But there’s more than a grain of truth in that, at least as regards racial and ethnic identity. (Ann Bonny, wherever she ended up, could never have guessed how examplary her story as recounted in the General History would one day be.) I’m just an interested layman, but Marcus Rediker’s book on the subject seemed pretty solidly grounded, and he strongly suggests that the urge to sign the articles was pretty universal among the common sailors of the day (and that the racial tolerance of pirates may be frequently overstated but was probably more of a fair shake than could be obtained in, say, London or Madrid).

Libertalia was supposedly begun by Captain Misson. Misson appears in Defoe’s General History of the Pyrates: Volume II. Misson was a fiction character invented by Defoe to attack the social standards of the time, including religion and greed. Misson began a war against all nations, demanding a freedom from what he sees as the evil lawmakers who wanted to oppress those they were in charge of. Libertalia was the utopian settlement Misson began, running it in the fashion of his beliefs, that all man were equal, there should be no slaves, no revenge, no unnecessary violence, no greed, no oppression by money, power or religion. Hence the flag, For God and Freedom…

Like all good satire, it’s scarily close to the truth of much recent pirate-focused literature, which tends to be heavily laden with wishful thinking about “geographically transgressive symbolic categories of race, gender, and ethnic identity.” Jo Stanley’s paper in Journal of Transport History says it all: “And after the cross-dressing cabin boys and whaling wives?”