Volume 30, Number 8 · May 12, 1983
Jolly Rogers
By Christopher Hill
Sodomy and the Perception of Evil: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
by B.R. Burg
New York University Press, 215 pp., #20.00
Dr. Burg's object is to take the seventeenth-century Caribbean pirates as a self-sufficient isolated population and to consider the incidence of homosexuality among them. It is an interesting idea. But there are problems. 'Nothing could be further from the truth,' he proclaims, than that this is 'a historical work.' It 'relies heavily on behavioral theory and other devices from the social and behavioral sciences that are often anathema to historians.' That is fair enough, and does not render 'apoplectic' this historian. Dr. Burg draws parallels between seventeenth-century pirates and modern secluded populations whose behavior has been studied, such as inmates of prisons and submarine crews. These offer intriguing analogies, but there are also significant differences, to which Dr. Burg very properly draws attention, notably that his pirates had mostly freely chosen their closed society, and voluntarily submitted themselves to such discipline as they knew.
Review, 2060 words
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