An Oceanic Nation of Pirates in Emmanuel Appadocca or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers

In Emmanuel Appadocca or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854), sometimes called the first novel of the Anglophone Caribbean, Maxwell Philip has his eponymous protagonist revenge himself on the world as a pirate in the transnational space of the Caribbean. The pirate forms not only a crew but a nation that functions as a challenge to the British Empire. The novel thus subverts the traditional accusation of pirates as men without a nation. As captain of this ship-nation, Appadocca is no longer excluded because of his race. In analysing this relatively little-known novel, I investigate how his nation can exist because it is limited to a ship, a heterotopic space. It moves within the atopia of the ocean, an untameable space that takes up a central role in the British imaginary precisely because it is outside the power of the Empire. The question remains whether such an oceanic nation can ever be stable.