Pirater er bare trendy i øjeblikket, men hvordan levede de egentlig? Ikke helt så lovløst og grusomt, som vi forestiller os. James Surowiecki opsummerer i The New Yorker interessant ny forskning om Piraternes Forfatning:
When Bob Dylan sang, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” he probably wasn’t thinking of seventeenth-century pirate captains. Nonetheless, his dictum seems to apply to them. While pirates were certainly cruel and violent criminals, pirate ships were hardly the floating tyrannies of popular imagination.
…
Leeson is fascinated by pirates because they flourished outside the state—and, therefore, outside the law. They could not count on higher authorities to insure that people would live up to promises or obey rules. Unlike the Mafia, pirates were not bound by ethnic or family ties; crews were as remarkably diverse as in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Nor were they held together primarily by violence; while pirates did conscript some crew members, many volunteered. More strikingly, pirate ships were governed by what amounted to simple constitutions that, in greater or lesser detail, laid out the rights and duties of crewmen, rules for the handling of disputes, and incentive and insurance payments to insure that crewmen would act bravely in battle.
Spørgsmålet er så: Lyder det mere eller mindre kedeligt at sejle under dødningshovedets flag, når man ved, at man er forsikret med 600 guldstykker for tab af en arm?
Surowiecki er også forfatter til The Wisdom of Crowds, og tippet til hans interessante artikel fik jeg fra Marginalrevolution.