this is a review i found of the book.
Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash has nothing to say about rum or the lash and the sodomy seems to exist only in the author’s mind. Nor does Hans Turley answer the fascinating question set out in his introduction. “How did the pirate … become the outrageously masculine anti-hero familiar to us through novels, movies, plays, and other outlets of popular culture?” (p.2). Hans Turley is a literary historian who, in this book, analyses a number of early eighteenth-century texts relating to piracy, such as trial records, Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates and novels by Daniel Defoe, in order to examine the sexuality and masculine identity of pirates. His argument is allusive, dense and riddled with jargon not easily accessible to the maritime historian, though no doubt clear enough to literary critics and students of gay studies. His aim seems to be to suggest by innuendo that the world of the pirate was not just homosocial but also homoerotic, but he fails to convince. Turley is honest enough to say that “the evidence for piratical sodomy is so sparse as to be almost non-existent” (p.2), but lack of evidence does not prevent him from seeing things in the pirate mind that are not apparent to other observers. He attempts to bolster his argument by drawing unconvincing parallels between pirates and the sodomites who attracted much prurient attention ashore. “Both the pirate and the sodomite are attracted to and gravitate toward other men. For the sodomite, this attraction is explicitly eroticized. For the pirate, this attraction is homosocial, but implicitly eroticized because he is culturally deviant, yet his sexuality is neither questioned nor determined.” (p.81) This last is an important point for Turley who claims (inaccurately) on several occasions that sexuality is left out of almost all depictions of piracy and that when it is implied it is ambiguous, as in Captain Johnson’s unspecific mention of the “riotous manner of living, as is the custom of pyrates” engaged in by Captain Vane and his crew while they were careening their ship. Johnson’s silence is a gift to the author. “Sodomy is tantalizingly implicit and repressed”, claims Turley. (p.85). But this is nonsense and indeed deliberate blindness on the part of the author, since Captain Johnson spells out on many other occasions what pirate custom was in these careening parties and it was certainly not homoerotic. Captain England’s crew lived “very wantonly” in West Africa for several weeks, “making free with the negro women”; Bartholomew Roberts’s men met “with handsome treatment” from local women in the Virgin Islands; Captain Taylor’s men caused havoc in the Laccadive Islands, “whose women they forced in a barbarous way to their lusts”. Is sodomy “tantalizingly implicit” in these and other descriptions which Turley must surely have read if he has read Captain Johnson? Turley also claims (again inaccurately) that “with the exception of some articles that Captain Roberts’s crew signed – in which ‘No boy or woman is to be allowed amongst them’ – the pirate’s sex life remains uncontrolled by any pirate rules.” (p.40). That “boy” is obviously useful to his argument, but again this is deliberate blindness, since several other pirate articles do mention sex but not the sort of sex that would suit Turley’s thesis. The articles signed by the crew of Captain John Phillips for instance, which are in Johnson, state that “if at any time you meet with a prudent woman, that man that offers to meddle with her, without her consent, shall suffer present death” and this is echoed in the articles of Captain Anstis which are preserved in the Admiralty records. (PRO ADM 1/4104/75) “If any … shall go on board of a prize and meet with any Gentlewoman or Lady of Honour and should force them against their will to lye with them shall suffer death.” Such articles suggest that pirates were not just heterosexual in their lusts, as most people would expect, but that they had also retained a greater sense of propriety and class-consciousness than Turley and indeed several other historians have suggested.
Hans Turley tells us in his preface that he first got interested in the theme of this book when studying Defoe’s pirate novel Captain Singleton where he was struck by the “almost explicit homoerotic desire shown by the title character for his friend and companion, Quaker William.” (p.vii). Later, he discerned a similar relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday and these two themes are interestingly developed in the last two (and best) chapters of the book. These readings of Defoe may or may not be correct, but it does seem rather superficial to look only for the homoerotic in relationships between men in all-male societies, whether they be pirates, sailors, cowboys or indeed rugby players. Friendship, mateship, peer competition in violence, blasphemy, showy dress and outrageous behaviour, lust for money, adventure, drink (and indeed women) are not necessarily homoerotic in motivation. Being all men together in defiance of the rest of the world was clearly an important part of pirate motivation, as indeed it is an important factor in explaining the continued attraction of the pirate in popular culture. But surely it is not realistic to suggest, on virtually no evidence, that it is the pirate’s secret homoeroticism that drew these crews together and has since provided prurient fascination for boys of all ages. Masculine identity and masculine culture are fascinating subjects for inquiry and a pirate ship makes a good laboratory, though sadly one with very little evidence, but Turley has not managed to solve the riddle of his hypermasculine anti-heroes despite his claim “that once the hatches to the pirates’ holds are opened a crack, ‘reality’ destabilizes, things unsaid may be spoken, and the homoerotic implications of elements in pirate history and fiction can be explored.”
