Be more Pirate or How to take on the world and win by Sam Conniff Allende : Book Review

Since it is talk like a pirate day, I thought it might be an interesting experiment to consider what a pirate might say rather than putting on a silly accent (though I have no problem with that part.) I want to speak about “Be More Pirate: Or How to Take on the World and Win” a book that has an admittedly pro-pirate stance but backs up that stance pretty well by pointing out the many things that the pirates got right. This is both interesting and an excellent example of how you can make any group look good if you pick and choose your focus well enough. But ignoring that let’s imagine we plucked a pirate from the Golden Age of Piracy and drop him into our world, what might he say?

Take Care of Your Crew

One of the interesting things I liked in “Be More Pirate” was that if you were injured as a member of a pirate crew, you weren’t simply abandoned. Ships would put aside part of everything they took for those who would be injured. The amount which could be as much as 800 pieces of eight depending on the injury. This was a significant amount of money at the time and while not an entirely new idea certainly wasn’t how it was done in the navy that many of the pirates escaped from. It is true that we have workers’ compensation laws now, but we also all know that it isn’t particularly effective. Proving you were injured isn’t always as easy as it should be, and we can do better. We can take care of people who are injured in ways that the pirates might not have understood, and we can take care of people in far better ways.

Be more Inclusive

When you think of pirates, one thing you’re unlikely to land on is inclusively, but you would be wrong. It turns out that pirate ships in the Golden Age of Piracy were more inclusively that much of the modern world. While not always true, they gave freedom to slaves and black men made up as much as thirty five percent of pirates and were paid the same and had the same rights as anyone else. More than that, though, there were female pirates who had considerably more freedom than on land. Most surprising though is that “Be more Pirate” points out that they accepted and even celebrated homosexuality. Since they paid the families of crew-members who were killed, you could leave that money to your husband.

Break Rules worth Breaking

One thing that “Be More Pirate” never avoids is that the pirates were criminals. They were regularly hunted down and executed. They were thieves and killers many were psychopaths. But consider the people who they were stealing from. There were the treasure fleets made up of treasures that were taken from the new world and shipped back to the old. There were slave ships, there were ships full of people who had been press ganged into service and there was of course the colonial powers.

And the pirates broke other rules. Like the rule that the captain had absolute dictatorial power on a ship, which was replaced not only by democracy but by giving a significant amount of power to the quartermaster who had nearly as much power as the captain. They also broke the rules of how people were paid. On a pirate ship every man was paid in shares, and while the captain and officers got more, it was far, far, far more equal than it is now. Typically, they’d get two or three shares while everyone else, including the deckhands, would get one. In this way, the captain would get rich by making everyone else wealthy as well rather than by stripping away every cent he could from those beneath him.

Find something worth fighting for

“Be More Pirate” is quite clear that the modern pirate isn’t the same as the pirate of old. But there is one way in which we should be the same. The pirates from the golden age found something that they were were willing to fight and die for. They were willing to take risks because they saw something of value in it. And while they didn’t know that they would become the inspiration for much of America’s independent and liberty spirit, they knew that there were ways to make things better. Not grand things that needed to change the entire world, but ways to make their jobs better, their lives better, and the lives of those around them better. They saw the value of freedom and spread that idea along with their code not by changing the entire world all at once but by creating a system that was just a little better than the last one.

Conclusion

For talk like a pirate day, let’s try to actually talk like pirates. Talk about how we can work together to make things better for all of us, talk about how we can make all of us actually mean all of us. Talk about the rules that make it possible for the worst crimes of humanity to be completely legal and break them so utterly that they won’t raise their heads again in our lifetimes. And find something that is worth fighting for. You’re unlikely to be executed for it, but you might lose a friend or be embarrassed. You might be called names or angry people threaten you, but for one day a year at least talk like a pirate and speak your mind. Take the risk and tell people your truth.

You can see more from Sam Conniff Allende at his website.