The Many-Headed Hydra Read online

  To the memory of Christopher & Bridget Hill

  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Introduction

  1. The Wreck of the Sea-Venture

  2. Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water

  3. “A Blackymore Maide Named Francis”

  4. The Divarication of the Putney Debates

  5. Hydrarchy: Sailors, Pirates, and the Maritime State

  6. “The Outcasts of the Nations of the Earth”

  7. A Motley Crew in the American Revolution

  8. The Conspiracy of Edward and Catherine Despard

  9. Robert Wedderburn and Atlantic Jubilee

  Conclusion: Tyger! Tyger!

  A Map of the Atlantic 1699

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface to the Second Edition

  IN HIS POEM “A Worker Reads History” (1935), Bertolt Brecht asked, “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” He answered, famously, “The books are filled with the names of kings.” Then he wondered, subversively, “But was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?”

  Brecht ranged across the planet, from Europe to Latin America, the Middle East, India, China, and Africa, imagining how a motley crew of workers might figure in a history long dominated by “great men” and monuments to their vainglory. We followed in Brecht’s footsteps in writing this history of Atlantic workers, emphasizing sailors and slaves. We begin this new edition by saluting Brecht, champion of “history from below” and author of its anthem.

  The book combines the African American, English, and American traditions of history from below. W. E. B. Du Bois taught us to study the color line and the insidious ideology of white supremacy. He published Black Reconstruction in America in the same year of Brecht’s poem, writing: “The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.” C. L. R. James, in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, published in 1938, explained the first victorious workers’ revolution in modern history, adding that what the plantation slaves began, the European urban masses completed. George Rawick introduced to us the notion of self-activity. After his twenty volumes of the Slave Narratives, it was impossible not to think of the slave as a historical actor. Walter Rodney always held forth the supreme example of the scholar, theorist, and activist. He urged a “radical break with the international capitalist system.” The African American tradition of history from below, necessarily concerned with slavery and its abolition, adopted an Atlantic perspective.

  A strength of English history from below was a notion of the working class that was theoretically deep and historically specific, such as E. P. Thompson provided in The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The specificity brought a methodological corollary—archival discovery. Because the ruling class has been the keeper of the archive, documents “must be held up to a satanic light and read backwards,” wrote Thompson. A second strength of the Anglo tradition of history from below was its emphasis on alternative ideas to those of the dominating class. Of the radical ideas of the English Revolution described by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down (1972), those that have signified most to us have been antinomianism and the commons. Indeed we originally conceived this book as a way to link these two famous studies, by Hill and Thompson, respectively, and to explore the era between the 1640s and the 1790s.

  In America, Brecht’s poem had the declaratory effect of a manifesto. Jesse Lemisch abridged “A Worker Reads History” to begin his 1968 essay “The American Revolution as Seen from the Bottom Up.” Herbert G. Gutman and his colleagues at the American Social History Project used the poem to introduce and name their two-volume history of workers in America, Who Built America? (1989). This history from below challenged the Cold War’s chronicle of great men, championed the inclusion of diverse historical subjects, and cracked the conservative consensus that was dominant in American historical writing. In remarks made at Kent State University in 1998, Staughton Lynd said he relied on “oral history from the bottom up” to explain that the “history of poor and working people is a history of dreams, of reaping, of unexpected divinity, and of memorable death.”

  These traditions have tended, as Paul Gilroy notes, to be volkish in their approaches, whether Afrocentric, Anglocentric, or “American exceptionalist.” They have been found wanting, first, for parochialism or insularity; second, for disregarding the wageless; and third, for privileging Protestantism and neglecting the struggles of Catholic workers. They tend in some incarnations to be “histories from the lower middle up,” concentrating on artisans and people of small property. Production not reproduction was their sphere, so questions were raised by the women’s movement and the new history it demanded. We also drew on liberation theology, a vital and largely Hispanic approach to history and politics from below.

  Some of these questions we posed in our earlier work, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987) and The London Hanged (1991), whose similarity is expressed by the proverb “The sea and the gallows refuse none.” The former book analyzed the struggles of sailors and port workers, providing an alternative to the artisanal labor history of the nineteenth century and moving the history of the proletariat back to an earlier time of capitalism. The latter book expatiated on the criminalization that was a necessary complement to the waging of labor. Both books concerned the uprooted. We crossed the Atlantic in opposite directions. Marcus had been in Philadelphia, where social history meant not history from below but social science, so he crossed eastward to refresh himself at the fountain of English radical historians. Peter, satiated by a long draught from the cup of Anglotude, crossed westward to search for groundings in the black revolution. We met and shared a determination to study and learn from C. L. R. James. We discovered that our passage was part of a long-standing historical pattern from America to England and back, via the Caribbean.

  The book had its beginning in the period 1979–1981, when Margaret Thatcher had already begun to attack British steelworkers and miners, and Ronald Reagan America’s air-traffic controllers. Union busting was the order of the day as free-market, neoliberal policies were unleashed upon the planet. Various struggles from below—in Brixton, Philadelphia, Long Kesh prison, and Central America—were on our minds as we organized a conference through the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the goals of “The World Turned Upside Down: Working People in England and America, 1660–1790” was to discover continuities and connections between peoples’ movements that had been artificially separated by nationalist histories.

  Over the next twenty years we found in the historical records that we studied an arresting number and variety of references to Hercules and the many-headed Hydra, a variant of a near-universal combat myth in which a demigod fights a monstrous enemy, defeats chaos, and creates nomos, or social order. Classically educated Atlantic rulers used the metaphor of Hercules battling the Hydra to explain to themselves their bloody, historic project of building a new capitalist economy. We wondered how did the metaphor work in the early modern Atlantic, and what did the heads of the hydra mean? How would we interpret them? Did they express the evolving division of labor? the producers of different commodities? the practitioners of different skills? the workers of different regions? Or did they stand for different creatures of gender, of race, of ethnicity, of geography, or of type or of species? The first interpretation suggested an economistic hydra, roughly parallel to the social division of labor among various workers. The second interpretation led to a biological hydra, a taxonomy of diverse organisms. The forme
r had undertones of class, the latter of race. The ambiguity would prove useful.

  We found that the hydra heads did not often share “class” consciousness, certainly not of the class “for itself.” And if they were not class conscious, neither were they race conscious, gender conscious, or nation conscious to any advanced degree. The heads were not always coherent: they snarled at one another with red-eyed rage and sometimes they bit. They also talked, as people will. These were the wild men and rimers of Ireland with their glib and mantle plucking the forbidden harp string; the obstinate craftsman of London with tankard and tool singing a ballad under the Tyburn tree; the skilled hunting, surfing teenager shivering with unknown companions on the middle passage preserving and creating deep, percussive rhythms of home; the lined countenance of the wise woman and healer entering trances with her keening and lullaby; the chained men and boys spirited away with the glinty-eyed former commoner singing a Jubilee hymn; the Jamaican maroon in the bush and the cockpits studying the Englishman and signaling by conch. Slowly, what began as a metaphor became a concept: the hydra allowed us to consider the mobile histories of such people, each in relation to the other, and to discover surprising connections. The second labor of Hercules became a way of exploring the vast class struggle.

  In analyzing the Putney Debates, a high point of the English Revolution, we followed Colonel Thomas Rainsborough in emphasizing the historic connection between the subsistence and relative autonomy of the commons on the one hand and the violence and terror of expropriation and slavery on the other. These themes found resonance and dissonance among our readers. We pursued both subjects; Peter writing about the long historic struggle over the commons (Magna Carta Manifesto, 2008), Marcus about the long historic struggle over the violence and terror of the slave ship (The Slave Ship, 2007), both in relation to the making of modern capitalism. Against our critics, we are convinced that these twin themes are even more important than we were able to show when we published The Many-Headed Hydra in 2000.

  This book has had a happy life so far. In addition to current or forthcoming translations into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, the book has had an impact in South Africa, among both researchers and activists, and in India, where a “pirated” edition circulated through Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. It has found friends in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica. It has inspired and influenced art (Mike Nelson’s The Delivery and the Patience and the Otolith Group’s Hydra Decapita), music (from folk to electronic to punk), fiction (Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, among other novels), and drama (Paul Zimet’s Belize and John F. Levin’s 1741). It anticipated and helped advance a major new trend in historical scholarship over the past decade: the turn from national to transnational, oceanic, and global history. It has also played a role in various movements from below, ranging from antiglobalization and the campaign against the death penalty to the struggle to reclaim the commons and Occupy. The artistic and the political came together in an exhibition called Hydrarchy, which opened in London in 2010 and in Cairo in 2012.

  Brecht’s worker ends his poem by saying that history from below raises “so many particulars” and poses “so many questions.” Nothing makes us happier than to know that scholars and activists, artists and musicians, novelists and poets and dramatists are providing the former and asking the latter. They inevitably encounter resistance from above as they do so. It is true, our book has not been burnt, though it has been confiscated at an international border, and we’re proud that it occupied a place, albeit briefly, near Wall Street in the People’s Library of Zuccotti Park, before the mayor of New York and his myrmidons cleared it away in sanitation trucks to dump in the river. The hydra has always been an aquatic creature, and we are confident that its many heads will rise again.

  Introduction

  WITH RACHEL CARSON, let us first look from above: “The permanent currents of the ocean are, in a way, the most majestic of her phenomena. Reflecting upon them, our minds are at once taken out from the earth so that we can regard, as from another planet, the spinning of the globe, the winds that deeply trouble its surface or gently encompass it, and the influence of the sun and moon. For all these cosmic forces are closely linked with the great currents of the ocean, earning for them the adjective I like best of all those applied to them—the planetary currents.” The planetary currents of the North Atlantic are circular. Europeans pass by Africa to the Caribbean and then to North America. The Gulf Stream then at three knots moves north to the Labrador and Arctic currents, which move eastward, as the North Atlantic Drift, to temper the climates of northwestern Europe.

  At Land’s End, the westward foot of England, break waves whose origins lie off the stormy coast of Newfoundland. Some of these breakers may even be traced to the coast of Florida and the West Indies. For centuries fishermen on the lonely shores of Ireland have been able to interpret these long Atlantic swells. The power of an ocean wave is directly related to the speed and duration of the wind that sets it in motion, and to the “length of its fetch,” or the distance from its point of origin. The longer the fetch, the greater the wave. Nothing can stop these long waves. They become visible only at the end, when they rise and break; for most of their fetch the surface of the ocean is undisturbed. In 1769, Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin noted that packets from Falmouth took about two weeks longer to reach New York than merchant ships took to sail from Rhode Island to London. In talking to Nantucket whalers, he learned about the Gulf Stream: the fishermen and the whales kept out of it, while the English captains stemmed the current, “too wise to be counselled by simple American fishermen.” He drew up some “Maritime Observations” in 1786, and with these the chart of the Gulf Stream was published in America.

  The circular transmission of human experience from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back again corresponded to the same cosmic forces that set the Atlantic currents in motion, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the merchants, manufacturers, planters, and royal officials of northwestern Europe followed these currents, building trade routes, colonies, and a new transatlantic economy. They organized workers from Europe, Africa, and the Americas to produce and transport bullion, furs, fish, tobacco, sugar, and manufactures. It was a labor of Herculean proportions, as they themselves repeatedly explained.

  The classically educated architects of the Atlantic economy found in Hercules—the mythical hero of the ancients who achieved immortality by performing twelve labors—a symbol of power and order. For inspiration they looked to the Greeks, for whom Hercules was a unifier of the centralized territorial state, and to the Romans, for whom he signified vast imperial ambition. The labors of Hercules symbolized economic development: the clearing of land, the draining of swamps, and the development of agriculture, as well as the domestication of livestock, the establishment of commerce, and the introduction of technology. Rulers placed the image of Hercules on money and seals, in pictures, sculptures, and palaces, and on arches of triumph. Among English royalty, William III, George I, and George II’s brother, the “Butcher of Culloden,” all fancied themselves Hercules.1 John Adams, for his part, proposed in 1776 that “The Judgment of Hercules” be the seal for the new United States of America.2 The hero represented progress: Giambattista Vico, the philosopher of Naples, used Hercules to develop the stadial theory of history, while Francis Bacon, philosopher and politician, cited him to advance modern science and to suggest that capitalism was very nearly divine.

  These same rulers found in the many-headed hydra an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism. The second labor of Hercules was the destruction of the venomous hydra of Lerna. The creature, born of Typhon (a tempest or hurricane) and Echidna (half woman, half snake), was one in a brood of monsters that included Cerberus, the three-headed dog, Chimera, the lion-headed goat with a snake’s tail, Geryon, the triple-bodied giant, and Sphinx, the woman with a lion’s body. When He
rcules lopped off one of the hydra’s heads, two new ones grew in its place. With the help of his nephew Iolaus, he eventually killed the monster by cutting off a central head and cauterizing the stump with a flaming branch. He then dipped his arrows in the gall of the slain beast, which gave his projectiles fatal power and allowed him to complete his labors.

  Hercules and Iolaus slaying the Lernean Hydra, Eritrian amphora, C. 525 B.C. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

  From the beginning of English colonial expansion in the early seventeenth century through the metropolitan industrialization of the early nineteenth, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labor. They variously designated dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban laborers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves as the numerous, ever-changing heads of the monster. But the heads, though originally brought into productive combination by their Herculean rulers, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against those rulers, from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution. Like the commodities they produced, their experience circulated with the planetary currents around the Atlantic, often eastward, from American plantations, Irish commons, and deep-sea vessels back to the metropoles of Europe.

  In 1751 J.J. Mauricius, an ex-governor of Suriname, returned to Holland, where he would write poetic memoirs recollecting his defeat at the hands of the Saramaka, a group of former slaves who had escaped the plantations and built maroon communities deep in the interior jungle, and who now defended their freedom against endless military expeditions designed to return them to slavery:

  There you must fight blindly an invisible enemy