i went to alex's surprise birthday up at snowden on the weekend. as he is obsessed with everything pirate, the theme was set. not having any pirate attire of my own, i instead wore shiny-pink pants and bought a paper-mache parrot at the dollar store. actually, it was a budgerigar, but maybe i'm short enough that it just looked like a small parrot (probably not though...). but it did sit quite nicely on my shoulder.
like many montreal apartments, alex's is maze-like. it looks tiny from the front entrance, but rooms open onto room in a dizzying array enhanced by montreal hip-kids walking around in skeleton costumes and eye-patches and rrrrrrum punch. midway through my second glass eric told me he had ms. in the maze-like apartment, trapped between two hallways leading seemingly to nowhere i followed my own path back to my own father's death from ms 11 years ago. i hate thinking about it. but eric looks great. and talking about the special privilege of the already-dead, the still-alive, those of us granted extra life through artificial means at a party for pirates... it was delicious.
but back to pirates.
the following is an exceprt from a paper written by my colleague lily cho, at the university of western ontario. the full paper is downloadeable
here, and was presented at the most recent
cacs (canadian association of culture studies) conference in hamilton, ontario. lily's argument with regard to Black Atlantic studies, Aisian diaspora and indentured labour, mutiny, and the shadowy borders of piracy on the Atlantic has stuck with me. questioning the trope/stereotype of Chinese coolie labour as passive and docile, lily examines instances of mutiny and piracy that instead speak to a murky history of Chinese piracy, a parallel between Asian and Black diaspora studies, and an agency hetetofore overlooked, or overwritten in mainstream history....
"1866. Somewhere between South China and Callao, Peru. The ship is on fire. There are 650 Chinese indentured labourers in the hold who have started the fire in a desperate attempt to seize the ship. The crew cannot put out the fire because they had placed tarps over the hatch in an attempt to suffocate the mutineers and every time they lifted the tarp to pour water into the hold, they accidentally created a huge backdraft which only worsens the fire. Eventually, the crew abandoned ship leaving the hatches locked and everyone inside the ship’s hold to burn alive....
The Napoleon Canavero was originally named the White Falcon. It was built in Pittston Massachusetts in 1853 and was one of the fastest clipper ships of its time. It was mainly used on the trade routes between China and the west Coast of South America. It momentarily disappeared in 1859 when it left Callao for Hampton Roads with a load of guano. It was found in 1862 ashore at Foo Chow in South China “being floated with the loss of a portion of keel” (Howe 693). Had this ship already survived one mutiny? What had happened between 1859 and 1862 and how did it end up in China when it was last seen in Peru? But I am getting ahead of myself – these are questions we will come back to. The White Falcon was docked and repaired at Hong Kong and then sent to Manila. It was sold in 1864 for $28 000 to Cana Vero and Co. of Lima, became a Peruvian ship and renamed the Napoleon Canavero. She was then put into the service of what is euphemistically called the China trade until she burned with the screams of those trapped in her hold echoing in the guilty ears of the crew who escaped.....
.... According to reports compiled from newspapers at the time and a number of secondary histories, one out of eleven coolie ships mutinied. It was not unheard of for the crews of entire ships to resign upon learning that they would be sailing a coolie ship because the dangers of these voyages -- the potential for mutiny was so common. Persia Crawford Campbell notes that “[c]oolie-voyages to South America become so risky that in August, 1852, though large contracts were in the market, no vessels could be procured for shipment” (97). I am haunted by the stories of these ships, burning in unknown waters with hundreds of the already dispossessed burning alive locked in the hold. I want to find a way of understanding their resistance as neither futile nor naïve. Yes, these were desperate acts. But surely, just as there is still no end to the desperation which unhomes hundreds of thousands of people every year, then acts of resistance do no simply end with the terror of those did in the hold.
One glimmer of possibility lies in re-orienting our understanding of coolie subjectivity and following the history of some ships that really do seem to have disappeared. While there are records of ships that have burned at the hands of mutinying indentured labourers, there are also records of ships that have simply seemingly disappeared. If you think about it, this doesn’t make sense. Usually, some member of the crew survives to tell the tale. Ships are vast objects and do not simply disappear. One possibility then would be to read in these disappearances the possibility of successful mutinies.
One of the most fascinating parts of the indenture archive is the occasionally slippage which occurs between coolie subjectivity and pirate subjectivity. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, there are moments where we get a sense of the intermingling between pirates and coolies, of pirates infiltrating the barracoons where coolies would be imprisoned prior to sailing, of pirates leading ship board mutinies on indenture ships, of coolies and pirates as being one and the same. The slippage in this language around piracy and indenture captures a fascinating area of ambivalence between these terms. As the work of historians such as Dian Murray and Marcus Rediker suggests, many pirate communities can often be understood as anti-colonial and anti-capitalist communities made of the desperate and the dispossessed. While there are relatively few records of coolie rebellion in the imperial archive, there is a vast record of piratical activity and the fight to suppress piracy along the very coastal towns from which coolie labour was recruited. Maybe, just maybe, what the British called piracy and terrorism in the nineteenth century would be what a diaspora critic might now call agency. This is a possibility that I am hoping to explore."
