Little is known about the life of Alexander-Olivier Exquemelin, aside from what is divulged in his own memoir. Originally from Honfleur, Exquemelin left France as an indentured servant with the French West India Company on 2 May 1666.⁹ Upon arrival on the island of Tortuga, off the coast of Saint Domingue, he was condemned to harsh agricultural work before the governor, Bertrand d’Ogeron (1613-1676), intervened on his behalf, arranging for Exquemelin to be bought by a surgeon, for whom he worked for a year. Once he was able to buy his freedom, Exquemelin joined the buccaneer settlement on Tortuga, where he worked as a barber-surgeon for several multicultural pirate crews, from 1668 to 1674. In 1674, he enlisted as chief surgeon on a Dutch warship which left for a campaign in the Antilles against the colonies of France, then at war with the Dutch Republic.¹⁰ Due to his Reformed faith, instead of returning to France – where Louis xiv was decreeing increasingly discriminatory measures to reduce the freedoms granted to the Huguenots under the 1598 Edict of Nantes – Exquemelin moved to Amsterdam, where he passed the exams to join the surgeon’s guild on 26 October 1679.¹¹ Amsterdam at the time was the centre of the publishing industry in Europe, producing almost half of its books while developing the most advanced sales techniques for printed materials of the period.¹² It was here that he wrote the account of his experiences as a buccaneer which has become the standard-bearer of all pirate literature, both factual and fictional: De Americaensche Zee-Roovers.

The book was first published by the Amsterdam printer and bookseller Jan Claesz. ten Hoorn (1639-1715). The original manuscript, unfortunately long lost, was most likely written in French before it was translated into Dutch and substantially edited by ten Hoorn.¹³ It is probable that ten Hoorn exercised significant influence over both the content and form of the book, and that he was in charge of its distribution and afterlife, negotiations with booksellers and censors, handling finances, supplies, shipments, and publicity.¹⁴ After its original release in Dutch in 1678, the volume was translated into German in 1679, Spanish in 1681, English in 1684, and subsequently back into French in 1686. It was an immediate and widespread success, although its veracity was continuously called into question. With every new translation and edition, the text underwent significant changes, with vocabulary and stories being supplemented and substituted based on the intended readership.¹⁵ The French edition is likely more faithful to the original manuscript than ten Hoorn’s Dutch translation: it is significantly longer than the Dutch edition, and focuses more on natural history, geography, and biological curiosities than on the adventures of the pirates.¹⁶ There were two notable English editions published in 1684, by the competing printers Thomas Malthus and William Crooke. As I will analyse later in this essay, the textual content as well as the illustrations of both English editions differ substantially from the Dutch version.

The first Dutch edition of the book contains many engravings by the artist Herman Padtbrugge (1656-1686). Although there is limited information available about him, it is known that his father, Denys Padtbrugge, was also an engraver, who left Amsterdam for Stockholm in 1663, later bringing his sons to join him in 1669. It was in Sweden that Herman’s career as a draughtsman first took off: he obtained several notable positions, including one with the Antikvitetskollegium, the Swedish historical society.¹⁷ In 1676, Herman moved back to Amsterdam, where he began making small copper engravings for Jan ten Hoorn’s widely popular Americana and other travelogues.

These books were printed in large numbers, following a recognizable format with illustrations that were often recycled across the various publications. Sometimes the engravings were adapted to fit their new literary context, but they were often simply reused without any changes. Michiel van Groesen has argued that this indicates not only that accuracy was increasingly sacrificed in order to cut costs, but that from ten Hoorn’s perspective, all of these books on the Atlantic world also belonged in the same category.¹⁸ Jan ten Hoorn’s Americana were characterised by his adoption of a standard formula: adventure narratives written in the vernacular, organised into concise chapters, and augmented throughout with illustrations by Padtbrugge and Jan Luyken (1649-1712), another local engraver who also often collaborated with ten Hoorn.¹⁹ Exquemelin’s memoir was by no means ten Hoorn’s first book dealing with piracy, as, for example, his edition of Lambert van den Bos’s Leeven en daden der doorluchtighste zee-helden (Lives and Achievements of the Most Illustrious Naval Heroes, 1676) included descriptions and portraits of Barbary pirates, as I will discuss below. Ten Hoorn would also go on to publish Pieter Dan’s Historie van Barbaryen en des zelfs Zee-Roovers (History of Barbary and its Pirates) in 1684. These fearsome portrayals of Barbary pirates were not unusual for the time: this sort of image sometimes accompanied captivity narratives and other travel accounts popular in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam.²⁰ Rather, ten Hoorn’s publication of Exquemelin’s memoir combined various existing publication models, including captivity narratives set in the Mediterranean and collective biographies, in order to illustrate Caribbean piracy for the first time.

It is likely Padtbrugge produced all of the thirteen engravings used in ten Hoorn’s De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, including the frontispiece, possibly in collaboration with Luyken. Only two of the engravings were signed, both by Padtbrugge (figs. 11 and 12). The illustrations include two maps: one view of the city of Maracaibo and its surroundings, another of the city of Panama and its vicinity. Six plates depict battle scenes: the attack on Portobello by Henry Morgan and his forces (fig. 11); a pirate attack seen from the sea (fig. 9); a scene of pirates tormenting townspeople in a forest setting; another two plates depicting sieges of unspecified towns; and an illustration in two parts displaying Morgan’s fight against the Spaniards in Panama City, as the town burns. The final four plates consist of portraits of some of the main characters of the narrative: the pirates François L’Olonnais, ‘Rock’ the Brazilian, Bartolomeu Português, and Sir Henry Morgan. Despite their fame – or notoriety – they are the only existing contemporary likenesses of these historical figures. It is unclear why ten Hoorn chose to highlight these four figures out of the multitude of buccaneers described in Exquemelin’s narrative. It is also notable that other characters mentioned in the text are not portrayed. The selection of pirates represented do coincide with the book’s narrative, suggesting the portraits were made especially to serve as illustrations for Exquemelin’s publication. The accuracy of these portraits is impossible to ascertain as there are no surviving earlier illustrations on which the engraver could have based the likenesses, but they provide a face to the characters in Exquemelin’s narrative, enabling readers to visualise the exciting tales of danger and debauchery at the other side of the Atlantic.

In order to understand the ways in which Padtbrugge conveys the liminality of his subjects stylistically in the four portraits, it is important to first place them within the text they illustrated. In De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, Exquemelin intersperses the story of his own adventures with geographic and botanical descriptions of the places he visited – the island of Tortuga, Cuba, and Panama – and with tales about some of the most renowned and dreaded pirate captains at the time. He describes the quotidian existence of buccaneers, providing insight into their organisation and customs. Exquemelin relates in detail events which he witnessed first-hand, including the sack of Panama City and the battle of Maracaibo by Sir Henry Morgan, which occurred while he was a member of his crew. He also recounts raids in which he would not have been able to participate, such as the atrocities committed by François L’Olonnais in Honduras. In order to establish his authorial credibility, Exquemelin relies paradoxically on his familiarity with, yet also distance from the buccaneers as ship’s surgeon.²¹ His unique social position enabled him to be close enough to observe the events first-hand, but he is careful to distance himself from these criminal actions, so as to not tarnish his own character as a humble and respectable witness to history.²²

Richard Frohock has argued that Exquemelin accelerated a public dialogue about buccaneers and imperial plundering due to his dark depiction of the colonial world as a place where corruption was ubiquitous, and pirates were not mere ‘devilish rebels operating in the interstices between official colonialisms’, but came to stand for ‘broader, systemic, imperial evils’.²³ To Exquemelin, pirates like Henry Morgan not only exceeded regulatory measures, but embodied the brutality and duplicity of colonial policy in the region. He characterised buccaneers as executors of divine punishment for the crimes perpetrated by the conquistadors, thus creating a coherent narrative out of the seemingly senseless brutality and suggesting that there was a just force at play behind the chaos and cruelty of the Caribbean world.²⁴ State-sanctioned violence was foundational to the colonial system, resulting in the near-extermination of indigenous Caribbean peoples and the brutal transatlantic slave trade. Thus, the brutality of the buccaneers was not an anomaly. Exquemelin’s critique of state-sanctioned violence comes together to form a subtle, but pointed, indictment of the English empire in particular. He was especially critical of the aid given to Henry Morgan by Sir Thomas Modyford, the governor of Jamaica, aid that included legal protection, financial and material assistance, and a port of refuge. Exquemelin’s volume also offered harsh criticism of his fellow buccaneers: their use of indiscriminate violence and their reckless spending. He scornfully dismissed any outward appearance of buccaneer civility and egalitarian codes of conduct as no more than ‘a thin gloss over their extraordinary viciousness’.²⁵ For Exquemelin, guided by his Protestant ethics, pirates were perhaps predominantly guilty of squandering extravagant sums, driven by self-destructive desires. Conversely, with its graphic scenes of sieges and plundering, the illustrations of Exquemelin’s book are characteristic of the violent prints which were popular in the Dutch Republic in the late seventeenth century. Generally featuring violence occurring in distant regions of the earth, these prints ‘allowed for violence to become a theme in its own right: a theme that did not always necessarily supersede, but most certainly co-existed with partisan, religious, and political discourses on violence’.²⁶

The broader historical context of the ambiguous socio-cultural and legal status of the buccaneers, and their zone of operation in the Caribbean, is also key to understanding the iconographic choices made by Padtbrugge in the four portraits. The Caribbean was a space where the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ World collided: in a time where national narratives were beginning to consolidate on the European continent, in the Americas identity and political affiliation were more flexible. Highly influenced by the imagined and idealised vision of the ‘New World’ presented in Americana literature, as a ‘savage’ new realm of infinite potential and freedom, European identity and self-fashioning in the Caribbean was mutable. It is precisely this freedom that has created the lasting cultural appeal of the buccaneers; a group of individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds and social classes working and living together, outside of legal constraints. Exquemelin’s initial description of the buccaneer settlement in Tortuga is almost utopian: a freer society apart from the brutal plantation system which relied on the labour of indentured servants and West African slaves. While historians debate the extent of this egalitarian ethos, it is undeniable that the buccaneers flouted European social hierarchies and judicial norms.²⁷ Mark Hanna has pointed out that piracy has been categorised in scholarship and in novelistic literature as a fixed type with a common ideology, an oversimplification which also spuriously implies that there existed ‘a homogeneous society on land with shared social values and economic or political interests’ and that pirates were somehow completely disconnected from these.²⁸ Nevertheless, this mythologisation and idealisation of buccaneer society has had enormous cultural impact as early as the seventeenth century. Although Exquemelin quickly became disillusioned with this interpretation of buccaneer society, he himself exemplified the potential for social mobility in this context.

Despite increasing comprehension, regulation, and militarization of the maritime domain throughout the seventeenth century, the high seas were still characterised as a freer and more open space than land. However, Lauren Benton has convincingly argued that ‘even as freedom of the seas developed as a legal doctrine, Europeans recognised that ocean space was crisscrossed by corridors of imperial control’.²⁹ Furthermore, although pirates have historically been characterised as anarchic forces, ‘the enemies of all mankind’, as they respect no law and possess no loyalty to a particular group or larger entity, Benton maintains that they actively contributed to the construction of imperial maritime space through their relationships with various sovereigns across the ocean.³⁰ Exquemelin demonstrated how both the buccaneers and colonial administrators alike took advantage of the spatial dynamics of the open seas to move fluidly in and out of different imperial jurisdictions, fluctuating between political, cultural, and commercial affiliations. People were able to transgress boundaries, evade rules, and reinvent themselves as they navigated the chaotic Atlantic world.

Virginia Lunsford has argued that the Caribbean in particular was a liminal space, characterised by murky, fluctuating identities: ‘a place where yesterday’s criminal pirate could become today’s licit and upstanding seaman’.³¹ In the undefined space of the Atlantic world, corruption was rampant. Surviving archival documents from the Dutch West India Company and other authoritative corporations attest to the fact that these criminal activities were occurring endemically at an institutional level and could not simply be attributed to wayward individuals.³² In these distant colonial outposts, the licit and illicit not only co-existed, but were woven together into a synergistic ecosystem.

The privateer and pirate of the Golden Age were two facets of one force – ‘an ambiguous, symbolically charged figure who simultaneously incarnated both the glorified hero and the reviled criminal in the eyes of his home culture’, as Lunsford has put it.³³ A privateer was officially commissioned by a state, but if he lacked this licence, he was considered a pirate. This division was further cemented in De iure praedae (On the Law of Prize and Booty, 1604) by Hugo Grotius, considered the founder of modern international law. However, the legal distinction between unlawful pirate and lawful privateer can already be encountered in earlier works, such as Alberico Gentili’s De iure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1598), and even has its roots in classical legal principles and precedents.³⁴ Grotius’s writings concern the law of property, the law of prize and booty, the law of peace and war, and the legal status of sovereignty. In his legal philosophy, the pirate and his ‘legal twin,’ the privateer, were two sides of the same coin; they represent the differentiation between ‘right’ and ‘non right’.³⁵

Despite the strict laws regulating piracy and privateering, many of those who were suspected, accused, or even convicted of piracy faced little to no consequences. They often received gentler penalties than the law stipulated, or they simply were pardoned and permitted to re-join respectable society due to the wealth they brought back home as well as for their contribution to national defences. It must be stressed that a binary division between unlawful piracy and lawful privateering did not exist for the average seventeenth-century witness; they were usually much less interested than we are in attributing legal specificities and moral judgement.³⁶ Guy Chet has pointed out that the distinction is usually much clearer to historians today than it would have been to early modern observers.³⁷ To Exquemelin’s contemporaries, the attribution of the status of evil pirate or naval hero was guided by their own national affiliations; for instance, a captain attacking Spanish galleons could be seen as a hero by the Dutch and a villainous pirate by the Spanish. In the eyes of early modern audiences, the liminality of pirates active in the Caribbean was linked to their status in the cultural imagination rather than their legal standing: it lay in their reputation as swashbuckling adventurers flouting European social norms on the edges of civilisation. Despite their piratical behaviour, Golden Age privateers were institutionalised, and even became the subject of widespread public veneration and idolatry as part of the nationalistic cult of naval heroes.³⁸

The cult of naval heroes that took hold in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic did so in the context of warfare against the Spanish and English, which required sustained military efforts. These popular folk-heroes were portrayed in paintings, books, statues, and funerary monuments as fearless defenders of the young nation, and according to uniform iconographic conventions. Cynthia Lawrence has argued that this iconography combined a variety of Christian and classical motifs to frame these naval officers as heroes, simultaneously a ‘patriotic martyr’ and a ‘secular saint’.³⁹ This tradition used visual symbols to indicate the status and profession of the sitter, including globes, military garb and weapons, maps, medallions, and using seascapes as backdrops.⁴⁰ The status of these national heroes was exploited by a new kind of publication, the ‘collective biographies’ of iconic maritime figures that became popular in the second half of the century.⁴¹ At times these included international navigators, but divisions along national lines were increasingly common in the late seventeenth century.⁴² One of the most famous of these collective biographies, Leeven en daden der doorlughtige zee-helden, was written by one of the first bestselling Dutch authors, Lambert van den Bos (1610-1698). It narrates the lives of the major Dutch admirals from the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century.⁴³ Published in 1676 by Jan ten Hoorn, this book featured engravings by Herman Padtbrugge and Jan Luyken of many famous naval officers, such as the illustrious privateers Piet Heyn and Michiel de Ruyter (figs. 5 and 6). These two portraits feature the resplendently dressed heroes firmly gripping their batons, their broad shoulders filling the frame in an imposing manner, while in the distance ships shrouded in clouds crowd the horizon. These portraits of national heroes are stylistically and formally very similar to Padtbrugge’s portraits of the buccaneers in De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, published only a few months later.

However, despite the striking resemblance, Padtbrugge used specific iconographic markers to indicate that his subjects in De Americaensche Zee-Roovers were pirates, rather than naval heroes. Each of the four portraits in Exquemelin’s book has a practically identical composition: the figure is centred and shown from the waist up, standing on the shore while a battle scene rages in the background. Along the bottom of the page, a framed inscription gives their name and some biographical information. Each figure has a slightly different pose, turned at slightly different angles towards the viewer, and scowling menacingly out of the frame. Only Morgan is shown holding a baton, the other three men are brandishing large broadswords, threatening the reader from the page. This echoes the image of the buccaneers on the frontispiece (fig. 7) who are depicted victoriously stepping on their enemies with their swords raised high, poised to kill. The two victims, one dressed in stereotypical indigenous clothing and the other resembling a generic European gentleman, plead for mercy from under the heeled boots of the unforgiving buccaneers, their mouths twisted in a primal scream.

One can imagine that if you could zoom out from the portrait busts of François l’Olonnais or Rock the Brazilian (figs. 2 and 3) later in the volume, a similar scene could be unfolding. The pirates are dressed not in armour, or with military signifiers such as medallions, but in civilian clothing, of varying degrees of finesse. The noble and serious gaze of the naval hero has been replaced by frowns and furrowed brows. Their mouths curl contemptuously, framed with deep creases, and adorned with swirling moustaches. Their glowering expressions scowl under foreheads heavy with wrinkles. All four stare out at the viewer from the furthest corner of their eye, heightening their shifty appearance. Sideways glances underline the ambiguous moral character of these figures, as it was quite unusual in early modern Western portraiture tradition to depict eyes in this way, without showing the whites of the eyes on either side of the iris.⁴⁴ Although these particular images were specifically created to accompany Exquemelin’s book, it is important to note that the engravings produced for this type of popular publication were often made by imitating and reworking existing prints, a fact which presumably accounts for the uniformity of the compositions. While Padtbrugge depicted both Heyn and Banckert in military garb with weapons on their person, the pirates make a much more aggressive impression because of their drawn swords; they are ready to attack. This visual convention is practically identical to the one used in Ignatius Lux’s double portrait of the Barbary pirates Horusce and Hareaden Barbarossa, included in van den Bos’s Leeven en daden published by ten Hoorn only a few years before in 1676 (fig. 8). Their unsheathed swords and aggressive expressions are a departure from the otherwise mostly conventional naval portraits: they indicate to the viewer that these men are not admirable maritime heroes, but rather vicious rogues destabilising the region.

In the naval portraits that Herman Padtbrugge engraved for Jan ten Hoorn, he places his figures in front of a maritime scene. For the portraits that he completed of the men in Exquemelin’s book, however, the scenes in the background contain battles that occur not only on the high seas but also on land. In his portraits of François L’Olonnais and ‘Rock’ the Brazilian, Padtbrugge departs from the naval battle typically used as a backdrop for naval portraiture, instead featuring a clear depiction of a tropical landscape engulfed in flames. Behind ‘Rock’ the Brazilian, Padtbrugge shows two intricately drawn cavalry regiments charging at each other under clouds of gunpowder smoke, set in a jungle landscape. It is no coincidence that the two figures that Exquemelin characterised as the most morally reprehensible – operating the most blatantly outside of legality and legitimacy – are portrayed on land. The text details many atrocities committed by these two figures: most famously, the ruthless torture practiced by L’Olonnais on his Spanish foes, including eating the heart of one of his victims, as well as the drunken violence of ‘Rock’ the Brazilian, who would threaten to shoot anyone passing by who would not drink with him.⁴⁵

The same phenomenon can be observed when comparing Padtbrugge’s two depictions of naval battles, one for Exquemelin and the other for van den Bos (figs. 9 and 10). In the former, we see a fortress under attack in the lower right corner of the composition, while the battle scene from the collective biography takes place on open water. Daniel Heller-Roazen has noted that land has historically been accorded a privileged position in the law of nations, as opposed to the sea: ‘The seas cannot be cultivated; they lack all stable lines of division; and by nature they do not lend themselves to becoming foundations of stable architectural constructions.’⁴⁶ As already suggested, the high seas were characterised by a greater ambiguity over sovereignty and jurisdiction, in contrast to the more clearly demarcated colonial territories on land: this was sometimes used to justify the pillaging activities of privateers and other military officers. Therefore, by depicting L’Olonnais and ‘Rock’ the Brazilian fighting on land – transgressing the boundaries of acceptable maritime competition and attacking a city, an imperial outpost – Padtbrugge conveys to the viewer that their activities were unambiguously and irredeemably categorised as piracy.

The liminal status of the Caribbean buccaneers is visible in the iconography by Padtbrugge’s combination of the format and conventions of naval portraiture with attributes which symbolise the violent excesses of these characters. These elements are visible both in their menacing physical appearance – their dark countenance, clothing, menacing eyes, and raised weapons – and the contextual elements surrounding them: sinking ships, open flames, and chaotic battle scenes, under billowing clouds of smoke. The manner in which these symbols of extrajudicial violence and moral reprehensibility are combined with the stylistic conventions of the cult of naval heroes evokes the paradox at the heart of the mythology of the pirate: simultaneously a divine punishment and a secular saint – a counter-cultural figure that was inherently embedded in colonial power structures.

Out of the four portraits Herman Padtbrugge completed for De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, the one of Henry Morgan (fig. 1) stands out. While the other three pirates brandish sabres, Morgan instead holds a command staff. This baton was a well-established symbol of power and authority in early modern military portraits, not only in the Netherlandish tradition but throughout European visual culture more broadly.⁴⁷ Princes and admirals were often depicted holding a baton, usually a short wooden staff with two metallic end caps. In addition to his more restrained pose, Morgan’s clothing is noticeably more sumptuous than that of his piratical peers: he wears a sash, conventionally used in naval portraiture of this period to indicate the status of military officers and naval heroes.⁴⁸ Even his expression is softer than that of the other pirates: although his brow is still furrowed and his countenance quite dark, the other pirates’ grimaces are more pronounced. These differences come into sharp focus when one compares the portraits of Morgan and L’Olonnais side by side. Morgan’s splendidly dressed figure occupies a larger portion of the frame, obfuscating so much of the naval battle scene unfolding behind him that the shore is barely depicted. In contrast, L’Olonnais presides over an extremely graphic scene of carnage. On his left we can see numerous ships sinking, only their masts remaining above the water; in the foreground we see figures fleeing to shore, clinging to a floating piece of wood. Through this comparison it appears that Padtbrugge was attempting to represent varying levels of evil within the book. Henry Morgan, unlike the others portrayed, mostly worked as a privateer, and was officially enlisted as such with the English colonial administration in Jamaica. On the other hand, François L’Olonnais, ‘Rock’ the Brazilian, and Bartolomeu Português had operated primarily as buccaneers, independent of state-sanctioned interests, despite having their geographic origins incorporated into their names.⁴⁹

Having obtained a privateering commission from the English crown, Morgan issued it in turn ‘to all the ships not already provided with them, permitting all acts of violence against the Spanish dominions […] according to the right of reprisals, as overt enemies of the English crown’.⁵⁰ However, Exquemelin’s account of Morgan’s ruthlessness against the Spanish shows how he far exceeded any mandate he had: ‘Morgan being the general, should have set a better example, but he was no better than the rest.’ Instead, he left a trail of destruction and pillage, rape, torture, and death in his wake that was in every way equal to that of an unlicensed pirate.⁵¹ Exquemelin’s descriptions of Morgan’s exploits alternate between characterising him as a shrewd and authoritative military commander and as a barbaric buccaneer leader. He writes that Morgan was ‘a man as merciless to the Spaniards as l’Olonnais had been, but more successful in his enterprises’.⁵² One example is his treatment of a merchant’s wife imprisoned in Panama, whom he torments and starves as retribution for her chaste refusal of his advances. Another example of his ruthlessness can be seen in his overseeing of the violent torture and murder of innocent civilians, including a ‘poor innocent simpleton’ in the pursuit of booty and ransom for his own personal gain, that far exceeded his official duties as a privateer.⁵³ However, as Mark Hanna points out, seventeenth-century audiences would likely not have interpreted Morgan’s behaviour as particularly excessive, but rather as generally within the boundaries of acceptable conduct as a privateer in service of the Crown in the colonial periphery.⁵⁴

Originally from Wales, Sir Henry Morgan (c. 1635-1688) rose to prominence and amassed significant wealth primarily through his raids on Spanish colonial holdings in the Caribbean and West Indies on behalf of the English colony of Jamaica. These exploits not only bolstered Morgan’s own finances, but also degraded and destabilised the infrastructure of rival colonial power Spain. In fact, his crew seized so many Spanish coins during the 1668 raid on Porto Bello that they became legal currency in Jamaica.⁵⁵ The nature and legality of Morgan’s famously brutal activities in the region – primarily against the Spanish – have often been called into question. Although Morgan’s crew had previously operated with official support from the Jamaican governor Sir Thomas Modyford during a time of hostilities, Morgan’s 1670-1671 naval campaign in Panama breached privateering codes, as it occurred at a time when Spain and England were officially at peace.⁵⁶ In fact, his siege of Panama proved to be so politically problematic that both Morgan and Modyford were called to London to face trial.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, Morgan was treated by the English court as an overzealous naval hero who had exceeded his commission, and exonerated. He subsequently received a knighthood and was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. However, by the time the English translations of Exquemelin’s book appeared in 1684, Morgan had been removed from the Jamaican government due to partisanship and his own indiscretions.

It is important to note that most of what we know about Morgan’s biography is drawn from Exquemelin’s memoir, which was disputed by Morgan himself and at least one contemporary account. One of the only sources contradicting Exquemelin’s account was The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharp and others in the South Sea, published by the London printer Philip Ayres in direct response to Malthus’s book, and which sought to ‘in some measure rescue the Honour of that incomparable Souldier and Seaman [i.e., Sir Henry Morgan], from the Hands of such as would load him with the blackest infamy’.⁵⁸ Other extant sources chronicle his raids, including most significantly the siege of Panama, from a Spanish perspective. Historian Peter Earle has cross-examined these various sources in order to piece together the circumstances surrounding the 1671 raid, concluding that although Exquemelin certainly witnessed the brutal raid, his harsh portrayal of Morgan may have been coloured by his anger at receiving a much smaller share of the booty than expected.⁵⁹

These differing contemporary accounts of Morgan’s character speak to the liminal nature of his activities at the far reaches of imperial space. Indeed, the tension between his characterisation in the various editions of Exquemelin’s book – as well as other publications – as both an upstanding civil servant and a criminal aggressor led to a legal dispute back in England. In early 1685, a year after the appearance of the two English translations of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America, Morgan’s attorney, John Greene, filed a libel lawsuit against the London publisher Thomas Malthus and threatened rival printer William Crooke with similar action. In his suit, Green portrayed his client as feeling ‘politically and even physically threatened’ and contested specific excerpts from Exquemelin’s book, including biographical details about Morgan and his operations on Jamaica’s behalf, as well as his association with buccaneers and activities outside the realm of ‘legitimate’ privateering.⁶⁰ While Crooke quickly settled out of court, Green won his case against Malthus, who was forced to pay damages to the plaintiff. In spite of this legal victory, which created an important precedent for libel law in England, Morgan’s public image was never rehabilitated and he was unable to control his literary legacy as ‘the paradoxical emblem of the violence that drives empire forward’.⁶¹

Although it was engraved years before the libel suit, Padtbrugge’s portrait of Henry Morgan reflects the ambiguous character of his subject. While this engraving borrowed conventions reserved for official military personnel and naval heroes, several aspects of its composition indicate to the viewer that the figure portrayed trod the fine line between licit privateering and illicit piracy. These subtle differences become clearer when one compares Padtbrugge’s portrayal of Henry Morgan with his engraving of another famous privateer, Piet Heyn (fig. 5), completed two years previously in Leeven en daden. Both publications, which were printed by Jan ten Hoorn, feature a similar rhetoric, though one was a collective biography of historical naval heroes, and the other a memoir condemning piracy and colonial activity in the Caribbean. Ten Hoorn’s ‘Preface from the Bookseller to the Reader’ in De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, dated 1 September 1678, states that the ‘brave enterprises and courageous expeditions of the most famous pirates’ were no less impressive than the feats of the old naval heroes, who were the subject of the cult he had helped popularise by publishing the Leeven en daden. Indeed, the similarities between the two books are even more substantial, since ten Hoorn reused two engravings of Barbary pirate raids in Tunis made by Padtbrugge for the Leeven en daden, to accompany the description of Henry Morgan’s attacks of Portobello and Maracaibo (figs. 11 and 12). Ten Hoorn reused these illustrations without making any changes to the plates. For example, we notice the turbans worn by the assailants meant to identify them as Barbary pirates (fig. 12). Piet Heyn, one of the most legendary Dutch naval heroes, is best known for his capture of a Spanish silver fleet off the coast of Havana in 1628 as well as his instrumental role in the Dutch invasion of Brazil. In both editions of the Leeven en daden, Padtbrugge’s copper engraving (fig. 13) immortalised the capture of Forte do Mar and the conquest of Bahia led by Heyn, which ushered in decades of Dutch presence in Brazil. This image reinforced Heyn’s canonical status, prolonged the collective memory of these events, and promoted nationalist narratives of naval heroism in the Dutch Republic.

Padtbrugge’s portraits of Morgan and Heyn have many similarities: from their identical pose holding the baton in their left hand, their fine costume complete with a sash, and the background featuring a maritime battle scene. However, subtle yet consequential disparities in their portrayal distinguish between the respective position and status of each subject. Firstly, their costumes reveal their temporal separation: Heyn sports a ruff around his neck, an indication that he was active in the early seventeenth century, while Morgan is pictured wearing a cravat, which displaced the lace collar as the dominant form of neckwear in the 1670s. Heyn is portrayed with a medallion on his chest, pointing to his status as a naval hero and his official affiliation with the emerging Dutch nation. Both men are shown in three-quarter view, but Heyn gazes directly out at the viewer, while Morgan peers out sideways. The most striking difference between the two portraits is that Morgan is shown in front of a much more graphic and brutal naval battle: clouds of smoke billow out from a mass of sinking ships, as figures are thrown into the water below. In comparison the maritime scene behind Heyn occupies about half as much space as that of Morgan. Surrounded by a clement sky, Heyn appears to command much more authority over the naval scene below him. By using almost identical pictorial conventions in his representations of Morgan and Heyn, Padtbrugge is indicating to the viewers that Henry Morgan had legally worked as a British privateer and was more respectable than some of his peers. However, the engraver complicates this image by adding visual references to his extrajudicial piratical activities in the form of shipwrecks in the water around him. Although these ships engulfed in flames and shrouded in smoke on the open water are less graphically violent than the images of sieges on land upon which the other three portraits from Exquemelin’s book are set, they are still much less peaceful than the maritime scene in Heyn’s portrait. Despite maritime violence being permissible within the legal parameters of a privateering commission, the explicit depiction of naval aggression and plunder as a backdrop to Morgan’s portrait as opposed to the tranquil commercial fleet behind the figure of Piet Heyn effectively conveys the greater ambiguity of Morgan’s activities in the Caribbean. Padtbrugge’s subtle iconographical differences illustrate the blurred lines between piracy and privateering in the socio-cultural imagination, as well as the legal definition, in the early modern Atlantic.

In Exquemelin’s book, as well as in European society more broadly, the attribution of the legitimising privateering label was guided by nationalist motives. Those characterised as pirates were primarily foreigners, while the perception of Dutch pirates was more nuanced, reflecting a liminal status of which the public was both aware and tolerated.⁶² The English versions of the book reflect this dynamic: in both text and image they portray ‘Sir’ Henry Morgan as more respectable than those French, Portuguese, or Brazilian pirates. William Crooke’s Buccaneers of America (1684) contains engravings by an anonymous artist based on those by Padtbrugge. The portrait-bust of Morgan (fig. 14) is largely unchanged, inviting readers to imagine Morgan’s destructive activities in the region. In Crooke’s edition, Morgan’s face is smoother and less severe, framed by longer and looser curls. His moustache is significantly longer and curlier than in Padtbrugge’s version. However, Crooke’s portrait features one very significant alteration from the Dutch original: Morgan’s left hand has been rather clumsily omitted, along with the baton it held. This modification is as notable as it is curious, since it removes the legitimising iconographic marker of naval authority. The omission of this honorific symbol may have been the result of the political controversy surrounding Morgan, which led to his removal from colonial office in 1681. However, by removing the arm altogether instead of simply replacing his baton with a sabre, the image refrains from a direct indictment of Morgan, allowing for some ambiguity, and showing him in a more respectable light than his companion buccaneers.

In his edition, Thomas Malthus moved further in the direction of rehabilitating the image of Morgan. He included fewer illustrations, engraved by Frederick Hendrik van Hove (a Netherlandish artist living in London), which diverged much more from Padtbrugge’s originals (figs. 15 and 16). In Malthus’s edition, Morgan’s portrait is placed on its own page, completely apart from the portraits of the four other buccaneers which were placed together on one plate further along in the book. Despite the significant stylistic differences, the facial features and clothing are similar enough to suggest that it was almost certainly based on the plate from the earlier Dutch edition. Van Hove’s portrayal of Morgan appears gentler, and more genteel, than the other two versions: he resembles less the dreadful pirate than a colonial bureaucrat dressed in the sash of an officer. The background has been completely erased; the naval battle replaced with an ornamental frame. In this version, Morgan’s expression is even more placid than in Cooke’s portrait: his brow is unwrinkled, his eyes are wider, and his sideward gaze less pronounced. His lips seem even to form the faintest of smiles under his jaunty moustache, which echoes the festive curls of the ribbons decorating the frame. In this second English version of the portrait, the baton is again omitted by the much more closely cropped composition. In contrast, the portraits of Rock Brasiliano, François L’Olonnais, Pierre François, and Bartolomeu Português – of Dutch, French, and Portuguese origin, respectively – are much more threatening in appearance. Van Hove depicts them with their swords drawn menacing the viewer, without any of the pomp and ornamentation which frames Morgan. This appears to be a deliberate choice to suggest to the viewer that Morgan (and by extension the English) should not be placed in the same category as the wicked buccaneers of other nationalities.

The extraordinary feats of the motley crew of pirates narrated by Exquemelin became synonymous with the brutality of life at sea and in the colonies. Their stories inspired an extremely successful literary genre of uninhibited adventure which thrived well into the eighteenth century, the legacy of which continues to this day. The larger question of the conspicuous invisibility of piracy in Dutch visual culture relative to its importance in wider society and literary culture merits closer examination. This essay is a first step in that direction, as it has shed light on some of the rare historical portraits of pirates by examining the ways in which their visual representation reflects their ambiguous role in society. The pirate topos embodies the rise of globalisation during this period in myriad ways: a liminal figure, the pirate tested the boundaries of burgeoning national identities and legal frameworks. De Americaensche Zee-Roovers exemplifies the contradictions at the heart of pre-modern globalisation: a former pirate himself, Exquemelin was cosmopolitan and well-travelled, and his treatise had global success, but at the same time, with each translation both text and illustrations were adapted to suit local national narratives and agendas.⁶³ The publication itself was the result of extensive collaboration between the author, engraver, and publisher, and was clearly influenced by the vibrant editorial industry of late seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

A close examination of the portraits of the spirited marauders described in Exquemelin’s memoir reveals the visual strategies used by Padtbrugge to imply the liminal socio-cultural status of these figures who were engaged in pillaging and plundering on the other side of the Atlantic. This essay has drawn a link between both the legal framework and the cultural mythology of piracy and the iconographic qualities of the portraits of these four historical figures: both in their physical attributes – angry scowls, raised weapons, and shifty gazes – and their contextualization – fortresses under siege, burning palm trees, and sinking ships. In an era when magistrates, governors, and officers were working to create regulatory mechanisms for the open sea, a broader cultural perception of the ocean as a wild frontier full of possibility and freedom persisted. The inherent liminality of the early modern buccaneers goes far beyond any juridical label, to the deeper question of their unresolved status between globality and national affiliation at the colonial periphery: they were both integrated into the imperial system, yet operated outside of and against it. This paradox is at the heart of the idealised image of the pirate in literature and in history. The four portraits of pirates discussed in this essay combine the visual conventions of the cult of naval heroes with the terrifying backdrop of a civilisation in flames.