Charles Johnson (Daniel Defoe)

General History of Pirates

Foreword

War, trade and piracy

Three kinds of essence one.

I. Goethe. "Faust"

Even small children probably know that archaeologists are looking for the remains of the bygone life of mankind in the earth. Shards of stone, used for hunting and fighting, processed skins and harvested crops. Nondescript fragments of rough pottery. Shapeless ruins that were once the walls of houses. More spectacular outward discoveries rarely happen: everyday life and its attributes at all times have many times exceeded the number of holidays and extraordinary objects. And yet ... In all the archaeological expeditions in which I had to participate (and there were more than a dozen of them - in Moldova, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even in the Summer Garden, in the very heart of the Neva capital), residents of the surrounding area always visited the excavation site, unless, of course, someone lived within the horizon. For some time, the guests quietly stood on the edge of the pit, in which dust-covered hard workers swarm. And when someone straightened his aching back and walked with an unsteady gait to a tin milk can for a sip of warm, tasteless water, a short and, as it were, joking conversation began - always the same:

- Hello. Are you digging? And how did they find a lot of gold?

At first it amused me. Then it annoyed me. And only much later I realized that this sacramental question was dictated not by greed, not by ignorance, and not even entirely by curiosity. It's just that in each of us, even the most cynical and bitter over the years of a routine, exhausting struggle for survival, there is an indestructible romantic with huge blue eyes. And it doesn’t matter to him at all what can be bought with the gold he asked about: the very sound of the word “treasures” resounds somewhere inside in a chord so sweet and subtle that low-lying matters are far from them, like the earth’s surface from the source of the music of the spheres…

I saw the unbearably shining eyes of the children crowding along the Neva parapets during the days of the Cutty Sark regatta: through the reflections of the colorful sails, the same romantic blueness of the unique shade of warm tropical seas splashed in these eyes. And the familiar chord was woven into the overtones of the trade wind ringing with shrouds and the serpentine hiss of a heavy wave ripped open by the keel, the scream of restless sailor souls in the skies and the spells of a strange bird that had seen a lot, muttering over the ear in the night:

- Piastres! Piastres! Piastres!

That is why the theme of pirates of the “classical” period at the very end of the bloody century of the two world wars attracts, and will certainly still attract many generations of growing romantics with huge blue eyes: mysterious treasures, distant seas, sails, the sound of swords, strong-willed men and their royally exalted ladies hearts knighted by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan ... The enchanting legend woven by Byron, Poe, Sabbatini and many, many others is spiritualized and harmonious just enough to induce the wings folded behind our backs to fly, and those standing behind it the silhouette of the Last Creditor with a scythe is just so ghostly and not terrible that the blood of pirate victims seems to be nothing more than cranberry juice. And even the antagonists of the "noble robbers", with black armbands, wooden legs and a pathologically evil disposition, since the days of Stevenson, Xu and Conan Doyle fit perfectly into the overall picture: in the end, the "good guys" defeat the "bad guys", and virtue, as it should be, triumphant. In the discussion of the sublime movements of the soul, which are so lacking in our pragmatic time (however, what time is not pragmatic?), this whole myth is beautiful and necessary, and it would be a sin for me, who even now will not miss the opportunity to enjoy a good "pirate" novel, try to debunk it. However, the book you now hold in your hands is of a completely different nature. And in our preface, we will also talk about something completely different.

Usually, the idea of ​​the phenomenon of piracy is firmly associated with the 16th-18th centuries - the time that was called “classical” a little higher. However, in reality, its origin is lost in the mists of time. The very word "pirate" firmly entered the lexicon of the ancient Greek inhabitants of the century four years before our era, but it had predecessors, and the heroes of Greek myths did not disdain acts of piracy - Minos, Odysseus, Hercules, Jason ... Pirate craft was already just as common then , like arable farming or cattle breeding, differing from them only in a greater degree of risk, and in the budget (as we would now say) of many Mediterranean city-states often played an even more significant role: the same Minoan Crete, for example, largely lived at the expense of sea ​​robbery.

Moreover, in the Roman Digests (collections of laws), one of the laws that came to Roman law from the time of the ancient Greek sage Solon, three maritime "specializations" are listed - sailors, merchants and pirates. Let's add on our own: not just three equal professions, but three hypostases of one maritime business, and whether to be a game or a hunter on the high seas depended solely on circumstances in antiquity, and, as we will see later, in "enlightened" centuries.

No matter how eccentric it may sound, it is to piracy that the ancient Greek civilizations owe their commercial and technical flourishing at sea, just as to land raids and wars - the development of military technology, military leadership and political systems. After all, the need to protect their lives and property pushed sailors to improve ships and weapons, develop new trade routes and develop the art of navigation, develop the principles of cartography and various economic disciplines. And this inevitably led to the rapid development of navigation and trade. And here an analogy arises with the “orderlies of the forest” - wolves, which objectively contribute to the survival and prosperity of many “victim” species.

And just as an excessive increase in the number of wolves turns them from a blessing into a disaster, the excessively increased power of the pirates made them a brake instead of an incentive for development. Then the state organized a raid on them, similar to the one carried out by Gnaeus Pompey in Sicily, and the number of "orderlies of the sea" for some time was within reasonable limits. So these two processes of mutual regulation alternated from century to century, until the useful beginning of sea robbery was finally exhausted - and this was recognized only a little more than a century ago!

Charles Johnson (Daniel Defoe)

General History of Pirates

Foreword

War, trade and piracy

Three kinds of essence one.

I. Goethe. "Faust"

Even small children probably know that archaeologists are looking for the remains of the bygone life of mankind in the earth. Shards of stone, used for hunting and fighting, processed skins and harvested crops. Nondescript fragments of rough pottery. Shapeless ruins that were once the walls of houses. More spectacular outward discoveries rarely happen: everyday life and its attributes at all times have many times exceeded the number of holidays and extraordinary objects. And yet ... In all the archaeological expeditions in which I had to participate (and there were more than a dozen of them - in Moldova, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even in the Summer Garden, in the very heart of the Neva capital), residents of the surrounding area always visited the excavation site, unless, of course, someone lived within the horizon. For some time, the guests quietly stood on the edge of the pit, in which dust-covered hard workers swarm. And when someone straightened his aching back and walked with an unsteady gait to a tin milk can for a sip of warm, tasteless water, a short and, as it were, joking conversation began - always the same:

- Hello. Are you digging? And how did they find a lot of gold?

At first it amused me. Then it annoyed me. And only much later I realized that this sacramental question was dictated not by greed, not by ignorance, and not even entirely by curiosity. It's just that in each of us, even the most cynical and bitter over the years of a routine, exhausting struggle for survival, there is an indestructible romantic with huge blue eyes. And it doesn’t matter to him at all what can be bought with the gold he asked about: the very sound of the word “treasures” resounds somewhere inside in a chord so sweet and subtle that low-lying matters are far from them, like the earth’s surface from the source of the music of the spheres…

I saw the unbearably shining eyes of the children crowding along the Neva parapets during the days of the Cutty Sark regatta: through the reflections of the colorful sails, the same romantic blueness of the unique shade of warm tropical seas splashed in these eyes. And the familiar chord was woven into the overtones of the trade wind ringing with shrouds and the serpentine hiss of a heavy wave ripped open by the keel, the scream of restless sailor souls in the skies and the spells of a strange bird that had seen a lot, muttering over the ear in the night:

- Piastres! Piastres! Piastres!

That is why the theme of pirates of the “classical” period at the very end of the bloody century of the two world wars attracts, and will certainly still attract many generations of growing romantics with huge blue eyes: mysterious treasures, distant seas, sails, the sound of swords, strong-willed men and their royally exalted ladies hearts knighted by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan ... The enchanting legend woven by Byron, Poe, Sabbatini and many, many others is spiritualized and harmonious just enough to induce the wings folded behind our backs to fly, and those standing behind it the silhouette of the Last Creditor with a scythe is just so ghostly and not terrible that the blood of pirate victims seems to be nothing more than cranberry juice. And even the antagonists of the "noble robbers", with black armbands, wooden legs and a pathologically evil disposition, since the days of Stevenson, Xu and Conan Doyle fit perfectly into the overall picture: in the end, the "good guys" defeat the "bad guys", and virtue, as it should be, triumphant. In the discussion of the sublime movements of the soul, which are so lacking in our pragmatic time (however, what time is not pragmatic?), this whole myth is beautiful and necessary, and it would be a sin for me, who even now will not miss the opportunity to enjoy a good "pirate" novel, try to debunk it. However, the book you now hold in your hands is of a completely different nature. And in our preface, we will also talk about something completely different.

Usually, the idea of ​​the phenomenon of piracy is firmly associated with the 16th-18th centuries - the time that was called “classical” a little higher. However, in reality, its origin is lost in the mists of time. The very word "pirate" firmly entered the lexicon of the ancient Greek inhabitants of the century four years before our era, but it had predecessors, and the heroes of Greek myths did not disdain acts of piracy - Minos, Odysseus, Hercules, Jason ... Pirate craft was already just as common then , like arable farming or cattle breeding, differing from them only in a greater degree of risk, and in the budget (as we would now say) of many Mediterranean city-states often played an even more significant role: the same Minoan Crete, for example, largely lived at the expense of sea ​​robbery.

General history of pirates. The Life and Pirate Adventures of the Glorious Captain Singleton (compilation)

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Title: A General History of Pirates. The Life and Pirate Adventures of the Glorious Captain Singleton (compilation)

About Daniel Defoe's book A General History of Pirates. The Life and Pirate Adventures of the Glorious Captain Singleton (compilation)"

“Many things, it seems to us, have always existed. Since childhood, we have become so accustomed to Defoe that it is difficult for us to realize that there were simply no English novels before him. And before him there were no magazines in England. He founded the first weekly, The Review, which ran for ten years. For ten years, once a week, Defoe had a crazy day, and besides, he wrote most of the articles himself ... "

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A general history of the robberies and murders committed by the most notorious pirates, and of their manners, politics, and government, from the time of their first appearance on the island of Providence, in 1717, where they established their settlement, until the present year, 1724; with the addition of the amazing deeds and adventures of the female pirates Anne Bonnie and Mary Read; to which is prefaced an account of the adventures of the famous Captain Avery and his comrades, with a description of what kind of death he took in England.

Charles Johnson (Daniel Defoe) A General History of Pirates

Foreword

War, trade and piracy

Three kinds of essence one.

I. Goethe. "Faust"

Even small children probably know that archaeologists are looking for the remains of the bygone life of mankind in the earth. Shards of stone, used for hunting and fighting, processed skins and harvested crops. Nondescript fragments of rough pottery. Shapeless ruins that were once the walls of houses. More spectacular outward discoveries rarely happen: everyday life and its attributes at all times have many times exceeded the number of holidays and extraordinary objects. And yet ... In all the archaeological expeditions in which I had to participate (and there were more than a dozen of them - in Moldova, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even in the Summer Garden, in the very heart of the Neva capital), residents of the surrounding area always visited the excavation site, unless, of course, someone lived within the horizon. For some time, the guests quietly stood on the edge of the pit, in which dust-covered hard workers swarm. And when someone straightened his aching back and walked with an unsteady gait to a tin milk can for a sip of warm, tasteless water, a short and, as it were, joking conversation began - always the same:

- Hello. Are you digging? And how did they find a lot of gold?

At first it amused me. Then it annoyed me. And only much later I realized that this sacramental question was dictated not by greed, not by ignorance, and not even entirely by curiosity. It's just that in each of us, even the most cynical and bitter over the years of a routine, exhausting struggle for survival, there is an indestructible romantic with huge blue eyes. And it doesn’t matter to him at all what can be bought with the gold he asked about: the very sound of the word “treasures” resounds somewhere inside in a chord so sweet and subtle that low-lying matters are far from them, like the earth’s surface from the source of the music of the spheres…

I saw the unbearably shining eyes of the children crowding along the Neva parapets during the days of the Cutty Sark regatta: through the reflections of the colorful sails, the same romantic blueness of the unique shade of warm tropical seas splashed in these eyes. And the familiar chord was woven into the overtones of the trade wind ringing with shrouds and the serpentine hiss of a heavy wave ripped open by the keel, the scream of restless sailor souls in the skies and the spells of a strange bird that had seen a lot, muttering over the ear in the night:

- Piastres! Piastres! Piastres!

That is why the theme of pirates of the “classical” period at the very end of the bloody century of the two world wars attracts, and will certainly still attract many generations of growing romantics with huge blue eyes: mysterious treasures, distant seas, sails, the sound of swords, strong-willed men and their royally exalted ladies hearts knighted by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan ... The enchanting legend woven by Byron, Poe, Sabbatini and many, many others is spiritualized and harmonious just enough to induce the wings folded behind our backs to fly, and those standing behind it the silhouette of the Last Creditor with a scythe is just so ghostly and not terrible that the blood of pirate victims seems to be nothing more than cranberry juice. And even the antagonists of the "noble robbers", with black armbands, wooden legs and a pathologically evil disposition, since the days of Stevenson, Xu and Conan Doyle fit perfectly into the overall picture: in the end, the "good guys" defeat the "bad guys", and virtue, as it should be, triumphant. In the discussion of the sublime movements of the soul, which are so lacking in our pragmatic time (however, what time is not pragmatic?), this whole myth is beautiful and necessary, and it would be a sin for me, who even now will not miss the opportunity to enjoy a good "pirate" novel, try to debunk it. However, the book you now hold in your hands is of a completely different nature. And in our preface, we will also talk about something completely different.

Usually, the idea of ​​the phenomenon of piracy is firmly associated with the 16th-18th centuries - the time that was called “classical” a little higher. However, in reality, its origin is lost in the mists of time. The very word "pirate" firmly entered the lexicon of the ancient Greek inhabitants of the century four years before our era, but it had predecessors, and the heroes of Greek myths did not disdain acts of piracy - Minos, Odysseus, Hercules, Jason ... Pirate craft was already just as common then , like arable farming or cattle breeding, differing from them only in a greater degree of risk, and in the budget (as we would now say) of many Mediterranean city-states often played an even more significant role: the same Minoan Crete, for example, largely lived at the expense of sea ​​robbery.

Moreover, in the Roman Digests (collections of laws), one of the laws that came to Roman law from the time of the ancient Greek sage Solon, three maritime "specializations" are listed - sailors, merchants and pirates. Let's add on our own: not just three equal professions, but three hypostases of one maritime business, and whether to be a game or a hunter on the high seas depended solely on circumstances in antiquity, and, as we will see later, in "enlightened" centuries.

No matter how eccentric it may sound, it is to piracy that the ancient Greek civilizations owe their commercial and technical flourishing at sea, just as to land raids and wars - the development of military technology, military leadership and political systems. After all, the need to protect their lives and property pushed sailors to improve ships and weapons, develop new trade routes and develop the art of navigation, develop the principles of cartography and various economic disciplines. And this inevitably led to the rapid development of navigation and trade. And here an analogy arises with the “orderlies of the forest” - wolves, which objectively contribute to the survival and prosperity of many “victim” species.

And just as an excessive increase in the number of wolves turns them from a blessing into a disaster, the excessively increased power of the pirates made them a brake instead of an incentive for development. Then the state organized a raid on them, similar to the one carried out by Gnaeus Pompey in Sicily, and the number of "orderlies of the sea" for some time was within reasonable limits. So these two processes of mutual regulation alternated from century to century, until the useful beginning of sea robbery was finally exhausted - and this was recognized only a little more than a century ago!

Finally, in addition to the progressive and "sanitary" components, in addition to the idea of ​​​​robbing the loot, which is still close to many, piracy, until the very latest times of its official recognition, was associated with the slave trade. “Hunting should be done both on wild animals and on those people who, being by nature destined for submission, do not want to obey. This kind of war is inherently just." These words belong, no less, to the father of European positivist science, Aristotle, although once the pirates enslaved his own teacher, Plato, and they managed to redeem him only after much trouble.

True, by the beginning of the Age of Discovery, European piracy had gradually lost its role as one of the main suppliers of “living goods” to world markets: the vast hunting grounds of Guinea, that is, almost the entire western coast of Africa, turned out to be at the service of the maritime states of Europe. The Portuguese, and then the Dutch, English, French official expeditions of slave hunters quickly drove the pirates out of this lucrative sector of trade. And yet, they managed to snatch good pieces from the sale of captured transports with black slaves, not to mention the traditional practice of ransoms for noble white captives. The other side of this topic is somewhat unexpected - the Negro slaves who fled and captured on transports turned out to be an abundant source of replenishment for the number of pirates themselves. At the same time, the crews of pirate ships, partly composed of blacks, were particularly resilient in battle: the former slaves had something to avenge, and in the event of captivity, a fate much more bitter than the gallows awaited them.

But the most important factor that shaped the main features of the piracy that we now perceive as "classic" was, of course, the discovery of America. When the newly appeared maritime states - Holland, England and France - began to timidly penetrate the ocean expanses, the world was already completely divided between the superpowers of those times: Spain and Portugal. On legal grounds, other countries could not claim the creation of overseas colonies: this state of affairs was consecrated by the bull of the Pope himself. Capture by force? It is also doubtful: the same colonies supplied silver and until then rare in Europe gold to the treasuries of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in an endless stream, so that the war with these monsters was doomed to failure for purely economic reasons. The only way out of this vicious circle was sanctioned piracy "on a national basis."

Thus flourished the famous institution of privateering, aimed at undermining the economic power and colonial omnipotence of the Spaniards and Portuguese. And in a very short time, most of the European pirates, having oriented themselves in the situation, moved to the Caribbean Sea and to the African shores. Pirate bases began to appear in Tortuga, Providence, Madagascar, and by the middle of the 17th century, Caribbean pirates had become strong enough not only to attack Spanish treasury galleons, but also to capture entire cities on the Panama and Darien isthmuses. A golden age began in the history of piracy.

In the European countries - contenders for equal membership in the "marine club" this state of affairs caused twofold feelings. On the one hand, even after the death of the Great Armada, Spain remained the undisputed master of the sea, so the government of England, for example, tried not to go on the rampage and officially disowned "their" pirates. On the other hand, for the realization of the colonial aspirations of newcomers, robbery attacks on Spanish transports continued to be extremely useful. In addition, the dangers of navigation in European waters have decreased, and among the bourgeoisie, high-profile pirate campaigns against the "golden cities" of New Spain caused real surges of patriotism, sometimes even a little feverish.

Yes, in public opinion, a particular living pirate formally remained an odious person, even if the state itself stopped prosecuting him. But the pirate exploits themselves, with all their blood and dirt, not only happened far from their native threshold, but also greatly fueled the feeling of national pride. It is no coincidence that it was in the 16th-17th centuries in England that books of a hitherto unknown genre began to be printed - travel diaries and memoirs of pirates, which invariably enjoyed a certain reader demand. And, finally, in 1678 in Holland, and soon in a number of other European countries, an essay appeared that laid the foundation for an extensive family of books on the history of piracy - "Pirates of America" ​​by A. Exkvemelin.

It is still not known for certain which name was encrypted in this anagram. However, all historians agree that under the pseudonym "A. Exquemelin" was hiding a French doctor who, by the will of fate, became a buccaneer in Tortuga and was directly involved in the famous Panamanian campaigns of Henry Morgan. Returning to Europe in 1674, Exquemelin took up medical practice in Amsterdam, and at his leisure wrote down what he found interesting from his observations of nature, the customs and customs of the Caribbean, from his experience as a buccaneer and participant in pirate attacks, interspersing ethnography and naturalistics with lengthy biographies of Caribbean pirates. It was this book that not only preserved in history, but also strongly singled out the names of L’Ollone and Rock the Brazilian from the general series of pirates of the 17th century, and immortalized the living details of Morgan’s expeditions.

"Pirates of America" ​​caused a sensation in Europe. In a matter of months, the book was translated and republished in Germany, Spain, England, and France. It is characteristic of that time that the translators edited The Pirates in the spirit of their national predilections; as a result, if the Dutch text depicted the atrocities of the Spaniards in the New World, then in its Spanish version the Spaniards were exposed as innocent sheep, and the English pirates, and especially Morgan himself, were bloody monsters. This circumstance might not be of particular interest to you and me if the English translation of the book had not been made ... from Spanish. But this is exactly what happened, and this circumstance in a certain way influenced the formation of the entire “pirate” genre.

In 1724, a book appeared on the shelves of London bookstores, which was destined for the ambiguous fate of the "gray eminence" of literature about pirates - "A General History of Pirates" by Captain Charles Johnson. It outlined the biographies of ten Caribbean pirates of the 1710s. Like Pirates of America, the book was a huge success with readers: soon the second and third editions were published, supplemented by new biographies, and in 1728 the second volume of the General History appeared, telling about the pirates of the Indian Ocean.

Many details of the style of the "History" indicate that its author took the work of Exquemelin as a model. The same topicality, since the book dealt with the events of several recent years. The same slightly dry, and at times deliberately impassive language of an outside observer-chronist. The same abundance of small everyday details - and at the end of the book, for greater similarity, even a lengthy "Description" sewn into the fabric of the presentation, which tells about the natural and geographical features of the islands of Sao Tome and Principe: undoubtedly curious, but, unlike "Pirates of America ”, which has almost nothing to do with the main text. Finally, impressive pictures of the atrocities of English pirates (and all the main characters of the "History" are English), which continued the tradition laid down, as we already know, by the light hand of the Spanish translator Exquemelin. And yet, what gave Johnson's book a special value in the eyes of contemporaries and even more valuable today was an undoubted find of the author: reliance on documentary evidence.

It is unlikely that the general public could have had the opportunity to read a letter from the captain of a merchant ship detailing the brutal battle he fought with two pirate ships. Or the original text of the speech with which the king's judge addressed the captured pirate before announcing his death sentence. In some places, Johnson's "History" even resembles a certain statistical report, with such scrupulousness it lists data on ships captured by pirates: type, name, captain's name, number of guns, crew size. Exquemelin, for obvious reasons, could not have access to this kind of information. But in his book there is something that Johnson does not have: the experience of an eyewitness and a direct participant in the events described.

Charles Johnson was not such an eyewitness, and he could draw the living details of what he wrote about only from the memories of other people. This is apparently the source of the numerous minor inaccuracies and lacunae that plague parts of the text that are not based on documents. Hence, there is some fog in the descriptions of the places of action: the author often has a poor idea of ​​who, where and in relation to what is moving. But this is not the main drawback of "History of Pirates" from the point of view of the historian: after decades, it gradually became clear that many details in the description of the characters, not to mention the dialogues, Johnson ... simply invented! The apotheosis of the author's dishonesty turned out to be that the biographies of the female pirates Mary Reid and Anne Bonny were fictionalized by him from the beginning and almost to the end. Such things, as you know, do not fit well in the heads of professional historians. And the "General History of Pirates" went into the shadows.

Of course, it was impossible to completely ignore it: both a hundred and two hundred years after the writing of this book, it was much more important for an ordinary reader to feel captured by her strangely ordinary events in their cruelty than to meticulously find out the authenticity of this or that detail. In addition, very, very much of the information contained in the "History" not only did not suffer from the intervention of the author's imagination, but is also absent from all other sources. And if this information were withdrawn from historical use, gaping gaps that would not be filled in any way would be formed in their place. Therefore, professionals involved in the history of piracy (and such appeared already by the end of the 1700s) chose the Solomonic solution. Information (and sometimes myths) from the "History of Pirates" has been used in all books on this topic for two and a half centuries. The "History of Pirates" itself as a source of this information is not mentioned almost anywhere. So, due to his own dishonesty, Charles Johnson became the "grey eminence" of the history of piracy.

However, as I have already said, only historians reproached Captain Johnson for dishonesty, and in their own way they are, of course, right. But is this correctness absolute? After all, even without speaking more about the certain slyness of the representatives of historical science, one should recognize the "History" and undoubted literary value. Could it not happen that the "factual forgery" made by the author was dictated not by his evil will, but by some more respectful circumstances? In order to fairly answer this question, it was necessary first to understand what kind of person Captain Charles Johnson was. But when they began to understand, it turned out that such a person ... simply does not exist.

When it was established that Captain Charles Johnson was not listed in the archival lists of the Maritime Ministry of Great Britain, many researchers reasonably assumed that in this the author of the History followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, A. Exkvemelin, and, also being a pirate in the past, published a book under a pseudonym. Such a hypothesis explained Johnson's exceptional knowledge of the details of the life of the pirates of the 1710s, but left open both the question of his honesty and how the former pirate could get access to documents. The mystery of Charles Johnson's personality remained a mystery until 1932, when the American literary scholar John Moore published an article analyzing The History of the Pirates.

John Moore suggested that behind the pseudonym "Captain Johnson" was the English writer Daniel Defoe - the world-famous author of "Robinson Crusoe". To confirm his hypothesis, he had to do a lot of work. The scientist found documents from which it followed that in the late 1710s and early 1720s, when the General History of Pirates was being written, Defoe was keenly interested in shipbuilding and navigation. During these years, he actively wrote on pirate topics and published several books, although less documentary than "History", but dedicated to the same people and based on the same sources. After conducting a textual analysis of some of the works of Daniel Defoe and several chapters from the "History of Pirates", Moore showed that in some cases their texts are absolutely identical, and the biography of the pirate John Gow, which appeared in the third edition of "History", was a simple processing of Defoe's pamphlet, published by a few months earlier.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the writer published the "History" under a pseudonym. Of the hundreds of books and articles written after 1710, he published only two works under his real name, and of all his works (there are more than 500) - only about a dozen.

At present, John Moore's hypothesis has become universally recognized outside of Russia. However, in our country to this day there are books, including well-known and respected authors of popular books on the history of piracy, where Captain Charles Johnson's "History of Pirates" is presented as an essay from which Daniel Defoe drew factual material for his works on a pirate theme. The beauty of the situation lies in the fact that some of the authors at the same time restrained, but unambiguously reproaches Defoe for plagiarism. Let's hope that now that the book is finally published in Russian, such misunderstandings will become a thing of the past.

Although Daniel Defoe “came out” on the pirate theme quite by accident, the very appeal to it was completely natural: here, as it were, two parallel current aspects of his life merged together. One way or another, everyone knows about one of these sides, because who else in school years did not read any of the editions of Robinson Crusoe, and therefore the preface to it? A brilliant and very prolific satirist who published his first political pamphlet at the age of 23, and the last one at the age of seventy-one, a few months before his death, was repeatedly arrested, fined for his work, and once even sentenced to standing at the pillory. Publisher of the weekly "Review" and the newspaper "Political Mercury", journalist and editor. The author of numerous works on the history of Great Britain and the first fictionalized biography of Tsar Peter I of Muscovy. Finally, the creator of 18 novels, the first of which, published when Defoe was already 59 years old, immortalized his name ...

The second side of his activity is less known to our reader. 18-year-old Daniel, who was preparing to take the priesthood, abandons this career and begins to engage in various kinds of trade, including those related to the import and export of goods to America (this is where, it turns out, the first thread of his interest in the problems of maritime communications comes from). In the summer of 1685, he took part in the uprising of the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, and three years later he got in touch with William of Orange, a pretender to the English throne, and even became part of his retinue during the Duke’s trip to Ireland in June 1690. Then comes the first collapse in the commercial soil: in 1692, Defoe, who by that time was engaged in insurance of ships, was ruined due to their frequent death (there was a war for the Palatinate inheritance); the amount of debt is 17,000 pounds. Now all his commercial projects will be connected with land.

In his fifties, having endured a series of fines and prison sentences associated with both a sharp pen and commercial failures, Defoe comes to direct cooperation with the government. At the end of 1704, he was released from prison, his debts were paid by the crown, and the pamphleteer himself became a propagandist and informer - first under the Tory government, and from 1715 under the new Whig government. This change in status not only did not interfere with his prolific pamphleteer, as already mentioned above, but apparently helped to emerge in a new capacity as a writer of novels.

Some of them lay in a drawer for many years: The Joys and Sorrows of the Famous Moll Flanders, a novel published in 1722, dated, for example, 1683! And if you look at the themes of Defoe's major works as a whole, then you are once again convinced how wrong the conventional wisdom about the "specialization" of writers is. There is a well-known anecdote about Queen Victoria, who, having come to the delight of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, demanded all his writings and received a pile of mathematical treatises. An anecdote is an anecdote: Carroll had enough poetry collections, short stories, and even novels. But only a children's fairy tale is widely known and loved. Something of the sort happened to Defoe.

If you look for analogies to his creative passions, the first thing that comes to mind is Vladimir Gilyarovsky. "Uncle Gilyai", the singer of the Moscow slums and the coryphaeus of Russian journalism, was keenly interested in the inhabitants of the world of loaders, cabbies, thieves and beggars. Defoe was just as interested in the world of London prostitutes (remember the same "Moll Flanders"), swindlers and adventurers. And… pirates. The position of a government informant, presumably, provided him with every opportunity to collect the necessary information, and the instinct of a person who writes did not allow him to neglect such a storehouse of plots and topics. Therefore, "Robinson Crusoe" and its two sequels, practically unknown to the reading public in Russia, stand apart in his work, like Carroll's "Alice" and "Through the Looking-Glass". But a good half of Defoe's major works are related to the pirate theme, and all of them were written after 1718: "The Pirate King", whose hero was Henry Avery (published in 1719), "The Life and Pirate Adventures of Captain Singleton" (1720), "The Story of Colonel Jack" (1722), "A New Voyage Around the World" (1724), "Four-Year Wanderings" (1726), "Madagascar, or the Diary of Robert Drury" (1729) ... Of course, the "History of Pirates" should also be included here; and... Robinson Crusoe.

The latter may seem somewhat strange, although there is an episode in Robinson in which the hero is captured by pirates. To dispel the bewilderment, and at the same time try to explain Defoe's sudden interest in the activities of pirates (which arose a decade and a half after the writer could have last faced its consequences), we will have to change the subject again.

Where did pirates come from in the 16th-18th centuries? As usual, here you can find several sources and several reasons. If you look closely at the periods of ups and downs of piracy activity, it turns out that its bursts occur at the end of major wars between the maritime powers of Europe. Defoe in The History of the Pirates is very precise about this. Indeed, people with an adventurous streak, not too concerned about the cleanliness of their gloves, during the next war received an excellent opportunity to legally satisfy both their passion for adventure and their thirst for profit by obtaining a letter of marque. When the war ended, most of them, having become addicted to, but having no more legal grounds for sea robbery, began to engage in it illegally. After some time, the government had to once again undertake a demonstrative cleaning of pirate nests. (Just about one such period, which was destined to become the last peak in history of massive pirate activity in the Caribbean Sea and off the coast of Africa and India, and tells the "General History of Pirates".)

The second source today may seem quite unexpected: sailors and even officers of ships captured by pirates. But let us turn again to the dry statistics given by Defoe on the pages of this book. In the chapter "The Life of Captain England", in the list of ships captured by this pirate from March 25 to June 27, 1719, we read: "Eagle" ... 17 crew members ... 7 became pirates; "Charlotte" ... 18 people ... 13 became pirates; "Sarah" ... 18 people ... 3 became pirates; "Bentworth" ... 30 people ... 12 became pirates; "Deer" ... 2 people, and both became pirates; "Carteret" ... 18 people ... 5 became pirates; "Mercury" ... 18 people ... 5 became pirates; “Shy”… 13 people… 4 became pirates; "Elizabeth and Katherine"... 14 people... 4 became pirates." It turns out that the pirate freemen, along with the noose looming in the future, was preferred by every third, and even a little more!

We can talk a lot here about the social situation that provoked such decisions, but this would lead us far astray, and it has already been noted more than once. You can give a few more sources of replenishment of the pirate ranks. And yet more important, in our opinion, are the questions “who?” and why?" move to another plane. After all, the “trinity” of the maritime professions of a merchant, sailor and pirate has not been canceled, it has not only been preserved since ancient times, but also acquired a fourth hypostasis: a pioneer of newly discovered lands. And the New World with its gold, Indians, pioneers and filibusters turned out to be the valve through which people with the same general quality escaped from aging Europe: those whom Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov called "passionaries". It was here that their irrepressible energy could be used, and to direct it to destruction or creation depended on the circumstances.

One of these people, whose name is often mentioned on the pages of the History of Pirates, was the reason for such a seemingly distant digression from the topic. The English privateer Woods Rogers, a hereditary sea captain, first sent privateers on raids against French ships, and when the British government stopped demanding 20 percent of the cost of production from privateers, he himself went hunting. Leading a flotilla of two frigates, in September 1708 he headed for the Pacific Ocean and after a brief stop at the Juan Fernandez Islands, capturing several Spanish and French ships along the way, in May 1709 he unexpectedly attacked the port of Guayaquil and plundered it. In January 1710, he captured the Manila galleon - an unrealizable dream of the vast majority of Caribbean pirates, and was wounded by a musket bullet in the upper jaw, but only three days later he tried to capture another galleon. During this fight, a piece of shrapnel knocked out a piece of Rogers' heel bone and cut off more than half of his leg under the ankle. The second tidbit could not be captured. However, the already captured good was more than enough to pay for the expedition. In October 1711, the ships returned to England, and in 1712, Rogers' book "A Voyage Around the World" was published, based on diary entries. Some researchers believe that the book was edited by ... Daniel Defoe. But we will return to this episode a little later.

In 1713–1715 Rogers transported slaves from Africa to Sumatra, and at the end of 1717, at the request of planters from the Bahamas, he was proclaimed the first royal governor of the island of New Providence, the main Caribbean base for pirates of those years. Appearing in the Bahamas in July of the following year, he managed to force some of the pirates to lay down their arms in exchange for a royal amnesty, dispersed the rest, and hanged some. Pirates began to bypass New Providence. However, the metropolis did not provide any support to the governor's activities, and in 1721 Rogers went to London for help. He failed to get money to protect the island (now from the Spaniards), went bankrupt and ended up in a debtor's prison. He was reinstated as governor only in 1728, and four years later Woods Rogers died in New Providence.

Unfortunately, I do not know for certain how close Defoe's acquaintance with Woodes Rogers was. But the fact that such an acquaintance was and lasted for many years, I have no doubts. It has already been mentioned above that Defoe is believed to have edited Rogers' book. But this book says, in particular, about a stop at the Juan Fernandez Islands, and about a pirate landed by his comrades on one of the islands and picked up by Captain Rogers. This pirate was named Alexander Selkirk, and after a few years he became known throughout England, and then to the whole world, under the name of Robinson Crusoe.

After Rogers' trip to London in 1721, Defoe had enough material about the pirates of the Caribbean at his disposal to write a whole series of books. And all these pirates are from among the “offended” by the governor of New Providence in 1718, which Defoe always mentions in their biographies from the General History. Of course, the final judgment on the connection between these two people can only be made after a thorough study of the topic. But I think that even now we can safely say: Defoe's interest in the life and work of pirates, a number of his novels, which opens with the immortal "Robinson", "The General History of Pirates" with its unique historical data - all this is just a reflected light of the passionarity of Captain Woods Rogers.

But let's give credit to the author. Let's not talk about novels - that has its time and its place. As for The General History of Pirates, in this book the aged rebel and informer managed to convey to us what no one else could. Let at times dry protocol facts and his own violent fantasies mix in his head, the desire to create a reliable picture of events and the senile tendency to write didactic "life experiences" (but in this sense, the biblical "Book of Wisdom of Solomon" is no different, say, from the third volumes of Robinson!). Defoe did the main thing: he fixed ordinary piracy for centuries. Reading Exquemelin, we can imagine that the whole life of a pirate consisted of the capture of cities, caravans of gold, gigantic fleets of many hundreds of boarding sabers. On the pages of the "History of Pirates" we see the truth: "workdays" with regular cleaning of the bottoms, captures of small boats and going to the blocked port for medicines; with ship prostitutes, captured along with pirates and therefore became a historical myth, and household robbery of food; with the deposition of captains and a stampede from military patrol ships ... All this carries a unique flavor of authenticity, and is presented in such a way that layers of the author's tribute to the Imagination not only do not interrupt it, but in an incomprehensible way set off and enrich it. And a strange thing: while working on the translation, I kept sarcastic to myself, calling The History of Pirates a "manufacturing novel." And the huge blue eyes of the one sitting inside, for some reason, flared up brighter and brighter ...

The text of The General History of Pirates is published in Russian in the same volume in which the book first appeared on the London shelves in 1724. Explanations of some cultural realities, brief biographical notes, and other things that, in the opinion of the translator, might be of interest to the reader, are given in the notes (they are partly placed at the bottom of the pages, partly at the end of each chapter). Geographical names, nautical terms, ancient measures of weight, length, etc., as well as monetary units, are separated into special appendices for ease of use.

The translator expresses sincere and deep gratitude to E. N. Malskaya for her great technical assistance in preparing the translation; E. V. Kislenkova, Academic Director of the Educacenter, for effective assistance in a critical situation; employee of the National Library of Russia M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, historian M. A. Govorun - for their help in working with reference literature and searching for visual materials; Candidate of Historical Sciences S. V. Lobachev - for the materials provided, partially used in the preparation of this book.

Igor Malsky

Current page: 1 (the book has 15 pages in total)

Charles Johnson (Daniel Defoe)

General History of Pirates

Foreword

War, trade and piracy

Three kinds of essence one.

I. Goethe. "Faust"

Even small children probably know that archaeologists are looking for the remains of the bygone life of mankind in the earth. Shards of stone, used for hunting and fighting, processed skins and harvested crops. Nondescript fragments of rough pottery. Shapeless ruins that were once the walls of houses. More spectacular outward discoveries rarely happen: everyday life and its attributes at all times have many times exceeded the number of holidays and extraordinary objects. And yet ... In all the archaeological expeditions in which I had to participate (and there were more than a dozen of them - in Moldova, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even in the Summer Garden, in the very heart of the Neva capital), residents of the surrounding area always visited the excavation site, unless, of course, someone lived within the horizon. For some time, the guests quietly stood on the edge of the pit, in which dust-covered hard workers swarm. And when someone straightened his aching back and walked with an unsteady gait to a tin milk can for a sip of warm, tasteless water, a short and, as it were, joking conversation began - always the same:

- Hello. Are you digging? And how did they find a lot of gold?

At first it amused me. Then it annoyed me. And only much later I realized that this sacramental question was dictated not by greed, not by ignorance, and not even entirely by curiosity. It's just that in each of us, even the most cynical and bitter over the years of a routine, exhausting struggle for survival, there is an indestructible romantic with huge blue eyes. And it doesn’t matter to him at all what can be bought with the gold he asked about: the very sound of the word “treasures” resounds somewhere inside in a chord so sweet and subtle that low-lying matters are far from them, like the earth’s surface from the source of the music of the spheres…

I saw the unbearably shining eyes of the children crowding along the Neva parapets during the days of the Cutty Sark regatta: through the reflections of the colorful sails, the same romantic blueness of the unique shade of warm tropical seas splashed in these eyes. And the familiar chord was woven into the overtones of the trade wind ringing with shrouds and the serpentine hiss of a heavy wave ripped open by the keel, the scream of restless sailor souls in the skies and the spells of a strange bird that had seen a lot, muttering over the ear in the night:

- Piastres! Piastres! Piastres!

That is why the theme of pirates of the “classical” period at the very end of the bloody century of the two world wars attracts, and will certainly still attract many generations of growing romantics with huge blue eyes: mysterious treasures, distant seas, sails, the sound of swords, strong-willed men and their royally exalted ladies hearts knighted by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan ... The enchanting legend woven by Byron, Poe, Sabbatini and many, many others is spiritualized and harmonious just enough to induce the wings folded behind our backs to fly, and those standing behind it the silhouette of the Last Creditor with a scythe is just so ghostly and not terrible that the blood of pirate victims seems to be nothing more than cranberry juice. And even the antagonists of the "noble robbers", with black armbands, wooden legs and a pathologically evil disposition, since the days of Stevenson, Xu and Conan Doyle fit perfectly into the overall picture: in the end, the "good guys" defeat the "bad guys", and virtue, as it should be, triumphant. In the discussion of the sublime movements of the soul, which are so lacking in our pragmatic time (however, what time is not pragmatic?), this whole myth is beautiful and necessary, and it would be a sin for me, who even now will not miss the opportunity to enjoy a good "pirate" novel, try to debunk it. However, the book you now hold in your hands is of a completely different nature. And in our preface, we will also talk about something completely different.

Usually, the idea of ​​the phenomenon of piracy is firmly associated with the 16th-18th centuries - the time that was called “classical” a little higher. However, in reality, its origin is lost in the mists of time. The very word "pirate" firmly entered the lexicon of the ancient Greek inhabitants of the century four years before our era, but it had predecessors, and the heroes of Greek myths did not disdain acts of piracy - Minos, Odysseus, Hercules, Jason ... Pirate craft was already just as common then , like arable farming or cattle breeding, differing from them only in a greater degree of risk, and in the budget (as we would now say) of many Mediterranean city-states often played an even more significant role: the same Minoan Crete, for example, largely lived at the expense of sea ​​robbery.

Moreover, in the Roman Digests (collections of laws), one of the laws that came to Roman law from the time of the ancient Greek sage Solon, three maritime "specializations" are listed - sailors, merchants and pirates. Let's add on our own: not just three equal professions, but three hypostases of one maritime business, and whether to be a game or a hunter on the high seas depended solely on circumstances in antiquity, and, as we will see later, in "enlightened" centuries.

No matter how eccentric it may sound, it is to piracy that the ancient Greek civilizations owe their commercial and technical flourishing at sea, just as to land raids and wars - the development of military technology, military leadership and political systems. After all, the need to protect their lives and property pushed sailors to improve ships and weapons, develop new trade routes and develop the art of navigation, develop the principles of cartography and various economic disciplines. And this inevitably led to the rapid development of navigation and trade. And here an analogy arises with the “orderlies of the forest” - wolves, which objectively contribute to the survival and prosperity of many “victim” species.

And just as an excessive increase in the number of wolves turns them from a blessing into a disaster, the excessively increased power of the pirates made them a brake instead of an incentive for development. Then the state organized a raid on them, similar to the one carried out by Gnaeus Pompey in Sicily, and the number of "orderlies of the sea" for some time was within reasonable limits. So these two processes of mutual regulation alternated from century to century, until the useful beginning of sea robbery was finally exhausted - and this was recognized only a little more than a century ago!

Finally, in addition to the progressive and "sanitary" components, in addition to the idea of ​​​​robbing the loot, which is still close to many, piracy, until the very latest times of its official recognition, was associated with the slave trade. “Hunting should be done both on wild animals and on those people who, being by nature destined for submission, do not want to obey. This kind of war is inherently just." These words belong, no less, to the father of European positivist science, Aristotle, although once the pirates enslaved his own teacher, Plato, and they managed to redeem him only after much trouble.

True, by the beginning of the Age of Discovery, European piracy had gradually lost its role as one of the main suppliers of “living goods” to world markets: the vast hunting grounds of Guinea, that is, almost the entire western coast of Africa, turned out to be at the service of the maritime states of Europe. The Portuguese, and then the Dutch, English, French official expeditions of slave hunters quickly drove the pirates out of this lucrative sector of trade. And yet, they managed to snatch good pieces from the sale of captured transports with black slaves, not to mention the traditional practice of ransoms for noble white captives. The other side of this topic is somewhat unexpected - the Negro slaves who fled and captured on transports turned out to be an abundant source of replenishment for the number of pirates themselves. At the same time, the crews of pirate ships, partly composed of blacks, were particularly resilient in battle: the former slaves had something to avenge, and in the event of captivity, a fate much more bitter than the gallows awaited them.

But the most important factor that shaped the main features of the piracy that we now perceive as "classic" was, of course, the discovery of America. When the newly appeared maritime states - Holland, England and France - began to timidly penetrate the ocean expanses, the world was already completely divided between the superpowers of those times: Spain and Portugal. On legal grounds, other countries could not claim the creation of overseas colonies: this state of affairs was consecrated by the bull of the Pope himself. Capture by force? It is also doubtful: the same colonies supplied silver and until then rare in Europe gold to the treasuries of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in an endless stream, so that the war with these monsters was doomed to failure for purely economic reasons. The only way out of this vicious circle was sanctioned piracy "on a national basis."

Thus flourished the famous institution of privateering, aimed at undermining the economic power and colonial omnipotence of the Spaniards and Portuguese. And in a very short time, most of the European pirates, having oriented themselves in the situation, moved to the Caribbean Sea and to the African shores. Pirate bases began to appear in Tortuga, Providence, Madagascar, and by the middle of the 17th century, Caribbean pirates had become strong enough not only to attack Spanish treasury galleons, but also to capture entire cities on the Panama and Darien isthmuses. A golden age began in the history of piracy.

In the European countries - contenders for equal membership in the "marine club" this state of affairs caused twofold feelings. On the one hand, even after the death of the Great Armada, Spain remained the undisputed master of the sea, so the government of England, for example, tried not to go on the rampage and officially disowned "their" pirates. On the other hand, for the realization of the colonial aspirations of newcomers, robbery attacks on Spanish transports continued to be extremely useful. In addition, the dangers of navigation in European waters have decreased, and among the bourgeoisie, high-profile pirate campaigns against the "golden cities" of New Spain caused real surges of patriotism, sometimes even a little feverish.

Yes, in public opinion, a particular living pirate formally remained an odious person, even if the state itself stopped prosecuting him. But the pirate exploits themselves, with all their blood and dirt, not only happened far from their native threshold, but also greatly fueled the feeling of national pride. It is no coincidence that it was in the 16th-17th centuries in England that books of an unprecedented genre began to be printed - travel diaries and memoirs of pirates, which invariably enjoyed a certain reader demand. And, finally, in 1678 in Holland, and soon in a number of other European countries, an essay appeared that laid the foundation for an extensive family of books on the history of piracy - "Pirates of America" ​​by A. Exkvemelin.

It is still not known for certain which name was encrypted in this anagram. However, all historians agree that under the pseudonym "A. Exquemelin" was hiding a French doctor who, by the will of fate, became a buccaneer in Tortuga and was directly involved in the famous Panamanian campaigns of Henry Morgan. Returning to Europe in 1674, Exquemelin took up medical practice in Amsterdam, and at his leisure wrote down what he found interesting from his observations of nature, the customs and customs of the Caribbean, from his experience as a buccaneer and participant in pirate attacks, interspersing ethnography and naturalistics with lengthy biographies of Caribbean pirates. It was this book that not only preserved in history, but also strongly singled out the names of L’Ollone and Rock the Brazilian from the general series of pirates of the 17th century, and immortalized the living details of Morgan’s expeditions.

"Pirates of America" ​​caused a sensation in Europe. In a matter of months, the book was translated and republished in Germany, Spain, England, and France. It is characteristic of that time that the translators edited The Pirates in the spirit of their national predilections; as a result, if the Dutch text depicted the atrocities of the Spaniards in the New World, then in its Spanish version the Spaniards were exposed as innocent sheep, and the English pirates, and especially Morgan himself, were bloody monsters. This circumstance might not be of particular interest to you and me if the English translation of the book had not been made ... from Spanish. But this is exactly what happened, and this circumstance in a certain way influenced the formation of the entire “pirate” genre.

In 1724, a book appeared on the shelves of London bookstores, which was destined for the ambiguous fate of the "gray eminence" of literature about pirates - "A General History of Pirates" by Captain Charles Johnson. It outlined the biographies of ten Caribbean pirates of the 1710s. Like Pirates of America, the book was a huge success with readers: soon the second and third editions were published, supplemented by new biographies, and in 1728 the second volume of the General History appeared, telling about the pirates of the Indian Ocean.

Many details of the style of the "History" indicate that its author took the work of Exquemelin as a model. The same topicality, since the book dealt with the events of several recent years. The same slightly dry, and at times deliberately impassive language of an outside observer-chronist. The same abundance of small everyday details - and at the end of the book, for greater similarity, even a lengthy "Description" sewn into the fabric of the presentation, which tells about the natural and geographical features of the islands of Sao Tome and Principe: undoubtedly curious, but, unlike "Pirates of America ”, which has almost nothing to do with the main text. Finally, impressive pictures of the atrocities of English pirates (and all the main characters of the "History" are English), which continued the tradition laid down, as we already know, by the light hand of the Spanish translator Exquemelin. And yet, what gave Johnson's book a special value in the eyes of contemporaries and even more valuable today was an undoubted find of the author: reliance on documentary evidence.

It is unlikely that the general public could have had the opportunity to read a letter from the captain of a merchant ship detailing the brutal battle he fought with two pirate ships. Or the original text of the speech with which the king's judge addressed the captured pirate before announcing his death sentence. In some places, Johnson's "History" even resembles a certain statistical report, with such scrupulousness it lists data on ships captured by pirates: type, name, captain's name, number of guns, crew size. Exquemelin, for obvious reasons, could not have access to this kind of information. But in his book there is something that Johnson does not have: the experience of an eyewitness and a direct participant in the events described.

Charles Johnson was not such an eyewitness, and he could draw the living details of what he wrote about only from the memories of other people. This is apparently the source of the numerous minor inaccuracies and lacunae that plague parts of the text that are not based on documents. Hence, there is some fog in the descriptions of the places of action: the author often has a poor idea of ​​who, where and in relation to what is moving. But this is not the main drawback of "History of Pirates" from the point of view of the historian: after decades, it gradually became clear that many details in the description of the characters, not to mention the dialogues, Johnson ... simply invented! The apotheosis of the author's dishonesty turned out to be that the biographies of the female pirates Mary Reid and Anne Bonny were fictionalized by him from the beginning and almost to the end. Such things, as you know, do not fit well in the heads of professional historians. And the "General History of Pirates" went into the shadows.

Of course, it was impossible to completely ignore it: both a hundred and two hundred years after the writing of this book, it was much more important for an ordinary reader to feel captured by her strangely ordinary events in their cruelty than to meticulously find out the authenticity of this or that detail. In addition, very, very much of the information contained in the "History" not only did not suffer from the intervention of the author's imagination, but is also absent from all other sources. And if this information were withdrawn from historical use, gaping gaps that would not be filled in any way would be formed in their place. Therefore, professionals involved in the history of piracy (and such appeared already by the end of the 1700s) chose the Solomonic solution. Information (and sometimes myths) from the "History of Pirates" has been used in all books on this topic for two and a half centuries. The "History of Pirates" itself as a source of this information is not mentioned almost anywhere. So, due to his own dishonesty, Charles Johnson became the "grey eminence" of the history of piracy.

However, as I have already said, only historians reproached Captain Johnson for dishonesty, and in their own way they are, of course, right. But is this correctness absolute? After all, even without speaking more about the certain slyness of the representatives of historical science, one should recognize the "History" and undoubted literary value. Could it not happen that the "factual forgery" made by the author was dictated not by his evil will, but by some more respectful circumstances? In order to fairly answer this question, it was necessary first to understand what kind of person Captain Charles Johnson was. But when they began to understand, it turned out that such a person ... simply does not exist.

When it was established that Captain Charles Johnson was not listed in the archival lists of the Maritime Ministry of Great Britain, many researchers reasonably assumed that in this the author of the History followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, A. Exkvemelin, and, also being a pirate in the past, published a book under a pseudonym. Such a hypothesis explained Johnson's exceptional knowledge of the details of the life of the pirates of the 1710s, but left open both the question of his honesty and how the former pirate could get access to documents. The mystery of Charles Johnson's personality remained a mystery until 1932, when the American literary scholar John Moore published an article analyzing The History of the Pirates.

John Moore suggested that behind the pseudonym "Captain Johnson" was the English writer Daniel Defoe - the world-famous author of "Robinson Crusoe". To confirm his hypothesis, he had to do a lot of work. The scientist found documents from which it followed that in the late 1710s and early 1720s, when the General History of Pirates was being written, Defoe was keenly interested in shipbuilding and navigation. During these years, he actively wrote on pirate topics and published several books, although less documentary than "History", but dedicated to the same people and based on the same sources. After conducting a textual analysis of some of the works of Daniel Defoe and several chapters from the "History of Pirates", Moore showed that in some cases their texts are absolutely identical, and the biography of the pirate John Gow, which appeared in the third edition of "History", was a simple processing of Defoe's pamphlet, published by a few months earlier.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the writer published the "History" under a pseudonym. Of the hundreds of books and articles written after 1710, he published only two works under his real name, and of all his works (there are more than 500) - only about a dozen.

At present, John Moore's hypothesis has become universally recognized outside of Russia. However, in our country to this day there are books, including well-known and respected authors of popular books on the history of piracy, where Captain Charles Johnson's "History of Pirates" is presented as an essay from which Daniel Defoe drew factual material for his works on a pirate theme. The beauty of the situation lies in the fact that some of the authors at the same time restrained, but unambiguously reproaches Defoe for plagiarism. Let's hope that now that the book is finally published in Russian, such misunderstandings will become a thing of the past.

Although Daniel Defoe “came out” on the pirate theme quite by accident, the very appeal to it was completely natural: here, as it were, two parallel current aspects of his life merged together. One way or another, everyone knows about one of these sides, because who else in school years did not read any of the editions of Robinson Crusoe, and therefore the preface to it? A brilliant and very prolific satirist who published his first political pamphlet at the age of 23, and the last one at the age of seventy-one, a few months before his death, was repeatedly arrested, fined for his work, and once even sentenced to standing at the pillory. Publisher of the weekly "Review" and the newspaper "Political Mercury", journalist and editor. The author of numerous works on the history of Great Britain and the first fictionalized biography of Tsar Peter I of Muscovy. Finally, the creator of 18 novels, the first of which, published when Defoe was already 59 years old, immortalized his name ...

The second side of his activity is less known to our reader. 18-year-old Daniel, who was preparing to take the priesthood, abandons this career and begins to engage in various kinds of trade, including those related to the import and export of goods to America (this is where, it turns out, the first thread of his interest in the problems of maritime communications comes from). In the summer of 1685, he took part in the uprising of the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, and three years later he got in touch with William of Orange, a pretender to the English throne, and even became part of his retinue during the Duke’s trip to Ireland in June 1690. Then comes the first collapse in the commercial soil: in 1692, Defoe, who by that time was engaged in insurance of ships, was ruined due to their frequent death (there was a war for the Palatinate inheritance); the amount of debt is 17,000 pounds. Now all his commercial projects will be connected with land.

In his fifties, having endured a series of fines and prison sentences associated with both a sharp pen and commercial failures, Defoe comes to direct cooperation with the government. At the end of 1704, he was released from prison, his debts were paid by the crown, and the pamphleteer himself became a propagandist and informer - first under the Tory government, and from 1715 under the new Whig government. This change in status not only did not interfere with his prolific pamphleteer, as already mentioned above, but apparently helped to emerge in a new capacity as a writer of novels.

Some of them lay in a drawer for many years: The Joys and Sorrows of the Famous Moll Flanders, a novel published in 1722, dated, for example, 1683! And if you look at the themes of Defoe's major works as a whole, then you are once again convinced how wrong the conventional wisdom about the "specialization" of writers is. There is a well-known anecdote about Queen Victoria, who, having come to the delight of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, demanded all his writings and received a pile of mathematical treatises. An anecdote is an anecdote: Carroll had enough poetry collections, short stories, and even novels. But only a children's fairy tale is widely known and loved. Something of the sort happened to Defoe.

If you look for analogies to his creative passions, the first thing that comes to mind is Vladimir Gilyarovsky. "Uncle Gilyai", the singer of the Moscow slums and the coryphaeus of Russian journalism, was keenly interested in the inhabitants of the world of loaders, cabbies, thieves and beggars. Defoe was just as interested in the world of London prostitutes (remember the same "Moll Flanders"), swindlers and adventurers. And… pirates. The position of a government informant, presumably, provided him with every opportunity to collect the necessary information, and the instinct of a person who writes did not allow him to neglect such a storehouse of plots and topics. Therefore, "Robinson Crusoe" and its two sequels, practically unknown to the reading public in Russia, stand apart in his work, like Carroll's "Alice" and "Through the Looking-Glass". But a good half of Defoe's major works are related to the pirate theme, and all of them were written after 1718: "The Pirate King", whose hero was Henry Avery (published in 1719), "The Life and Pirate Adventures of Captain Singleton" (1720), "The Story of Colonel Jack" (1722), "A New Voyage Around the World" (1724), "Four-Year Wanderings" (1726), "Madagascar, or the Diary of Robert Drury" (1729) ... Of course, the "History of Pirates" should also be included here; and... Robinson Crusoe.

The latter may seem somewhat strange, although there is an episode in Robinson in which the hero is captured by pirates. To dispel the bewilderment, and at the same time try to explain Defoe's sudden interest in the activities of pirates (which arose a decade and a half after the writer could have last faced its consequences), we will have to change the subject again.

Where did pirates come from in the 16th and 18th centuries? As usual, here you can find several sources and several reasons. If you look closely at the periods of ups and downs of piracy activity, it turns out that its bursts occur at the end of major wars between the maritime powers of Europe. Defoe in The History of the Pirates is very precise about this. Indeed, people with an adventurous streak, not too concerned about the cleanliness of their gloves, during the next war received an excellent opportunity to legally satisfy both their passion for adventure and their thirst for profit by obtaining a letter of marque. When the war ended, most of them, having become addicted to, but having no more legal grounds for sea robbery, began to engage in it illegally. After some time, the government had to once again undertake a demonstrative cleaning of pirate nests. (Just about one such period, which was destined to become the last peak in history of massive pirate activity in the Caribbean Sea and off the coast of Africa and India, and tells the "General History of Pirates".)

The second source today may seem quite unexpected: sailors and even officers of ships captured by pirates. But let us turn again to the dry statistics given by Defoe on the pages of this book. In the chapter "The Life of Captain England", in the list of ships captured by this pirate from March 25 to June 27, 1719, we read: "Eagle" ... 17 crew members ... 7 became pirates; "Charlotte" ... 18 people ... 13 became pirates; "Sarah" ... 18 people ... 3 became pirates; "Bentworth" ... 30 people ... 12 became pirates; "Deer" ... 2 people, and both became pirates; "Carteret" ... 18 people ... 5 became pirates; "Mercury" ... 18 people ... 5 became pirates; “Shy”… 13 people… 4 became pirates; "Elizabeth and Katherine"... 14 people... 4 became pirates." It turns out that the pirate freemen, along with the noose looming in the future, was preferred by every third, and even a little more!

We can talk a lot here about the social situation that provoked such decisions, but this would lead us far astray, and it has already been noted more than once. You can give a few more sources of replenishment of the pirate ranks. And yet more important, in our opinion, are the questions “who?” and why?" move to another plane. After all, the “trinity” of the maritime professions of a merchant, sailor and pirate has not been canceled, it has not only been preserved since ancient times, but also acquired a fourth hypostasis: a pioneer of newly discovered lands. And the New World with its gold, Indians, pioneers and filibusters turned out to be the valve through which people with the same general quality escaped from aging Europe: those whom Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov called "passionaries". It was here that their irrepressible energy could be used, and to direct it to destruction or creation depended on the circumstances.

One of these people, whose name is often mentioned on the pages of the History of Pirates, was the reason for such a seemingly distant digression from the topic. The English privateer Woods Rogers, a hereditary sea captain, first sent privateers on raids against French ships, and when the British government stopped demanding 20 percent of the cost of production from privateers, he himself went hunting. Leading a flotilla of two frigates, in September 1708 he headed for the Pacific Ocean and after a brief stop at the Juan Fernandez Islands, capturing several Spanish and French ships along the way, in May 1709 he unexpectedly attacked the port of Guayaquil and plundered it. In January 1710, he captured the Manila galleon - an unrealizable dream of the vast majority of Caribbean pirates, and was wounded by a musket bullet in the upper jaw, but only three days later he tried to capture another galleon. During this fight, a piece of shrapnel knocked out a piece of Rogers' heel bone and cut off more than half of his leg under the ankle. The second tidbit could not be captured. However, the already captured good was more than enough to pay for the expedition. In October 1711, the ships returned to England, and in 1712, Rogers' book "A Voyage Around the World" was published, based on diary entries. Some researchers believe that the book was edited by ... Daniel Defoe. But we will return to this episode a little later.

In 1713 - 1715. Rogers transported slaves from Africa to Sumatra, and at the end of 1717, at the request of planters from the Bahamas, he was proclaimed the first royal governor of the island of New Providence, the main Caribbean base for pirates of those years. Appearing in the Bahamas in July of the following year, he managed to force some of the pirates to lay down their arms in exchange for a royal amnesty, dispersed the rest, and hanged some. Pirates began to bypass New Providence. However, the metropolis did not provide any support to the governor's activities, and in 1721 Rogers went to London for help. He failed to get money to protect the island (now from the Spaniards), went bankrupt and ended up in a debtor's prison. He was reinstated as governor only in 1728, and four years later Woods Rogers died in New Providence.

Unfortunately, I do not know for certain how close Defoe's acquaintance with Woodes Rogers was. But the fact that such an acquaintance was and lasted for many years, I have no doubts. It has already been mentioned above that Defoe is believed to have edited Rogers' book. But this book says, in particular, about a stop at the Juan Fernandez Islands, and about a pirate landed by his comrades on one of the islands and picked up by Captain Rogers. This pirate was named Alexander Selkirk, and after a few years he became known throughout England, and then to the whole world, under the name of Robinson Crusoe.