Project Background
This project was conceived and produced as the final project for Professor Sheila Bonde's project seminar HA 191: Water and Architecture at Brown University in Fall 2004. I was drawn to a project focused around the topic of pirates and piracy because of the peculiar romanticization of this marginalized group of people. Pirates have somehow always fascinated the imagination as people who exist outside the bounds of society and are able to, in many ways, 'defeat the system.' Similarly, today's most prevalent form of piracy exists in information technology in the incarnation of hackers. Some of the most troublesome pirates are no longer sailing the ocean, but rather surfing the net. Appropriately, this project is focused on bringing information about piracy to the internet. It becomes clear through common sense and much research that pirates led very unromantic lives full of danger and brutality. The fact of the matter is that, when times are hard, people must and will turn to illegitimate means in order to survive. Many of the pirates I studied were merchants, fisherman, or peasants looking for a way to obtain food and a way of living when government edicts forced a drastic change on their livelihoods.
The goal of this project has been to look at pirates from a much less known geographic location and historical era. There have always been pirates all over the world, but the most famous ones operate out of the coasts of Europe and around the Caribbean. I chose not to focus on these pirates, but instead on pirates that came from a very difficult historical context. I happened to find some scholarship on pirates around the coast of China and came to find that a project around a lesser known vessel, the junk, in the context of piracy would be of great interest to me. So, I began with the issue of pirate junks and then branched off into other issues surrounding these pirates such as living conditions, historical context, shipbuilding, etc. In addition to the research that went into the text of the project, I also designed and implemented a website in and effort to share the information that I have gathered. I hope that the design for this website is intuitive, visual appealing, and also engaging.
I have a great deal of excitement for this topic and plan to continue working on it after the close of this semester. Currently, I am in the process of constructing a rough syllabus for an independent study course for Fall 2004.
Please feel free to contact me at michelle_lee at alumni dot brown dot edu with any form of feedback: questions, comments, or suggestions (or sea shanties, or booty, or grog).