Posts Tagged ‘Privateer’
“There was a sound in their voices which suggested rum”*…
Pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read depicted in 1724
How many real-life pirates can you name? While Captain Kidd or Blackbeard might come immediately to mind, names like Anne Bonny and Mary Read probably don’t. But as noted historian Marcus Rediker writes, they were just a few of the many women who sailed the seven seas disguised as men.
These women pirates have been almost completely obscured by the lore that surrounds their male counterparts. But they weren’t that uncommon: Marcus writes that women pirates “were not entirely unusual cases” and that they were part of “a deeply rooted underground tradition of female cross-dressing, pan-European in its dimensions but particularly strong in modern England, the Netherlands, and Germany.”
This tradition hinged on women with nothing to lose: people so marginalized and forgotten that all was opportunity. Women dressed as men to escape poverty and follow adventure on land, and women like Bonny and Read did it at sea…
Tap the barrel of rum at “Women were pirates, too.”
* Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
###
As we raise the Jolly Roger, we might spare a thought for William Kidd; he was hanged on this day in 1701. Better known as “Captain Kidd,” he was a Scottish privateer, hired by European royals to attack foreign ships, mostly in the Caribbean. But when, on an expedition to the Indian Ocean, his crew insisted on attacking the Quadegh Merchant, a large Armenian ship laden with treasures, Kidd found himself on the wrong side of the British government. He was publicly executed in London in 1701, as a warning to other pirates.
Legends persist about Captain Kidd and the treasure some believe he buried in the Caribbean.
“A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy”*…
If You See Something, Say Something
Here are a few suggestions of what Americans can report to the FBI:
1. Any information about espionage, sabotage, and subversive activities. The FBI is as close to every person as the nearest telephone. See the front of any telephone book for the FBI’s number.
2. Don’t worry if the information seems incomplete or trivial. Many times a small bit of information might furnish the data we are seeking.
3. Stick to the facts. The FBI is not interested in rumor or idle gossip. Talebearing should always be avoided. The FBI is not interested in what a person thinks but what he does to undermine our national security.
4. Don’t try to do any investigating yourself. Security investigations require great care and effort. The innocent must be protected as well as the guilty identified. That is the job for the professional investigator. Hysteria, witch-hunts, and vigilantes weaken our internal security.
5. Be alert. America’s best defense lies in the alertness of its patriotic citizens.
The atmosphere of aggressive concern– if not paranoia– over “foreign” threats that’s so pervasive today is, in fact, nothing new. The passage above is an excerpt from J. Edgar Hoover’s 1958 opus Masters of Deceit, which combined a flaming warning of the Communist threat with a painfully-specific how-to manual for combating it.
MoD was required reading for countless junior high school students across the U.S.– inclusding your correspondent, for whom it was the text in a six-week “special unit” on Communism, mandated by the Florida State Department of Education.
[via Lapham’s Quarterly]
* Honoré de Balzac
###
As we watch both our borders and our backs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that a US Navy Privateer with 10 people on board flew from Wiesbaden, West Germany, to spy over the Soviet Union. Soviet reconnaissance spotted the plane over Latvia. and Soviet La-11 fighters shot down it down just off the coast, over the Baltic Sea.
A U.S. Navy Privateer in flight
You must be logged in to post a comment.