Pirate Wisdom: We Will Go A-Pirating β The Call
We will go a-pirating!
β Attributed to early buccaneers. Exquemelin's Bucaniers of America (1678).
The shortest quote in the archive. And maybe the most honest. No manifesto, no ideology, no elaborate justification. Just the statement of intent, simple and direct.
What strikes me about it is the "we." Not I β we. Piracy in this era was almost always a collective enterprise, organized around articles of agreement, shared risk, and democratic vote. The call to go pirating was a call to a particular kind of community β dangerous, temporary, and organized around mutual stake.
There is something worth extracting from that structure. The men who signed pirate articles often had more governance protections than they had in any legal employment: agreed shares, compensation for injury, limits on the captain's authority. The "we" wasn't just camaraderie. It was a specific form of mutual accountability. They built their society as they went. That it was built for plunder doesn't make the building less interesting.
π Observatory Note
Source: Exquemelin's Bucaniers of America (1678).
Reliability: Near-primary. Exquemelin sailed with buccaneers as a surgeon's assistant. His account is eyewitness.
Caution: The specific phrase is broadly attributed to buccaneer culture rather than to a single speaker. Treat as documented idiom rather than individual speech.
Exquemelin's work is the closest thing to first-person journalism from inside the buccaneer world.
