Profs & Pints Chicago: Pirate Justice

[Profs and Pints Chicago](https://www.profsandpints.com/chicago) presents: “Pirate Justice,” on the alternative legal system that existed on ships flying the Jolly Roger, with John Donoghue, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago who researches piracy and teaches courses on it.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/chicago-pirate-justice.]

Climb aboard as Profs and Pints revives its offerings in Metro Chicago by staging talks at the Guinness Open Gate Brewery in the West Loop. Its debut offering there will be historian John Donoghue’s fascinating and surprising discussion of the ways in which pirates sought to administer rough justice on the high seas.

In popular culture pirates seem to embody the anti-hero dream of a life of freedom lived in defiance of rules. The real history of piracy, however, reveals something much more intriguing. Far from losing themselves in a life of lawlessness, pirates created an alternative system of law and order that they called “the government of the ship.” It sought to convict and punish the enemies of all “men of spirit,” as these outlaws styled themselves.

Dr. Donoghue will discuss how pirate justice arose in response to the appalling conditions that sailors faced in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Despite soaring mercantile profits, they suffered low wages, rotten food, endemic disease, and the captain’s lash and cudgel. Those imprisoned for debt were regularly sold to short-handed slave ship captains to work off their arrears. Many serving in the Royal Navy had been forced into service after being snatched off docks by armed toughs dispatched by the state.

Once sailors mutinied and turned pirate, however, they felt free to right the wrongs visited upon maritime workers, As pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts said in 1718, the chief aim of a pirate “was to do justice to sailors.”

When pirates captured a ship, especially a slave ship, pirates, many of whom were Black, took testimony from the crew about the captain’s character. They then drew on the pirate Code to convict or acquit the captain based on the crew’s word. While acquittal meant release, conviction meant violent punishment or execution.

Pirate justice was rough and ready, but it was not wanton and arbitrary. You’ll be thrilled to have learned about it at this talk by Profs and Pints, a social enterprise with a mission of democratizing access to higher learning and providing scholars with new audiences. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A color-enhanced photo of an original pirate flag on display at Finland’s Åland Maritime Museum. (Photo by Anneli Karlsson / Wikimedia Commons.)