Davy Jones’s Logic

Why modern-day Captain Hooks respond to the invisible hand.

There’s something about pirates that makes them seductive and romantic, a cachet that has enabled them to retain their resonance in popular culture since the “golden age” of piracy in the early eighteenth century, when about 2,000 maritime bandits–more than 15 percent of the personnel strength of the Royal Navy–were active on the high seas. Long John Silver may have been more Treasure Island and Peter Pan, respectively, and arguably the books’ most memorable characters. Errol Flynn made his mark as the swashbuckling Captain Blood, and one of Johnny Depp’s archest portrayals is that of the self-amused pirate Jack Sparrow–whom Depp based on Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones’ charmingly louche guitarist–in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise.

What singular quality makes pirates so compelling? They were, by definition, thieves. They were murderers. They occasionally tortured their quarries. Yet there is an enduring if vague sense–which culture, as distinct from history, seems to have upheld–that pirates had rules and abided by them, that there were ways in which they were civilized and even enlightened. While the Somali pirates of today are a long way from the scourge of the Spanish Main, viewed through the lens of economics and rational choice they in fact have much in common. The insight these disciplines afford into pirates’ code of conduct may help policymakers answer a question that seems to have risen from the dead: What can states do to combat maritime outlaws?

Peter T. Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, puts salty flesh on the bones of the pirates’ legend in The Invisible Hook, pulling off the formidable trick of being both rigorous and cheeky. With thorough research and casual irony–“Barbaric? Sure. But effective”–he demonstrates that the most legendary aspects of the pirate’s life were largely products of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” Circumstances peculiar to the early 1700s made piracy a sensible, if risky, proposition. One hijacking might have yielded a single pirate up to A£1,000–equivalent in purchasing power to over $200,000 today–which would take an able merchant seaman about 40 years to accumulate. Seamen were plagued by low wages for hard work and exploitative, brutal captains who enjoyed virtually absolute power at sea. Employed by absentee ship owners who accorded them an equity stake in the ship and its profits, and empowered by admiralty law that underwrote petty tyranny, predatory captains had both the economic incentive to dock sailors’ pay on the pretext of damaged freight, perceived insolence, or shirking, and the legal latitude to impose corporal punishment–which in practice could include severe beatings, imprisonment, even death.

Judiciously weighing admittedly inconclusive evidence, Leeson determines that, contrary to popular belief, most pirates were not conscripts, but volunteers. Because sailors would not be attracted to merely another authoritarian regime, pirate leaders did not follow the predatory-captain mold. They accorded themselves quarters, rations, and even pay similar to those of rank-and-file pirates, and they did not lash, “keelhaul,” or maroon troublesome crew members by fiat. Why? First, as outlaws, pirates were subject to no coercive external set of rules or government; second, since they stole their vessels, they had no ship owners to answer to. According to Leeson, pirates were thus compelled, by way of written constitutions known as the “pirate codes,” to develop democracy as James Madison would come to contemplate it generations later–namely, an attempt to resolve the paradox between a governing body’s need for control and its obligation to regulate itself through checks and balances.

Pirate democracy operated on the principle of one pirate/one vote, delegated authority to a quartermaster as well as a captain, and entailed the crew’s right to remove the captain on the basis of a majority decision. In turn, pirate democracy usually accorded each pirate a roughly equal share in the crew’s booty, and it generated property rights, rules for resolving conflict and penalizing transgressions, and public goods including a system of workers’ compensation, all to be interpreted and applied by an on-board “pirate council.” This set of rules minimized disputes over entitlements, intramural theft, externalities, and “free-riding.” Thus, Leeson coyly notes, “pirate life was orderly and honest.”

By Leeson’s lights–and they are bright and convincing–even practices that ostensibly smacked of gratuitous malevolence actually had prudential, profit-maximizing rationales. True, pirates occasionally engaged in torture, but not without an immediate goal: They were usually trying to extract intelligence as to where treasure was located, or punishing officials for trying to apprehend them or harming fellow pirates. But they also aimed in several ways to forestall resistance, which could impose costs in terms of damage to their ship and loss or incapacitation of personnel. First, the very act of victimizing predatory merchant captains enhanced their Robin Hood-like image as defenders of rank-and-file seamen, encouraging the seamen’s acquiescence and possibly even complicity in pirate operations while stoking recruitment. Second, the selective use of torture imparted a symbolic bloodlust that enshrined a reputation for devil-may-care ruthlessness and cruelty. And third, by flying the infamous “Jolly Roger” flag with its baleful skull and crossbones, they associated their ship with both heroic and horrific behavior and thereby pre-empted armed resistance. Only incidentally an emblem of swaggering machismo, the Jolly Roger was mainly a rational instrument of Schelling-esque compellence that “operated to save merchant sailor lives, not take them” (emphasis in original). Pirates even get credit for bucking the racist mores of their day for the sake of profit: Documentation suggests that 25 to 30 percent of the average pirate crew during the golden age of piracy consisted of blacks, many of whom were free.

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