Much has been said about the Black Sails finale and its statement of the showâs themes, so Iâd like to focus instead on the penultimate episode, specifically the following speech Jack gives as heâs headed back to Nassau with the goal of killing Flint:
The result ahead of us promises to be a victory of a different sort. A true victory. Freedom...in every sense of the word. How many men in the history of the world have ever known it? How remarkable a moment is this? How fortunate are we to be standing on the threshold of it?
I think this speech really gets to the heart of the show: itâs ultimately about what it means to be truly free. While this notion of freedom is discussed in Flintâs unparalleled final speech about dragons, itâs perhaps in 4.09 that we get the fullest exploration of freedom.
There has obviously been a lot written on the subject of freedom throughout human history, and rather than foolishly attempt to summarize thousands of years of philosophy, Iâm going to refer to one of my favorite understandings, written by W.E.B. DuBois:
I dream of a world of infinitive and valuable variety; not in the laws of gravity or atomic weights, but in human variety in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip. But more especially and far above and beyond this, is a realm of true freedom: in thought and dream, fantasy and imagination; in gift, aptitude, and geniusâall possible manner of difference, topped with freedom of soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to a world and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality. Each effort to stop this freedom of being is a blow at democracyâthat real democracy which is reservoir and opportunityâ (The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History, pg. 165.)
DuBois here notes three central elements of freedom: the physical (âto do and beâ), the mental (âthought and dream, fantasy and imaginationâ), and the generational (âgive to a world and build into itâ). The first two components of freedom are understood by much of Western political philosophy through the terms ânegative libertyâ and âpositive libertyâ (coined by Isaiah Berlin), freedom from external threats and freedom to engage in philosophic activity. To these conceptions, DuBois adds a third that all the white dudes who conceived of the other two wouldnât be concerned with: central to achieving them is the recognition that every individual owes prior and future generations their efforts to maintain liberty, that liberty is not just a theoretical principle but an action.
Turning now to episode 4.09, I think we can begin to understand how each of these three types of freedom overlap.
To start, the conflict of the episode deals with negative liberty. Silver and Flint to some degree know that if one catches the other with the chest, there is a chance they will be killed, and Silver wants the chest to ensure that Woodes Rogers does not kill Madi. In short, they are fighting for their survival, their physical freedom.
Moving on to the flashbacks between Flint and Silver, we begin to see the connection between negative liberty and positive liberty. First, because Silver and Flint are equals without the same political obligations to each other as they have to the crew, the people who serve them and who they serve in turn, they can be honest with each other. Silver recognizes this in telling Flint: âThe men...I have to manage how they see me...But for pride to be an issue between you and I, well, I think weâre playing past that by now.â Because they, at that point, have physical/negative liberty with each other, they are then allowed to pursue mental/positive liberty, that being the revelation of their true selves.Â
However, Flint becomes aware that this physical liberty is an illusion because Silver is unwilling to meet him equally in their pursuit of positive liberty:Â
You know my story. Thomas, Miranda, all of it. Know the role it played in motivating me to do the things that I've done, the things I will do. It has made me transparent to you. Not only that, but when I told you this story, you insinuated yourself into it. The latest in a line of ill-fated partners, situating yourself such that...were you and I ever to come to blows, I'd be forced to hesitate before doing you any harm.
Thus Silver actually has a physical advantage over Flint, negating any semblance of Flintâs physical liberty in their relationship. Through Silverâs attempts to kill Flint in this episode and in the finale, we see that without both physical/mental (or negative/positive) liberty present in any relationship, neither will exist; you cannot have one without the other.
This brings us to what Iâve decided to call generational freedom, though I suppose it could also be called communal freedom. In this episode, the concept of generational freedom is brought up in relation to both Jack and Madi. First, we see it in Jackâs conversation with the man he chose to navigate him to Skeleton Island:
Jack: You sailed with Avery.
Old man: Long time ago.
Jack: 20 years? More, even, maybe?
Old man: More, aye.
Jack: Mm-hmm. You do know where you're going, yes? No, seriously, I've got quite a lot riding on this.
Old man: One day, you'll leave the account. Take a wife, father children. See less and less of the sea until she becomes like a painting hanging on the wall, static and irrelevant to your daily existence. But she'll keep on calling you. And when she does, you'll step into that painting and feel the swell beneath your feet. It'll all come back as if it were like yesterday.
Jack: Is that so?
Old man: I've watched you and yours handle the account since I and mine left it. Accomplish things that no one I ever sailed with could dream of. From what I've overheard, if you reach Skeleton Island, might mean the end of the governor. Maybe keep the account alive a little while longer. Is that so?
Jack: That and more.
Old man: Then I'll take you to it. Hold on to this for as long as you can, for all of us who once had it...and walked away.
In this conversation, we see the generational connections within piracy. The old man sailed with Henry Avery, the person most responsible for establishing the current status of piracy in Nassau, and he is conversing with the person who will usher Nassau into a new era. He is careful to remind Jack of this link and of how unseverable it is; no matter how far away Jack gets from piracy, he will never be able to leave it fully behind. There is some sense of owing his existence in this world to Avery and all those who came before him, a debt he must repay with his actions (namely, removing Woodes Rogers and continuing the life of piracy in Nassau).
Immediately after this conversation, we get Woodes Rogersâ bargaining with Madi. He offers her an ultimatum: accept his treaty or he will kill Silver and all of Silverâs crew, which includes many of Madiâs people. Madi rejects his ultimatum with one of the most poignant speeches in the show:
The voice you hear in your head, I imagine I know who it sounds like, as I know Eleanor wanted those things. But I hear other voices. A chorus of voices. Multitudes. They reach back centuries. Men and women and children who'd lost their lives to men like you. Men and women and children forced to wear your chains. I must answer to them and this war, their war, Flint's war, my war, it will not be bargained away to avoid a fight, to save John Silver's life or his men's or mine. And you believe what you will, but it was neither I nor Flint, nor the Spanish raider who killed your wife. That, you did.
Because of her existence as a former slave who had lived in hiding for most of her life, Madi most fully understands generational freedom. She knows that the supposed freedom Rogersâ treaty offers her and her people is not actual freedom because it fails to address the unfreedom of her ancestors, of the rest of the enslaved people in the Caribbean, because she knows that freedom will never be achieved on the terms of the oppressor. She knows that she owes this war to every victim of Englandâs empire and that it is the only way to achieve what DuBois calls the opportunity to âgive to a world and build into it.âÂ
This episode thus introduces the idea that âfreedom every sense of the wordâ depends on one recognizing oneâs duty to oneâs community that consists of not just its current members, but its past and future members. Complete freedom is achieved when one begins to fight to protect the freedom of those who do not yet exist. Madi understands this about freedom, as does Flint, but despite Silverâs insistence that he and Flint are true friends and equals, he is incapable of grasping the generational component of freedom and he therefore ensures that physical and mental freedom, too, will fall outside of his grasp.












