The Devil’s Anarchy
The Other Loose Roving Way of Life & Very Remarkable Travels of Jan Erasmus Reyning, Buccaneer
by Stephen Snelders

Anarrrghkists! By rebelling against hierarchical society and living under the Jolly Roger, pirates created an upside-down world of anarchist organization and festival, with violence and death ever-present. This creation was not a purely whimsical process. In The Devil’s Anarchy, Stephen Snelders examines rare 17th-century Dutch pirate histories to show the continuity of a shared pirate culture, embodied in its modes of organization, methods of distributing booty and resolving disputes, and tendencies for high living. Focussing on the careers of Claes Compaen, a cunning, charismatic renegado who claimed to have stolen more than 350 vessels, and Jan Erasmus Reyning, who hit the seas at age 12 and became a buccaneer in the pirate jungles of Santo Domingo, Snelders paints a salty picture of the excesses, contradictions, and liberatory joys of pirate life.

“Snelders has made a major contribution to piratology by introducing certain rare Dutch sources full of anecdote and illumination. But he’s contributed even more to the field of radical piratology: pirate as libertarian hero, pirate as symbolic focus for anti-Capital’s desire. Rimbaud might’ve dreamed something like this when he was twelve. But here it is at last, a book of true stories.”

From the Introduction by Peter Lamborn Wilson

About the Author
Stephen Snelders is a Dutch historian with a research focus on social transformation and resistance in the body as well as the mind. He is past editor of Pan Forum, a leading research journal of psychotropic studies.