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Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity. By Hans Turley. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Pp. ix + 199. Notes, bibliography, index, illustrations. $55.00 cloth, $19.00 paper. Although he himself "never played pirate" (vii) as a child, as he explains in the preface to his book Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality and Masculine Identity, Hans Turley astutely identifies the large role played by pirates in the European and American cultural imaginations. Turley, who describes the book as "both a revisionist history of pirates and a critical analysis of the early novel"(3), draws upon such sources as eighteenth-century novels (particularly those of Daniel Defoe), histories, ephemera, and legal documents in order to interrogate the figure of the pirate as an economic, cultural, and sexual outlaw. Chapter One, "Life on Board an Early-Eighteenth-Century Ship," provides a glimpse of what life was like for legitimate mariners. By describing the abuses and indignities sailors were apt to suffer at the hands of their supremely powerful captains, (including a particularly horrific description of Captain Jeane's ghastly and creative abuses of his unfortunate cabin boy), Turley makes it clear why some mariners would choose to turn pirate. By doing so, sailors could leave legal abuse, impressment, and servitude behind and enter into "a homosocial world that made its own discipline and regulations" (27). In Chapter Two, Turley introduces the concept of the "piratical subject." Unlike any specific pirate, real or fictional, the "piratical subject" blends the "legally defined" pirate and the "culturally revered pirate, a hypermasculine, transgressive, desiring subject"(7). This allows Turley to simultaneously treat both actual historic pirates, such as Blackbeard, and fictional pirates as equally significant components of the pirate mystique. Early-eighteenth-century trial records and pirate confessions are the source material for Chapter Three. By examining records of sodomy trials, Turley illustrates the way in which both the crime of sodomy and that of piracy "join the actor with the act"(51), forging one of the book's more explicit links between the two subjects. Further, Turley asserts that this early pirate literature established the implicit eroticization of the pirate figure, which he explores in Chapter Four through an examination of the writings about the pirate Captain Avery. This line of inquiry continues through Chapters Five and Six, in which Turley reads Captain Johnson's General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. The book, described by Turley as "the most influential pirate book ever written"(7) and which blends history and fiction with little regard for genre boundaries, has been attributed to Daniel Defoe. Though some doubt exists about Defoe's authorship of the General History, Turley argues for the importance of piracy as a trope in Defoe's literature. The General History's depiction of pirates as hypermasculine economic outlaws living in homosocial societies is read against the feminized sodomite's rejection of the heterosexual model of domestic economy. One of the more interesting sections of Chapter Six deals with the General History's account of Anne Bonney and Mary Read, women pirates in men's clothing. Turley dismisses a too-simplistic reading of women pirates as the "sedatives" needed in an early-eighteenth-century narrative to counteract the anxiety over pirates' transgressive homosociality. He writes that Bonney's and Read's characterizations are too complex to render them "sedatives" and that they are at once "feminine" and "masculine," represented both as "passionate mates" to individual pirates and as whores. The book ends with further analysis of Defoe's novels, focusing on issues of sexuality and masculinity in the pirate novel Captain Singleton as well as in Robinson Crusoe and its sequels Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections. Chapter Eight concludes that Robinson Crusoe and its sequels present fervent belief in Christianity as the only way to "break away from any transgressive position that questions normative heterocentric identity"(158). Turley presents a thoroughly-researched literary and cultural history of the transgressive pirate figure in the early eighteenth-century. Despite the frequent disclaimer that not all pirates were sodomites, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash effectively shows how the pirate not only threatened mariners on the high seas, but continues to threaten those readers invested in normative models of economic and sexual behavior. Amy Clary |
