Captain Misson's Failed Utopia, Crusoe's Failed Colony: Race and Identity in New, Not

Quite Imaginable Worlds

Author(s): Lincoln Faller
Source: The Eighteenth Century , SPRING 2002, Vol. 43, No. 1 (SPRING 2002), pp. 1-17
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41468199

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The Eighteenth Century, vol.43 no. 1

Captain Misson's Failed Utopia, Crusoe's Failed

Colony: Race and Identity in New, Not Quite
Imaginable Worlds

Lincoln Faller

world opened up to Europeans by the great voyages of discovery is

ONE world Bernal of opened
Bernal the
Díaz Díaz first dels TheupConquest
del Castillo' great Castillo'
of News Spain
to Europeans narratives The Conquest by of the exploration great of New voyages Spain and conquest , of an discovery eyewitness in the is
, an eyewitness
account not published until 1632. Early on in his narrative, as Cortés's ships lie
off the coast of Cozumel, Diaz describes the approach of a large canoe. All the
people in it seem to be Indians, but one turns out to be a Spaniard. Ship-
wrecked some years before and made a slave, he now looks "exactly" like an
Indian and is repeatedly taken for one as he passes up the chain of command,
being recognized in each instance only by his now "clumsy" and "inarticu-
late" Spanish. There was another Spaniard shipwrecked with him, he says,
who has refused the chance to come along. "I am married," that man said,
"and have three children, and they look on me as a Cacique here, and a captain
in time of war. Go, and God's blessing be with you. But my face is tattooed and
my ears are pierced. What would the Spaniards say if they saw me like this?
And look how handsome these children of mine are!"1 At the very start of one
of the greatest of all imperial adventures, the distinction between European
and savage which stands at the very foundation of all modern imperial proj-
ects is called into question. The absolute and empowering difference between
the colonizer and the colonized, on which all right of conquest is based, is
challenged by other ways of imagining difference and identity.
The tattooed Spaniard seems to me an early instance in the history of West-
ern colonialism of that phenomenon Homi Bhabha calls "hybridity." He
stands "beyond the knowledge of ethnic or cultural binarisms," in "a new
hybrid space of cultural difference," "a space of cultural and interpretive
undecidability." As both sign and historical agent, he "resists the binary oppo-
sition of racial and cultural groups." He can even seem one of those "complex
figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclu-
sion and exclusion" that so fascinate, as Bhabha says, these postmodern, post-

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 2 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

colonialist times.2 But the ta

ing for Diaz as he is or can b
encouraged the Indians to at
Cortes says, "I wish I could g
him here."3

The two narratives I'm ab

Diaz, in attitude as well as
extremely interesting way
imagining in the early eighte
before racial attitudes had n
would.4 Both tell the stories
also fail as stories. It is the lat
ing back through history, it
principles on which they w
important point is not that
accounted for.

The "lives" of two pirates in the second volume of Capt. Charles Johnson's
General History of the Pirates , published in 1728, make up what is actually one
narrative. Together, "The Life of Captain Misson" and "The Life of Captain
Tew" tell the strange and fascinating story of an attempt to establish some-
thing very much like a utopia off the coast of Africa. Though Tew was a real
person, Misson is a fiction and so (of course) is the story. Until recently we
were fairly sure that this story - and the History of the Pirates generally - was
the work of Defoe. What John Robert Moore wrought, Furbank and Owen
have undone.5

Misson is French and well-born. Converted to deism by a lapsed Italian

priest who becomes his second-in-command, he becomes a philosophical
pirate who "bid[s] defiance to the Power of Europe " (391). Though he repudi-
ates Christianity and indeed all established religion as "no other than human
Policy" (388), Misson nonetheless retains a high sense of morality based on
natural law. "They were no Pyrates," his deputy the ex-priest insists, "but Men
who were resolved to assert that Liberty which God and Nature gave them,
and own no Subjection to any, farther than was for the common Good of all"
(392). Urging his crew to maintain "a brotherly Love to each other," Misson
hopes "none would follow the Example of Tyrants, and turn his Back upon
Justice; for when Equity was trodden under Foot, Misery, Confusion, and
mutual Distrust naturally followed" (394). Thoroughly equitable himself, Mis-
son rules only with the consent of his crew, but so charismatic is he, so gener-
ous and so obviously lacking in self-interest, that they choose almost always to
follow his advice.

"Bid[ding] defiance to the Power of Europe " involves Misson and his crew
in a wide variety of initiatives. They practice a primitive form of communism,
keeping a "common Treasury, Money being of no Use where every Thing was

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 3

in common, and no Hedge bounded an

They elect their officers and a "council"
Perhaps most strikingly, however, Misso
slavery and the slave trade on the ground
own Species, cou'd never be agreeable to
not exempted his Neck from the galling
asserted his own Liberty, to enslave othe
increasingly motley crew prey on slave s
to their own cause. Seeing the slaves the
"Colour, Customs, or religious Rites" - a
Being, and endued with equal Reason," th
"a strengthening of their Hands." Clothin
messes, they teach them French and begin
and navigation (403^1). Eventually, the
Negroes growing useful Hands" (428), som
African, half European.
Misson and his men bid greatest defian
begin to create their own nation on the n
calls their settlement "Libertalia" and gi
desiring in that might be drown'd the dis
Dutch , Africans , &c." (417). The "&c." in
the Comorre islands, whom Misson an
wives. Successfully defending itself a
developing a productive economy and th
flourishes as a multiracial democracy. It
Conservator" who holds "supream Power,
Misson is the obvious choice, and he app
them, without Distinction of Nation or
began to be incorporated, and one made
cant, too, that at this point "an equal Div
Cattle, and everyone began either to enc
bour, who would hire his Assistance"
labor are here reinstituted, though to b
where the People were themselves the Ma
(432).
By now the narrative is well into the sequel, "Life of Tew," and at last shifts
its focus onto him. Tew goes off to visit some other pirates, English like him,
who have also established a settlement on Madagascar. No particularly inter-
esting political arrangements prevail here; in fact, there is hardly any polis at
all. Each Englishman lives pretty much on his own as part of a loose confeder-
ation. They continue as pirates, trade slaves for products from Europe and
America, and, asked to join Libertalia, demur. Freer-living than any Liberi,
retaining their old national identities, these Englishmen are happy as they are.
They want no new state authority but would, if they could, once again become

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4 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

legitimate British subjects,

British colony.
Ripe and interesting comp
ments, the one seeking to co
tion, the other seeking to lin
this possibility drop. Tew g
by native peoples from the i
pointed outward, against a
ously peaceable relations wi
strophically bad.
Misson alone survives - or n
crew. Sailing in formation w
storm off the Cape of Good
seems to be saying, for all
object of attention for a last
then is tempted out on one l
but richer. Attacking one of
in the belly and dies, holdin

What to make of this strang

dence of an underground su
and as an anticipation of vi
the 1720s," Marcus Rediker
. . . had . . . self-consciously
order of their own, a subver
chant, naval, and privateerin
Atlantic capitalism with its
ery." Though they frequently
source, they have nothing a
a fantastical projection of,
their crusade against slaver
seem quite unlike any actual
Better probably to see this
wheeling, Utopian and dyst
Like Robinson Crusoe and G
Europe to see what might ha
European social, political, eco
non-European peoples outs
ism. Looked at from this ang
goes and does not go, for th
on, as well as for how it end
Up until a point just short
the overall trajectory of the

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 5

lishment of civil society, with hierarchy,

"coercive" laws (432). The implication here
radically men seek to restructure their soci
to drift back towards established Europea
ideology, then, Libertalia would eventually
social relations among men that count here
men marry play no role in this new comm
men find by taking women captive from
against this seizing of women - he doesn't s
ery after all? - yet this is one instance whe
Nowhere else is the drift back towards p
than in the new nation's need to contradict
lishing, after all, a death penalty, the first
pens, the starting point for its reconstruct
based society. Two of the Portuguese attac
captive by Liberi pirates and then freed on
pact forces the Liberi into realizing they h
however much it violates natural law, eve
punishment if it's to protect an otherwise
the narrative doesn't make much of this
had to face this crisis if they hadn't repud
the Portuguese captives against their will i
imposed penal servitude on them afterwar
their betrayal.
Here, I suggest, the imagination behind this narrative edges into an inter-
esting set of issues, one which would have had some resonance in early eigh-
teenth-century England, where, it seemed, social order could only be main-
tained by an increasing reliance on capital punishment.8 It's not just that men
tend naturally not to live by the Law of Nature, needing instead a political
order, but that, even within a political order dedicated to maintaining the
greatest possible individual liberty, some men must have their freedom
denied absolutely. If the law cannot rely on slavery or something like it on the
grounds that slavery is an offense against "humanity" - and penal servitude
for early eighteenth-century England was a form of slavery - it must then
have the death penalty. If "liberty" requires that no men may be enslaved, it
requires, then, that sometimes they be killed.
None of this, not surprisingly, bears on the situation of women, though it
might, were Misson's concerns about his men's kidnapping them into mar-
riage further developed. Moira Ferguson's Subject to Others recounts the grow-
ing use of slavery as a metaphor for the situation of women in late seven-
teenth- to early nineteenth-century England, but the story of Captain Misson
seems barely if at all conscious of this possibility.9 Nor is it much concerned -
or, I suggest, much able - to follow the future fortunes of Libertalia. It is cer-

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6 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

tainly possible that slavery

as well as the death penalty
inequitable society might ha
But this is not to happen. Th
ry, away from Libertalia to t
My suggestion is that it mo
know where to go with w
schemes, is even perhaps un
more familiar ground. It kn
English pirates.11 The Englis
ally again, his overweening
which rips open; his appetite
Misson's fate is not at all so
boundary problem. There is
he vanishes under pressures
pos'd Happiness was vanishe
tion given, in the Dead of th
great Bodies, and made a gr
(437). This sounds like some
how sexual, too, the "two
However well the Liberi can
they can achieve an integra
society, they fall victim fin
interior; they are swallowed
inable heart of darkness. The
suit of liberty under natur
some people - if no slavery,
according to race, religion,
women; if no imperialism,
awe of the metropole.
At a deeper level, someth
something with powerful im
British imperialism. I take
Johanna leader, who has som
dangers of allowing a stron
their own kingdom. As "ma
was not likely they would m
because their Friendship mi
there was nothing to be app
be half their own Blood" (41
in the night are anticipated b
a mestizo state. As the narra
political order, ignoring any
represses the fact that wom

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 7

will no longer be European. The strike from

preemptive, a way of cutting off any thou
and, after all, equivalent horror, one that
native, of losing one's distinctive being an
finally an alien otherness. In one genera
would no longer be other to the others th
their new state. Misson wishes "the disting
Dutch , Africans " to be "drown'd" in his n
trying to get around the fact that Africa i
unsprung and dead-ended story of his fail
the reason there never was - for good or il
bique and Angola, of Brazil or Cuba, of Mex

Whether or not Defoe wrote the story of M

tive impasse that stops this narrative is only
of a similar blockage in the Farther Advent
nine years earlier in 1719.13Here, too, we'r
island colony out of multiple groups that lo
commonwealth" (165). There is no revoluti
trary. Everything is done on the basis of "
the question of the death penalty comes u
the basis of natural law but on the sense of
feel toward their absent proprietor.14
Nor does this story have the relatively st
son's, things moving here only by fits and
by either the agents themselves nor, it wou
overall resemblances. There is the same
natives with a move towards their amalgam
here, also, are somewhat refractory, re
Spaniards, in this case, instead of the Fren
curious of all, the supreme leader, who her
in his vision of what needs to be done and
cies by a rather unusual priest. Crusoe's co
for success, fails finally to take root. Thoug
anything even more puzzling. No great cris
just somehow doesn't work for reasons that
The Farther Adventures is a loose and ram
halfway around the world, back to his isla
Good Hope to Madagascar, India, Indochina
land through China, Siberia, and Russia bef
It gives its greatest sustained attention to co
colony he left behind when he finally escap
original volume. Nearly half of Farther Adv
the English would-be mutineers and pi

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8 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Spaniards who arrive shortly

native peoples who menace b
this threat will have been de
be on their way to becoming
Most of the excitement is o
to do some further necessary
clothing, guns, and other nec
the artisans and craftsmen
most importantly, does wha
by raising their religious aw
the Englishmen originally le
needing it. The primary foc
Will Atkins, the only one of
and the only one of the islan
Atkins's story is one of r
mutineer and would-be pirate
sian sort of life, in perpetua
Spanish, he and the other En
"savages" (37) the Spanish
remembered, were cannibals.
joined in common cause w
hordes of attacking canniba
into a kind of domesticity. H
form of living" (77) - has sti
called civilization proper. His
favoured, agreeable ... in bot
women, "had they been perf
women, even in London itsel
aren't white. The Spanish, it
with native women, declarin
them," some of them sayi
lik[ing] women that were no
the behavior of Spanish men
Crusoe himself says their "v
my travels" (77).
Atkins's domestic arrangeme
conventionally European. "W
Crusoe says, "they looked, at
And as for Will Atkins, who
and sober fellow, he had ma
was never seen." A long, det
ketwork buildings that form
which, altogether, three fam

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 9

and she and her children live communally

appears to be a single household economy,
(106-8). Crusoe is so struck by the novelty
he repeatedly refers back to it, in admiring
pens, is a hybrid form. The "Indians, or sa
have been "wonderfully civilised" by their
among other things basketry and wicker w
masters," making "abundance of most in
houses the Englishmen now live in with th
bate Spanish, it might be noted, live in cav
Seeing Atkins in his basketwork house, w
dren, Crusoe knows what he must do. If t
these people must be "brought home into th
131). That involves a religious reawakening
are, and the proper instruction of the wom
God," for they still practice "idolatry" (130
marry their wives in a "stated legal man
require" (127). Without such marriage, as A
"order and justice could not be maintained
wives and abandon their children, mix con
ther families be kept entire, or inheritanc
also 127-8, 136-7).
Fortunately, on his way to the island Cru
from a burning ship in the Atlantic. He is
"c" catholicity, not especially perturbed by
and Roman Catholics. Indeed, says Crusoe, w
might be all Catholic Christians" (149). Thro
soe serving as translator, Atkins and the o
the chance to sanctify and legitimize their
well as if they had been born in their own
would not leave them upon any account wh
their wives were as virtuous and as modest,
as much for them and for their children
"For his own particular," he adds, "if any m
to carry him home to England, and make h
in the navy, he would not go with him if h
dren with him" (137).
Prompted by the occasion to rethink his
on to help his "tawny savage wife" take th
proper Christian and thus a proper wife. I
reported between Crusoe and Friday in the
her allegiance from Old Benamuckee to the
himself to become a better Christian. Cruso

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 10 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

dialogue from a distance, over

verbatim, broken English and a
basketwork house for the last
legally married wife is "such a
in all my observation or conve
learned to read English as well
her husband prepare to make u
gives them.
Having done all this and much else, too, Crusoe departs. Giving all the
inhabitants who want it written title to an adequate share of land to be worked
by them and their heirs, he leaves the islanders to provide their own govern-
ment and laws, they being "a kind of commonwealth" among themselves
now, of English, Spanish, and at least some native people, it would seem,
though the status of the natives not intermarried with the English is left quite
ambiguous at the end. (There are exactly thirty-seven of these people, repre-
senting, it appears, a majority of the adults on the island. All but a few choose
to work as servants for the planters rather than become planters themselves,
but the choice, it's emphasized, is freely theirs.) The native population is not to
be used as slaves, says Crusoe, but it's not clear just what sort of social status
they will have. The hope is that, settled down and interspersed among Chris-
tians who themselves have agreed never to "make any distinction of Papist or
Protestant in their exhorting the savages to turn Christians" (167), they will
gradually and inevitably be absorbed into a disparate but nonetheless unified
social and economic order.15

All would seem hopeful for the future. Many years later, however, Crusoe
gets a much delayed letter from the island. Things "went on but poorly," it
says, and his colonists "were malcontent with their long stay there." Will
Atkins had died some time before and the rest of them want to be fetched

away, "that they might see their own country again before they died." This is
all we know of their fates. Crusoe takes the blame for this turn of events. Had

his "wandering spirit" let him stay with his colony, things "would have done
well enough." "I pleased myself with being the patron of those people I placed
there, and doing for them in a kind of haughty majestic way, like an old patri-
archal monarch; providing for them, as if I had been father of the whole family,
as well as of the plantation." But he was not as patriarchal as he ought to have
been. Lamenting that he did not attach his island to a specific "government or
nation," which might have provided some lasting, overruling authority, he
goes on to say, "nay, I never so much as gave the place a name, but left it as I
found it, belonging to no man, and the people under no discipline or govern-
ment but my own

enough" (186-7). Once again, it might seem, Crusoe has

archal authority, this time in failing to exert it sufficie
instead of failing to obey it. Because he would not do w

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 11

he was abandoned on an island; because he w

he should have been, others have been aband
One can admire the neatness of this closur
zling, as it has no real explanatory power. Mi
of an egalitarian, communistic, and material
time. Crusoe's island colony looks back towar
even to him quaint and long outdated. More
term is used repeatedly by Crusoe and others
of common ideas but through the power of a
supported by an inclusive Christianity. Yet b
teriously, it seems, as Misson's.

A host of reasons might have been given for

own narrative supplies some possibilities, th
work he and his friend the French priest left
conversion of the thirty-seven natives yet t
society. The colony could have failed for this
n't. Or it might have failed because of re
Spaniards and the English, for religious reason
the islanders sent from Brazil, Crusoe dispat
daughters to provide wives for the Spaniard
their hand. Or the colony might have taken
soe also sends sugarcane from Brazil, and this
ent social and economic order from the one h
arcane comes slavery and, in fact, a single s
from Brazil. To make the failure of the colony
ciently broad patriarchal shoulders is someth
of sorts.

There are two strikingly memorable moments in Crusoe's story of his

return to his island. One is the dialogue on religion between Atkins and his
wife. The other, which at first seems to offer a kind of warm closing image for
the narrative as a whole, looks forward to the two of them in their basketwork
house studying to become better Christians, surrounded by their children.
The English Bible will be essential to this project, and so it is a good thing that
all the Englishmen's wives have learned English "pretty well," and "all the
children . . . too, from their first learning to speak, though they at first spoke it
in a very broken manner, like their mothers" (108). Eventually, it's implied,
these children will speak English fluently, as well perhaps as their fathers
themselves. Is there something wrong with this picture, that it cannot be left to
stand? Are we seeing here the same impossibility of imagining a mixed race
society that I've found in the Misson story?
Though less explicitly concerned with matters of political economy, the
story of Crusoe's colony does not forget that women make men. Patriarchy is

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12 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

ever aware of this, which is why

Atkins is made to observe, marr
unconfused transmission of prope
tains male lineages, and upon w
European will the (male) beneficia
their mothers, perhaps, and spea
selves nor even European - thoug
will present to European eyes a k
even legitimately sanctioned m
like these might in fact seem on
European norms by virtue of the
provide.16 "Hybridity" carries wi
Bhabha is concerned to point out,
tinctions that support the discou
seem quite as transparent as they
lenged or put at risk.17 Such epis
soe's observation that some of th
Christians - would make no m
ladies, except for the color of the
ing Atkins's wife a "savage," even
And yet Atkins and his wife - in
religion that Crusoe and the Frenc
of wonderful. The text can no m
it unimpaired. Observing Atkins
standing of God and each other,
Prospero and Ariel hovering ho
Miranda, Caliban lurking somewh
resents,mutatis mutandis , all tha
iban, though multiplied into hund
name derives), is effectively disp
into a kind of indigenous Mirand
island. О brave new world that ha
logue between Atkins and his wi
day during their time alone toget
ten. Whatever it was these two men had between them, then, has been
replaced now by a more natural, more fruitful, in some obvious ways more
socially valuable, and - dare one say it? - more sanctionable relationship. The
basketwork house, let us note, represents an adaptation to the island unlike
anything Crusoe (or the Spaniards) have achieved, as do the wife and chil-
dren.

For all Crusoe's greater authority and power, the comparison between him
and Atkins is not entirely to his advantage. Given its potentially subversive
effect, little wonder that Friday, and the island itself, are so abruptly dispensed

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 13

with. It may be significant - given al

sodomites and their place in early eighteen
does not long survive the refiguration of h
soe's departure from the island, he is kille
denly and quite gratuitously, by still othe
to speak with them in his own language,
terms. "As soon as he had called to them,
turned their canoes from us, and stooping
sides; just as if, in English, saving your presence, they had bid us kiss

(179). Then the rest of the savages shoot him full of arr
Still another dangerous line of potential thought - t
another kind of epistemological crisis - may be getting
day's abrupt, quite curious, even "queer" disappeara
Instances of "hybridity" can be as challenging to sexu
and cultural categories of difference, can produce just
in any case sails on without Friday, to other problema
behind his still unnamed - perhaps unnamable - island
to it and its new inhabitants. Their story gets no furth
clusion, not even much in the way of closure. There is
him or his narrative to dwell on. All we have at the end
adventure is Crusoe's uneasy feeling that he ought, so
more in control of whatever it was that finally happene

NOTES

Lemuel Johnson , who read and critiqued an earlier version of this essay , died March
The dearest of friends and a most exquisite colleague , he possessed knowledge and acuity
passing any I might ever hope to achieve. I learned more from him than I can say, more even
could know. In gratitude I dedicate this essay, such as it is, to him.

1. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, tr. J .M. Cohen (Baltimor
64, 60. The Spaniard who remained was Gonzalo Guerrero. For another accoun
same episode see Francisco López de Gomara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by H
tary, tr. and ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson from the Istoria de la conquista de Mexico (B
1966), 30-2; the Istoria was first published in 1552.
2. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 204, 206, 207, 1.
3. Diaz, 65.
4. It is now well documented that European attitudes towards Africans, Native
cans, and Asians displayed an increasing racism over the course of the eighteenth c
even though "race" had not yet come to acquire its full modern meaning. On t
point see Nicholas Hudson, "From 'Nation' to 'Race': The Origin of Racial Clas
in Eighteenth-Century Thought," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996): 247-6
development of white attitudes of racial superiority, see particularly (among a
potential sources) Richard Popkin's "The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-C
Racism" in Racism in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultur
ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland, 1973), 245-62, and, of more recent vintage, Iv
naford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C., 1996), especiall
"The First Stage in the Development of an Idea of Race, 1684-1815," 187-233.

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 14 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

5. John Robert Moore attributed

Pillory and Other Studies (Bloomin
list of the Writings of Daniel Defo
Owens have mounted a strong chal
sation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven,
R. Moore's Checklist (London, 1994
referenced in the text by page n
modern edition, i.e., Daniel Defoe,
(London, 1972). It should be note
the two narratives by placing Tew
in the original where two other "l
6. Christopher Hill, "Radical Pira
land, vol. 3 of The Collected Essay
163-5.
7. For their large claims about the advanced political views and consciousness of
pirates, see Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners,
and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), chap. 5, "Hydrarchy:
Sailors, Pirates, and the Maritime State," 143-73; for the quote, see 172. Rediker and
Linebaugh argue, among other things, that pirate ships were "multinational, multicultur-
al, and multiracial": "Hundreds of people of African descent found places within the
social order of the pirate ship. Even though a substantial minority of pirates had worked
in the slave trade and had therefore been part of the machinery of enslavement and trans-
portation, and even though pirate ships occasionally captured (and sold) cargo that
included slaves, Africans and African Americans both free and enslaved were numerous
and active on board pirate vessels" (164, 165). The qualifications that attach to this point
seem to weaken its initial thrust considerably. Observing that "many" pirates in the West
Indies were indeed "black slaves," David Cordingly would nonetheless insist that "the
precise status of the black men on . . . pirate ships is not clear." "Pirates shared the same
prejudices as other white men," he asserts, suggestions to the contrary being "romantic"
and "not borne out by the facts" (Under the Black Flag: Romance and Reality of Life Among the
Pirates [New York, 1996], 12, 15-7). For more on the "antiauthoritarian," "egalitarian,"
"communitarian," even "utopian" tendencies of pirates, see also Rediker 's Between the
Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge, 1987), chap. 6, "The Seaman as Pirate: Plunder and
Social Banditry at Sea," 254-87. Rediker advances no evidence here that these attitudes
encouraged opposition to slavery, nor (though in Many-Headed Hydra, he and Linebaugh
point out that pirates often preyed on slave ships) do they make any specific claim that the
pirates' motives were at all ideological. For an account of recent thinking by Rediker and
Linebaugh and other historians on the politics of pirates, especially their attitudes toward
slavery and race, see Lawrence Osborne, "A Pirate's Progress: How the Maritime Rogue
Became a Multicultural Hero," Lingua Franca, March 1998, 35-42. Also worth consulting
for an overview of the legal and social significance of pirates in early eighteenth-century
English culture is Joel Baer's seminal essay, "'The Complicated Plot of Piracy': Aspects of
English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe," The Eighteenth Century: Theo-
ry and Interpretation, 23 (1982): 3-26, rpt. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 14, ed. О.
M. Brack (Madison, Wisconsin, 1985), 3-28.
8. For a brief discussion of this subject see Lincoln Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms
and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Eng-
land (Cambridge, 1987), 153-5.
9. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others : British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-
1834 (New York, 1992).
10. The hiatus in the original text of the General History of the Pirates between the abrupt
breaking off of Misson's story and its continuation in the "life" of Tew after two other
pirates' stories have intervened (see n. 5 above) may itself be of some significance. It was
not uncommon for typesetting to follow close upon composition, and there may have

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 15

been some delay here in supplying the addition

time to think on how to wrap things up.
11. For the conventions of pirate narrative, see
Richardson: Narrative Patterns , 1700-1739 (Oxf
story as a "counter-myth" to the typical pirate
tional Utopian speculations . . . are an attempt t
and secular independence which is implicit in th
instance, "the dialectic opposite" of the account in
tain Avery's efforts to build his own state on
nothing more than social incoherence and hum
settlement under Tew), seem to Richetti a "delibe
of the pirate (75, 68). "Decorous" and "conventio
deeply subversive hopes and ideas, and one mig
century would or could have thought them so.
anomalous; what puzzles me is that this "utopia
quote Richetti again, "is totally destroyed by a
flaws in its constitution" (73). "The demonic
"revolt from law and morality" (75) would seem
fact, Libertalia failed of its own accord. Nor
much opportunity for the norms of "law" and "m
ly, does.
12. 1 see implicit here the same kind of anxiety about racial and national identity that
Amy Boesky, in Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England (Athens, Georgia, 1996),
finds operating in Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668). Pointing out that Utopian fic-
tions address not only political concerns at home but a new awareness of the possibilities
and dangers that come for the nation with imperialist expansion, she includes miscegena-
tion among the latter: "The establishment of a new colony in a new (and to the English,
racially different) world mandated strict taboos against interracial relations. How else
could the colonists ensure that national integrity would be maintained once citizens left
England behind them?" ( Founding Fictions, 146). She sees in The Isle of Pines, among other
things, an intent "to represent interracial relations as dystopic" (160). Neville's novella
offers the history of one man and four women shipwrecked on a fertile and abundant
island with only a Bible and a bare minimum of tools. One of the women is a "Negro"
slave, but all the others are freebom English. The man has children by all the women, and
these children intermarry until eventually four "tribes" develop, each tracing its origins
back over several generations to one of the original mothers. Because all of them descend
from the same patriarch, his contribution to their lineage is insignificant. Those descended
from the black slave are indiscernible from the others in language, culture, and physical
appearance, but are incorrigible troublemakers, something the narrative makes clear is
owing to their degraded origin. The Dutch ship's captain who discovers them is surprised
to find "in such a strange place so many that could speak English and yet to go naked,"
and later in his narrative describes the astonished reaction of "these poor unarmed naked
people" to the discharge of guns - something they've no previous knowledge of - in
terms that make them seem no different from primitive peoples elsewhere (Three Early
Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines, ed. Susan Bruce [Oxford, 1999], 191,
204). And yet, he concludes, these people "are very intelligible, retaining a great part of the
ingenuity and gallantry of the English nation, though they have not that happy means to
express themselves" (ibid., 212). Obviously more than just miscegenation threatens "Eng-
lishness" here, for even without the African intermixture these people would be naked,
unarmed, naïve, and, as the Dutch captain indicates elsewhere, ripe for colonial exploita-
tion (205, 212). "Englishness" is not an absolute category, as the captain suggests in telling
of an Irishman who served on his ship and astonished the inhabitants of the island with
his playing of the bagpipes, something he had learned to do in England! "Yet so un-Eng-
lished he was," the captain continues, "that he had quite forgotten [the] language" (211).

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 16 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Isle of Pines has often been cited as

ofthis paper will suggest, it may have c
Crusoe than to the original novel.
13. Page references to the Farther Adv
Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson
G. H. Maynadier (New York, 1905).
14. See Farther Adventures, 64-6, wh
absence will not hear of hanging the En
Spaniards because "it was to the gener
their preservation and deliverance."
15. The settling of the as yet unChr
Europeans rather than apart and on the
ways of their immediate neighbors and
tinctiveness, recalls the late seventeen
refugees among Dutch settlers in their
this topic see C. Graham Botha, The Fre
13, 35-42, and Frank Welsh, South Afric
16. Roxann Wheeler provides an int
novels of "interracial sex and romance" i
Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Ph
ference: Benevolent Subordination and
of which appeared as "The Complexi
Century British Novels," Eighteenth
guishes these novels from earlier narr
ing Defoe's, but the story of Will Atk
what she finds significant in the novel
what more problematic. Thus, in these
acceptable identity on Other women,
apparently natural racial subordinatio
ing English husband

England that Other women's success is measured" ( Complexion of R

doesn't quite work in the Farther Adventures. Particularly worth not
the Misson story as well is Wheeler's observation that, while many
novels she discusses are actually of mixed race, there is a significant
heroes: "A mixed-race hero is not . . . ideologically likely at this perio
culine gender, he was not believed to be as assimilable to British au
counterpart, and his allegiances were not believed to be naturally c
The absence of mixed-race sons suggests the difficulty of categoriz
ining their return to Europe as autonomous citizen subjects" (ibid.).
dence is offered for the supposed "belief," this seems to be a plausi
17. It seems suggestive that on Crusoe's island the Spaniards don
kept from doing? - what they elsewhere so freely and promiscuous
clivity for establishing mixed-race societies, with elaborately self
delineating the degrees of mixture (and so of "Spanishness"), is put
ture. Spaniards were very much concerned with "purity" of blo
abroad but did not operate within the binarisms of English racial c
clearly began to develop in the American colönies towards the end of
tury (on the latter, see especially Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Bla
toward the Negro, 1550-1812 [Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1968]).
celibate heightens the sense of epistemological crisis here, for it
Spaniards did, about racial and national identity in terms of a cont
statuses) rather than as an either/or proposition.
18. The many articles by Randolph Trumbach on the developmen
around the turn of the eighteenth century will presumably be sup

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FALLER- CAPTAIN MISSON'S FAILED UTOPIA 17

coming second volume of his Sex and the Gender Rev

cinct account of his and others' recent scholarship
work, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enligh
key idea of Trumbach's is that the development of /
is inextricably linked to shifts in the performance a
ality as well; the two stand in dialectic. Willy-nilly,
mixed-sex couple into the symbolic economy of C
their own mixed-race, homosocial relationship int
least peculiar light.
19. On Friday's death and how it may figure into "
ic world implicit in both Robinson Crusoe and the
Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Ma
I am grateful to Turley for calling my attention to t
of Friday, and for making it seem significant.

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