The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

by Neil Price

The key word here is ‘hydrarchy’, which was expanded in the eighteenth century to become a general label for the revolutionary fulcrum of dangerously radical social ideas represented by the Atlantic maritime community. The situation the term tries to capture is one in which there are no overall leaders with whom to negotiate (there was never a pirate monarch, which was part of the point), no state structures to oppose, and indeed no formal organisation to fight. The mythical hydra, the multiheaded beast of Greek legend, was a challenge to defeat because every time one of its heads was severed, two more grew to take its place. Likewise, sinking individual pirate ships or killing notorious captains did little to dent the nature of the enemy—and yet, through it all, ‘the pirates’ as a collective source of grave political peril remained entirely valid and operative, just like the supposedly unkillable hydra.