The Reprints

This press takes records nobody owns and nobody can reach, sets them entire, and puts them back into the world with no rights reserved. It claims nothing and licenses nothing.

The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea

Cotton Mather, Boston, 1726 · the expanded edition

In May 1726 the boatswain William Fly threw his captain into the sea, took four vessels in a month, and was carried into Boston in irons by the forced men of his own crew. He was among the last pirates of the Golden Age.

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Cotton Mather went to the prison to collect the confession that always came, and to print it. Fly gave him nothing. He denied the charge as laid, would not be led to the meeting house, and used what he was told would be his last words to advise the shipmasters in the crowd to treat their crews better and pay them what they were owed. At the gallows he told the hangman he was no craftsman and retied the noose himself.

Mather printed all of it anyway. The most articulate refusal any Golden Age pirate ever made survives only inside the tract written to bury it.

He also left a great deal out. The trial gets a single sentence. Twelve acquittals go unmentioned. Three men named in the indictment as principals in the killing were never brought to trial at all, and the ship’s own new name never appears in fifty-one pages.

This expanded edition prints the pamphlet entire and fills its gaps from five other sources: the complete trial record, the narrative Benjamin Colman took from the pilot who retook the ship, and the London printings that recorded what Boston did not.

Read the whole book, free the complete edition at the Internet Archive

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Hostis

Enemies of all mankind

A free man is sovereign by virtue of being. He is the locus of his own existence, the keeper of the light he carries, the author of every step he takes. He asks no man’s leave for what is already his. He stands under the flag he raised himself.

Hostis humani generis. Enemy of all mankind. Cicero’s charge, fastened onto pirates and hardened by English admiralty law into a rule. A pirate belongs to no nation, may be tried by any nation, stands outside the protection of every one. Mankind agrees to treat a man as the common enemy of mankind. The category is a verdict passed by interested parties, and always was. Enemies of all mankind by their decree. We keep the name by consent.

Before a company put to sea it wrote down the terms it would sail by. A vote to every hand aboard. An equal share of the provisions. Payment in coin for a limb or an eye lost at work. Captains elected, and turned out again by ballot. No king in Europe granted a seaman one of the four. The crews took all four in the one place on earth where nobody could stop them, and the Crown answered by hanging them in chains at the mouths of harbours, where the lesson would be legible from the deck of every ship coming in.

Court transcripts. Articles of indictment. Inventories of confiscated goods. Sermons preached at the condemned on the Sunday before they died. Power documents itself to justify itself, the paper outlives the office, and it is read at last by people it was never meant for.

The fence has moved. From the shore to the page, from the page to the server. The name moved with it. We are where we have always been.

One crew, then, and a long one. Each hand on it told what he might do with what was already his. Those companies. The printers. The mechanic. The farmer. The archivist. The cryptographer. The buyer. The spender. The seeder. Every one of them was asked the same question at the moment it was put to him. Every one gave the same answer.

More is being set, and every edition is released under Creative Commons Zero. This press claims nothing and licenses nothing, and the rest of the case is at hostis.black. A press against enclosure that becomes a gate is worth nothing. Take a copy. Reprint it. Reprint it against us.