Pirates and Slavery: The Unromantic Reality

[corsair91]

Pirates and Slavery: The Unromantic Reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sHqpJ1RFbM


Gold and Gunpowder
https://www.youtube.com/@GoldandGunpowder

This video delves into the critically overlooked involvement which pirates had in the slave trade.
Contrary to popular belief, pirates weren't egalitarian, abolitionist, or revolutionary.
They didn't deliberately seek out slave ships to liberate the slaves chained aboard.
For a slave aboard a Guineaman, the worst possible fate, was to be captured by pirates.


Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
03:20 Attitudes towards slavery
07:50 Buccaneers and slavery
10:43 How pirates treated slaves
15:46 End of the pirate slave trade
20:47 Recruitment

Examples of buccaneers who settled down as slave and plantation owners (sans Morgan):
Richard Guy, Laurens Prince (the owner of the Whydah), George Brimacain

- From a 1666 resolution by the council of Jamaica, listing a number of reasons why it is necessary for the island to grant Letters of Marque:
"It hath and will enable many to buy slaves and settle plantations, as Harmenson, Guy, Brimacain, and many others, who have considerable plantations."

- It was common that new arrivals in the Caribbean felt sympathy for slaves (Jean-Baptise Labat, Charles Leslie), but they would eventually get used to and accept it (Labat later owned slaves)

Basically, the matter of slavery is intrinsic to understanding pirates

- Slavery on the island of Bermuda was instigated by pirates.
The first blacks on the island were "Spanish negroes" invited by the English to teach them how to plant and cure tobacco, and were treated like sharecroppers.
From 1620 onwards, English privateers began importing slaves seized from the Spanish, who were shared out between the chief magnates and set to work the land (Source: Craton, Michael, and Gail Saunders. Islanders in the Stream, Volume I : A History of the Bahamian People, p.71)