In Defoe’s Captain Singleton, published a year later, the eponymous pirate comes back home with new notions of equality and communal property. Indeed, as Defoe teaches us, the highest ideals can be merged with everyday life, and we can relocate utopia, make it practicable, rescale it to manageable proportions. What’s distance, anyway, when ships connect the earth’s farthest corners?
The ideals of Captain Singleton are very different. Here, Defoe unfurls a similar narrative pattern: utopia found; utopia debunked; utopia recreated on a smaller scale in England. But this is a novel about piracy in which the pirates — villains in the prior novel — are now cast as heroes. Crusoe’s utopia is solitary; Singleton’s is social.
One trait of early pirate culture, often overlooked in the colorful (now campy) mythology that followed, was the formation of parallel societies notable for egalitarianism. Pirates voted for their captains and shared their spoils equally. They accepted identity differences for the greater good of all, welcoming women and African slaves, condoning disparate religions and queer sexualities. They developed their own cultures, their own pidgin languages, and even established colonies in remote outposts, for instance Madagascar, where Henry Avery was believed to have founded a colony called Libertalia. Never mind the Disney ride turned into a blockbuster movie franchise. Pirates were, in the popular phrase, “enemies of all mankind”, and their ships couldn’t have been more unlike the strictly normative and hierarchical merchant and naval vessels that vastly outnumbered them. Pirate societies, therefore, were radically separate, different, oppositional — distant. {read}