Pirates: What they were and what they weren’t

Jim Hawkins and Israel Hands from Treasure Island

Mostly thanks to Treasure Island, when the word ‘pirate’ is spoken today, we instantly conjure up a picture of flintlock pistols, the Caribbean, ostrich feathers, eye patches and the Jolly Roger. Amazingly enough, pretty much everything we think we know about pirates sprang from that one book published in 1883. Things like the black spot, one legged men with parrots, treasure maps, ‘X’ marks the spot, and fifteen men on a dead man’s chest (how can you get fifteen men on a dead man’s chest?) came from the spectacular imagination of Robert Lewis Stevenson. A few details were filled in by other people, of course, like Daniel Defoe, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, J.M. Barrie and Howard Pyle. Hollywood actors did their bit, too; Errol Flynn was swashbuckling and  Robert Newton made the West Country accent of southern England and Cornwall synonymous with pirates (eg: Arrg Matey!).

Julius Caesar

Unsurprisingly, pretty much all of this is myth and legend. Piracy never was (and still isn’t) anything like the movies and is such a general crime that nobody can say “it started here”. The Romans dealt with pirates in their day (Julius Caesar was even held for ransom a couple of times)…no Jolly Rogers fluttered from their mastheads, but merchant ships could still tell when one was coming by their characteristic green or blue sails. The Vikings were pirates in every sense of the word; when they weren’t moving in, they were taking loot and capturing European slaves to sell into slavery in the Far East.

Burning of the USS Philadelphia

The Barbary Pirates (or Ottoman corsairs) who operated out of Northern Africa, regularly raided Europe, as far north as England, Ireland and even Iceland, capturing whole towns to sell into slavery in the Middle East. They weren’t checked for hundreds of years until Thomas Jefferson sent the young United States Navy to the Mediterranean to take them on.

Pretty much anywhere there is a source of wealth, there are pirates. It’s highway robbery without the highway. And as shown by the Vikings, or the Barbary Pirates, piracy and slavery go hand-in-hand, even the Cilician pirates that pestered the Romans traded slaves. John Hawkins, a 16^th century British Naval commander dabbled in piracy until he found a far more lucrative option…the African slave trade. It was the African slave trade that turned both sides of the Atlantic into pirate waters. Merchant captains picked up slaves in Africa, then traded them for the valuable goods produced by the New World like sugar and tobacco. Pirates of all nationalities preyed on them in between…and sometimes piracy wasn’t entirely illegal. Navies were small, so during wars, governments issued licenses called ‘letters-of-marque’ to ship captains, allowing them to prey on the shipping of the enemy. This turned these captains into ‘Privateers’, free-lance extensions of the navy.

Rose Hall Great House, Jamaica; houses like this one
were built all over the Caribbean by plantation owners

So, to boil it down, pirates didn’t make people walk the plank (there are a few isolated instances of it), they didn’t always believe women were bad luck aboard ship (women were actually considered better navigators than men), they didn’t wear eye patches any more often than anyone else (there is some speculation they wore them to improve their night vision). Pirates didn’t stay in one place, either, they made the rounds. The Mediterranean, the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and the China Seas were stiff with the same pirates that sailed the Caribbean. Piracy was a risky, dangerous business, completely lacking in glamour; pirates like Henry Morgan and Edward Low were notorious for their deliberate cruelty. Only a handful of professional pirates made a fortune, the rest spent it all, or died of illness or execution (Henry Every was one of the only pirates on record who managed to escape and retire with his loot).

However…not everything we think of today in association with pirates is myth.

Captain Kidd giving a dark look

If you like flintlock pistols, skulls and crossbones, pirate brotherhoods and sunken treasure, there is a period that spanned the 17^th and 18^th centuries that might fulfill your piracy dreams. It lasted about eighty years and is associated with the ‘famous’ pirates. Captain Kidd was hanging around Long Island during this time and Henry Morgan, pirate turned pirate chaser, carved out a reputation so infamous he was knighted and made governor of Jamaica. But within this period, there was a smaller one; it only lasted ten years, but it is called ‘The Golden Age of Piracy’. Pretty much everything real that we associate with pirates occurred during this time.

The Brig La Grace is a replica of the sort of ship pirates would
have sailed; small, fast and relatively easy to handle

It happened just at the end of the War of Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne’s War as it was referred to in the Americas. When the fighting ended in 1714, privateer captains suddenly found themselves out of a job and when the Royal Governor of Jamaica, Lord Archibald Hamilton, started handing out secret letters-of-marque to form a Jacobite Navy (yes, he was Scottish and yes, he hated the English), things spun out of control. Big pirate names crawled out of the woodwork: Henry Jennings, Charles Vane, Samuel Bellamy, and Edward England…and before long, Stede Bonnet, “Calico” Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Bartholomew "Black Bart” Roberts, Edward Low, William Fly, and most infamous of all, Edward Teach…soon to be known as Blackbeard.

Port Royal, Jamaica, went from a pirate haven to a
ghost town after an earthquake caused it to fall into the habor

Since Henry Morgan, with the help of a cooperative earthquake, had cleaned up Jamaica at the end of the last century, these new pirates set up shop in Nassau. The few hundred occupants of the town were outnumbered by more than a thousand pirates and the whole island of New Providence was declared a Pirate Republic. It was during this time that pirate flags were occasionally flown…and most of the time, they had nothing to do with a skull and crossbones…only "Black Sam" Bellamy and Edward England flew the classic ‘Pirate Flag’, the other flags consisted of red skeletons and crossed cutlasses. In fact, the only thing they had in common was the black ground, which developed from the ‘Black Flag’ of no quarter every ship carried.

Calico Jack's Flag

These pirates set to work on the rich shipping in the Caribbean…there was the Spanish treasure fleet and ships of the Dutch, Danish, French and Swedish West India companies. The records of ships captured in the 18^th century are suddenly littered with the names of pirates. But, as mentioned before, the Golden Age of Piracy didn’t last long. A few, like William Fly, held on until 1726, but most of the pirates, like “Black Sam” Bellamy, Blackbeard and Calico Jack, only had two or three years of pirating under their belts before the Royal Navy hunted them down between 1717 and 1720 (Blackbeard supposedly jumped overboard and swam around his ship three times after his head was chopped off). Governor Woodes Rogers arrived in the Bahamas and offered pardons all around and Governor Hamilton, the fellow who started it all, was brought back to London in chains where he was acquitted…after all, his big brother was the Duke of Hamilton. You don’t mess with a Duke.

A Desert Island

But, despite being only about ten years long, that period after Queen Anne’s War has had a massive impact on pirate lore. Thousands of years of global piracy have paraded grandly past, yet we’re stuck on flintlock pistols and islands in the Caribbean. We have ‘talk like a pirate day’ and romanticize about how ‘free’ pirates were. Gentleman pirates swing on convenient ropes like Tarzan while wooing the fair maid. In most of the depictions, pirates are so busy adventuring that they hardly have time for piracy at all.

As far as I know, pirates did not look like this

The dirty, disease-ridden, brutal reality of piracy is often overlooked for ostrich feathers and elegant coats. Piracy hasn’t changed since the world began and it’s still practiced as much today as it was during ‘The Golden Age’. The ships are made out of fiberglass now and the perpetrators don’t have eye patches or cutlasses, but they are still pirates, still capturing ships and holding them for ransom. As much as I want to buckle some swash every time I watch The Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s important to keep in mind that almost nothing in the movies depicts reality. 

If you’re interested in knowing more, a good place to start is the book that opened my eyes, Under the Black Flag by Erik Christian Haugaard. It’s short and it’s a children’s book…but those aren’t marks against it. 

~Psyche

PS: None of the pictures are mine

The Swallows and the Amazons

A map of their Adventures

When I was seven years old, my sister deemed I was finally Old Enough for Some Things. One of them was the Seven-Year-Old Wonder Book, which she started reading to me the night of my seventh birthday, the other was Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.

Growing up homeschooled in a place that doesn’t really approve of homeschooling, can often be lonely. Some years we didn’t have any friends at all; they, or their parents would make short work of the relationship. So often times, we had to make do with ourselves…and various characters in books. There were weeks on end when my sister was Sir Percy Blakeney and I was Sir Andrew and we were rescuing people from prison during the French Revolution. Genres even crossed sometimes, with the successful rescue of Sidney Carton from under the noses of the French. We rewrote War and Peace with a happy ending, amended The Chronicles of Narnia so it could be played out with two children instead of four, and went off to wander the slopes of Wales with Taran and Eilonwy in The Prydain Chronicles.

Coniston Water in what is now Cumbria,
one of the cheif influences behind the books
Photograph by Paul Mcgreevy on Flickr

So we really weren’t as lonely as might be expected. We had each other, and we had books and along with The Chronicles of Narnia, Away Goes Sally by Elizabeth Coatsworth, and The Good Master and Singing Tree by Kate Seredy, there was the Swallows and Amazon series.

It’s perhaps my favourite series of all time. Though it’s hard to say, because there are others that finish very close to it. I can say, however, that it is the most engrossing and deceptively simple series I have ever read. Not only are the plots ingenious and unexpected, but each book is completely different from the last. 

Horning, Norfolk, setting for two of the books
Photograph by Rob Fairweather on Flickr

Starting in 1929, the series follows a group of children as they grow up in England in the years just before the war. There is no frivolous description, no romance to muck things up, they are strictly stories of childhood…and what stories they are. Many people are attracted to the books because of the things the children get to do; they camp on islands, are allowed to use matches, go gold prospecting, sail across the North Sea by themselves in a gale…among other things. The books are also packed with masses of practical knowledge about wind and tides and fishing, and include other professions that are almost dead, like charcoal burning and wooden boat building.

More breathtaking scenery form the Lakes District
Photograph by Andy Rothwell on Flickr

But the thing that shines the brightest is how real they are. Somehow they make ordinary things seem exciting; getting lost in the fog becomes an epic adventure, and other things that might easily become boring, like camping in a garden, aren’t. It’s hard to believe that these children and this lake and those sailboats could have come from the imagination of anyone…and to be fair, they didn’t. Arthur Ransome, the author (he was a good friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, by the way), based it on his own childhood, and on the adventures of children he knew.

A first edition of Pigeon Post, the first book
ever to win the Carnegie Medal

Consequently, the characters in the stories are some of the most vivid I have ever read about. They are so alive, that, despite their author, they begin to grow up as the years pass. Almost imperceptibly they change through the series, their roles shift, they become wise from their mistakes; some of them make plans for the future…and quite suddenly, Arthur Ransome realized that his beloved children had grown up on him and he stopped writing.

For some unknown reason, because they are written for children, about children, the Swallows and Amazons series is dismissed by most people as silly little children’s’ stories. In reality, there is nothing silly about them. They are more serious and thought-provoking than many ‘adult’ stories and painstakingly paint a picture of a world that once was and never will be again: a world of river wherries and tall ships going down Channel, a world of exploration without restriction, a world where children are capable and can be trusted without lifejackets.

Shotley in Essex, one of the starting off points for
We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, our favorite book in the series
Photograph by David Parker on Flickr

I would recommend Arthur Ransome’s books to anyone, but somehow I doubt an adult could ever understand what it was like to be first introduced to them at seven years old, and to be able to grow up with them and watch them change just the way you yourself were changing in the meantime. Perhaps, as an adult, if you grasp the novel idea that children’s thoughts are just as important, and their feelings just as sophisticated, as those of grownups, you may be able to appreciate these books. Life isn’t all about who falls in love with whom, or gangsters in dark cities, or going off to a war. There are the times in between, as well.

The Nancy Blackett, Ransome's own boat, and the inspiration
for Goblin

Just to wet your appetite, here’s an excerpt from Secret Water one of the last books in the series, which I think sums up what the books are like:

“I say,” said Titty. “We ought to count days, like Robinson Crusoe.”

John bent down and cut a notch in the flagstaff. “That’s for today,” he said. “Every day we’ll cut another notch until the Goblin comes back…”

“And then when we lie exhausted on the sand…” said Titty.

“Jolly wet mud,” said Roger.

“We’ll see a sail far away. And it’ll come nearer and nearer. And the captain will say, ‘Clap your eye to a spyglass, Mister Mate.’ And the mate (that’s Mother) will say, ‘There’s something moving on the shore. They’re still alive.’ And we will wave and try to shout, but our parched throats won’t let us. And they’ll sail in, and we’ll hear the anchor chain go rattling out. And then we’ll all sail away together and see the island disappear into the sunset.”

“It may be morning,” said Roger.