It's so pervasive that it practically has become a rallying cry for libertarians and anarchists I have found. The image of the popular democratic pirate, voting on everything, having little councils on how to run things, and depending on the persons politics they're singing shanty's about respecting each other's feelings, or discussing how the new Pirate utopia village they built will be good for BitCoin.

Okay, let's back up for just a brief second and discuss one principle fact that tends to get overlooked in this ideology:

PIRATES AND PRIVATEERS WERE THIEVES AND MERCENARIES

I always remind them of that fact. Pirates stole, raped, murdered, and tortured their way around the sea. They constantly screwed each other over, as in the case of Blackbeard, he ran off with a small band and left most of his crew without any of the loot they had taken. He also essentially stole Stede Bonnet's boat from him and took over his crew. Henry Morgan did the same thing with his crew after they sacked Panama.

As punishment, pirates would maroon people. Essentially leaving the on a deserted island with no food or water and just one bullet...to kill themselves after they suffered long enough. They would whip, burn (legend has it a few pirates would stick lit fuzes under a subjects eyelids), dunk you in water, just to name a few to get you to reveal where you hid your money. I can't remember who was reported to have done it, but when a crew of pirates captured a merchant vessel and caught the captain trying to throw his money overboard, they tortured him for it. Pirates would often torture merchant captains out of spite for harsh treatment in the past from other captains. Of course there was always the lash to go around, but they would add "brining" or throwing salt or salt water into the wounds. One crew is reported to have thrown glass bottles at one captive. Henry Morgan used nuns as human shields allegedly. One torture was called woolding, or where they would tie a rope around a persons head and then using a stick keep cranking it tighter and tighter til their eyeballs popped out of their head. There was being strappadoed, which someone accidently did to me once. Ouch.

Oh and let's not forget the burning of houses in sacked towns. Burning churches as well; Protestants LOVED to burn down Catholic churches.

And rape. Lots of rape. Gang rape...to death.

There was also impressing (kidnapping) people like doctors, navigators, carpenters, etc. who the pirates needed to perform a service. Kidnapping for ransom.

And black people a.k.a slaves? Just as likely to toss them overboard since they couldn't feed them, or sell them into slavery for a tidy profit.

Ah, and finally, lets not forget that Pirates and Privateers weren't just stealing gold from Spanish Treasure Galleons. Their most common targets were average merchants and common folk. Most often they didn't sail away from a prize with a few chests of doubloons, but their sugar, cotton, tobacco, and other goods they were taking to market. And we're not talking tons of it at a time, fifty pounds here, a couple dozen bushels there. They didn't rob the rich, they mostly robbed the working class.

Pirates and privateers were not some merry band of outlaws, sticking it to the man. They were not like Robin Hood and didn't live a communal lifestyle like Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. They were more like the antagonists in a Mad Max movie. They were less of a Captain Blood and more like Pablo Escobar.

I didn't have a chance to get to this until now, sorry about that.

I would say that egalitarianism is a definite point of pride among ship's crews in the Napoleonic period, and likely stretching back even further than that. The idea that sailors were skilled workers, doing something that no one else could do easily or well, show sup again and again in the literature - we have accounts from the 1830s and 1840s that British ships heading home from Malta would have a crew member dancing a hornpipe on top of each mast as the ship left harbor; the skill to do that boggles the mind. Similarly, what seems to have caused the Hermione mutiny is Pigot's continuing disparagement of the crew's skill; the event that pushed the crew over the edge was when he referred to crewmen who had fallen from the yardarms as "lubbers." (Pigot had made a practice of flogging the last men down from setting sails, which is both brutal and nonsensical; the last men down were the two who went right out on the ends of the yardarms, the most dangerous place and that requiring the most skill.) So yes, there was certainly a sense of esprit de corps among the men, and though there were definite social ranks that corresponded to levels of skill, the amount of teamwork it would take to have a happy/efficient ship would tend to have a leveling effect. We know that when the petty officer ranks (particularly with new specialities) were being standardized in the 1840s and 1850s, for example, men who accepted that promotion faced a fair amount of scorn from their ship-mates for "putting on airs" or thinking that they were better than other men, etc., to the extent that it was difficult to find men for some of those ranks.

Now, against that, of course, had to be set the indisputable fact that many crews had a huge proportion of men who had been impressed -- not all of them were from jails and madhouses by any means, but many of them were people who would stretch the definition of a seaman. I would be very interested in a good study of how those men's experiences and the fact of having those men around in crews changed the dynamics of the crew over time, but I'm not sure there's a good body of work on that.