colonial project; that New York merchants maintained extensive involvement with pirates in an early modern global trade network; that Madagascar, its pirate settlements, and its slaving stations played a surprisingly outsized role in the colonial imagination; and that slaves were absolutely central, not just as commodities but as integral components in Indo-Atlantic trade in particular and maritime trade networks more generally. Understanding this illicit Indo-Atlantic trade network also underscores the significance of a global perspective in examining important yet understudied aspects of colonial American history—including consumer desire.²⁰

As both an institutionalized and a haphazard