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By Root 1918 0

into alternative societies - quite literally so in the case of what is today Madagascar, where they created a nation called Libertalia. Libertaliawas in some ways a brutally Hobbesian realm: families retreated into isolated enclaves for fear of mutual attack. But in other ways pirate society seemed to compare rather favorably to that available to London readers. Captains were elected, spoils distributed equitably, crews recruited from all races and creeds.4 Libertalia probably never existed in reality, yet it drew plausibility from those long-standing evocations of pirate countersocieties. And as with those evocations, the point may partly have been to get readers to reexamine their own surroundings. The elaborate customs of Johnson's pirates looked like parodies of the rituals and conventions trumpeted by companies in their own city with a volume that to many Londoners rang false. A London company might claim to provide for the poor of its trade; Johnson's pirates established rules for the division of spoils and the protection of the injured. Defoe, whether or not he had a hand inJohnson's History, was also responsible at this time for advancing the first taxonomy of the "Press-Piracy" then reigning in the streets of the capital.5

For just as there were heroic pirate captains in the West Indies, so there were mock-heroic pirate kings in London. Henry Hills junior was only the first. Ned Ward referred to a ruined bookseller "flinging out as many Invectives against Harry Hills, and the rest of the Pyrates, as if they had given him cause to think'em worse Rogues than those that were hang'd last Sessions." (The hanged were, of course, the real pirates, whose bodies were left out to rotpoureticouragerles azttres.) John Gay too disdained "Pirate Hill's brown sheets, and scurvy letter." Later, Hills's position would be inherited by Edmund Curll, whom an imposter posing as John Dunton described as a"Pirate" not "frighted from hisTrade" even bybeing thrashed and tossed in a blanket. ("To see Thee smart for Copy-stealing," Dunton is made to say, "My Bowels yearn with Fellow-feeling.") By that time, another victim was vowing rhetorically to "bombard some more modern small pyratical Fortress" that he represented as lying on the coast of Africa, at ancient Carthage. Such figures -Curll himself would yield his place to William Rayner, and so on down to nineteenth-century stalwarts like Richard Carlile and Thomas Tegg-were quite prepared to pose as commonwealthsmen, even Levellers. They claimed that they acted in the public interest by issuing literary work at affordable prices. Sometimes they even projected themselves as midwives of genius, printing work that otherwise might not appear at all. Pleading for pirates "in the Face of Day," as Samuel Johnson would call it, took hold in the post-1688 generation.

In the streets and coffeehouses of London, piracy by now referred to a wide range of sins involving the misappropriation of ideas. The concept became something like a shibboleth of the new society, standing as a symbol of the moral dubiety of "revolution principles" alongside the national debt, projectors, the Bank of England, and standing armies. By 1718 London's theatergoers could even go to see the leading actor of the day, Colley Libber, playing the role of Peter Pirate, "a Bookseller byTrade, but broke lately," in the latest comedy. Mr. Pirate personified all the associations of his caste, with his obsession with "credit," his claims to have solved the longitude, and his memory of "a dose of Antimony" administered to him by a Wit ("and I have never been my own Man again since" ).7 If the Whig defense of 1688 rested on a principle of property-as it largely did- then piracy, like stockjobbing, represented the weakness, amorality, ambition, and transgression that came with it.

The Glorious Revolution therefore left a legacy in this sphere of piracy, the metropolis, as much as it did in the other sphere of piracy, the Caribbean. That legacy was epitomized in the rampant terminology of pirates. Like pirates of the sea, moreover,