Most pirates did not decide to become pirates and then go out and become pirates. Typically pirates arrived at piracy in the course of performing a perfectly legal job--sailing. Then, once you're out at sea, maybe you start thinking that your situation might improve if you broke a rule or two or twenty. Or, somebody who's already a pirate might coerce you. (Or at least you can claim that was the case when you're on trial!) And of course, there are a number of pirates who didn't know (or at least claimed not to know) that they were doing anything illegal. William Kidd is perhaps the most famous example of this. Pirates emerged from the larger population of seafaring men. You could say pirates were a criminal "subgenre" of mariners. Most of them already had experience and skill in seafaring before turning to piracy.

Sailors were working class men, usually from port cities, who made money off their bodies. In the country, if you were uneducated but able-bodied, you could find work in the fields. But in urban areas, well, not a lot of fields. If you were uneducated but able-bodied in a city, you could go to sea. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that no sailors had any education--but it simply was not required. Sailing, legally or illegally, was manual labor. It didn't pay well or reliably, but it was often the best gig available to men who didn't have a lot of options. Sailors and their wives sometimes had to threaten, petition, appeal, and negotiate in order to extract money rightfully owed to them. And we can't forget that some sailors were enslaved black men working for their masters, or runaway slaves for whom sailing was a convenient way to get some miles behind them. Stede Bonnet is a pirate captain who had a number of black slaves working on his ship.

Officers are another story. The master of a ship was in control of everything and everyone on the ship. This was the position of the highest authority and the greatest responsibility. "Captain" is a naval rank, so it's inappropriate to describe the master of a merchant ship, but a pirate ship was a war ship, and captains were responsible for making decisions about combat (as well as every other decision). But during the quotidian mundanity of sailing, the captain's main task was moving the ship from place to place. This required navigation knowledge. There was no GPS so they had to calculate their position by keeping track of where they had been, how long they sailed, in what direction, and at what speed. This requires math and reasoning skills as well as the ability to write and keep records. There's a very interesting trial from 1720 for a group of sailors on a slave ship who conspired to overthrow their captain in a mutiny in order to turn pirate--but their downfall was that they asked the third mate to be their new captain, and he promptly reported their scheme. The sailors wanted to get rid of their captain, but they knew they had to replace him with somebody qualified to run the ship. Charles Vane was a pirate captain who got replaced, by his quartermaster--the quartermaster was an officer who was in charge of allotting food to the men as well as dividing spoils between them. Again, it's a job that requires math. Some poor people certainly did learn to read and write and do math, but navigation was taught in a formal educational setting. (This knowledge could certainly be obtained through practical experience, of course, but it would require a foundation of math ability, as well as somebody willing to teach it, so not everybody could just figure it out.) Blackbeard is a pirate who was wealthy--I don't know if he learned navigation in a classroom, but he inherited a plantation long before he committed an act of piracy.

So, captains and their officers were usually higher class, or at least better educated, or at the VERY least had more specialized skills, than the men under their command. As for the motivations of pirates, lust for adventure vs necessity--of course there are as many motivations to crime as there are individuals who commit crimes. But there's a reason all this piracy happened in Europe's overseas colonial territories--because it was hard to enforce the law so far away from the seat of power. The New World was the Wild West. People tested what they could get away with, how far they could go while avoiding legal repercussions. Piracy is manual labor, but it's also organized crime. Above anything else, piracy was about making money, something beloved by rich and poor alike.

For more, check out:

Quest for Blackbeard: The True Story of Edward Thache and His World by Baylus C. Brooks

Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580-1800 by Patricia Crawford

Affiliation Without Affinity: Skilled Slaves in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina by S. Max Edelson, published in Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society

Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 by Mark G. Hanna

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 by Marcus Rediker

The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet, both printed in British Piracy in the Golden Age: History and Interpretation, 1660-1730

Daily Life in the Age of Sail by Dorothy Denneen Volo and James M. Volo

And on the topic of sailors and literacy--MarineLives is currently analyzing signatures and marks of 17th century sailors. Check out the MarineLives Twitter for updates on this fascinating project.