Historically, there have been certain environments that, due to their special characteristics, forced the forced coexistence between individuals of the same sex; This is what happened in the military or naval world, where men could spend months or even years away from the presence of women. In such cases, it was not unusual for intermale relationships to develop that often involved sex, but sometimes went further, even to a civil union with a contract. This is what was institutionalized in the world of Caribbean piracy in the 17th century under the name of matelotage.
matelotage It is a word that comes from French matelot, which means sailor; something almost logical, taking into account that many pirates of the 16th century began their adventures in the Caribbean as buccaneers, that is, hunters of pigs and wild cows who smoked the meat and the skin (a process called bucán, a Caribbean term alluding to the grill) then sold to ships, and were often of Norman origin. Later, they used to reconvert or, at least, reconcile that activity with filibustering, more lucrative and in theory less exposed to the punitive expeditions of Spain.
In fact, some of the most famous of those outside the law came from France: since the corsair Jean Fleury went down in history for having stolen Moctezuma’s treasure during his transfer to Spain, names like Jean David Nau (more known as Francois l’Olonnaisthat is, the Olonese), Emanuel Wynne, Michel Etchegorria the Basque, Michel de Grandmont or Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin (author of a fundamental autobiographical book to know about the subject). To them could be added those who worked under a letter of marque, in the case of Jean Ango, Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, François Le Clerc (alias Jambe de Bois, that is, Pata de Palo), Guillaume Le Testu or Jacques de Sores .
In short, the Gallic maritime terminology was not strange in the western area of Hispaniola, where they operated at first, and later on the famous islands of Tortuga and Nassau. It was in those pirate republics where, in the 17th century, the Portuguese Bartolomeu Portugués created a normative corpus for the Brotherhood of the Brothers of the Coast, an organization that emerged in Tortuga that integrated buccaneers and filibusters. That regulation, of which no written version is preserved and has come down to us thanks to oral tradition, vetoed the presence of women on board ships.
That meant that each crew would travel in conditions similar to those of any other ship, whether merchant or war: with the prospect of weeks or months with no more females than the unfortunate ones that fell into their hands. In reality, the ban had some exceptions, because despite the libertarian and egalitarian nature of the piracy code, it could not escape the mentality of other times and referred only to white women, allowing others or those who were dedicated actively in the business (as did the British Anne Bonny and Mary Read or the French Anne Dieu-le-veut).
Even on land, the number of men vastly outnumbered the number of women, and the need for a relationship that went beyond the physical often arose. As we said at the beginning, there are historical precedents, of which the most obvious and well-known is that of the Sacred Battalion of Thebes. It was an elite corps from 4th century BC Greece that consisted of three hundred hoplites. What was unique was that all the members formed affectionate couples, which was supposed to encourage each soldier to fight harder to protect his mistress. This is how Plutarch explains it in his work Pelopidas:
«For men of the same tribe or family there is little value for one another when danger presses; but a battalion founded on friendship based on love will never be broken and is invincible; for lovers, ashamed of not being worthy in the sight of their loved ones, and loved ones in the sight of their lovers, willingly throw themselves into danger for the relief of one another.”
The Sacred Battalion was a variant of the old Hellenic custom, the relationship between a heinochoi (driver, always older) and a paraibatai (companion, younger) or, to use the vocabulary of Athens, a erastes and a eromenos. Actually, it was not something limited to Greece but frequent in Antiquity, although there was a certain tendency to practice it primarily in the nobility and, more specifically, among the kourètes (members of the equestrian class), as also happened in Japan with the samurai. The matelotage would be a modern version.
With an extra, yes: its formal institutionalization through a kind of civil marriage. Now, the prospect of so much time without sex was not the cause of the matelotage. The sailors of the 16th and 17th centuries used to associate with a fellow bandit in order to live together, apart from professional life. It all started as a mere economic contract and was evolving; It is difficult to establish if it often transcended sentimentally, but in other aspects it was a union for all purposes, with a contractual commitment to take care of each other’s wounds and illnesses, fight together, share benefits and bequeath their assets to the other in case of loss. death.
On the other hand, the old aphorism of “in the good and in the bad”, although the relationship was not one of total equality because, as in the Greek example, one of the two played the strong role and the other the weak. This was due to the fact that the pirate used to choose a servant or slave as a companion, generally a very young cabin boy, novice and eager to prosper (the protégés of the captains used to ascend in the ranks and the matelotage extended, then, to the learning process, which lasted a couple of years). It was also not unusual for the filibuster to be already married to a woman and the matelot could join, sharing it; Of course, that didn’t usually happen at sea, since, let’s remember, in theory no one could take his wife on board.
However, prejudices were reproduced on land and that type of relationship was not seen with such compromise, connecting with what was happening in the naval world of all countries. And it is that, in fact, the custom was not limited to the field of piracy but was practiced among the sailors in general, although the Spanish Navy, the Royal Navy and others punished all sailors who were accused of homosexuality by hanging. , so they made sure that the matelotagand, when it occurred, it was restricted exclusively to the non-sexual part.
After all, it constituted a break with the canons of the society of his time, which considered that situation completely immoral, probably even above the criminal nature of its practitioners. That is why in 1645, when the Brotherhood of the Coast Brothers established an unofficial government in Tortuga (tolerated by France because it favored the island’s prosperity), Jean Le Vasseur, governor between 1640 and 1652, asked the French government to send of a thousand and a half prostitutes so that the sailors would have a sufficient number of women to avoid the practice of matelotage.
The truth is that it was practiced by some of the most prominent pirates: the Englishman Robert Culliford, whose voyages through the Indian Ocean rivaled those of Captain Kidd, had as matelot to John Swann, to whom the name of “great consort”; Bartholomew Roberts was about to start a riot against him when in a fit of rage he killed the matelot of one of his men, but Roberts himself favored John Walden, nicknamed miss nanney; the aforementioned Anne Bonny and Mary Read also formed a couple, although it is not clear whether contractually or in fact and, in any case, both depended on a third individual, Jack Calico Rackham.
Given that all of these were British and that the expressive nicknames seem to indicate a relationship beyond the merely economic, it is appropriate to add that the English word equivalent to matelot it was bunk mate, that is, bunk mate. Yes, it was French Louis Le Golif, pirate protagonist of a manuscript accidentally discovered in Saint-Malo in 1944 and entitled Cahiers de Louis Adhemar Timothée Le Golif, dit Borgnefesse, captain of the flibuste (Memoirs of Louis Adhemar Timothée Le Golif, called Borgnefesse, captain of freebooters), where he recounts their relationship matelotage with a certain Pulvérin, whom he later left for one of the prostitutes imported in 1665 by another governor, Bertrand D’Ogeron.
The problem with this work is that historians consider it a forgery. On the other hand, that of another Gaul is authentic, the aforementioned Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, Histoire d’avanturiers que sont signalez dans les Indes. Exquemelin was a doctor hired under deceit by the West India Company in a modality called deceive me (a kind of apprenticeship in a harsh regime similar to servitude, with hardly any rights), who later enrolled with Henry Morgan when his mentor did not want to attend to him during a serious illness and later he himself adopted a matelot. Exquemelin says:
“It is the general and solemn custom of all of them to look for a comrade or companion, whom we might call a partner, with whom they unite the whole stock of what they possess.”
From the words of the filibuster doctor, no sexual use seems to emerge. ET Fox, in his Pirates in their own wordswhere he reviews the documented case of Francis Rees and John Beavis in 1699, summarizes it to finish:
Matelotage was an agreement or bond between two men to share everything in common, from food and drink to money and sometimes women. It has been suggested, virtually but with no actual evidence, that matelotage also included a homosexual element. It is not unlikely, of course, that some pirates were homosexual, but the same goes for any professional group and there is no reason to suppose that the matelotage was in any significant way preferentially homosexual…”
Sources
Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, Pirates in America. Testimony of a French filibuster | Jean-Pierre Moreau, Pirates. Filibusterism and piracy in the Caribbean and the South Seas (1522-1725) | Christopher L Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle. Literature and culture of the slave trade | E. T. FoxPirates in their own words | Hans Turley, Rum, sodomy, and the lash. Piracy, sexuality, and masculine identity | BR Burg, Sodomy and the pirate tradition. English sea rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean |Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, History of piracy in Spanish America/Wikipedia
