English Colonialism & Piracy from the Atlantic to the Pacific

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you today's lecture is presented by the John Dubuque Kluge Center at the Library of Congress the Kluge Center is a vibrant scholars center on Capitol Hill that brings together scholars and researchers from around the world to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the library's rich resources and to interact with policymakers and the public the center offers offers opportunities for senior scholars and post and pre doctoral fellows to do research in the Library of Congress collections we also offer free public lectures conferences symposia and other programs and we administer the Kluge prize which is a lifetime recognition achievement for fields of humanistic and social science studies for more information about the Kluge Center our programs our fellowships our prizes please grab a brochure or sign our email list getting to get updates through email and through RSS today's lecture is titled English colonialism and piracy from the Atlantic to the Pacific and our speaker is dr. Patricia O'Brien dr. O'Brien is concluding her tenure here at the Kluge Center as a kiss Lac fellow for the study of the history and cultures of the early Americas her research focuses upon Australian history in particular Australian cultural and political history she also specializes in the colonial history of the Pacific race relations indigenous histories British imperial history and mining in Melanesia currently she's working on histories of Australian Imperial relations in the colonies of Papua and New Guinea new zealand colonial relations with samoa and british colony colonialism privateers and indigenous contact in the caribbean she's authored numerous publications and received several prestigious awards and appointments including JD stout fellow in new zealand studies at the stout centre victoria university of wellington new zealand for 2012 the first Australian to be awarded this prestigious fellowship she's the first full-time faculty member for the centre of Australia and Zeeland studies where she's been teaching since 2001 and is also a visiting associate professor at georgetown university she also knows a lot about pirates and that is where I am very excited to hear her speak so without further ado please welcome dr. patty O'Brien thank you very much Jason for that very generous introduction I would like to begin by saying thank you I'd like to start by thanking the Kluge Center team headed by Carol Brown Carolyn Brown sorry Mary Lou Rica Joanne Kitching and I'd also like to say a special thank you to the to Travis Hensley and Jason Steinhauer for all their work in accommodating me over the time that I have been here I also had a bit of a break in my kiss like tenure I had a as Jason mentioned I lived in New Zealand last year so I had my own Pacific journey but now I'm back in in the Americas and this of course has brought out a lot of things about this relationship between the Americas and the Pacific that I'm going to talk about today I've also been very blessed in recent weeks by having a very gifted summer intern work with me ariana arias is she here no not yet anyway I have really put Ari through her paces with numerous research tasks and she's really impressed me with the standard of her work so I think re very very much I also want to say thank you to the many librarians that I've encountered during my time here at the LOC and also to acknowledge the very rich intellectual community that I have been a part of as I wrote up this lecture it reminded me of the many many scholars that I have met here in the various conversations we've had the various references they've given me or various aspects of history that they led me to and so there so this community has greatly enriched my work I also very much need to acknowledge the JI kiss Lac foundation who found who has funded my fellowship and also the Kluge endowment for their support of the Kluge Center so you might wonder what business does a Pacific historian have doing a fellowship in American Studies but I hope the answer to that question will be answered by the end of this lecture so to begin three hundred and thirty years ago a ship named revenge set out from Cape Charles Virginia at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay not far from here in August eighth of 1683 on board were English Buccaneers according to one of the voyagers chroniclers William ambrosia Cowley he was lured on the eighth gun revenge to be its master and pilot on the false pretext that was heading for his desired destination of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Cowley found out instead that the revenge was heading for the Cape Verde Islands which would be the first be his first port of call on what would eventually be a circumnavigation of the world by the Englishman also on board the revenge was a man who would go on to considerable Fame William Dampier this is a voyage of Cowley's expedition very faintly outlined here I'll return to this in a moment also on borders are William Dampier he already had experience as a Buccaneer having participated in a mass crossing of Buccaneers over the Isthmus of Panama in 1679 to terrorize the Pacific coast sacking and burning Spanish colonial towns in Central America in a series of attacks unprecedented in their brutality after living a pirate's life Dampier lived quietly in Accomack County on Virginia's Eastern Shore for before joining the revenge along with 53 other men after provisioning at cape verde islands the officers decided against sailing into the South Seas in the revenge instead they sailed for the coast of Guinea in search of a better vessel they found one off the coast of Sierra Leone she had 40 guns was and in their words of Cowley was weld stored with good brandy water provisions and other necessities by her danish crew this prize was taken and was renamed the bachelors delight and the crew made for Cape Horn and then the Pacific I've been extraordinarily fortunate during my time here at the Kluge Center to have been able to dive into the immense and fascinating literature on piracy it's a literature filled with epic stories and events improbable feats and experiences and a historiography that spans a spectrum from admiration to revulsion for poetical historical figures and their deeds but what was piracy the label pirate relates to alternatives like Buccaneer freebooter privateer sea rover swashbuckler maroon and Corsair all of which assigned different nationality and status to the men for the most part who undertook robbery at sea being a Buccaneer gained cachet and currency after the publication of John s qui melling's Buccaneers of America in 1678 that was translated into English in 1680 for the the same year that the bachelors delight into the Pacific the term Buccaneer was most closely aligned with privateer and freebooter indicating that a Buccaneer was an Englishman who attacks Spanish ships towns and settlers with or without official sanction though they may not have held letters of marque or reprisal or papers that gave government endorsement to their anti Spanish activities Buccaneers were accepted by some English authorities in an number of instances for performing patriotic activities that benefited the English nation being described as a Buccaneer which was problematic of course for the individual helped some of these seafarers most notably the educated ones from being allowing them to cash in twice on the high seas and then in sales have their published accounts of their adventures so great was the intrigued with Buccaneers and their deeds as historian Oscar spate so richly put it late 17th century Buccaneer accounts were part of a massive publicity in which solid strategic commercial information was spiced Lee garnished with tales of derring-do and atrocity despite attempts to blur the lines of English pirates between debonair Buccaneers and hyper-violent Desperados on the other the Spanish were always clear about who were pirates the application of that term of course always dependent on your perspective these portrayals of the great English navigator a towering figure in Pacific history Captain James Cook by an indigenous Australian artist Daniel Boyd attests to this this point about perspective this is captain no-beard and then this picture here which is a depiction of Cook's landing at Botany Bay south of Sydney entitled we call them pirates out here as does this take on a well-known map of Australian indigenous language groups that true that Boyd entitled Treasure Island I want to emphasize that I'm talking today about Pirates of Atlantic ancestry as Buccaneer cruise though captained by Englishmen were also a complex mix of nationalities and cultures piracy in the Pacific also had a very long history that predates European incursions into the ocean in this history Wako pirates from Japan are most prominent having raided the coasts of China and Korea for centuries and profoundly shaped East Asian history but that is a history that is beyond what I'm going to discuss today as its most popularly known buccaneering is entwined with the history of the Atlantic and most particularly with the Caribbean look at any virtually any pirate film or any kids book on the subject but the story is a more geographically complex one there is a substantial and quite brilliant literature that transgresses Atlantic and Pacific history depicting a more accurate story of the vast and complex one of piracy that did encompass the world monumental works by Oscars fate and Rodriguez and important works by Glinda Williams and historians of Micronesia such as Robert Robert Rogers have presented a more expansive view of piracy studies of individuals most notably of William Dampier also shed light on the larger story of which they apart indeed Oscar spate has described Dampier as the most weighty observer amongst a cadre of contemporaries and the historical attention he has received Julie recognizes his historical contribution Joyce Chaplin's recent work on the history of circumnavigation likewise underscores the expansive terrain in which the piracy story played out it is one of the purposes of this lecture to recollect that English piracy was also a Pacific story though what I'm presenting today is but a sliver of that immense history it adds new twists and complexities to that story of buccaneering in the new world and I should add at this point that growing up Australian that I first met William Dampier as about a seven-year old as most Australian kids did when they were given their first dose of Australian history in the seventh decade of the 20th century William Dampier was very much introduced to us as a man who basically turned the lights of history on in Australia because he was the first Englishman to set foot on the continent he has gone through many revisions since that time so the stories of the Buccaneers who started out on the bachelors delight and the histories that they made and witnessed stand out in the histories that I've been reading they provide deeper unusual and troubling insights into buccaneering I am particularly intrigued with the delineations of indigenous worlds encountered in the expansive travels of Buccaneers and the accounts from the bachelors delight crew are particularly interesting for this purpose they not only acknowledged indigenous historical actors to be critical to their activities they focused on the state of indigenous worlds they encountered in the case of Guam which I will be focusing on today it was impossible to ignore the desperate struggle of Chamorro people against Spanish colonialism though the Buccaneers had no sympathy for their plight and contributed to the dire situation as we will see any discussion of new world indigenous Serkis 1680 is by definition also a study of European colonial contact I'll come back to this matter it's also a map of study of is a discussion about the extent of European colonial contact and in this case the I'm talking about the Spanish Empire the Buccaneers were focused upon the Spanish Empire in its fullest extent in the Caribbean the Atlantic the Pacific coasts of the Americas and to the western extremities in the isles of the west as they were termed the isles of the west lying over 8,000 miles across the pacific encompassed the philippine islands and from here spanish power moved eastwards into what we describe as Micronesia islands in the northern hemisphere spanning an immense area of the pacific ocean comparable landmass of the 48 states of the United States in the history of Spanish Pacific 1565 is the year of possession it was in this year that kept General captain-general maguey lópez de Legazpi made his Pacific his legendary voyage across the Pacific and founded a Spanish base in the Far West and expand and extended New Spain across 8,000 miles of ocean in 1565 the Spanish base was on Cebu then in 1571 Manila was founded in 1565 Legaspi also dispatched the first trading galleons from the first trading galleon from Cebu bound for New Spain once Manila was secured it became the Western base for the epic galleon routes that shipped that shipped Chinese luxury goods east to the Americas overland in Panama and then across the Atlantic to Spain the Acapulco galleons returned enroute to Manila laden with goods people some of who were enslaved and most importantly with silver needed to buy into the Chinese markets this extraordinary trade was conducted over a span of more than 200 years with seasonal regularity it transferred vast amounts of wealth across the Pacific and is of course what attracted Buccaneers to the far side of the world in the first instance the first English circumnavigation by the Sea Hawk Francis Drake in the Golden Hind and his capture of this of the Spanish galleon that was colorfully named caca Fuego off the Pacific coast of Central America in 1578 became the stuff of legend Lagasse's contribution to expanding Spanish Empire included more possessions taken in 1565 he declared possession of the Marshall Islands from their island of which the Spanish named barbudos he then took possession of the ladrones islands from Guam a declaration of possession he enacted when he took out his sword and cut tree branches pulled out grasses threw stones and cut crosses into trees but making a claim and actually possessing a territory were two very different things one of the myths of Spanish Empire was that the desolation of indigenous happened expeditiously due to the deployment of extreme violence and disease though historian Matthew resto has challenged this myth regarding the Americas the case of Guam really calls this historical myth into question we all see this from Kelly's account of Guam some 120 years after Spanish possession was proclaimed popular renditions of buccaneering activities often portray it as a two-way contest between European rivals however the accounts of Carly and Dampier make quite clear how critical indigenous people and their knowledge was to this history they both acknowledged the role of indigenous actors as conduits of information about fortifications of Spanish towns ship movements and geography acting as pilots on water and guides on land some indigenous people were allied with the Spanish and they were termed Spanish Indians by the Buccaneers some indigenous peoples were mentioned in accounts because due to the fact that they came into conflict with the pirates resenting their presence or mistaking them for the Spanish who had carried our previous depredations or indigenous people were reacting to violence meted out by the Buccaneers themselves dampier's account of his first navigate circumnavigation in particular gives the heavy emphasis to the role of Indians in The Buccaneer Enterprise in the Spanish Empire Dampier his first circumnavigation and the bachelors delight was only one part of it took 12 years in many stages as I mentioned earlier Dampier crossed between oceans by the Isthmus of Panama during the raids on Central Pacific towns in 1675 79 at this time he noted I must confess that the Indians assisted us very much and he doubted whether the Buccaneers would have been able to make the crossing without the help of local Kuna people indeed Dampier went further to acknowledge the extreme vulnerability of the Buccaneers during his journey this was most apparent when they tried to befriend one Kuna man but he would have none of it and he answered them in such a very angry tone Dampier wrote we were forced to make a virtue of necessity and humor him for it was now neither the time nor place to be angry with the Indians all our lives lying in their hands Bakken has tempted him with beads money hatchets and machetes but he was unmoved until one of the men pulled out a colorful petticoat for the man's wife which caused great delight and the Buccaneers could finally get what they wanted out of this man information so appreciative with the English of their good relations with local people on the isthmus the Dampier further noted that rewarding them with toys of beads looking glasses scissors and knives as well as half a dollar per man from each privateer was the first order of business at the journey's end that they hoped would ensure that good relations would continue to the next group of English privateers as well as these Kuna Indians in Darien Mosquito Indians who inhabited the coast from Honduras to Nicaragua here were particularly noted for aiding English privateers Dampier went so far as to say that it's very rare to find privateers destitute of one or more of them when the commander and most of the men are English they do not love the French and most and the Spaniards they hate mortally the English so highly prized Mosquito Indians for their exceptional skills at hunting fish turtle and manatees for their courage and also for having such extraordinary good eyes that they could try to cry I fell further we'll see anything better than we though damp you tried to promote the idea that various indigenous peoples allied themselves with Buccaneers through their better judgment closer readings of his accounts hinted the role of coercion and the role of superior arms it's also clear from Dampier and Cally's accounts that indigenous people differed in their strategic importance value to their enterprise into their relative power and the Buccaneers behavior towards them altered accordingly Iberian imperial expansion buccaneering and indigenous contact and conquest of their land and resources were all inextricably bound together by the time of Elizabethan seadogs the time the timing of the emergence of English piracy is of course linked with the Spanish expansion and dominance in the Philippines and the commencement of the galleon route in 1565 this in turn accelerated contact and attempts to conquer more indigenous peoples across the Caribbean the Americas and the Northern Pacific Islands securing the galleon routes in the Pacific in the Atlantic hastened hastened this contact after Drake's audacious and completely unanticipated attacks after this Spain expended immense resources to armed and secure it ships and colonial outposts English pirates could be kept out of the Atlantic but some Spanish thought they could prevent them from sneaking into their Castilian sea and this gave rise to the scheme of settling the Magellan straits but I'm gonna have to set that aside any how many one was to ask many questions about that I'll talk about that at the end so the Spanish were unable to keep the English out of the Pacific but the extremities of Pacific voyaging did reduce buccaneer presence there when the bachelors delight sailed into the Pacific in 1684 it was part of a in Pacific BOC buccaneering activity Oscar spate explains the uptick in presence of Buccaneers as a result of the Treaty of Madrid at 1671 the treaty ceded Jamaica to the British crown along with other English Holdings in the Americas and provided for the quote mutual oblivion of all hostile acts and eventually what this meant was that Buccaneers had to move their activities and disassociate themselves with British colonial outposts or English clonal outposts in the Caribbean and this is what pushed them into more outlying areas of the Spanish Empire and it was in these conditions that spurred that English Buccaneers into the Pacific people like John knob or Bartholomew sharp and others they rounded the horn and tried to follow the shining example that Francis Drake had set 100 years earlier when the bachelors delight entered the Pacific in 1684 they met up with another Buccaneer ship the Nicholas and together the ship sailed in consort ship to the lonely island of Juan Fernandez which is here here members of the bachelors delight crew who had sailed in the area with Bartholomew sharp which included Dampier went ashore to look for a mosquito Indian who had been left there unintentionally three years earlier by the Buccaneers when we were chased by three Spanish ships in the years 1681 Dampier and more particularly another mosquito man amongst the crew who had been named Robin were aesthetic to found to find the marooned man who had survived alone all those years underscoring the mosquito hunting skills that Dampier so admired damp you described the exceedingly affectionate reunion of the two men the marooned man who the English named will would inspire Daniel Defoe's man Friday character in Robinson Crusoe whilst another's marine seaman Alexander Selkirk who was reputedly left on one Fernandez on purpose and was found there by Buccaneer Woodes Rogers in 1709 became the basis of the title character of that book that first appeared in 1719 though of course to foe ship did the location of the deserted island from the Pacific to the Atlantic from Juan Fernandez the Nicholas and bachelors delight hella headed for a richer in present-day Chile and held councils to work out where they should wait for the Spanish plate fleet coming towards Panama they had little luck only taking a ship laden with timber bound for Peru which they felt compelled to do so she would not discover us which burdened the English ships were 30 more mouths to feed in water the Buccaneers had another council and planned to attack the port of Trujillo in present-day Peru but the men were weak in their numbers depleted and instead took three ships laden with provisions but no silver as the Spanish had heard of the Buccaneers and put their treasures ashore the Buccaneers was so pleased were pleased enough with the provisions and decided to lie still in the Galapagos Islands for a number of months to refresh and hopefully give the impression to the Spanish that they had left the Pacific Callie was captivated with the natural world of the Galapagos Islands and this chart has drawn from a description of of the islands and he spent a lot of time describing the many wonders he saw there here there was excellent gorgeous Sweetwater and the abundant of bird and sea life made excellent good food Callie enthused after their time of respite they headed back to captures pontiff's on the gulf of nicoya Costa Rica here they plan to raid the town of Yahoo in Nicaragua and tried to glean information from three Spanish Indians possibly people of the pueblos of Nicholas who came aboard the bachelors delight thinking it was a Spanish vessel according to Cali once these men realize that they were not Spanish these these indigenous set a longboat on fire the three men were captured and led by the neck but they escaped and gave notice that to the town of Rio Hall in the bucket and of the of the Buccaneers presence this made our men very much discouraged that they were decried Cali reported the Buccaneers instead took islands in the gulf of San Miguel which was inhabited by Indians and another was well stored with cattle but for gold and silver we got little it was here that Cali departed the bachelors delight in Dampier and joined the Nikolas as the master without the element of surprise along the Pacific coast of the Spanish Empire or even the ability to wring a ransom for two ships taken at anchor from the authorities at Peter and enraged John Eaton the Nikolas as captain decided to head west to what Carly describes as the East Indies by which he meant the Spanish isles of the west and this is where his account becomes particularly interesting the Nikolas arrived in Guam we are in march 1685 after a long trans-pacific voyage the Nikolas was by now a very sick ship no man being free of scurvy and in a very consuming condition conditions on board the ship was serious enough but what the Nikolas crew did not know was that they were sailing into the middle of an insurrection by Chamorro people against Spanish colonialism that had got so bad that most of the people of the island had fled north to other islands tensions were so great between the Spanish the Nikolas crew and Cha Morrow's that here the Europeans the Pirates in their prey who should have been archenemies actually allied against the indigenous who were doing their best to repel the intruders by the time Kali appeared in 1685 the chemours had over 160 years of contact experience giving them some of the long first exposure to European colonialism in the new world the Magellan voyage like the Nicholas arrived at Guam with a very sick ship when it finally made the first European voyage across the ocean in 1521 which I should mention is hundreds if not thousands of years after Pacific Islanders had navigated and settled the constellation of islands in the vast ocean this first encounter between Europeans and ksham Oros was marred by violence the Spanish killing tomorrow's after they became incensed by what they perceived as constant theft of their possessions and this inspired Magellan's name for the group he called it the the ladrones islands the islands of Thieves the contact history prior to 1565 the year of Spanish possession encompass spaniards living on the island amongst the chemours for periods also incidences of kidnapping and enslavement as well as more peaceful periods of contact with Spanish explorers when the great Spanish general Legaspi landed on Guam in 1565 he tried to establish cordial relations based on an erasure of the often violent prehistory to his encounter his men were ordered to do no harm to the timorous or even threaten them with words and the Spanish claimed to have endured many provocations by the locals but relations lurched towards violence after the Spanish captured a woman man and a boy with the Spanish reporting that the man hanged himself the chemours then attacked a Spanish deckhand in revenge Legaspi unleashed an intense wave of violence burning villages massacring and kidnapping so as friar Martin Radha would report that the next time Spanish vessels of His Majesty came here they would receive them better and keep their word when they promised to be friends but Chamorro disaffection continued after possession in contrast to this ammonia's image of tomorrow trading with the Galleon in 1590 contact could be characterized as sporadic accepting the regular but brief galleon visits until 1668 in this year jesuit diego luis san vittore came from new spain and landed on guam accompanied by four other priests a layman and three soldiers and renamed the ladrones islands the Marianas after Queen Mariana wife of Philip the fourth though the Jesuits initially claimed staggering success in converting the tomorrows their attempts to alter sexual cultures and parental fears that baptisms often preceded infant mortality began to seriously strain relations by 1670 there was open rebellion and Samba Torres was killed in 1672 after he went ahead with a baby's christening against the wishes of the Father the father's name was mutt upon and he became one of guan's resistance leaders the man who became governor of Guam in 1680 Jose Quiroga unleashed classic conquista God tactics prompting many tomorrow's to flee to northern islands the lack of people on Guam meant that the galleons could not be resupplied so the Spanish rounded up chemours who had taken flight and forced them to return to larger settlements Caraga was relieved of his duties as governor in 1681 due to the alarming reports of his actions reaching Spain but he returned to Guam in 1684 not as governor but to lead a renewed military expedition against the Chu Morrow's and this was the very tense situation that the Nicholas sailed into in march 1685 as you will recall the ship's crew were in desperate need of fresh food and water they tried to make contact with the locals Kalli reported that their first attempt when they rowed ashore with a flag of truce they found that when they came near that the native had burnt their houses and run away by the light of them the crew felt some coconut trees and took the fruit back to the ship they again encountered Indians armed with Lance's seeming as if they were designed to attack us but we called out to them and told them that we were their friends this seemed to work for a day when shamora is engaging with tomorrow's engaging in free trade with the Nikolas crew when a longboat ventured on the other side of on the west side of Guam the Indians fell upon our boat with stones and lances and the English responded by shooting at them and kill and we killed and wounded some of them carly wrote though he he added that known men of the Nikolas came to any harm two days later the governor s planner came down to the ship and sent a letter on board in English French and Dutch demanding in the name of the king of Spain what we were whether we wear whether we were bound and from whence we came the answer was written in French and claimed that we were employed by a gentleman of France upon the discovery of unknown parts of the world a deception that Cali thought worked though the spinet that though the Spanish were not so easily duped when the English met the governor they apologized that we had killed some of the Indians in our own defence governor s planner responded Kelly wrote by giving us quote toleration to kill all of them if we would calorie counter information about Guam its location and for crews ravaged by depravations of the Pacific crossing what food could be found he learnt about your visits of the galleons saying sometimes there arrived two from the south part of Mexico or and eight from Manila which do bring sugar tobacco silks and other commodities also of high importance was the intelligence that the Spanish have about 600 soldiers here although Cali and others may have been assessing the odds of a successful attack the relations between the in the Spanish continued to be ever more extraordinary the Nicholas was bought an abundance of food on behalf of the governor 10 pigs potatoes plantains papayas and red peppers in return captain Eaton sent the governor a diamond ring that Cowley noted was worth 20 pounds and the captain also sent the Spanish swords the next day the reason behind the governor's largesse became clear again emissaries came in board inclusive including a Jesuit a friar and a captain and asked captain Eaton if he could quote spare some powder by reason that they had war with the Indians and our commander spared them three barrels of powder and offered them four great guns the Spanish accepted the powder but refused the guns in exchange for the gunpowder they presented eaten with 1,600 Pieces of Eight in gold and silver but Cowley wrote our captain would not take a penny and for his generosity the captain was given a diamond ring with fifty pounds the alliance against tomorrows between the Buccaneers and the Spanish colonists continued with the English crew chasing some tomorrow's and making them forsake their boat the governor's boat came again this time bringing coconuts potatoes chocolates a piece of plate in six China cups a Jesuit who was French and surely able to discern that the niccola's crew was not taught them how to make coconut milk Kelly found out more about the revolt of the timorous and the galleons which he said had seven decks and about 1,500 souls on board of which 400 were crew and Cali also seemed to wear of that the others that some of the other passengers were enslaved being transported to plantations in the Philippines he also suggested that tomorrow's were at risk of being kidnapped too for this purpose saying that the ships strike a great dread upon the Indians after some days Kelly thought that the chemours had forgotten our first saluting of them so they came frequently on or to trade they came with food and the cruise exchanged old nails and old iron though cally noted we trusted them not before we always had our small arms ready and great guns loaded with roundball and cartridges and he began to refer to the CH Amoros as infidels some of the Nikolas crew went ashore and the friendly relations quickly evaporated when they thought they were being ambushed carly wrote that their men were armed and so let go and amongst a thicket of them and killed a great many of their none of their number flincher morris were confronted by other Buccaneers who saluted them also by making holes in their hides for tomorrow's were taken prisoner and with their hands tied behind their backs they were bought on board three lapped overboard and a boat was sent in pursuit so well-built with the chemours Carly noted that a strong man at first blow could not penetrate their skins with a cutlass one of the escapees received in my judgment 40 shots in his body before he died and the last one was killed after swimming and mile not only with his hands behind him as before but also with his arms pinioned or amputated even if we discount some of Carly's account of Chamorro physical strength eeeh that he recounted such grotesque levels of violence perpetrated by the Buccaneers is deeply deeply revealing on many levels not least of which is that it was acceptable not only for the Buccaneers but also his readership Carly's account first was first published in a collection of for voyage narratives in 1699 the unpublished manuscript of Carly's account varies from the published version when recounting the chase of these three tomorrow's in the original version Callie wrote when the boat caught up with them our carpenter a strong man tried to cut off the head of one of them with his sword he struck twice before he could fetch blood their skins being hard than a ball one of the Indians had 40 shot holes in him when he was found the violence meted out on the chemours continued to contrast with the increasing generosity of the governor bringing 30 hogs and fruit and vegetables and captain Eaton reciprocated with six small guns while some of the niccola's crew were watering the watering the ship in preparation for departure - two Filipinos from Manila approached they told the crew that the majority of the Indians will run away to another Island ten leagues off insinuating the weakness of the Spaniards in this island and would have us cut them off and plunder the island of its riches but captain Eaton The Buccaneer replied he would hear of no such bass action according to Callie before the Nicholas departed Guam after six weeks and about a hundred Shema rows made their way to the ship with some coconuts but our people knowing their church knowing their treachery fired about 20 guns at them not to hit them which made them run away on sailing away from the Spanish the Nicholas saluted the governor with three guns and the governor responded ending this fraud episode between Spanish colonists English Buccaneers and a defiant indigenous peoples by the time Cali was enroute back to England Dampier had made the arduous voyage across the Pacific now on board the ship the Signet Dampier wrote of the dread the crew had of the crossing but was encouraged by the captain who evoked the feats of Drake and Cavendish and estimated the time that it would take them to cross would be less than fifty days he also promised that they would cruise off Manila awaiting a galleon the arguments that convinced the crew to head for Guam they arrived after 52 days with barely any food remaining and the crew was grumbling about mutiny and eating captain Swann once they anchored off guam the Signet was approached by a boat with a priest and three tomorrows who took them to be Spanish they came aboard the Signet but realizing their mistake tried to get away with great civility captain Swann held the priest and to tomorrow's captain captive in the great cabin and declared their purpose for being at Guam was to get provisions in exchange for money the priest told them of the fair Commerce and rich gifts exchanged between the governor and captain Eaton of the English ship Nicholas but since departed 14 months ago the situation had deteriorated the priest argued though the circumstances he recounted happened before the Nicholas had arrived captain Swann asked for three months provisions for 200 men the priest responded that a month's supply would strain all the resources they had remaining while the priest was held hostage letters and gifts were exchanged with the governor though Dampier wrote that they would get provisions by fair means or force some of the crew went ashore well-armed in case of attack either by tomorrow's or Spanish and to shoot birds when they spied coconut trees they cut them down and gorged themselves on its milk and flesh Chamorro has visited the Signet and offered to carry us to the fort and assist us in the conquest of the island but captain Swann was not for molesting the Spaniards here Dampier wrote the get the governor began to send provisions hogs rice fruit pickled fish and accepted gifts of fabric and more importantly a barrel of gunpowder a brace of pistols and a dozen machetes whilst the Signet lay off guam the galley in the santa rosa came into view with the governor's center Chamorro prow with advice of our being here the news of the galleon put our men in a great heat to go out after her but captain Swann persuaded them out of this humor for he was now wholly adverse to any hostile action right Dampier though Dampier does not offer a reason for this no doubt the poor health of the crew was a leading factor at the end of the cygnets week-long stay off guam the governor sent one last present of food to the ship and the captive priests returned ashore with the gifts of a brass clock an astrolabe and a large telescope damn pious observations of the fraud state of affairs on Guam and the more predictable pirate activities he took part in is a significant piece of this history however it is arguably his observations of the natural world of Guam that have had the most enduring significance especially for the new fruit he reported growing their breadfruit dampier's descriptions of this fruit and the idea he posited about its potential utility as a cheap source of food for slaves in the British Caribbean underpinned the scheme to relocate breadfruit seedlings from Tahiti to Jamaica 100 years later this was the mission of hms bounty though this voyage descended into a piratical seizure of the ship in 1789 and another legendary episode of English piracy in the Pacific though this time against the British Navy by a mutinous crew but that is another story this journey into the Pacific with these two English Buccaneers brings another a number of important historical factors into sharp relief it sheds light on the triangular history of indigenous resistance Spanish colonialism and buccaneering history and how relations between these three groups of actors operated differently across the vast geography of the Spanish Empire in the 1680s to the Spanish and Buccaneers Guam was a frontier were their superior arms or other relative technological advantages against the tomorrow's were challenged by the rigors of trans-pacific travel and the accompanying deprivation of the necessities of life the shared vulnerabilities of the Spanish and the Buccaneers forged unlikely alliances and the suspension of the usual hostile relations and purposes to the tomorrow's or fighting an epic struggle to repel intruders who deployed the most violent means to bring them into submission the struggle between tomorrow's and Spanish that these Buccaneers witnessed and participated in did not end for another 10 years when the CH Amoros despite everything that the Spanish had already done were in the words of Micronesian historian Rodrigue Levesque finally subdued in 1695 I hope that this look at Buccaneers has challenged some of your thoughts about these pirates historical figures so often seen in admiring stereotypes and the worlds in which they operated and impacted I also hope that this lecture helps you contemplate the issues related to the projection of imperial power across the Pacific from America to Guam this is an interesting issue to think about from Washington DC at this particular historical moment as the u.s. concentrates its military presence there as part of its specific pivot and on that provocative note I shall end thank you we had with judging the veracity of the primary documents that you were reading researching knowing that the author may not to either embellish or like this mm-hmm well what I was trying to what I've been trying to do is make comparisons between published versions of the story and the unpublished versions and and as I pointed out in that case in that incidence of that moment of violence that Cowley reported there is a significant difference so there are differences there was a toning down of certain aspects but I think particularly in the case of Dampier and Kali that they were writing very much with publication in mind so I think that a lot of what they wrote was tempered by that so so so that's what we have to work with we do have what were unpublished manuscripts which have since been published and available which i've been able to read here and then you have the the the publications that were published at the time so we so working through those you know we try i've been trying to arrive at a a point where I can serve evaluate what is you know exaggeration or truth which of course is the perennial problem of doing any historical research yeah I mean there is some so so the question was about whether Spanish sources had information about these voyages I have not done a whole lot of research on Spanish sources there is the Rodrigue Levesque who I mentioned has published an immense multi volume of on my shelf I've got it takes about this much shelf space of volumes of primary documents about Micronesia most of which are Spanish sources but I have not been through all of those as I have with I mean he includes the Buccaneer accounts published and unpublished but he doesn't I haven't been through all those volumes about these these Buccaneer accounts and you mentioned the mosquito we know about the mosquitos going towards Guam but with as far as the tomorrow's there is something which I need to research more it is possible that they were picked up and taken on galleons and taken east but I mean some of them were picked up and taken in very various times that I don't know of any particular individuals who are mentioned as being in the Americas enroute yes but not actually residing but I imagine that there were a number of them who did make that that journey tomorrow oh okay thank you all again for coming if you want to learn about future events that we're hosting here at the center please do sign our list I'll give you a teaser coming up at the end of August we have a lecture by one of our kooky fellows on diplomatic relations in Mongolia and then in September Chet Van Duzer Formica slack fellow will be giving a book talk about his latest book on sea monsters on maps and then in mid-september our resident astrobiologists David Grinspoon will be leading a full day seminar on the future of human longevity on earth so those are some of our events coming up please do sign our list and thank you again so much this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 15,494

Rating: 4.4503818 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, Colonialism (Political Philosophy)

Id: av7uDEpxFoQ

Length: 55min 17sec (3317 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 04 2014