Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [105]
The extension of copyright to Ireland made what could be called the moral constitution of the nation's publishing industry illegitimate. Its customs had long been decried as piratical, and now theywere legally defined as such. Yet it was the end of those customs, and their replacement by a regime of law, that all but destroyed the industry and the literary efflorescence it had sustained. The implications were serious, and not just for Ireland. The transition of 18oo would stand as a test case - or a crucial experiment-for at least the next century
THE END OF A PIRATE KINGDOMAND THE START OF ANOTHER
September 7, 1784. The soldiers at the dockside eyed the coach suspiciously as it drew up to the quayside and halted. They were on their guard, alerted to look out for a desperate escaped prisoner. But it was a welldressed woman who stepped out and, limping slightly, climbed the gangplank onto a ship that was busily loading in preparation for imminent departure. The redcoats shrugged and let her pass. Later that night the vessel slipped anchor and slipped quietly out into the Irish Sea. Onlywhen she was safely outside territorial waters did the passenger feel safe enough to remove her bonnet and wig. As they came off, they revealed that beneath the disguise was a twenty-four-year-old man. A Catholic wanted for inciting treason in his radical newspapers, Mathew Carey had been arrested too many times already to hope for clemency any more. The ship he had boarded was bound for Philadelphia and exile. Her name was the America.
Carey's story has become one of the minor myths of early national American history. Born in I76o, he entered Dublin's book trade over the opposition of his father, apprenticing himself to a Catholic printerbookseller named Thomas McDonnell. McDonnell was a secret sympathizer with the radical opposition-Wolfe Tone dined at his house, and informers later betrayed him as a United Irishman.67 Carey recalled him as "a hard, austere master, of most repelling manners." The onlyvirtue he is now remembered for is that ofpreferring his apprentices to stay alive. In a city brimming with male conviviality, alcohol, and brittle honor, this was something. Duels were routine. But when Patrick Wogan-McDonnell's employer, the pirate of Sheridan, and in Carey's view another "ruffian"insisted that one of McDonnell's apprentices fight one of his, McDonnell refused to let his appear, and Careywrote up a denunciation of the custom in general. He delved into history to dismiss dueling as a crude practice with no place in a civilized trade.68 After this, he launched into writing against the administration, with a first effort radical enough that he had to beat a prompt retreat to France. There he found himself working for the Parisian printer Didot (whom he found reprinting English books), and then for Ben Franklin, through whom he met the Marquis de Lafayette. Back in Dublin, he then launched a newspaper called the Volunteers Journal. Its constituency was the paramilitary movement of that name, which paraded for the ancient constitution and a free citizenry. Carey'sJournal mustered allthe rhetorical extremity he could manage to "defend the Commerce, the Manufactures, and the political rights of Ireland, against the oppression and encroachments of Great Britain." It lauded the seventeenthcentury regicides and reprintedAmerica's contemporary revolutionaries.69 The authorities tried to undermine Carey's paper by backing a rival Vol- unteerEvening Post, to little avail (later, rival versions of the Journal itself would achieve that