The portrayals of pirates in the modern entertainment world are comprised of images of greedy, cutthroat, high seas adventurers who live a life of lawlessness with a trusty parrot, cutlass, and an earring. However, these views clearly misrepresent the socioeconomic and political factors surrounding the men dubbed pirates. Furthermore, they ignore the "revolutionary formula" Kenneth Kinkor describes in his article from C.R. Pennell's Bandits at Sea, in which he mentions the characteristics of liberty, equality, and fraternity that existed among these vessels and throughout their crews. It was these traits that led many Blacks, both free and freed, to join pirate fleets.
Perhaps the factors that drove most blacks to piracy were men seeking to protest a life that was largely that of oppression and poverty. Kinkor states that multiculturalism existed amongst pirate ships "from a pragmatic spirit of revolt against common oppressors. …
