Barbe Noire: le rebelle à l'esprit démocratique

Barbe Noire aurait été bien plus qu'un simple pirate selon Colin Woodard. Ce dernier le présente comme un rebelle qui s'est soulevé contre les conditions injustes imposées par les armateurs et les capitaines de vaisseaux. Woodard est l'auteur d'un nouveau livre sur le célèbre pirate intitulé “The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.”

 "There was also a democratic spirit aboard the pirates’ ships six decades before Lexington and Yorktown, more than seven ahead of the storming of the Bastille. Upon seizing a vessel, the pirates turned its government upside down. Instead of using whips and beatings to enforce a rigid, top-down hierarchy, they elected and deposed their captains by popular vote. They shared their treasure almost equally and on most ships didn’t allow the captain his own cabin. The contracts some crews drew up and signed included disability benefits: payments for lost eyes and limbs taken from the shared plunder before it was divvied up.

All this — and far better food, drink and hours — made piracy extremely attractive to merchant and naval sailors alike, who in this time period faced malnourishment, wage cheating, and brutal and sometimes sadistic officers. Typically when the pirates captured a ship, a portion of its crew would enthusiastically join their ranks, allowing the outbreak to expand from a handful of pirates in sloops to several thousand in multi-ship squadrons in just three years. Even the Royal Navy was vulnerable; when the ship H.M.S. Phoenix confronted the pirates at their Nassau lair 300 years ago this spring, a number of the frigate’s sailors sneaked off in the night to serve under the black flag.

Runaway slaves also joined the pirates as word spread that they allowed people of African descent to participate as equal members of their crews and sometimes as captains. At the height of the outbreak, it was not unusual for escaped or liberated slaves to account for a quarter or more of the pirates’ crews. In the months after Blackbeard captured his flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, witnesses would report as many as 70 serving aboard, and several remained in his closest circle to the day he died. Although pirates also treated many of the slaves they found on captured slave ships as cargo to be sold, not colleagues to recruit, their integrated ships still represented a threat to the slave colonies surrounding the Bahamas. Gov. Benjamin Bennett of Bermuda warned that slaves had “grown so impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising” against us and “fear their joining with the pirates.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/opinion/blackbeard-pirate-golden-age-.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage