Be More Pirate

Despite their pop-culture image, Golden Age pirates were important and innovative historical figures.

Thanks to movies like the popular Pirates of the Caribbean series, you might think that all pirates were drunken swashbucklers or murderous, scurvy-ridden thugs. Either way, it’s likely that you don’t think of pirates as politically-minded rebels fighting for justice and fair pay. Yet that’s precisely the case for many of the Golden Age pirates.

Golden Age pirates sailed the high seas between 1690 and 1725, a period during which piracy thrived as it never had before. And these men and women were such innovative thinkers, rebelling against such unfair times with such progressive ideas that they still have plenty to teach us today.

Specifically, there are five great attributes that Golden Age pirates should be remembered for.

First is fair pay. Many pirates were former Royal Navy or Merchant Navy personnel, so they were familiar with being treated unfairly. Those in the navy were routinely paid less than promised and often much later than scheduled.

In response, pirates practiced fair pay for every member of the crew. Captains and quartermasters got three to four shares of any pirated booty. Doctors and gunners got two shares. The rest of the crew got one share each.

These days, the ratio between the CEO’s pay and that of the lowest-paid worker of a corporation can be as bad as 384 to 1. Meanwhile, at progressive enterprises, it can be as good as 10 to 1. But the 4-to-1 ratio that included all crew members aboard was still far fairer than anything seen today.

The second amazing quality of the pirate’s life was protection against abuse of power.

Navy sailors weren’t only underpaid; they also had to put up with the oppressively dictatorial ways of their commanders. So pirates, determined to keep their own captains in check, invested quartermasters with more power than they’d traditionally had. In this early example of dual governance, captains were still responsible for planning and strategizing, but the quartermaster was now in charge of keeping the crew happy and letting the captain know about any disputes.

A similar two-house system of government was also catching on in England, with the 1689 Bill of Rights establishing a second house of government, which the United States would also put to use in 1776.