If I understand it correctly, during the heyday of pirates, several notorious figures established a code of conduct aboard their ships. Among those rules was how any prizes or loot would be split among the crew.
It seems to me that if the pirates took a prize, it would be divided into equal amounts of shares. Then each ordinary crewman would get one share, and higher-ranking officers either a share and a quarter or a share and a half, and the captain would get two shares. Am I understanding this correctly?
I’m asking because it seems crazy to me that a pirate captain would take only twice as much as a no-name seaman, but the average American CEO makes about 300 times more than his worker bee.
Well, pirates actually had a rather democratic system. Most pirate captains were generally elected by, and from, the crew. They could also be voted out and replaced at any time, and were only in command for as long as they were still getting results. They were probably thought of as equals, but with more expierience and resposibility.
Darn, I thought this was going to be about the Pirate Game. it’s a pretty interesting puzzle, but undoubtedly unrelated to any real world pirate behavior.
Supply and demand. Being a sailor was hard dangerous work such that the Royal Navy literally had to kidnap people and force them to do it. Add in that for a pirate the punishment was execution if they were caught. Pirate captains had to pay really well in order to attract good sailors.
Although, note in practice that every pirate ship was subject to capture by every nation except one. Most pirates were officially privateers working for some nation or another, and preying only on that nation’s enemies: It meant fewer targets, but also meant a safe port of call to spend your ill-earned gains at.
In the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic era, the Captain was entitled to 2/8 or 3/8 of the value of a prize, so they were much better off than pirate Captains.
To answer this question, it is worth pondering who the pirates really were. The pop culture version is that they were basically pillaging gangs with boats, like a nautical version of Mad Max. Undoubtedly, many / most of them were criminals. But they had diverse motivations. Some were colonists who had been kicked off their land by the Spanish. Some were privateers, who didn’t want to quit when the war officially ended. There’s some evidence that there were Jacobites among them (or, at least, they adopted Jacobitism as a countercultural post hoc justification) and in that sense they were an extension of England’s domestic troubles.
What they did have in common was a sense of freedom and independence. Piracy wasn’t just a way to make a buck, but a way of rebelling against the oppressive monarchies in the Old World. It’s a pretty common trope in movies for pirates to wax poetic about freedom and liberty, but no small number genuinely did see themselves as rebels and freedom-fighters.
It’s somewhat like the Monty Python bit. “Actually, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune…”
So my hypothesis is that many pirates would oppose the establishment of powerful authorities and exploitative leaders. As an industry, they shared best practices with each other and adopted common terms for pirate contracts and articles. An entrepreneurial pirate captain would have to pay good money to attract talent from rival ships, and if a pirate thought another captain offered a better deal he was free to leave for a new crew. The most widespread version of pirate articles have the Captain relatively limited powers, and saw most decisions made democratically. So it made sense for captains to be generous and moderate, rather than abusive mob bosses.
That’s a good point JB99. Also note that each pirate ship & crew was an independent entity. If a pirate captain was an abusive monster to his crew, and they mutinied, hanged him from a yardarm, and declared a new captain, there were no repercussions. If a Royal Navy crew did the same, the entire rest of the RN would try to track you down and hang you. So pirate captains had much more incentive to keep their crews happy, or at least uncomplaining.
A pirate captain in charge of maybe 2 dozen people compared to the average CEO in charge of more than 50,000 employees and accountable to thousands of major investors? That doesn’t really seem crazy.
Imagine if instead the captains of other pirate ships elected the captain. That might result in a situation where pirate captain pay begins to approach the stratospheric levels of corporate CEO pay.
I don’t think the “average” CEO has 50K employees and thousands of “major” investors. And Blackbeard at one point led a small armada of ships whose total crew members numbered in the hundreds.
However, number of employees and number of investors doesn’t justify high salaries. There’s no correlation between salary and success for CEOs, and in fact there are many incentives for CEOs to maximize their own compensation and not the strength of the company.
In conclusion, keelhaul all CEOs and replace them with pirates.
Nor does the “average” CEO make 300 times his/her employees. I was using the Fortune 500 averages, which I believe, is most relevant when discussing CEOs who make 300 times their employees’ salaries. The average Fortune 500 company has over 50,000 employees.
Interesting about Blackbeard and his armada, though. Did the entire armada share the spoils? Or did each ship only share its own booty, paying a royalty to Blackbeard and then distributing the rest among themselves; giving their captain 2x what everyone else on board got? I could be wrong, but I highly doubt all booty was divided equally among the entire armada, with Blackbeard only getting 2x what everyone else got.
Relevant, because a captain of a ship is more like middle management, I think. A CEO would be more like a pirate admiral or a queen or something.
Something you have to keep in mind is that pirate crews and ships were largely NOT like they are in movies. In movies, a pirate ship is a big ship, like the Black Pearl (a galleon, IIRC) crewed by scores of sailors - basically a bandit version of a Royal Navy ship.
In reality, pirate crews were usually a handful of men in a very small vessel, something suitable for coastal sailing but nothing you could take across the Atlantic. Blackbeard was a VERY rare exception. It really doesn’t take a lot of armed men to overcome a merchant vessel, especially since most merchant ships would not put up a fight; piracy was simply a cost of doing business in that day and age. So the notion of the captain giving up most of the loot - well, the “Captain” of a seven-man band is not like being the captain of a warship, and pirate crews generally weren’t together for years and many raids. It’s much closer to the truth to think of a pirate crew the way you would a crew of thieves knocking over a bank vault.
Not in most ships. A captain of a ship can be considered middle management if you think of a ship that’s part of a connected fleet; an independent captain is God while the ship is afloat. Actually, scratch that: God would need the captain’s permission to come aboard. By “independent” I don’t just mean one who’s ship-owner: I mean in any ship that’s not part of a coordinated group.
Exactly, if you could afford a large ship-of-the-line type vessel, might as well sell that and go legitamate.
Pirates in the “golden age” of piracy needed to remain as RickJay says, just a cost of doing business. If they become am impedance to business, they would see the Royal and Spanish Navies come down on them very hard.
Another thing to know, is as a result of the fact that Pirate ships were small, many times they did not bother with most of the cargo. Cargos are bulky, heavy stuff, which may have little resale value, and would be difficult load, sans a large crew.Personal possessions, provisions on thge other hand, were always taken.
