The crew carries on, raiding merchant ships belonging to various corporate entities and rousing the fear and anger of the governments that those corporations conspire with. John Gwin is elected leader of the crew and they sail forth after freeing the human cargo under the name the Night Rambler. The abuse of the crew by the Captain James Skinner forecasts the captain’s death and the takeover of the ship by its crew. The rest of the story involves a fugitive slave who fins himself an indentured sailor named John Gwin on a slave ship owned by the Royal African Company. Whether Rediker's marxist leanings give him special insight or a special blindness is up to the reader-this review suspects it has given him a little of both.The story here begins with the hanging of a pirate, who his fellows note remained defiant until the end. Yet, he admirably shows how easily it was for a sailor to blur the line between legal and illegal plunder with a set of "Sailor knew" propositions. It appears either lost on or unimportant to Rediker that this uncertainty would have patently stunted output and caused distress for any other wage earner in a time fraught with recession he admits that pirates had an impact on shipping but never follows the trail of hardship created by the pirates. While he deftly points out the meaning behind pirate violence (of which there are more original accounts than accounts of abuse by the Captains that supposedly "made the pirates"), he never takes on the economic uncertainty that was created by the large-scale thefts. As brilliant as their story is told, Rediker ignores what was lost. Rediker, a labor historian influenced by White, Hill and other communist writers, identifies class conflict (what a surprise, is there any other valid context for a socialist/marxist historian?) as the underpinnings of pirate formation and concepts of justice. This book might be one of the more entertaining histories written, it is also decidedly Marxist.
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