It is a concept often seen amongst film and literature; two bad guys team up for nefarious deeds such as a bank robbery, for example but ultimately one turns on the other to try and steal all of the profit for themselves.
But, historically, how much of this is true? One of the modules I took during my undergraduate degree was on concepts of Honour and Shame across different societies in different times, and one week we partly focused on pirate culture.
Captain Jack Sparrow is certainly a swoon-worthy modern depiction of an early modern pirate.. In the film franchise, the Pirate Code is referred to at several points. It is first mentioned right near the start, when the female star Elizabeth Swan is under threat for her life by two pirates who are chasing her. Miss Swan finds this shocking, as he is their friend and captain, but the crew shrug it off as The Code, and leave her on a rowboat to rescue Jack herself. Well, the concept of a Pirate Code did actually exist, although it was not one universal set of rules for all pirates β instead, individual ships or groups of pirates would create their own rules that all those in the group had to follow under pain of awful punishment.
In the early modern period there were of course plenty of reasons why someone became a pirate, but a common thread was that pirates were disgruntled ex-sailors. In this time, sailors were essentially freelancers who would sign up to join a ship. The ships were usually funded by a rich absentee who funded the voyage and paid for a captain, then the captain would hire crew and follow out the voyage under the instructions of the absentee funder.
However, the needs of the crew often did not align with the aim of the funder, meaning sailors often lost out both financially and in terms of welfare.
