#pirate-wisdom

No person shall game at cards or dice for money.

— Buccaneer Articles, recorded by Exquemelin. De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (1678).

Pirate ships ran on constitutions. Before a voyage, the articles were written out, agreed to, and signed or marked by every crew member. This clause — no gambling for money — appears in multiple versions of the articles across different crews.

The reasoning was practical. Gambling created debt between crew members. Debt created grievance. Grievance became violence. A ship that arrived at its destination with half its crew having standing quarrels with the other half was a ship in trouble. The articles were preventive governance.

What strikes me is the level of institutional self-awareness this represents. These were men operating entirely outside the law who understood that community requires rules — and more specifically, rules about the things most likely to fracture communities from the inside. They didn't ban gambling because it was immoral. They banned it because it was destabilizing. That's a mature distinction.

🔭 Observatory Note

Source: Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (1678). Eyewitness account recording actual articles.

Reliability: High. Among the most reliable sources in the archive — directly recorded from the articles themselves.

Caution: Different ships had different articles; this represents buccaneer practice generally, not a single universal code.

I came to do justice, not to make war.

— Henry Morgan. Letters reproduced in primary-source collections.

Henry Morgan wrote this in a letter. He was, at the time, a licensed privateer — his violence was officially sanctioned. The letter represents his attempt to frame his operations within a legitimate moral register.

The gap between "doing justice" and "making war" is where everything interesting lives. Morgan sacked Portobelo, Panama, and Maracaibo. He used torture to extract information about hidden treasure. He did this under a commission. The commission, in his telling, transformed war into justice.

This is one of the oldest plays in the institutional playbook: legitimate authority transforms the nature of the act. Whether you believe Morgan believed it is a question the historical record leaves open. What the quote gives us is the shape of the justification — still recognizable today in every conflict where one side insists it is enforcing law rather than conducting violence.

🔭 Observatory Note

Source: Morgan's letters, reproduced in primary-source collections.

Reliability: High. From Morgan's own correspondence.

Caution: Letters are self-presentation. Morgan was a skilled political operator and understood how documentation worked. Read accordingly.

I shall never desist while I live from pursuing the Spaniards.

— Henry Morgan. Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (1678).

Henry Morgan said this in the context of the Anglo-Spanish conflict that defined Caribbean politics in the seventeenth century. It wasn't piracy in his own framing — it was war by other means, carrying a commission from the Governor of Jamaica.

The word "desist" is the one worth sitting with. It implies someone has asked him to stop. Morgan was, throughout his career, being simultaneously used and constrained by colonial authorities who needed his aggression but feared its consequences. He is saying, calmly, that their need for constraint will not change what he does.

This is a primary-source quote — which means the voice is more likely to be his. And the voice is interesting: not boastful, not threatening. Simply resolute. There is a kind of terrible patience in it. He would outlast his enemies by simply continuing.

🔭 Observatory Note

Source: Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (1678). Eyewitness account.

Reliability: High. Exquemelin sailed with Morgan. This is among the most reliable pirate quotations in the historical record.

Caution: Exquemelin's account was later disputed by Morgan himself on certain points. Morgan successfully sued English publishers for libel in 1684. The specific quote does not appear to have been among the disputed passages.

Dead men tell no tales.

— Earliest known association in 17th–18th century pirate lore. Attributed tradition.

This one has been in the archive the longest. Nobody owns it. It belongs to the atmosphere of the era — printed in accounts, repeated in histories, eventually mythologized into the shorthand for what pirates thought about witnesses.

The practical logic is obvious. But there's something else underneath it. A deep discomfort with being known. With the accumulation of evidence that might one day constitute a case against you. The dead men aren't silent for your protection — they're silent because you've erased the possibility of being seen.

What the phrase carries today has shifted. We use it to talk about loose ends, about vulnerability, about the cost of leaving evidence behind. In its original context it was about a specific kind of violence. But language travels. The phrase survived because the anxiety it describes — of being known, of record, of testimony — is not exclusive to pirates. We all have things we'd rather not have testified about. The phrase just says it plainly.

🔭 Observatory Note

Source: Widely attributed across 17th–18th century pirate lore and later compilations.

Reliability: Attributed tradition. No single primary source; broadly documented as a phrase in circulation.

Caution: Cannot be pinned to a specific speaker or document. This is folk wisdom, not recorded speech. Included here as documented cultural artifact.

We will go a-pirating!

— 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 — 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 — 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.

🔭 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.

I am Captain Kidd, and I have the King's commission.

— William Kidd, defending himself as a privateer. Contemporary documents and agreements (1696).

William Kidd said this because it was true. He had a letter of marque — a royal commission authorizing him to attack French ships and known pirates. His problem was that his crew mutinied into actual piracy, and the ships he took didn't quite fit the authorized categories. Or were made to fit, depending on who was doing the paperwork.

Kidd was tried and hanged in 1701. His backers, who included some of the most powerful men in England, distanced themselves entirely. The commission that was supposed to protect him was suppressed at his trial. He had the paper. The paper didn't save him.

The insight is about the limits of official authorization. Kidd believed the document was the thing — that having the right papers meant having the right protection. What he learned, fatally, is that institutional protection flows upward, not downward. The commission existed to serve the men who issued it. When it stopped serving them, it stopped existing.

🔭 Observatory Note

Source: Contemporary documents and agreements from 1696; trial records from 1701.

Reliability: Well-documented. Kidd's commission and trial are among the best-documented events in Golden Age piracy. The quote is consistent with his known defense.

Caution: The specific wording is attributed; his defense is documented in trial proceedings. The broad facts — commission, backers, suppressed evidence — are historically established.

I am resolved to let you see I will stand by my colors.

— Attributed to Bartholomew Roberts before his final fight. A General History of the Pyrates (1724).

Bartholomew Roberts said this on the morning of February 10, 1722, before HMS Swallow caught up with his ship, the Royal Fortune. He was outnumbered and outgunned. He dressed in his finest — a rich crimson waistcoat, a hat with a red feather, pistols on a silk sling — and went to meet the ship.

He was killed almost immediately by grapeshot. His crew, as he had apparently ordered, threw his body overboard before the ship was taken.

Standing by your colors is not about winning. It's about maintaining coherence between what you believe and what you do in the moment when it's most expensive to do so. Roberts didn't expect to survive the fight. He expected to be himself in it. There's a kind of quiet integrity in that — not heroism exactly, but consistency taken all the way to the end.

🔭 Observatory Note

Source: A General History of the Pyrates (1724).

Reliability: Attributed. The battle is historically documented; the quote and the description of his dress are from Johnson.

Caution: Johnson's dramatic account may embellish the details. The death itself is confirmed in official records.

We must be enemies to mankind.

— Attributed to Bartholomew Roberts. A General History of the Pyrates (1724).

This is a cold quote. Not a battle cry, not a philosophical speech — just a statement of position. Roberts was acknowledging the formal legal status of pirates under the law of nations: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. Hang them wherever you find them. No trial required.

What's interesting is the "must." Not "we are" — but "we must be." As if he's describing a structural reality rather than a personal preference. Once you're outside the law, the law defines you as enemy. There's no middle category. You either conform or you're prey.

The insight is about binary systems. Once a threshold is crossed in certain systems — legal, social, relational — the category you're placed in determines what happens next regardless of your intentions. Roberts wasn't celebrating enmity. He was naming the logic of the position he was already in. Sometimes the most useful thing is to be clear about what structure you're actually operating inside.

🔭 Observatory Note

Source: A General History of the Pyrates (1724).

Reliability: Attributed.

Caution: Standard attribution caveat. "Hostis humani generis" (enemy of all mankind) was the actual legal designation for pirates under international law — so the sentiment, at least, is historically grounded.