However, many well-respected members of the upper classes had African ancestry or were biracial, among them Olaudah Equiano, a writer and abolitionist who helped eliminate the slave trade in England; Ignatius Sancho, a literary celebrity of Georgian England; and Dido Elizabeth Belle, upon whom Percy’s situation as a biracial child in a white aristocratic home is loosely based. There are also many prominent historical figures of the time period that the history books often fail to mention were biracial, such as Alexander Hamilton and Alexandre Dumas.
Scipio and his band of pirates are inspired by a real crew of African men taken as slaves and forced to work as sailors, who revolted against their white masters and became pirates. The eighteenth century was the golden age of piracy, and pirates from the Barbary Coast—modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya—made the Mediterranean treacherous waters for travelers (though their reach extended along the Atlantic African coast and in some places as far as South America). Ships that wanted to trade there had to pay a fee to the pirates for protection, or else risk seizure. Most of these pirates dealt not only in stolen goods, but also in human cargo, and either took their captured passengers as slaves to be sold in Africa, or held them to be ransomed back to their families for grand sums. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, between 1 and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by pirates and sold as slaves. The problem became so rampant that the United States declared war against the Barbary States twice over this issue in the early 1800s.
Queer Culture
The history of sexuality is tricky to study and trickier to write about, because the concept of sexuality itself is a modern one. In the eighteenth century, the general population would have had no vocabulary or understanding of any identity beyond cisgender and heterosexual, and even those were unacknowledged (and unnamed) because they were of an assumed universality. Sodomy—the most formal term for homosexuality at the time, drawn from the Bible—was a reference to the act of homosexual sex itself rather than attraction or identity. Every country had its own laws, but in most of Europe, homosexuality was both sinful and illegal, and punishable by fines, imprisonment, or sometimes death. Under the Buggery Act of 1533—which was not repealed until 1828—sodomy was a capital offense in England.
But in spite of the illegality, many European cities had flourishing queer subcultures, particularly for men (relationships between women at the time were largely undocumented and less commonly prosecuted). London in particular claimed more gay pubs and clubs in the 1720s than the 1950s. “Molly houses,” the eighteenth-century equivalent of gay bars (molly being one of many slang terms that preceded gay), were spaces where queer men could meet, have relationships, cross-dress, and playact marriages to each other. The most famous was Mother Clap’s, in London, which was raided in 1726. Some queer couples found a way to make a life together beyond the underground, and a few were even acknowledged as romantic partners by their community. (For further reading on this subject, I’d suggest Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, by Rachel Hope Cleves, and the essays of Rictor Norton, a historian whose work focuses primarily on queer men in history.)
In the eighteenth century, the concept of the romantic friendship—a close, nonsexual relationship between two friends of the same gender that often involved holding hands, cuddling, kissing, and sharing a bed—flourished. Though the term wasn’t coined until the twentieth century, it is used by modern historians to express close same-gender relationships before homosexuality existed as a recognized identity. There’s no way to know how many of these romantic friendships were truly nonsexual, and how many were those of queer couples covering their relationship with the guise of friendship—though the concept is distinct from homosexuality, the two may have overlapped. Close physical relationships between friends of the same gender like Monty and Percy were common, though taking it further than friendship would have required secrecy and discretion, and in most places would have been unacceptable.
Which begs the question—would a long-term romantic relationship between two upper-class English men during the eighteenth century have been a real possibility? I don’t know. They likely would not have been able to be open about it. But the optimist in me likes to believe that the twenty-first century is not the first time in history that queer people have been able to live full romantic and sexual lives with the people they love.
And if that makes me anachronistic, so be it.