Worldbuilding 203: YARRR PIRACY!
Ahoy and surdomute! Well, I be neither deaf nor mute, and even if I were, I'd still have me quill for scribin'! YARRR! Every soul fancies a bit o' pirate lore, whether they be scurvy knaves up to no good, or valiant hearts aimin' to right the wrongs! Pirates, they carry a hefty dose of historical allure, and we even hoist their Jolly Roger into the starry heavens! But arrr... What exactly be this thing called 'piracy'?
Alright, I promise I won’t keep doing that over and over, I promise… but maybe occasionally.
What be piracy?
I get to do it in my headings, alright? Anyway, I will be going for a slightly broader than traditional definition.
Piracy is when a group of people working together who are on the move repeatedly robs other groups of people who may be stationary or on the move of their material possessions.
The importance here is, of course, that it is continuously done. Sure, robbing one group once and never doing it again is an ACT of piracy, but you wouldn’t call a crew that does it once pirates. The astute among you readers, which is of course close to 100%, will also notice that I make no mention of crafts, ships, or the likes. That is because I want the broader definition. When done on land, it is more commonly called “raiding,” and I will discuss the differences a bit. We all know who the pirates are, right? The victims! Psyke! They are not.
Yarr, piracy arrr raiding
Under my definition, raiding is a form of piracy, but there is one big fundamental difference between raiding and what is normally called piracy: raiding is done on land and that carries some issues that any sea, air, or space piracy do not have to deal with, usually.
Namely, on land, you leave traces when you run away! Assume the raiders come in and do their thing and grab everything and ride away on their 6 legged horses, the attacked are now trying to gather themselves and figure out what to do. Your horses leave a trace that the victims can trace, so they gather people to help and come back for revenge!
This is in contrast with water, air, and space–WAS–where you get into your craft afterwards and can either destroy the other craft and have the entire crew die, or not if you attack a settlement of some sort. Either way, in the end, your vessel fucks off, and it is anything but easy to track you down! Which may be one of the reasons why they are considered so different despite their similarities, but that is only my speculation.
Me letter of marque
This means that all piracy and thus pirates were illegal then, right? Oh you silly goose. It is only illegal and bad if pirates strike against you and your ships! If it is others, who gives horse manure? That is what a letter of marque essentially did. I will henceforth just call it a marque.
A marque was given to a person, aka the privateer or corsair–I’ll stick to privateer–by the state. It was usually intended such that the privateer would attack enemies that the state was at war with. If the enemy ship was captured and taken back, there could be a bounty given from the state to you, the glorious privateer; in other cases the ownership of the ship was simply handed over to you.
A fleet is expensive! Much easier and cheaper to allow private people to handle it… probably no relationship to the word privateer, right? Anyway, it is cheaper to let private people do their thing with their ships, and when at war, simply give them a giant carte blanche to attack your enemies! After all, with a standing fleet, the state has to pay for maintenance and much else.
And yarr the pirate by another name, can work as a pirate, and when things get tough, you can run off back home, and they won’t punish you!
All Hands Up an' Vote, Ye Scallywags!
Media often portray pirates as rigidly hierarchical with the captain as the supreme glorious leader! YARR! But piracy is not like that at all. As I talk about in my government post about legitimacy, one needs legitimacy to rule, and how it is obtained does not matter. As long as you have it, you have the ability to rule. In ordinary states and jobs, the state has the monopoly on violence, and thus can enforce its will and rules while getting its legitimacy from other sources.
On a pirate ship, the only way to have any authority to rule is by consent. If a person doesn’t like you to rule, either they get the rest to get rid of you, or they fuck off whenever you go to land to get supplies because its going to be too expensive to keep people there who are unwilling to be on the ship. Which is unlike ordinary state ships because they only go into port where they have the right to force you back onto the ship if you’re unwilling after the first trip. Or, if you have some kind of magic that forces your crew to stay on ship and punish them for disobedience, then you can rule with an ironfist.
So for a normal pirate crew, who is the captain and who is the quartermaster, which I will get back to, is something that that all have to agree on, and your right to rule on the ship only goes as far as the crew allows it. So remarkably, pirate crews tend to be fairly democratic, including in how booty and plunder is divided.You don’t keep people happy with you as a leader if you start stiffing them on their share.
Cap'n's Biddin' vs. Quartermaster's Heedin'
Another common misconception that a lot of media portrays is that the only one who really stands out from the rest is the captain. No surrey! There are many who stand above the rest. The most obvious one is the captain, but we also have the quartermaster, and then some other ones, including doctor/surgeon, and some other more specialised professions. The specialised positions are much less prone to the democratic processes because, well, you can’t vote someone to know medicine. But a badly behaved doctor or surgeon can be tossed overboard the moment they are no longer needed.
Quartermaster and Captain are different. Both have to be more agreed on but do very different kinds of jobs. A short and sweet way to think about them is that the Captain is the general and the quartermaster is the administrator. The Captain decides when, who, how, and where to attack and barks the orders during the battle and the fight. This is also the one time when the captain could never, ever be removed. During battle and before and after, you don’t want questions about authority and confusion, so for that, the captain is set in stone. But if the captain fucks it up royally, well, can always vote them out afterward!
The quartermaster is the one that usually counted the booty, divided, wrote (illiteracy was historically very common for many when this was prominent), assigned day-to-day work, and kept the ship stashed with food and more. Day-to-day planning was the quartermaster's job, and if you ask me, after having done administrative work, that is so BORING! But someone had to do it. Though if you ask me, whoever is willing and capable to do that job would likely keep it because no one wants that boring task. And you don’t want to piss off the quartermaster; they can get you doing even more boring work.
Ourrr booty and me share
You don’t join a pirate crew for the fun of it! Unless it's an adventure world, at which, maybe? Either way, if you work on one, you are likely to, uh… go 6 feet under if caught, so joining one is a risk. This includes even if you got a marque; after all, that is only ONE government saying it's okay, the rest… Not so happy. But as long as the pay is great enough, people are willing to risk a lot!
And that is where a general share system comes in. The great thing with shares is that it incentivises everyone to do their best because only by working hard together can you get the maximum gain from any job you get on the high seas or grand nebulas! Yarrrr! So how does it work? Simple!
The Captain and Quartermaster do a lot of hard work so you know, they deserve a little extra for their extra work and responsibility, so they get 2 shares each. Special professions are harder too, so you know, they get 1.5 shares, the rest of you scallywags get 1 share each! So let's say we have a simple crew: captain, quartermaster, surgeon, carpenter, and 3 ordinary crewmen. That gives us 10 shares in total, and let's say the plunder is one thousand dubloons. Well, the ship suffered a lot of damage, so 300 dubloons goes to repairs, another 300 goes to all the food that you will need to buy. 200 goes to those that were injured.
Oh, you didn’t know? Pirates can have insurance if they get injured! It, along with everything, is often decided before they set sail, but if you got too injured, you, or your family, could receive some of the plunder so you could be comfortable once back on land. Anyway, that leaves us with 200 dubloons and 20 per share. So captain and quartermaster each get 40, the carpenter and surgeon get 30, and each of the rest get 20 each. The math is not terribly difficult.
Having shares like this and insurance to take care of you if shit goes sideways is a great way to make certain people give their all willingly! I am sure most of my readers feel that if things are fair and they are rewarded for good performance, they give more!
Pirates be now
Pirates exist to this day on Earth, but their modus operandi have shifted substantially from how it was. A lot of it is still about agreements between the whole people, but at the same time, it is also not. What are often called pirates today can be more closely called privateers. Though it is less like the state says “We want you to attack these ships” and more the states saying “We don’t care what you do so you can come back.”
Which of course means a lot of the comradery that could develop, doesn’t, because… when coming back to land, you have other forces that can make you comply with things you didn’t want, and a lot of the more uh… pleasant aspects no longer apply. That is one reason out of many why, for example, kidnapping is rampant. If the states strongly opposed the pirates, kidnapping a few hundred people from a massive ship would be infeasible as the state would start hunting them down as the international community goes berserk.
But because the government doesn’t care, they can take the people onto land and be considerably crueller than necessary. Pirates have always had to have a brand of being ruthless and necessarily cruel in order to get what they want, but when all you have is your brand and your crewmates, there is also a line you cannot cross. If you cross it, the enemy will fight you to the death, and you will also suffer greatly. It is a balance: cruel enough that people think giving up is worthwhile to avoid your cruelty, but not so cruel that they think that fighting no matter what is better than even risking your cruelty.
What ye booty be?
What are some things that can be taken? Well, it all always comes down to brass tax. Or more precisely, anything that can in some way be converted to money. After all, that is the entire point of being a pirate! So of course, stealing money straight up is the easiest, but unless it is nailed down, you can steal anything to try to sell. Someone is always ready to buy if you sell it cheap enough!
The second type of booty is ships and people. Though with people, it is called kidnapping, and it is an age old classic to get money. It tends to work easier with phones or similar technologies as you can more easily communicate without revealing your position, which is also why stealing ships that you don’t intend to keep has been less popular. It is much harder to hide yourself.
But if you want something more exotic, they could steal organs, life force, magical artefacts, literally anything that can be converted into money.
Yarr Why pirates be so beloved?
Well, modern pirates are not. They take that personal touch and make it horrible because of the aforementioned reasons of cruelty and unnecessary such. But what about historical ones? Well, romanticism, adventure, and codes, those are my suspected reasons why pirates are so popular. Let’s do them in reverse order.
Pirates are often portrayed as having some sort of code that they go by, which can be seen as not entirely false. You need to have your pirate brand, and it needs to be a certain way so that groups get a reputation that they stick to. And as someone who loves villains with codes, I understand it. It is always fun to have someone bad have this one line of badness they will not cross.
Adventure be second! Back in the age of sails, life was different. The world was huge, enormously huge! Huger than my butt! Not like today for you humans. A few clicks and buttons on your smartphones, and suddenly you know anything you want.
This is the kind of garbage they had to go with in the 17th century; sure, they knew there was some land in some places, but any details were completely obliterated by their sheer ignorance. No wonder you could get stories of Atlantis, El Dorado, and much else. The sheer vastness of the unknown begs to be filled in by stories, and those stories mean there are adventures to be had.
And not being bound by some pesky laws meant you could do anything you want, good or bad, you were free to explore as you saw fit. So it was a perceived source of adventure which of course means there are many ripe stores to be told. This brings me to the third reason.
Romanticizification, is that a word? No, except it is now! So with the adventure, you have everything ripe for a great story, but you know, people don’t want to read about horrible people maiming each other and being greedy arseholes, so you focus on the good stuff and tweak the bad sides so it is more palatable to the readers and viewers. And then the next generation takes those and changes the parts they liked and what didn’t work and keeps at it, and eventually you have something that is cool, awesome, fun, and not accurate worth a fucking damn.
Space operas are able to capture much of the adventure aspect because space has huge unknowns where a lot of stories can be told, and one can have pirates to start filling out the edges of the maps. Though depending on the ease of travel, they might be present or starting to be squished outward as governments expand their influence and power.
Ye aim be true or nay?
Do you have to be accurate? Well, no, as always, the need of the story takes precedence over accuracy, but you know, why not make new and maybe better compromises? Sure, there are a lot of things you can enjoy in the fictional depiction of pirates, but you can also think about how they logically fit. Their lawlessness does not mean they can behave like arseholes, despite how “tough” it looks on screen and such; would you be willing to work in such an environment? No, at least not if you believe it was true in how they behaved and not in jest. But if you can actually hold people down against their will, then the ruthlessness starts making more sense to keep people in place.
You can always go the opposite way, too, and have them remarkably kind, only lawless. Lawless does not mean immoral, albeit you do make a pretty lousy pirate if you start being squeamish about seeing blood. Though it would be hilarious, someone make that! (Anne: The show Our Flag Means Death does a wonderful job showing the kind nature of pirates who never quite get the pirating thing down).
Ye be pirate or nay?
Three terms I have seen often conflated are pirates, blockade runners, and smugglers. They are obviously not the same! Well, if they were, this section wouldn’t exist… Shut up! Pirates are people who do what I have said and often do lots of violence with it. So let's move to the others.
Blockade runners–oh, they can be fun! Blockades are interesting when it comes to war. Using your fleet to blockade! Well, that was a bit redundant; anyway, the ships make certain no one can come in with supplies that the besieger does not approve of, which is usually everything in order to starve the port city into surrender. Blockade runners get around that. Jolly ho! Onto your ship and sail the waves of nebulas or water and get past those pesky ships and give that town the supplies they need! Probably for a shiny penny. This is the big difference compared to pirates and smugglers: blockade runners generally would get paid before doing the job for someone.
Smugglers smuggle! Hurray for derivative morphology! Though, why don't fingers fing? Oh well, smugglers transport goods into areas where the state doesn’t want them. So they are still outlaws, but the difference from pirates is that they transport items and sell those that the government doesn’t want into the area it controls. Pirates, on the other hand, just take what they want. The technical term for what smugglers try to get into areas is contrabands… which is usually drugs, but it can be others! And as Anne can confirm, smugglers can be smexy too. (Anne: Confirmed).
Summa summarum
So what have we learned? I really should find a way to insert some kind of pop quiz into this region. Anyway, pirates are not like how they are often portrayed: they are inherently violent, but they have some good aspects to them too that are often overlooked. I guess the more democratic aspects are not cool! Why? Iunno, I think it is cool that when most societies went for non-democratic ideals, pirates often went for democratic, even if it is a natural product of having no monopoly on violence.
My point is to think about what the product of lawlessness really is and how it affects the story. If the governments are fine with piracy that doesn’t affect it, it will change how piracy is conducted and what they target. And if you write it, be aware that you are romanticising a lot of problematic historical topics. I am not too unhappy with such–I don’t mind ignoring it for a cool story–but for some, it matters, and if it does to you, think about it! I might do more or have a guest blog writer who has done much more research on the historical parts, we’ll see! Until next time!
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