Treasures of the Imagination: Rethinking Pirate Booty in Pirate Narratives

In its issue for 29 July, 1721, the Weekly Journal; or, British Gazetteer featured an “Account of the Life, Behaviour, &c.” of Walter Kennedy, a pirate who had sailed with the notoriously successful pirate captain Bartholomew Roberts but who had established his own reputation by the time of his capture. Kennedy had been executed on 21 July, so the “Account” is really a final confession and expression of repentance that also attempts to explain Kennedy’s attraction to piracy. Kennedy, we are told, had “served Her Majesty Queen Anne in the Wars against France, but being told what Lords the Pirates in America were, and that they had gotten several whole Islands under their own Command, he coveted to be one of those petty Princes.” The “Account,” therefore, directly blames tales of wealthy pirates for corrupting the impressionable young seaman. Kennedy did achieve some success as a pirate, but, as he himself notes, his pirate career “had so ill prosper’d, that he should want a Coffin to cover his Carcase in.” The message is clear: tales of wealthy pirates living like “petty Princes” are simply fanciful fictions, and rumours of pirate treasure should be ignored by any sensible individual. The Kennedy account reveals that stories of pirate wealth seemed to have been common enough during the period of the most intense pirate activity. Another version of Kennedy’s life, in The Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735), specifically mentions Kennedy’s hearing tales “from the Time of Sir Henry Morgan’s commanding the Bucchaneers in America, to Capt. Avery’s more modern Exploits at Madagascar,” although it provides no further details than that. What seems certain is that the stories featured these pirates both enjoying their wealth and assuming a certain degree of political power that had accrued to them from that wealth, but while pirates did sometimes grow rich from their plunder, their dreams of becoming rulers of anything remained as fantastic as Sancho Panza’s. The most noteworthy pirate of the age, Henry Avery, whose capture of the Mogul flagship Ganj-i-Sawaj in 1695 had already passed into legend, was widely believed to have established a utopian pirate community on Madagascar, but no evidence that such a community ever existed has come to light. Whatever the tales might have said, few authentic pirate narratives—such as newspaper reports or official trial documents—record pirates living like “petty Princes.” Certainly the closest that can be found to match such a reality were the buccaneers who, at the end of the seventeenth century, lived fully autonomous, albeit wretched, hand-to-mouth existences on uninhabited Caribbean islands: likely not the sort of thing Kennedy had in mind. A century later, long after the pirates themselves had disappeared, stories of pirate wealth persisted in literary fiction. However, the treasures in these fictions are not ostentatiously displayed but buried; they have become obscure objects of desire that both invite and elude discovery. Neil Rennie, in Treasure Neverland (2014), suggests that the trope of buried treasure is almost entirely a creation of nineteenth-century novelists, beginning in America, where much of this treasure was said to be buried. Tales of hidden pirate chests appealed to Washington Irving, eager to create “American rewritings of European folk-tales—moral fables, perhaps, demonstrating the consequences of neglecting the real world of impending progress in favour of illusory dreams of treasure buried and lost in the past.” In associating piracy with the eighteenth-century past rather than the nineteenth-century present, with buried rather than evident treasure, the literary image of pirates became inextricably linked with a fantasy of potentially limitless wealth, since pirate booty in fiction almost always means …