Long Waves Breaking

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000

This book rocks! I was spending a lot of time researching my own stuff in 2012 when I was supposed to be finishing my Comps reading, and I was beginning to feel bad about letting the fields slide a little. Especially the radical stuff. I half-reluctantly grabbed this from the bottom of the pile on my shelf, thinking I’d give it a day and jump-start this reading. A day and a half later, I decided to break my rule and buy this book. And I thought I needed to borrow some of these characters and start my radical history blog with them.  

Linebaugh and Rediker (L&R) began with a passage from Rachel Carson describing ocean currents. The Atlantic is the scene of this story, so they began with a view from space. Cosmic forces produce circular planetary currents and long waves originating half a planet away break on European shores. “For centuries,” they said, “fishermen on the lonely shores of Ireland have been able to interpret these long Atlantic swells. The power of an ocean wave is directly related to the speed and duration of the wind that sets it in motion, and to the ‘length of its fetch,’ or the distance from its point of origin. The longer the fetch, the greater the wave. Nothing can stop these long waves. They are visible only at the end, when they rise and break; for most of fetch the surface of the ocean is undisturbed.” (1) Yep, that’s a metaphor for the history they’re going to tell, and a damn nice one (much better, I think, than the Hydra vs. Hercules image from the title).

The event that set these long waves in motion for L&R was the rise of capitalism, specifically the expropriation of commons that began with British enclosure. “In the seventeenth century,” they said, “almost a quarter of the land in England was enclosed. Aerial photography and excavations have located more than a thousand deserted villages and hamlets, confirming the colossal dimensions of the expropriation of the peasantry.” (17) Little facts like this were strewn throughout the book, making me want to veer off to read about archaeology. But L&R powered on. The peasants thrown off the land took to the roads and are called vagrants, criminals, vagabonds. They were chased, jailed, beaten, branded, and sometimes hanged. And many were impressed or transported, or in L&R’s word, enslaved.

Violence and coerced labor were key elements in the rise of capitalism, said L&R. And they didn’t just say it once or restrict themselves to sanitary description. “Under Henry VIII,” they said, “vagabonds were whipped, had their ears cut off, or were hanged (one chronicler of the age put their number at seventy-five thousand).” (18) Well-known historical figures like Shakespeare and Francis Bacon reacted to risings and rebellions in their neighborhoods. Bacon came under repeated scrutiny, as L&R compared his historical reputation as an enlightenment philosopher to his brutal treatment of prisoners as solicitor general, repression of Irish peasants as enclosing landlord, and his 1622 Advertisement Touching An Holy War. But the terror wasn’t limited to the British Isles. It was also used to control the indentured or enslaved criminals who tried to run away from colonies like Virginia. They described in 1611, a group who “did Runne Away unto the Indyans...[were] hanged, Some burned, Some to be broken on wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death.” (34)

“In 1649 the Parliamentary Committee for the Preservation of Timber was formed to check the depredations of the ‘looser and disordered sort of people’ who continued to insist on their common rights in the forest,” thery continued. (43) This would make a nice jumping-off place for a rural history of forest people. Similarly, British water privatization began “with the New River Company, chartered in 1619, which brought water from Hertfordshire to Clerkenwell reservoirs...to private subscribers.” (49) People were resources to be privatized as well: In 1619 Bacon granted London authorities the power to “imprison any child who continued to resist” transportation to Virginia. The names of “165 were recorded. By 1625 only twelve of those were still alive...There is little reason to assume different outcomes for the fourteen to fifteen hundred children said to be on their way to Virginia in 1627,” and presumably many more in years without records. (59)

The experiences of these “hewers of wood and drawers of water” are shocking and graphic. So when rebels, pirates, and revolutionaries grew up in these circumstances, it was not an intellectual development in some sterile ideological world. It was the reaction of people who had been treated inhumanely and who had seen their families and friends brutalized and dehumanized. Winstanley and the Diggers recognized “that the death penalty was logically related to an enclosure movement [that] ‘hedges the weake out of the Earth, and either starves them, or else forces them through poverty to take from others, and then hangs them for so doing’.” (118) Not a bad argument against execution.

The most visible expression of the “world turned upside down,” that linked all the places around the Atlantic and communicated revolutionary ideas, was the pirate ship. (162) Pirate crews were egalitarian, racially integrated, and democratic, said L&R (Rediker is regarded as the foremost authority on privateers and pirates). While some of their descriptions may have been a bit romanticized (as a reviewer suggested), they also illustrated contemporary popular views of piracy, especially among L&R’s mostly-invisible target population of hewers and drawers. Hyrdarchy, the pirate world-view, was central to their story, as was Britain’s war against it. L&R suggested that pirates became a target of the empire when they turned their attention from harassing Spanish shipping to attacking the slave trade. (168) But even when the pirates were defeated, the “motley crew shaped the social, organizational, and intellectual histories” of the Atlantic world by spreading a “proletarian experience” and a resistance tradition that L&R believed was a catalyst of the American Revolution. (212)

Part of the motley crew’s contribution was expanding the definition of liberty to the rights of man. L&R said elite young rebels like Samuel Adams “faced a dilemma: how could he watch a crowd of Africans, Scotsmen, Dutchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen battle a press-gang and then describe them as being engaged simply in a struggle for the ‘rights of Englishmen’?” (216) Similarly, the experience of resisting press gangs and British Navy life when resistance failed, gave poor men of all ethnic backgrounds a sense of solidarity and a reason to oppose slavery. “If the artisans and gentlemen of the American Sons of Liberty saw their rebellion as but ‘one episode in a worldwide struggle between liberty and despotism,’ sailors, who had a much broader experience of both despotism and the world, saw their own struggle as part of a long Atlantic contest between slavery and freedom,” they said. (221)

The Sons of Liberty, in L&R’s story, ultimately betrayed the revolution and opened the door for the counterrevolutionary settlement represented by the Constitution. The Virginia manumission offered by Lord Dunmore and the American response to it seemed like interesting possibilities for further American stories. Thomas Paine’s increased radicalism and return to America after imprisonment in France also seems relevant in this light. L&R left the American story at this point, to return to England.

L&R regularly exposed elite intellectuals as tools of the ruling class. In A Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan blamed the slaves for their enslavement and in The Holy War (1682) “Bunyan inverts the historical truth, pretending that Africans assaulted European Christendom rather than the reverse.” (99) Edmund Burke called the people a “swinish multitude,” causing Thomas Spence to respond with Pig’s Meat; Or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. Paine didn’t take his vindication of natural rights far enough, L&R argued, and had to be be corrected by Mary Wollstonecraft and Spence. And Thomas Malthus blamed the people, projecting a population crisis to distract attention from the expropriation crisis that *was actually causing* the famine in his contemporary England. 

Along the way, a number of interesting facts dropped. For example, “William Cobbett reported in 1798 the belief that in Virginia and the Carolinas ‘some of the free negroes have already been admitted into the conspiracy of the United Irishmen’.” (279) And “between 1801 and 1831 alone, 3,511,770 acres of common land were legislated from the agricultural population...by the Parliament of landlords.” (315) Robert Wedderburn charged “Malthus has said, to please the rich, that the superabundant population is doomed to perish by the laws of nature.” James Kelley wrote of Jamaica in 1838 that “sailors and Negroes are ever on the most amicable of terms...[Slaves had] a feeling of independence in their intercourse with the sailor...In the presence of the sailor, the Negro feels a man.” (321)  

There’s a really nice scene toward the end, where C.F. Volney visited Jefferson at Monticello.  After dinner, they went out to view the slaves, who were dirty and dressed in rags. Jefferson ordered them around and they sullenly obeyed and passively resisted. This is a view we never get of the founding father and it deflates him quite effectively, even if Volney made it up. William Cobbett and Joseph Priestley denounced Volney, L&R said; and Adams probably had him in mind when he legislated against aliens. (344)  

Labor history, L&R concluded, spent too much time talking about “the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist, propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker.” (332) What was lost, they suggested, were the people who really tied together the Atlantic world. This was a very compelling thought for me, in light of other reading I was doing and ultimately the writing I want to do about transatlantic radicals. And even without that, it was just so much more interesting and compelling than the stories I was accustomed to seeing. If this was what the new “new labor history” looked like, I thought, I wanted to read more of it!

Some people to keep an eye out for:   

• James Nayler: Yorkshire evangelist, rode through the gates of Bristol on an ass in 1656, to suggest the kingdom was at hand.  Got 310 lashes, forehead branded, tongue bored through with a red-hot iron. (95-6)

• Thomas Rainborough: argued the Leveller’s position in the Putney Debates, assassinated by royalists in 1648.

• Masaniello: fisherman, led Naples Rebellion in 1647.  Executed.

• Robert Lockyer: soldier, opposed Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in 1649.  Executed.

• Edward and Catherine Despard: plotted to overthrow English monarchy.  Edward Executed 1803.

• Robert Wedderburn (1762-1836?)  

• William “Black” Davidson: sailor, shoemaker’s union secretary, cabinetmaker.  Implicated in Cato Street Conspiracy.  Hanged.

References (Primary Sources to check out):

• Volney’s Ruins, Burke and Paine

• Osborne Ward, The Ancient Lowly, 1888

• Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter, or a History of Bacon in Virginia, 1690

• Strange News From Virginia, 1677 (Bacon’s Rebellion)

• A General History of the Pyrates

• Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis, 1800

• Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the rights of Women, 1792

• Thelwall, The Rights of Nature, 1796

• Spence, The Rights of Infants, 1796, The Giant Killer, 1814

• Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of Odaulah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, 1789