Profs and Pints Online presents: “Portrait of the Pirate Captain Morgan,” a look at the real figure's legendary life and troubling legacy, with John Donoghue, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago who researches colonial piracy and teaches a class on the subject.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Captain Henry Morgan ranks as the world’s best-known but most misunderstood pirate.

In today's American popular culture he cuts a striking figure, portrayed as a charming rogue daring us to partake in the brand of rum that bears his name. Known in his own day as Sir Henry Morgan, he certainly downed more than his share of rum in the taverns of Port Royal, Jamaica, the pirate capital of the Caribbean.

The historical Henry Morgan, however, was much more than a legendary drinker. He was the most successful and innovative military leader in British colonial history, and he helped Britain overtake Spain as the dominant imperial power in the Caribbean. He did it by managing to transform a ragged band of buccaneers into the most potent military force in the Caribbean. Based in Jamaica and Tortuga, they laid waste to the port cities of Spanish America and stole a fortune in silver and gold—as well as thousands of slaves who had been serving under Spanish masters. Port Royal soon became one of the richest spots on earth, and Jamaica was well on its way to becoming the British Empire’s most profitable plantation colony by the time Morgan died in 1688.

The irony is that the buccaneers, men who became pirates after escaping different forms of forced labor, helped make Jamaica one of the harshest slave societies in world history, if not the harshest of them all. The Captain’s legendary image of spirited freedom thus stands in tension with a form of piracy deeply intertwined with the history of human bondage.

Profs & Pints Online: Portrait of the Pirate Captain Morgan