Intro: Pirates have long been something that has reached the outskirts of my interests. The thought of sailing the high seas and plundering treasure always soothed my adventurous spirit. They always drew me in with promises of freedom and the chance of a life of travel, something. What I thought a pirate was, how our modern stories depict them is not how they actually lived. At least to some extent. As time has gone our ideas of pirates have shifted and changed throughout the course of history. What constitutes a pirate? Who were they? Why did they become pirates? What controls the narrative that we tell of them today? Why do we lift up historical figures to the point of sainthood? Why is that problematic? I am Alexi Johnson. This is passing through. (Cue intro music)
Script proper: We all know pirates. Or at the very least we think we do. We all have the vision of peg legged men with eye patches and parrots. Wielding cutlasses or the occasional pistol. Ruthless and vengeful or wild and crazed. There are many different pirate narratives that we draw from to create these images. Most of these however are vast stretches of the truth. Tales spun by the poor in every bit of countryside in the western world. Poor that were being ravaged by feudal lords and the ilk. They needed heroes to stand in the place of their struggles. They spun the bad into good and once they turned on pirate populations the good into bad. A lot of our common perception and our tellings of history are distorted by word of mouth. Hundreds years long games of telephone.
Much of what we have to draw on within the era of piracy is documents that came from trials, folk tales and the first hand accounts of those who survived pirate raids. Pirates as we know them are a myth and even the truth about who they were has a bit of myth woven in. After all humans like nothing better than a good story or a tall tale.
So let us begin our stories with establishing popular modern views of pirates and how much of it is rooted in the truth of the time. The truth of the swashbuckling and the high seas that frame so many stories we enjoy. To do this I will use two examples highlighting one movie and one tv show. While there are hundreds of years of pirate stories across all different forms of media I have chosen these two because they are of particular interest to me.
The first piece of media I would like to cover is that of Pirates of the Caribbean. I will mostly be focusing on the first movie in the series but there are elements from later movies that may well come up. So I suppose if you haven’t seen these movies and care to this is your spoiler warning.
If you have not seen the film, have seen it but a fair bit of time has passed, or simply wish to not watch it at all here is a quick summary. The film follows three main characters. The first being Elizabeth Swan daughter of a Governor, She dreams of pirates and has a deep fascination with them. Next is Will Turner, son of a pirate working as a blacksmith and Elizabeth's childhood friend. Finally is Captain Jack Sparrow who only really wants his ship: the black pearl returned to him. There are plenty more secondary characters like that of Mr. Gibbs who we will discuss in a moment.
The movie kicks off with Elizabeth Swan getting kidnapped in a pirate raid from that of Captain Barbossa. An old rival of Captain Jack Sparrow and the current captain of the Black Pearl. Will Turner who is distressed at Elizabeth's kidnapping decides to team up with Jack in order to find her again. Jack wants his ship and Will wants Elizabeth returned.
Obviously the film has some extra magical elements like curses and magic pirate coins and the like. But those are not the only elements that the film gets wrong about pirates. First and most commonly known is that of pirate clothing. The pirates in this move sport a lot of leather which would not have bade well in the humidity of the Caribbean. More accurately pirates would have worn wool clothing which also was not the most ideal in the heat. If they were not in wool many pirates would have worn (at least on occasion) finery they had plundered from merchant ships.
Not exactly the “pirate look” but it would have been very effective for the time purely as an intimidation tactic. Something that stems from how they were forged. We can see an example of this in the film with the character of Mr. Gibbs.
You first see Mr. Gibbs at the beginning of the film speaking to a very young Ms. Swan about pirates. He is a sailor for the British navy working on a ship commanded by James Norrington who is transporting the new Governor of Port Royal and his daughter to their new home. This would be a similar experience to that of those who would become pirates. Most of them indeed were sailors. A dangerous and often lethal job which did not offer many if not any benefits. There were two routes you could take as a sailor at the time. You could work on a merchant ship or you could be conscripted into the Navy. Neither were good options. Most sailors were punished harshy with one case of a boy being tortured by his captain until he died. His was not an isolated case. If your captain did not get you it is likely dangerous storms would. If it was not that it was diseases. If it was not the diseases it could be the lack of rations. And if one managed to survive all of that and most likely more you would face another battle. That of getting paid. It was very difficult for sailors to get paid. Most were not paid until the very last minute when it was too late for them to leave before the ship took off on its next venture. If they left before that they would miss out on all their back wages. If they had managed to get paid and get off the ship they then risked getting functionally kidnaped and forced onto Navy ships.
It was no stretch of the imagination to wonder why many sailors were not happy with this life. While privateering had a hand in the birth of piracy it’s real mother was a complicated figure named Henry Avery. Avery and hundreds of other men had taken work aboard a handful of ships on what was promised to be a very lucrative merchant's trip. The trip turned out rather quickly to be a nightmare. The conditions were so poor among these ships that their crews turned to muntiany. Avery and his men over took the ships. And thus the first pirate of the golden age was forged. There is plenty of dispute as to how Avery was as a captain. He was reportaly a good captain to his crew and kind to English and Dutch ships.
Many stories floated around who he was. White captives held up his honorbality, his kindness and his mercy. Non-white captives did not hold the same experince. Avery actively participated in the slave trade. This track of behavior came to a head with Avery’s capture of the ship named Ganj-i-sawai. There were two common narratives of what happened aboard that ship. The folktale was told all around England by mariners and other commoners. And the experience of the crew of the Ganj-i-sawai who had survived.
The first story went as such: Avery upon boarding the ship met and was enamored with the granddaughter of Moghul Emperor. She was on route to her wedding with a gaggle of handmaids. It was said he proposed the moment he saw her. And when she said yes he married her right then and there with the blessing of a Muslim Cleric. His crew followed suit and married her handmaidens. It was then said everyone took their honeymoons together in Madagascar.
The truth about what happened aboard the Ganj-i-sawai was much less idyllic and was rather bloody. The survivors recorded their accounts of the burdley days long rape of the women on the ship of all ages. It was reported that multiple women killed themselves to stop the torment. Several of the Ganj-i-sawai’s crew were murdered in an effort to get teh crew to give up the location of the treasure. Once Avery’s crew had their plunder and were satisfied they left the ship with its surviving passengers.
Of course many of the pirates in the movies are not this brutal. Neither were the pirates of real life. Pirates like most people have a wide scale of behaviors and acceptance levels. By the time Avery’s time ended it was not uncommon to see freed or escaped slaves in pirate towns or aboard pirate ships. Those of mixed race also found homes amongst pirates giving them a certain level of freedom that they would not be able to find in other places in the world. This is not to say that pirates complicity in the slave trade ended here. There were still many crews that bought, sold and transported slaves. There were also crews that freed slave ships and would offer places on their crews.
On the whole there was a level of diversity aboard pirate ships. Something that is reflected in smaller scenes in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Such as with the pirate lords giving us a look at diverse groups of pirates that could be found all around the world.
Another show that takes the diversity of pirate crews into account is Our Flag Means Death. While the show is indisputably one of my favorites. I am seeing a concerning trend occurring with fans of the show. Something the plagues all forms of historical media and even historical folk tales and current historical records.
I call this issue the Hamilton effect. The Hamiliton effect is the glorification of historical figures brought on by their portrayals in fictional pieces of media. This happens regardless of what that historical figure has done. It was used quite a bit to uplift and rewrite the history of the founding fathers. Creating a culture that tore away the atrocities these men committed. Jefferson and Washington were both known to own and abuse their slaves. The Schuyler’s owned slaves. Eliza’s infamous orphanage did not accept bastard children nor children of color. It was not an altruistic action.
There is an expressed difference between liking Stede Bonnet the character from Our Flag Means Death and liking and uplifting Stede Bonnet the historical figure.
However, there is a clear difference between Hamilton and Our Flag Means Death. Hamilton is packaged and sold as a new take and telling of history. It often presents itself as historical fact. Our Flag Means Death on the other hand, is not that. The creator Davin Jenkins never once stated that he based this off of any biography or even that he intended it to be historical nir educational. The show is exactly what he intends. A goofy pirate romcom.
I will say now though. The historical pirates as they appear in the show are not the historical figures whose names they share. Thus someone's like of a character should not carry over to the historical figure. For instance Stede Bonnet in the show is an empathic person who cares for those around him. In real life Stede Bonnet was an enslaver who made his fortune on the backs of those in bondage.
This is a common issue with media that uses historical figures whether it be as parody or fact. People begin to associate the person with the story. A lesser example of this brings us back to Henry Avery. The sailors of the time upheld and glorified him despite his horrific actions because the stories he was attached to were so great.
I think this is something that we have to take into account when consuming historic stories or period pieces. We have to consider the truth of the people or the time and make sure we are not uplifting historical figures to the places of saints or gods. It is important if you do not know the context or the people to do research before uplifting historical figures.
The reason I note this is because I have seen the Hamilton effect beginning to slip into the Our Flag Means Death fandom. People visiting the grave of the real Stede Bonnet. People uplifting the real Izzy Hands who would have been a teenager at the time of the show. These people are not the characters nor should they be treated as such.
We need to be cognisant in order to consume this media separately for our history. Afterall, fictional pirates are not their real counterparts no matter how much they draw on context and rules of the time. We cannot let these characters frame our views on the time period and what it was like to live then for many people.
Outro: I thank you all for listening. You can find the podcast on other platforms such as soundcloud and spotify. Please check out the full script and sources and research I have used for this episode at PassingThrough.wix.com. You can also check out art piece number one the dance of the night witches which correlates to this episode.
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