Pirates, Travel, and Literature in Early Modern Spain

Travel literature, and in particular transatlantic travel literature, was very popular in early modern Spain as Spaniards managed a vast nautical empire that extended throughout all known continents. Many of the figures of what we now call the Spanish Golden Age wrote about travel, in particular Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. The transatlantic travel was a major literary theme for Spanish writers in the Americas, and interest in seafaring spurred curiosity about nautical language, which in turn made writers such as Eugenio de Salazar develop a peculiar style called lexicographic poetry, a style rife with technical nautical terms and even glossaries explaining their meaning. Since pirates were part of the transatlantic experience, piratical literature became a favorite with authors, as the abundant corpus on Francis Drake’s incursions demonstrates.

These texts adopted the characteristic lexicographic style that seems idiosyncratic to Colonial travel literature. Pirate books incorporated a series of erudite resources to better communicate their world’s lexicon and geography to readers in the metropolis. These resources included tables, textual glosses, marginalia, and even plates. Tables first appeared in La Araucana [The Araucaniad] before moving to texts with piratical content, such as Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado [Arauco Tamed] and Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea (an epic poem dealing with the last expedition and death of Sir Francis Drake), and became a main feature of piratical literature. By the second half of the seventeenth century, this association of pirates and knowledge had turned piratical texts into vehicles for a virtual trip to the Americas, presenting information about all sorts of fields, including geography, ethnography, and natural history.