It's an interesting question. Firstly one needs to frame "autism". It's rather like "eczema" in being a cover-all term, if a little less literally.

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Anybody who uses the term ‘autism’ is faced with the challenge that autism is a highly variable condition which affects people in different ways. For some people with autism, their autism is a severe impairment, a condition which brings severe challenges and affects many areas of their life. To not acknowledge their difficulties would be to fail to engage with the challenges they face and even to risk depriving such people of the evident justification for much needed help. For many people, however, autism can present challenges in some contexts but also advantages in others. For such people to term their autism a disability seems mistaken; for them there are good arguments for seeing autism as simply a difference, bringing both advantages and disadvantages, or strengths and weaknesses as with any other difference

Spikins P, Wright B, 2013

As autism is a modern definition we'd have to presume that your character presents with a set of traits that are simply... different from the norm to an extent that is noticeable by others. The concept of a classified Spectrum didn't exist until the 20th century so people may have been defined by others as "simple", "slow", "mute", but in a society with wildly varying levels of access to education and wider learning these things were very relative.

Establishing the 'norm' of your character's cohort in a work of fiction is entirely your job, and as Piracy really isn't my subject I won't expand on the varied nature of privateer or other freelancing crews. What I can be said is that if somebody could work well as part of a guild, group, crew, bench or other organisation then they would continue to be employed, whatever the profession.

And it could well be that autistic traits would aid people in being employed, or in finding niche tasks to specialise in. Spikin and Wright (2013) theorise that Stone Age and Ice Age discoveries suggest all kinds of activities that suggest links with autistic-spectrum 'abilities' like 3D mapping in art, a drive to understand and record complex systems through observation. Perhaps more importantly she suggests that autistic traits also help in the interpretation of these collections, a hint that there was an expectation that an audience would share in the understanding of a work.

She believes that these traits' necessity for social development makes them so significant that we shouldn't consider them to as a separate part of society but as fully integrated.

Research into Sami culture has found that autistic traits are very common amongst reindeer herders in terms of the depth of detail that they are able to memorise about their animals without paper records. In interviews other Sami workers said they wouldn't be able to do the same thing, that they couldn't tell how it was done, but that they couldn't survive if there weren't people who could do it.

Getting back to your pirates, I'm not aware of any research that specifically suggests links between known pirates and autistic traits so I'll extemporise based on the research that I mentioned above. If anybody does have some research then I would genuinely love to see it!

Your pirate is very likely retained because they have some useful, perhaps unusual, ability. The autistic traits particularly noted in historical research are ones that lend themselves to remembering (and mentally processing) large amounts of seemingly-uninteresting data, artistic representation from memory, literal descriptions unfiltered by external concepts, and observation/prediction of patterns in seemingly random information.

Often people with these traits seem 'different' because they may communicate literally, may not have a 'filter' on the things they say, may not form strong friendships easily, may tire quickly, and may just seem generally withdrawn. While this might cause barriers to camaraderie this doesn't necessarily mean that the subject will be disliked or dismissed.

Of course, how this particular subject's shipmates would react to is entirely up to you, I think it's pointless for me to speculate any further, but in general it seems likely that in a group of people working in concert on sailing tasks and raiding would be getting on with their own jobs and wouldn't be giving too much thought to the nature of man. If the person next to them was helping them to stay alive and gather sweet rubies then it's likely that everybody was happy.

Good luck with your writing, I look forward to reading the story!

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Sources:

The Prehistory of Autism, Spikins P, Wright B, 2013

The Stone Age Origins of Autism, Spikins P, 2016

Autism, the Integrations of ‘Difference’ and the Origins of Modern Human Behaviour, Spikins P, 2009

^(Note: I have read a lot of Dr. Penny Spikins' work, I'd thoroughly recommend her writing for further research.)

^(EDIT: Quote formatting and general tidying)