Defoe, and his ideas can seldom be reduced to unambiguous platitudes. He
was especially fascinated by the comparison between businessmen and
thieves. In 1707 he urged the government to pardon the Madagascar
pirates if they agreed to stop their crimes, pay a large sum of money
and "become honest Freeholders, as others of our _West-India_ Pyrates,
_Merchants I should have said_, have done before them." And he noted
that "it would make a sad Chasm on the _Exchange of London_, if all the
Pyrates should be taken away from the Merchants there."[1] Twelve years
later just before the start of the South Sea Bubble, Defoe attacked
stock-jobbing as "a Branch of Highway Robbing."[2]

Although these attacks were directed mainly at "trade thieves" and
corruptions in business practices, they reflect Defoe's growing concern
with problems of poverty and wealth in England. In his preface to the
first volume of the _General History of the Pyrates_, Defoe argued that
the unemployed seaman had no choice but to "_steal or starve_." When the
pirate, Captain Bellamy, boards a merchant ship from Boston, he attacks
the inequality of capitalist society, the ship owners, and most of all,
the Captain:

_damn ye, you are a sneaking Puppy, and so are all those who will submit
to be governed by Laws which rich Men have made for their own Security,
for the cowardly Whelps have not the Courage otherwise to defend what
they get by their Knavery; but damn ye altogether: Damn them for a Pack
of crafty Rascals, and you, who serve them, for a Parcel of hen-hearted
Numskuls. They villify us, the Scoundrels do, when there is only this
Difference, they rob the Poor under the Cover of Law, forsooth, and we
plunder the Rich under the Protection of our own Courage._[3]

Bellamy asks the crew of the captured ship to abandon the slavery of