Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity

by Hans Turley

An examination into the homoerotic and other transgressive aspects of the pirate's world

Despite, or perhaps because of, our lack of actual knowledge about pirates, an immense architecture of cultural mythology has arisen around them. Three hundred years of novels, plays, painting, and movies have etched into the popular imagination contradictory images of the pirate as both arch-criminal and anti-hero par excellence. How did the pirate-a real threat to mercantilism and trade in early-modern Britain-become the hypermasculine anti-hero familiar to us through a variety of pop culture outlets? How did the pirate's world, marked as it was by sexual and economic transgression, come to capture our collective imagination?

In Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash , Hans Turley delves deep into the archives to examine the homoerotic and other culturally transgressive aspects of the pirate's world and our prurient fascination with it. Turley fastens his eye on historical documents, trial records, and the confessions of pirates, as well as literary works such as Robinson Crusoe , to track the birth and development of the pirate image and to show its implications for changing notions of self, masculinity, and sexuality in the modern era.

Turley's wide-ranging analysis provides a new kind of history of both piracy and desire, articulating the meaning of the pirate's contradictory image to literary, cultural, and historical studies.

Genres: History, Pirates, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Sexuality, Historical

184 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite an academic book, despite the title sounding like a quiet night in for some friends of mine. Turley examines the contemporary literature about piracy; from sensationalist accounts, court records and novels written at the time. He relies quite heavily on Defoe, who wrote a history of piracy and several relevant novels (especially the Crusoe novels and Captain Singleton).
Turley draws on other historians and even that doyen of Marxist historiography Christopher Hill turns up arguing that the radicals of the English Civil War may have, after the Restoration have become outlaws and pirates seeking an alternative society (possibly in the pirate El Dorado Madagascar). The evidence for this is so thin as to be transparent. This is the problem all the way through; there is little solid evidence, for what went on board ship, for homosexuality, for clues about lifestyle; although it was certainly a very masculine world and apart from society.
Turley examines the virtually non-existent boundary between privateer and pirate and does his best with what he has; there are lots of interesting ideas and thought provoking asides. Much of the book examines Defoe's contribution, which is certainly ambiguous. The relationship between Singleton and Quaker William in Captain Singleton is clearly homoerotic. They swear to stay together forever, to pass as brothers and live like Greeks! Turley has some fun here with Foucault's concept of identity and heterosexual desire driving capitalism.
Turley does not argue all pirates were homosexual, but with the evidence he has he provides interesting arguments, some stronger than others. The analysis of the nature of masculinity is interesting and if you can get past the deliberately provocative title it is worth reading for the arguments and it is a window onto a lost and barely visible world.

[Arthur Graham]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xTsS...

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I shall not make claims that the pirate was a sodomite and that pirate ships were rife with buggery. What interests me instead is the way pirates have been eroticized through the past centuries.(6)

A singularly delightful volume: witty, sophisticated, and subtly attentive to ambiguity as only the best literary criticism can be. Despite the title, this book isn't really a history about pirate sexuality (readers are directed, with the now customary warning signs about its notorious overstatements, to Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean for that), but instead a hybrid work of source critique, queer epistemology, and cultural history based around what Turley calls "The piratical subject" - the sexually ambiguous antiheroic archetype that comes to mind whenever we hear the word "pirate" that has been long-term feature of pop-culture since the late 17th century.

This "piratical subject" is juxtaposed against the "sodomitical subject" - a pitiful archetype of queer (non)masculinity hidden within society against which the piratical archetype retained an uneasy, ambiguous stature to 18th century readers as a half-courageous/half-monstrous figure self-consciously setting themselves outside of society. It's not that pirates were or weren't sodomites, but that texts describing them almost universally contained strange ellipses on the matter of pirate sexuality in ways that queerly offset the flamboyant and individualistic masculinity they were admired for, alongside the economically disruptive and sadistic lifestyles for which they were denounced and labelled "enemies of all mankind." Where some scholars like Marcus Rediker try to use these sources to produce histories of pirates as proto-revolutionary heroes, and others such as David Cordingly devote themselves to unpicking the romance to find the criminal 'reality' beneath, Turley considers both approaches too crude for treating documentation produced by a culture whose interest in pirates was too ambivalent and mercurial to be bludgeoned into such coherent positions.

Turley's study covers a wide range of 17th/18th century primary material, including trial records, ballads, pamphlets, Captain Johnson's famous A General History of the Pyrates, and Daniel Defoe's output, with a particular focus on Captain Singleton and The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in order to unpick the evolution and ambiguities of this cultural reception. More than any other pirate historian I have read so far (including the many, many scholars who happily cite this book in their own texts!), Turley is exceptionally sensitive to the ambiguities of his sources, teasing out the state-centric biases of trial documents, or the "interpenetrating discourses" (73) of fact and fiction in Johnson's 'History' that most other scholars merely pay lip service to. The devil is in the details here, and Turley handles them brilliantly

As a result of this sensitivity, its hard to be annoyed when Turley turns the last third of his book away from pirates to do a 50 page queer reading of some of Defoe's more obscure fiction, using the "piratical subject" framing he has grounded in the period's cultural dynamics to defend 'Captain Singleton' and 'The Further Adventures of Robin Hood' as actually being really interesting, coherent, and worthwhile novels, saying that their neglect today mostly comes from literary historians being disappointed that they don't conform to the teleological progression of 'inventing the novel' that they want Defoe's career to exemplify. To understand these books, Turley argues, you have to understand what makes pirates different from other criminals (particularly the ones usually central to Defoe's fiction), what Defoe was saying about pirates elsewhere (such as in his pamphlets attempting to discredit the popular perception of Henry Avery as a sexy utopian statebuilder in Madagascar), and how to read quests for (queer?) identities into the circuitous, rambling plotlines of these stories.

Did this last third really have that much to do with the rest of the book? Not really, but Turley's a delightful critic and it was an unmitigated pleasure to be persuaded by him.

[Madison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it following an interested in Pirates of the Caribbean and wanting to know more about actual pirates. It covers the Pirate way of life, outlaws making their own laws and creating their own societies out of necessity and want, and how that affects sexuality. In a society that does not follow the norm, does sexuality? Some of the reasoning seems a bit far fetched, and there has been criticism against the author for implying homosexuality where there might not have been any. Still, I thought it was well-written and offered an interesting and different and wider perspective on outlaws.

[Jakey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the reason behind my gender description. I can't begin to tell you how good it is.

[Åshild Livsdatter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been interested in what the "pirate sexuality" could really be, given that pirates back in the day really spent most of their time with men only and for months at a time on a ship out in the sea. It's almost weird to me to believe anything else than that they at least had some encounters of bumpin uglies while out on the sea.

This book isn't entirely about the homosocial society of the pirate, and I kind of wish Turley had written even more about it, maybe even speculated (because sources are scarce) how the pirates thought of themselves. I've briefly heard that some pirates had "marriages" on the ship in a sort of a companionship not really defined by heterosexuality nor homosexuality, but he doesn't mention it. He also in one sentence mentioned how pirates has gone from a concept of a violent and savage lawless man to "boy's play" and it would be interesting if he had written more about that.

It's still definitely worth checking out. His writing style isn't totally my cup of tea, it's a little dry in a way (by comparison, I LOVE the writing style of William Ian Miller in The Anatomy of Discust, even if I had to look up in the dictionary many many times because he used many English words I'd never heard before). But there's still things to learn from the book.

I especially like the last few pages, where he talks about Robinson Cursoe and his personal journey from a pirate to a Christian and that when he devotes himself to God, he becomes more bloodthirsty and violent than he ever was as a pirate. It's interesting how religion can, especially in the wrong hands, turn someone more violent than the typical "savage pirate".

The last thing that really is missing, is a conlcusion, it just ends like a normal chapter, which is kind of a shame. I miss several small things from it, so I guess this won't be the last pirate related book I'll read (oh, no, what a shame!)

[James]

Pleasantly surprised by this one. Interesting and thought provoking theoretical engagement with The Idea Of Pirates and their receptions rather than piracy itself (a topic with very little primary historical evidence). Turley examines several early 'fictions' about pirates and their transgressions therein arguing that transgression and boundary crossing in one area can easily suggest it in another.

[Autumn Kearney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity is a well-researched scholarly read. It is not homoerotica. If that's what you are looking for, please look elsewhere. That being said, this is a serious historical work that is well worth the time to read if you are curious about maritime life back in the olden days. There isn't any romance in the reality of the harsh life of the sea.

P.S. Some of the descriptions are kind of disgusting.

[Heather Law · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are moments it seems to veer into tangents-- some more interesting than others-- where the argument of the book seems to escape Turley. The last two chapters, also, dive into a strange territory. It seems to conclude incredibly suddenly, but it is an interesting read! I think it does an interesting job playing around in the scholarship of pirate sexuality/sexualization in terms of masculinity.

[Drianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot more theoretical than Burg's book, much more about literature and the conception of the pirate than about actual queer pirates. And it's not his fault, but what I *wanted* was actual queer pirates. Totally worth reading, etc.

[Ciel Dahlberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked this. It's very informative and puts a lot of history into perspective, but I wish it went into a little more detail. I wanted to learn more from this book because it is so interesting and engaging, I wish it was fifty pages longer.

[Fred Langridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and pretty light academic work.

[Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting thesis with evidence to back it up. I enjoy the campy/dandy aspect of piracy rather than a Hollywood-ized version that creates pirates as bloodthirsty heterosexual uber-macho men hell bent on destruction and chaos. It's almost like that depiction (throughout history--not just Hollywood) had to be generated in order to wash away the queer sexuality and community of the pirates. It generates an image for me of pirates in black and hot pink, which is perfectly possible. I will say that this is an academic book and was a little hard to get into. But I kept plugging away and got through it. Besides, the title is FUCKING SEXY!

[Jacquelyn]

Turley makes broad and sweeping generalizations about pirates and their sexuality in this book. He provides very little evidence for his arguments, though I will give him the benefit of the fact that there is no historical evidence about the sexuality of pirates. He argues that pirates and sodomites (his term) are basically the same.

[6655321 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mismarketed book that was obviously originally a Defoe Studies book about masculinity/homosexuality and was rapidly reworked to be about piracy/masculinity/homosexuality in a few of the thinest and most circular chapters on the subject.

[Kristinaweena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This makes me understand those guys that dress up as pirates at Dragoncon a little better.