The Liues, Apprehensions, Arraignments, and Executions of the 19 Late Pyrates: Jacobean Piracy in Law and Literature

Abstract

The 1609 pamphlet The liues, apprehensions, arraignments, and executions of the 19 late pyrates tells the stories of nineteen pirates trialled in 1609. Historians of Jacobean piracy have used this pamphlet as evidence, finding value in its detailed, dramatic accounts of maritime depredation—yet it has often escaped close textual analysis. This article analyses the pamphlet’s content and context, in doing so illuminating the tensioned relationship between legal, state, and popular cultural narratives of what constituted a “pirate”. The pamphlet provides an opportunity to further discuss the ambiguous, developing cultural role of piracy (and its perpetrators) at this time. It allows us to approach such questions as: which elements of a pirate’s story were interesting to the seventeenth-century audience, and which elements marked out acts of depredation as truly being “piracy”? How does the source approach legal proceedings, and digest them for popular consumption? What place does this pamphlet have in the wider canon of piracy’s print culture? This article suggests that the figure of the pirate could be redeemed, where it was reconcilable with the sensibilities of the terrestrial community—however, tensions arose when different groups imposed their own ideologies and intentions upon the criminal. These tensions appear in the differences between representations of maritime depredation emanating from the state and from the public—differences visible in the transmission of information from law to literature.