Recruiting Pirates

Have you ever wondered how pirates recruited for their crews? With no human resources department or job agency for wood-be pirates, you might wonder how pirate ships were able to recruit staff. You can just imagine the scene: murderers, thieves and vagabonds heading down to the local seaport in search of a pirate ship that was hiring. While that is not far from the truth, the art of recruiting pirates was far more varied. Read on to find out how pirates used to recruit their motley crews.

Word of mouth

Like many great jobs, word of mouth can be an effective recruitment tool. Whether that means you are recommended to a company or that you are told that a company is recruiting, sometimes the best jobs are found by word of mouth. This was no different during the golden age of pirates. When a pirate captain was looking for new crew, gossip spread and would-be pirates headed for the port.

Pirate by birth

Some children really were born into a life of piracy, and some of these children became the most infamous pirates of their day. Grace O’Malley, for example, inherited her father’s pirate fleet after a youth of learning the ropes. Just as the children of blacksmiths were likely to follow in their parents footsteps, so too were there children who followed their parents into piracy. Easy recruitment.

Escape from slavery

Many slaves who fell into pirate hands were freed and then recruited by their liberators and captors. Hampered by lack of sailing experience few became famed pirates but they made up a large proportion of many a pirate crew. When faced with a life in slavery, a life in free poverty (always fearful of a return to slavery), or a life of piracy… you can see why so many would have joined the ranks of those who killed their captors.

A jobless population

At the very beginning of the Golden Age of piracy, a large number of young men were laid off by their national navies and suddenly found themselves out of work. Often this could mean there were entire crews laid off, officers and normal sailors, who would turn to piracy to make ends meet for their family! In these cases, it was not so much that pirates were recruited but that whole crews joined together to become pirates.

Rogue captains

It was often the case that if a captain turned to piracy his crew would by and large follow his lead. Many officers and captains would have at least a core of loyal followers. Take Ben Hornigold, for example, who, when the wars ran dry, continued to do what he did best (robbing French and Spanish ships) with his most loyal crew members. No need to recruit, his sailors simply followed.

Seeking revenge

 

Some pirates did, of course, join pirate crews for revenge; the Lioness of Brittany, Jeanne de Clisson, vowed revenge when her husband was accused of treason and beheaded by the king of France. She sold her lands to buy three war ships and built a successful career as a pirate (making sure to behead any French nobility she encountered).

Likewise, pirates were often sailors who were badly treated by captains and officers, who became sick of the bad food, the beatings, the sadistic punishments, and the killings. All of this led to a rage that made sailors disregard their careers and futures in order to get payback, and this sudden outburst could become a full blown mutiny.

Recruiting prisoners and kidnapped sailors

Once a ship had been boarded by pirates they would often take the chance to recruit new members with offers of better food, good pay, and revenge against those people who had wronged them. These tempting offers led many a man to sign the papers that made them pirates.

Fake kidnapping

Some sailors would actually approach pirate captains on the low-down to arrange a fake kidnapping so they could plausibly deny that they had been recruited willingly. Pirates were usually happy to comply.

Did you know that these were some of the ways in which pirates recruited to their crews? Let us know what you think in the comments section!

Reference: http://thepirateempire.blogspot.mx/search?updated-max=2017-08-07T20:19:00-07:00&max-results=7