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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 184 and I am your host Pascual Romero. With me as always is…

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward.

PR: And where is Ben?

0:00:37
CW: Ben is not here for the intro. We got a cryptic little message here from him saying that he’s, quote, “laying low in Lima, working both sides of the borderline,” whatever that means. So we won’t have Ben with us for the intro, but he will join us for the main recording, which I know is a topic that is right up his alley. We discuss the folklore and the realities of pirates and piracy, which is pretty apropos. We just recently had on Monday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

0:01:24
PR: Arrr, yes, that was that was correct. I had a lot of fun that day. I think quite a few people around me were very into it.

0:01:32
CW: Into it or annoyed yet kind of intimidated?

0:01:35
PR: I don’t know. I think it was pretty funny because a few people on Zoom meetings were taking on the effect. I could tell there was a lot of eye rolling, but something about the commitment to the bit for coworkers was pretty great.

CW: This is a year’s long bit. I don’t know how what annual number this is for Talk Like a Pirate Day, but quite a few newscasters mentioned that Queen Elizabeth’s funeral happened to take place on International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So if even just one of the eulogies had been done with that accent, I would have tuned in.

0:02:11
PR: And I suppose it would have been appropriate if they were from Cornwall or Bristol where the pirate accent originated.

0:02:18
CW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Missed opportunity. You’re going to have to wait until the death of the next monarch, which looking at Charles might not be all that far away. But that’s for another time. We are curious as skeptics to see what Charles will be doing. He did officially choose the name Charles for his king name. I guess it’s like roller derby. You get to pick a new name when you become a member.

PR: Yeah. Missed opportunity to start going by Macho Man for the rest of your years.

0:02:49
CW: Seriously, if you get to pick a name, you just go with what you’ve had. Anyway, we are, as skeptics, a little bit nervous about Charles’s well-documented, long-time love of homeopathy and organic farming practices that are put in place at great expense of efficiency and environmental safeguards. So I’m curious to see what’s going to happen if he does sort of manage to sort of get his ideas into laws or other… I’m really not sure how the UK manages their head of state versus monarch, how they do that. But maybe our UK listeners can give us a heads up if anything starts happening like that.

0:03:37
PR: Yeah, as an American, we always, I’ve always kind of viewed the monarchy as like a symbolic role, but at the same time, I know they still have some kind of power. I mean, I don’t know what you’re paying all that money for otherwise, but yeah, so I guess we’ll see what happens.

0:03:54
CW: Yeah, yeah. It’s a, I don’t know, the monarchy seems from far away at a glance, you know, somebody who has not grown up under the thumb of colonialism. The monarchy just kind of looks to the average American like a highly paid spokesperson mixed with a reality show.

0:04:11
PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:04:12
CW: Yeah, so we’ll see what Charles does.

0:04:15
PR: So what have you been up to lately, Celestia?

0:04:18
CW: Well, I don’t have any like talks or, you know, book tour planned or anything like that. But I did go see a movie. Oh my god, it’s been so long. I was buried in work and finally came up and took a breath and me and three other women, um, about my age, walked up to the box office, plunked our money down and said, we would like tickets to the giant naked Idris Elba movie, please. And if you haven’t seen the trailers, the one I’m talking about actually relates to squaring the strange. Cause we had a whole episode on djinn. DJINN, the word for genies as we know them in popular American culture. But, wow, what a beautiful movie. It’s called 3,000 Years of Longing. Have you seen it, Pascal?

0:05:04
PR: I have not, but I actually am very excited to see it, if nothing else, because it has the absolutely beautiful cast of Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, but also just, you know, looks really fun. And I believe it’s by George Miller, who did the Mad Max movies, who I am quite fond of.

0:05:26
CW: Yeah, the visuals are stunning. Now it’s out, but it hasn’t done tremendously well at the box office. I think it’s probably hindered by the fact that they released it streaming as well. So if you don’t want to leave your house, you can watch it for 15 bucks or something on Amazon. But seeing it in the big screen, well worth it. I actually kind of liked the fact that it wasn’t really busy because we went on like a Sunday night and it was just three of us in the theater by ourself. It was great.

0:05:54
PR: I love that.

0:05:55
CW: Yeah, the visuals well worth the price of a ticket to go see them on the giant screen. As you can tell by the trailer, it’s kind of a retelling. And I’m going to go into spoilers because I think it has some things I want to talk about. And Pascual, are you OK with that?

0:06:11
PR: Yeah, I think I’m OK with it. I think I get the gist of it. So I’m kind of interested to hear your take on it.

0:06:17
CW: Yeah, and I’m one of those people, I don’t know if listeners are too, but I kind of enjoy a movie more if I’ve heard a few spoilers on it. I think there’s actually a study, I’d have to look it up, that shows people do not enjoy something less if they know the ending. It actually kind of helps them enjoy it more. And that makes sense because you kind of look at all the foreshadowing and you look at this and you notice the different details. Anybody who doesn’t want any spoilers at all, I recommend that you either pause the podcast here, run to your local theater, watch it, and then listen to this podcast on the way home from the theater. Or you can just skip ahead to the main topic, just hit that 30-second button until you hear our music. And if you’re still with us, I’m going to talk about the movie. And I’m dying to talk to Ben about this, but he’s not here right now. First thing I noticed is the lead character, played by Tilda Swinton, is a narratologist, which is a legitimate function. You know, it’s a type of literary criticism that looks at narratives. But man, you could have just easily swapped it for folklorist. She studies stories. She studies how people come to tell stories and what people do in different stories. And at one of the pivotal scenes, she’s giving this like, almost like a TED Talk with another narratologist. And there’s like, giant big screens behind them. And it’s like a really elegant stage. And there’s all these people who have come to see her and I’m like okay that’s the only part that stands out as unrealistic is I’ve seen photos of folklore conventions and they’re not nearly that swank – that looks like a tech conference.

0:07:48
PR: Yeah I’ve been I’ve been to a few maybe not necessarily folklore conventions but I’ve been to talks at various events we’ve been to and they definitely have a little more of a local feel to them.

0:08:04
CW: Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen photos of like people in desks, you know, using an old classroom to give their little talk about something really esoteric, but exciting to them, you know. Now, one thing Miller did with this, and I’m curious to see for your take after you’ve seen it, is in my opinion, it’s ambiguous. They plant enough seeds where you could almost come out of the theater thinking, was that like Brazil? But not as much of a gut punch, like, are the things that we think are happening on the screen actually happening? Or is it the woman’s imagination? And there were just a couple of… and it could be either way. I’m thinking back. I’ve only seen the movie once There are hints that it could go either way. The djinn which she just calls djinn she caught she doesn’t have a name She just calls him gin and he’s beautifully portrayed Idris Elba makes a beautiful genie. He’s got like the pointy ears they kind of go into sort of a science II way to sort of throw some like realism into it like Oh djinn are composed of electromagnetism and this other thing. And, you know, all the electromagnetism of the earth actually kind of interferes with the djinn’s ability to think clearly and everything. And interesting little side notes about that, almost to sort of modernize it and put the djinn in our time. But the stories he tells and again, this is a narratologist listening to a genie tell stories. And he talks about how genies get together and tell stories. They’re very big on narratives. So they kind of absolutely have that in common. In fact, it’s kind of a recurring little joke where she keeps saying to him, but you’re a trickster figure. All genies are trickster figures. I can’t trust you. And, and he’s like, Oh no, no, no. Yes, others are, you know, but that’s not me. I’m one of the nice ones, you know, that kind of recurs. And I know folklorists probably got a kick out of that. But, but the whole movie is wrapped around the telling of these three stories that the genie has lived through. And I noticed that each of the protagonists in the story had something that was that was tied into the character that Tilda Swinton plays, the narratologist. The first story was about the Queen of Sheba who falls for this man who can tell, you know, King Solomon who comes and woos her and does all these things that she asks and then, you know, the genie notices that the Queen is falling for him and she just kind of like gulp, like swallows, like, wow I can’t handle how attractive this, you know, King Solomon is. And at one point you see Tilda Swinton, you know, the camera zooms in, she like gulps, you know, swallows at, wow, how attractive has this genie become to me? And the second story involves a younger girl who suffers a tragedy. And I’m not going to go too far into it, but there are, you see over the course of seeing the backstory of Tilda Swinton that she has suffered the same tragedy, not in the same way, but it kind of ended her girlhood almost as well. So, two similar tragedies for the middle story and then the final story is about a girl named Zefir who her main wish was she wanted to know everything and pursue knowledge, she was very book smart. And so he would bring her all these books and, you know, but she was also sheltered. She just lived in this one little room. So her imagination was what took her places. She wanted to know everything and she wanted to read. And she just would tell the genie, you know, things that she’d learned and, and he would tell her things and they would both learn from each other. And then you see how that obviously relates to the narratologist, who is kind of leading a sheltered life herself, except for the giant TED Talk stage I mentioned. She comes home to her little, you know, flat, and she always, she has mentioned several times that her imagination gets away from her. So it kind of plants that seed of like, is the genie a figment of her imagination? They go into this imaginary friend she had as a child, a boy she called Enzo, and she wrote, she wrote a whole journal about him. And then you see she’s written a journal about the genie as well. So it’s like the parallels are just so like Enzo didn’t exist, this boy that she talked about as a girl because she created him because she was so lonely. And then the genie, does the djinn exist? Or did she create him because she was so lonely?

0:12:47
PR: Oh wow, that’s, I love stuff like that. I love that it sounds like this isn’t one of those things that it’s… I mean, clearly it looks like there is a little bit of that being intentionally put into the story. So, you know, and I also love when directors are kind of ambiguous.

0:13:07
CW: Yeah.

0:13:08
PR: Because, you know, to think about, which I think is the best films or films you think about. So, yeah, I’m very excited now that you mentioned that. I think I am more excited now.

0:13:23
CW: So, yeah, and I hope listeners who did not choose to skip ahead of my little discussion of the movie. I hope you enjoy it more, too. I didn’t give away any particulars of any of the plots of the various stories, because you do get multiple stories for the price of one ticket here. There’s a story within a story within a story within a story. So enjoy your story.

0:13:47
PR: It’s like a Djinn-ception.

0:13:48
CW: Djinn-ception, yes, absolutely. All right, well, why don’t we move along to our main topic, which is pirates.

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0:13:49
CW: Well, I’m excited this week to hear Ben talk about pirates and also contribute some stuff myself. And Pascual, you’re bringing some information on a particular pirate as well, right?

0:14:26
PR: Oh, yeah.

0:14:27
CW: Excellent. I was surprised to find that in our backlog of episodes, we’ve never really had an episode about pirates or piracy. I know we’ve brought it up as a sort of tangential topic, and I’m betting at one point we said we should do a show on that.

BR: I would be surprised if we hadn’t.

0:14:44
CW: So why don’t you set the stage here, Ben? Tell us what makes a pirate.

0:14:48
BR: Well, buckle in, folks. It’ll be a little bit of a rocky ride. It’s a sprawling story of adventure and miscreants and romance and a lot of nastiness. So let me sort of set the stage sort of taking a step back. So when we think about pirates, right, typically the pirates that people think about due largely to Hollywood and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and things like that, we are, of course, thinking mostly of Caribbean pirates. It’s understandable. Those are the ones that are sort of most relevant to Americans. Although, of course, piracy per se is universal. As long as people have been moving goods on roads and on rivers and from place A to place B, there have been people who were eyeing those loads and wondering, well, that seems like an unarmed ship or there’s only a few guards in that particular stagecoach. Maybe we should have some of that ourselves. And one thing to keep in mind, of course, is that piracy is not gone, even though the pirates will be talking about essentially quit working or quit doing their dastardly deeds by about, you know, 17, 1750s or so. Earlier than that, piracy still goes on. A couple years back, there was the Tom Hanks film Captain Phillips, the story about a captain in 2009 who was abducted by pirates off the coast of Africa.

0:16:19
CW: Yeah, that doesn’t look like it was as fun of an experience as, say, the Our Flag Means Death pirates.

0:16:26
PR: Yeah, a lot less swashbuckling and a lot more, you know, like guns in faces.

BR: Yeah. Scary ass stuff. Yeah. And and yeah, so off the coast of Brazil and East Africa, even to the even to this day, piracy is still a significant problem for merchants and maritime goers. So so that’s sort of the broader perspective. But to really understand the golden age of piracy, you have to go back to another time. And this is where we have the sound effect of the… So basically, so the Caribbean piracy really began by in about 1650 and ended in 1730, give or take, with a peak of only about 10 years from 1716 to 1726.

0:17:18
CW: Yeah, that’s a small time period when you think about it.

0:17:22
BR: Yeah, you know, for his outsize presence that the pirates have in pop culture and imagination, they were really only active for a few decades. It was very, very fertile, rancorous, scary decades for people involved in it, but it was really only a short period of time.

0:17:44
PR: So, technically, wouldn’t, I guess maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean series is now giving actual piracy a run for its money in terms of longevity.

BR: Yeah, I remember someone telling me that the TV series MASH actually ran for like two or three times as long as the actual war did.

0:18:06
CW: Oh, yeah.

0:18:08
BR: So, yeah, I think there’s something to that. Because the historical and cultural setting of piracy is important, let me just sort of give a couple quick examples of what was going on. So, again, we’re talking 1650s, coffee houses were introduced in Paris and London. And in 1692, of course, we had the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Around the same time, 1666 to 1667, there was the London Plague outbreak. And 1714 was when Gabriel Fahrenheit created the first thermometer using mercury.

0:18:45
CW: What does the thermometer have to do with piracy?

0:18:47
BR: Well, I’m trying to give people a sense of how far back this really was. Certainly by the 1680s, most American commerce was moved through the waterways because railroads hadn’t really been introduced. So there’s a couple of different types of pirates to go into. So even though in the popular imagination pirates is sort of, you know, Blackbeard or Captain Kidd or, you know, some peg-legged miscreant, there’s sort of different nuances to it. So the first type of things we’re talking about are the official, capital O “Official Pirates.” These were, most of the pirates were ex-merchants or had some experience in the seas, but some of them were forced into it. And as we’ll touch on later, a handful of pirates were actually female.

0:19:38
CW: Yes, I’ll be bringing a couple of stories about the female pirates.

0:19:42
BR: So even though the heyday of piracy really was really only for a few decades, there are only about maybe 2,300, 2,500 pirates active over the course of the golden age of piracy.

0:19:55
CW: That sounds like a large number though. Like somebody tells me, you just have a few roaches, 2,500 to 3,000, I’d be like, no, that’s a lot. That’s, that’s a lot of pirates or…

0:20:04
BR: Well, 2000 pirates over, over the course of, you know, 70 years.

0:20:08
CW: Is that how many they caught or is that, I mean…

BR: That’s estimated as how many were active.

0:20:15
CW: Okay.

0:20:15
BR: Okay. And you know, keep it, and the other thing to keep in mind is I’ll touch on later, is that for a lot of people, piracy only lasted a few years, oftentimes because they were captured and hung. Their careers did not last long. So piracy was basically a young man’s career. So it was a tough life, often short life, with a high mortality rate. It’s easy to sort of think of these sort of old, salty sea dogs. Those were typically mariners, not pirates. The average age of a pirate was estimated to be about 27 years old. So most of them didn’t get far into their 40s and 50s before ending up either deep in the water or at the end of a rope. So these are sort of most of the pirates. So you have to think about, okay, where were the pirates and why were they there? Well, certainly at this point you had the merchant trade ships, right? So you had the Triangle. Slaves going from Africa to Brazil and to the Americas and to the West Indies. You had tobacco, cotton, and sugar, and molasses going from North America to Europe, and manufactured goods going from Europe to Africa and so on. So, at each of these junctures, on each of these trade routes, you had pirates who were laying in wait to get whatever they could. But not all of them were pirates. So there were also privateers. Do you guys know what privateers were?

0:21:38
CW: I’m trying to think. I know there’s probably a dirty joke I could make about privateers, but one’s not coming to me right away. So go on.

0:21:46
BR: Do tell. So privateers and, you know, some historians would argue that the distinction between privateers and pirates is basically a distinction without a difference. But basically, privateers were pirates operating under the protection of a particular country’s flag. So pirates specifically were, you know, people who, or groups of people, usually men, who were basically grabbing whatever they could opportunistically from ships that were passing by.

0:22:19
CW: So it’s like the difference between a freelancer and a realtor who’s working under the auspices of a realty company.

0:22:26
BR: Yeah, yeah, sort of like that. And so at the time, of course, you had several main powers. You had you had the Americas, you had you had the French, you have the British and a couple of the Dutch as well, and of course, the Spaniards. And they hated each other. They were, you know, you think things are bad now. Dial it back 300 years, see how much those countries hated each other. And in many cases, they were fighting proxy wars. And this is particularly true of businesses and trade in the Caribbean. So they were trying to not only exploit these colonies and these other places for their own benefit, but also to stick it to Spanish merchants all the better. So what would happen would be that privateers were awarded commissions, which would give them land titles to protect them from hanging in their own lands, of course. So if you’re captured by an enemy government, then your title means jack. You’ll be hung and quartered promptly.

0:23:32
CW: If you can race home and touch home base, you’re safe. I’m safe!!

0:23:41
BR: He’s like, not it, not it. Right. I got a piece of paper. So this is what the governments would do. They’d say, OK, well, you know, we don’t want you attacking our ships. But, you know, if you happen to see a Spanish galleon going by, if you happen to see, you know, a French ship, whatever, you do you, you know, whatever, whatever is good.

0:24:04
CW: You know granted that’s not a bad business model as far as the – yeah.

0:24:11
BR: Exactly, right? So of course as I mentioned, one country’s privateer was another country’s pirate. So that’s where the distinction comes in. But for example, Sir Francis Drake operated under a privateer arrangement under the Queen of England. John Paul Jones operated under the American flag. So there’s sort of a subcategory of pirates. And then we have buccaneers. What do you guys know about buccaneers?

0:24:38
CW: That’s a price of corn. I don’t know.

0:24:41
PR: They’re from Tampa Bay.

0:24:44
BR: Wrong on both counts, but good try. So buccaneers, and again, I know that in the popular parlance, these are all sort of lumped together, but this is why people tune into our podcast, is to sort of dig into the nuances. So, the buccaneers were not really pirates, but they kind of were. And in most cases, the buccaneers were actually French who lived on Tortuga in Hispaniola, which is the island of Haiti and Dominican Republic, the current one. So, they were people who, mostly French people who had come over there and they settled there and they were trying to farm the land. They were occasionally attacked by the Arawak Indians, and they subsisted mostly on wild cattle and pigs. And they sort of got their name because the Arawaks, when they weren’t fighting with them, they were learning different techniques to capture game and to process meat. And they cured their meat on drying racks called bouquins in the sun. And that’s where they got the name Buccaneers.

0:25:46
CW: So they’re named after like a barbecuing method.

0:25:50
BR: Yes, exactly.

0:25:51
CW: That’s that’s kind of cute and makes me think of tailgating Buccaneers. fans. They probably don’t realize how ironic they’re being.

0:25:59
BR: It’s come full circle, right? So yeah, so keep in mind that there wasn’t much for these French settlers to eat. I mean, there was the wild cattle and pigs and that was pretty much it. They would hunt for whatever they could, mostly the pigs and cattle, and they realized that they could use the fatter tallow from the pigs to coat the outside of ships because the tallow would actually repel worms that eat into the hull. This was a serious problem on the high seas was these shipworms that would bore holes, sometimes quite a few of them. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of them. And each individual hole is not very big, but when you have thousands of them, it can pose a very real threat to the ship.

0:26:44
CW: Yeah, I can’t imagine a worse place to have termites than in the middle of the ocean.

0:26:48
BR: Yeah, that’s the worst possible place.

0:26:51
CW: Yeah, well, I guess not termites, worms. Worms. Pretty much doing the same thing to your baseboards, yikes.

0:26:54
BR: Yeah, and of course, when you think about the life that they led and the things they had to be concerned about, I mean, you can’t just stay out there. I mean, you can’t just send somebody overboard to slap some paint on it. You know, this is a… It can be a serious problem if you’re far away from land and your ship is leaking and there’s worms all over it. Everybody could easily die if this isn’t taken care of pretty promptly. Anyway, so back to the buccaneers. So the buccaneers, they were feeding on wild cattle and pigs and things like that. And when the rainy season came, hunting was bad. They said, well, we got to do something. Why don’t we, hey, look at that. There’s, that looks like a Spanish ship. And sure enough, this is when Spain was, I was going to say looting, that’s a fair word, when Spain was looting and exploring parts of South America. And the buccaneers began to realize that the Spanish galleon ships would have to go right past where they were. And they also realized that the ships that were going to South America were usually pretty empty. The ones coming from South America had gold. This was like, well, hold on here. We can do something with this. So basically, the buccaneers were opportunistic pirates when the season came and when the Spanish galleons were coming up, headed for Spain with gold that was looted from South America. The buccaneers would sometimes go out in canoes and attack them and sometimes take their treasure.

0:28:31
CW: So the buccaneers were sort of like a low-rent seasonal pirate?

BR: Yes, that’s actually typical of a lot of pirates. Most pirate work, sort of like carny work, was seasonal.

CW: I beg your pardon?

BR: What part are you objecting to the comparison?

CW: Go on, go on.

BR: Yes, yes. So for the most part, the pirates hung around the Caribbean during the wintertime, and they would go north in April or May looking for ships to attack. So they were sort of the original snowbirds.

CW: Okay, so the buccaneers were attacking the Spanish galleons for gold and whatever else they could grab. What were the other major players? Because I mean, I keep hearing about rum. I mean, do we have pirates attacking rum ships specifically?

0:29:17
BR: On occasion, right? So the Buccaneers, although they were French, they were not, they weren’t privateers because they weren’t operating under the French flag. So basically the trade was, the trade at the time was dominated by three different groups. There was the English, the French and the Spanish. And there were a couple others, including the Dutch as well, but primarily those. And often piracy was seen as a patriotic duty. As I said before, if you were a French pirate, you’re more than happy to take the plunder from English and Spanish ships and vice versa. And there were, of course, other Caribbean colonies. There was Belize, formerly British Honduras, there was French Guiana, and so on. And so during this time, you have these three main governments trying to establish colonies throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere. Then as you might imagine, when piracy got especially bad, there were complaints because merchants can’t get their stuff. They’re like, what the hell guys, right? I mean, I’m a wealthy merchant, I’m sending these ships out. I send these ships out with these men to go out and bring back rum and cotton bales. And two months later, I found out that the ship has been attacked. So there’s a lot of economic pressure.

0:30:33
CW: It always goes back to supply chains, doesn’t it?

0:30:35
BR: It always goes back to supply chains, exactly. So there were complaints across the board from merchants of all nationalities to do something about the pirates. The British Royal Navy was stretched pretty thin, so they couldn’t escort every single merchant ship. So this is one thing we’re demanding. So, well, you’re the Royal Navy, we’re the British Empire, the sun never sets on us, we’re the greatest power on earth, come help us out. They’re like, yeah, we’re busy. So that didn’t go too far with it. So there was all this stuff going on. And frankly, France and Spain were not in any better shape either. They were fighting proxy wars. They couldn’t devote a bunch of resources to escort ships all the way across the Atlantic. You have a situation where everybody’s pissed off because the pirates are sapping everybody’s resources. So in the case of Spain, for example, most of the merchant ships were sailing for the crown. The King of Spain had a vested interest in making sure the ships were coming back, because of course that was helping to fuel the war. So everybody across the board was upset about it, and this is where the pirates came in.

PR: So I know pirates didn’t have a lot of days in their lives, but what was a day in the life of a pirate?

BR: It was nothing like Pirates of the Caribbean.

0:32:03
PR: Oh, that’s a bummer.

0:32:04
BR: Unlike Hollywood films, who would have thought?

0:32:07
CW: Yeah.

0:32:07
BR: So there’s a couple of caveats here. One is that we don’t have a lot of pirate artifacts. We have some, so our knowledge of pirates, it’s not minimal, but a lot of it is for a secondhand information for a couple of reasons. One was that pirates were by their nature itinerant. They often went from place to place. They changed ships all the time. Again, they didn’t last too long. So there are very few old pirate stories.

0:32:36
CW: Nobody was writing memoirs?

0:32:39
BR: That’s exactly right. I mean, very few of them were literate and so they didn’t record much. And it’s rare to find first-person accounts of pirate victims as well. So we do have a few of them.

0:32:51
CW: Now, so this kind of screams to me as like, there’s a vacuum here and folklore tends to fill vacuums in history.

BR: Right, exactly.

CW: This is why we have such a rich fiction of pirates because there’s not much fact, right?

BR: Well, it depends on what aspect we’re talking about, right? So in some parts of pirate history, we actually have pretty good records. And this would be, for example, in the pirate trials. Towards the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, you saw the increasing use of pirate trials, in which, even though they were pirates, they were still afforded due process or some 17th century version of due process. So, in fact, this actually became a bit of a problem because towards the end when there were bounties out for pirates, I’ll touch on this later, part of the law said that they actually had to be brought back to London for trial. And as you can imagine, this is kind of a pain in the ass because, you know, if you’re in Brazil or in Haiti or in Jamaica, you have to put all these pirates in chains and ship them back up the Atlantic, maybe taking weeks or longer just to bring them to the Old Bailey to give them a trial and to put them in the gibbet. So it was a bit of a clunky process. So again, we do have some information from the pirate trials. We have some information from people who encountered the pirates, very little from the pirates themselves for reasons I explained before. But most of pirate life was boredom punctuated by bits of excitement. So it wasn’t really romantic or heroic.

0:34:34
PR: It sounds an awful lot like touring.

BR: You’re a rock star for two hours and then you’re just some schlub in a bus, right?

0:34:39
PR: Yep.

0:34:40
CW: Hey, you narrowly avoided arrest a couple of times yourself, right?

0:34:43
PR: Yeah.

0:34:43
BR: You know, you do have a passing resemblance to Blackbeard, so maybe you were mistaken there.

0:34:54
PR: Hey, who knows?

BR: So yeah, so basically the modern version of pirates as sort of being romantic, heroic, is largely a fiction. I mean, you know, if you encountered pirates in their age, they were terrifying. They were thugs and thieves and they were killers and rapists and they were really undeserving of romantic treatment. And really when their image sort of became whitewashed was when Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island in 1883. And also Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and others as well, where you had pirates suddenly not being the evil, brutish, nasty killers, and suddenly being these sort of dashing Douglas Fairbanks films, like, you know, see the Black Pirate where you have, you know, mustachioed, swashbuckling heroes like that, that was not really quite what was going on.

0:35:51
CE: The Errol Flynn-ification of the modern pirate image.

0:35:56
BR: Yeah, exactly. So even though oftentimes the depiction of pirates in modern times is considered mostly Europeans, by some estimates, a quarter to a third of pirates were freed slaves.

0:36:08
CW: Oh, yeah.

0:36:09
BR: So, a significant number of them were black. I was going to say African Americans, but they weren’t so straight from America. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. Now, one of them was that, well, let me take a step back. So, you’re a pirate, you’re on the high seas, you see a ship coming. What do you do?

0:36:29
CW: You approach quietly and then raise the Jolly Roger.

BR: Yes. What else do you do?

0:36:35
CW: You attack them and pillage and plunder?

BR: Yes, well, you give them the finger. Well, not literally, because they’re too far away.

CW: Give them the hook!

BR: Give them the hook. Right. So there’s a couple things that would go on. Keep in mind that pirate ships were not made, they were taken. That is pirates, because again, being opportunistic, they would take whatever ship was fast and that could carry the crew. So, you know, nobody said, oh, I’m going to build a pirate ship. It was like, oh, I’m going to take that. That will now be a pirate ship. And unlike in Hollywood films, pirates preferred single massed sloop ships that were small, fast, and agile. Because of course, keep in mind, what is the goal here? The goal here is to spot a potential prey, identify what they may be carrying, gain on them on the open seas, and take whatever they have. Oftentimes, of course, they were attacking merchant ships. So when we think of pirate treasure, what do you guys think of?

0:37:34
CW: Rum and gold and doubloons.

BR: Doubloons!

PR: Like a chest full of silverware or something.

BR: Yes. Yeah, that that would be what I would have wanted. Unfortunately, most of the pirate treasure, I use the term treasure very loosely, would be somewhat underwhelming to modern ears. Most of what they got were tobacco bales, sacks of sugar, some carpenters tools, spare sails, things like that.

0:38:05
CW: So then they had to go find a way to sell this and use the profits.

BR: Right. So all of a sudden, yeah, so this actually was, this was a bit of a problem for pirates because all of a sudden they’re like, okay, great. We just risked our lives to take over the ship and oh, wow, look at that. Four sacks of sugar.

PR: Cool.

0:38:23
CW: So they were really the liquidators of the high seas.

BR: Right. So then they sort of began this sort of secondary market where in order to do something with that, they would travel to the Caribbean, in some cases even to America, to unload their pirate loot. Because again, what are they going to do with extra sails, of course, if there’s something wrong with the ship. But a lot of the goods that they were seizing just weren’t that, they just weren’t that valuable. And they weren’t, they weren’t worthless, but they, you know, there’s nothing that they could really do with a couple bales of tobacco.

0:39:02
CW: It’s like they’re solving the problem they’re creating. They’re like, oh, so all your ships got lost at sea or were attacked by pirates and the supply chains are terrible? Well, I happen to, you know, look at all this tobacco and molasses that fell off of a truck.

0:39:16
BR: Talk to my friend, Louie. He just, he just says that’s what happened. I don’t know. Anyway, do you want it or not?

0:39:23
CW: So pirates are, they got their fingers in everything by necessity.

0:39:26
BR: Yes. And there’s some debate about how egalitarian the pirates were. So it is certainly true that in some cases, the pirates would free the slaves because the slaves that were coming from Africa to the Caribbean, they didn’t want to have more mouths to feed. So yeah, they’re like, you know, and of course at the time, the slaves were cargo. And as I mentioned, in some cases, they would ask the slaves if they wanted to join the pirates and sometimes they would say yes. Other times, they would sell the slaves in the nearest port. Sometimes they would just push them overboard. Just depended on what the captain said at the time. That being said, there really was an element of democracy among pirate ships, which is perhaps unexpected, certainly for the time. So pirate ships were run by the captain. Everyone voted and the one who got the most votes was the captian.

0:40:30
CW: That seems like kind of a necessity thing. Because I mean, if you’re not, if you’re not running a crew with some sort of imposed structure, like, you know, the Queen’s naval officer school training, and everybody’s been trained in the same way, if you’ve just got a ragtag bunch of people, and they don’t like who the captain is, I mean, call it democracy or you can call it mutiny, but somebody’s going overboard.

0:40:54
BR: Well, the rule was that the captain had absolute authority, but could be deposed at any time except during an attack. So yeah, if you’re in battle, whoever is the captain is the captain. No questions asked. Nobody tries a mutiny in the middle of battle. Once it ends, for better or worse, you can elect a new captain and go on. Not only that, but there were actually pirate laws. In some cases, there’s a surviving list of pirate laws. I think I’ve forgotten the number. I think it’s 10 or 12 rules, official rules of piratehood.

0:41:33
CW: They do cover that a little bit in the documentary by Disney, The Pirates of the Caribbean, we talked about earlier.

0:41:38
BR: Yes, it’s a fine documentary.

0:41:40
CW: The rules of parlay and stuff like that.

0:41:44
BR: And yeah, so each of the pirates got a certain share that was agreed upon. So the captain got full shares and then the carpenter and sort of down the line, but again, it wasn’t sort of every man for himself. It was like, okay, it’s all agreed on. This is gonna be the treasure. This is how it’ll be divided up. And then when you’re talking about attacking the ships, right, so there’s a couple things that go on. So one of the main things that the pirates would do is of course, they would pursue and then attack ships. And despite their partly cultivated deadly reputation, pirates preferred to steal rather than fight. Ideally, a pirate ship would raise the Jolly Roger, and there were different versions of it, as I’ll touch on, and the other ship would surrender, and they would take whatever they wanted. So typically, they would offer the ship being attacked a chance to just surrender, and if they said yes, then everything was fine. If they said no, well, then you’re in deep, deep trouble. They expected immediate surrender. They weren’t like, you know, let me get back to you by tomorrow. It’s like, no, no, either you do or don’t want to be set upon. In most cases, unlike in the films, most of the battles were done in close quarters. So even though it makes dramatic films to see the battles and the cannonballs flying between ships. Typically, that was a rarity, partly because, number one, the cannons were, in some cases, just as likely to damage your own ship as the other ship. But keep in mind that the ultimate goal here is to take whatever is on the ship. And if you sink the ship, then you don’t get it.

0:43:34
CW: That makes sense.

0:43:35
BR: Yes, so there’s that.

0:43:36
CW: So during the exciting parts of pirate life where they’re racing to get a ship and hopefully, you know, I’m a looter, not a fighter, just taking the stuff. In between all that, I mean, I’m imagining a neat TV show that has yet to be pitched called, you know, you know, Joe Rabinowitz, pirate accountant who divides up all the loot for everybody and keep logs of the meetings and everything. What was all the boredom like? I mean, we all know what boredom is like, but I mean, do we have any idea what it was like for pirates between battles?

0:44:11
BR: Yeah, there was a sort of a special type of boredom that involves being on a dank, dark ship that’s constantly leaking, surrounded by saltwater. Typically pirate ships were overcrowded, right? So the merchant ships that they were attacking usually had just enough people to man the ship and to unload and things like that, the navigators and whatever else. But the pirate ships were often overcrowded, didn’t have enough food, didn’t have enough water. The water they had was brackish. The food was uniformly terrible. I was reading several books on pirates that described the worms and boll weevils that were common. I mean, it was just, you assume that what you’re eating will number one, break your teeth, number two, have worms in it.

CW: So there’s worms in this ship that might sink you, and there’s worms in your food that might kill you.

0:45:08
BR: If you’re lucky, they only have a few dozen worms. So there’s that. And of course, keep in mind that one of the biggest threats to any ship, including pirate ships, was fire. There was very little light. There’s one or two places that would have fire, for example, in the galleys.

CW: If I find worms in my food, I might try to set it on fire, too.

0:45:31
BR: Mmm, good stuff, right?

PR: It’s for the greater good.

BR: Yeah. So yeah. So most of the most of the time the pirates, they slept in hammocks or in rows below the lower decks, pitching and rolling constantly. And again, this is they’re not, they’re not above deck. They’re, they’re basically in near darkness. Or sometimes total darkness.

PR: Again, just like tour.

BR: Oh my God. Having flashbacks. Yeah.

PR: Just, you know, sleeping in a tiny dark box and swing to and fro for hours.

0:46:04
CW: So that sounds like a pretty not great existence in between your battles, which are not great also.

0:46:11
BR: Yeah, it’s sort of like, well, everything here sucks, but you know what? Some parts suck less than others. So let’s go with that. Yeah, so there’s a couple other things to think about the shipboard life. One of them was that the ship bell was essentially center to shipboard life. It told people when to eat, when to sleep, when to work, things like that. So, everybody was always tuned to when the bell was going off.

0:46:38
CW: So, there was sort of a military discipline of some sort?

BR: There was. And, in fact, it’s interesting. I don’t want to go too far afield here, but I had always understood that a significant number of pirates, certainly the British pirates, were what were called Shanghai or press ganged into service.

0:46:59
CW: Yeah, that was my understanding, too. Like you became a pirate, sort of like a vampire bites you and you become another vampire. You become a pirate when another pirate hijacks your ship or kidnaps you.

0:47:11
BR: So here’s the thing, right? Is that, so there actually was some, I mean, press gang was a thing. And it just, I’ve always been, I’ve always found the phrase Shanghaied just so evocative. I mean, it’s probably a bit of a slur in Shanghai, but it happened, it was common there. So it’s not a dig at them. That’s just, you know, how the word came about. But the idea of just sort of going about your life, your everyday life, you know, going to the market or doing whatever else, and then you meet somebody and then you get beat up or knocked out or something else, and you wake up on a ship surrounded by strangers on the water. You may never have been on a ship before, and suddenly there you are.

CW: Oh, great.

BR: But yeah, in some cases, the Royal Navy was so desperate for repo, they would actually what we call press gang them into service. The Royal Navy was not above abducting ordinary people and saying, well, you’re in the Navy now.

0:48:18
CW: Okay, so the idea I had in my head of pirates is actually true of the Royal Navy.

BR: That’s not too far off.

CW: Okay. All right.

BR:1Yeah. I mean, in some cases, the pirates would say either join us or die. Usually the correct answer was, yes, I’ll join you. But again, it was so it’s interesting, sort of, when you read about the comparisons between the Royal Navy and the pirates, one of the reasons why pirate life was appealing to many people was that it offered some measure of freedom and democracy. If you look at how the average person lived in London and other ports, not just in England, but around the world, in the 1770s and in 1780s, there wasn’t much opportunity. There was, you know, you’re a farrier or you’re a laborer and that’s your lot. And that’s what you’re going to do. Even though it made you run the risk of being hung at the end of a noose and gibbeted and your body being displayed on the Thames to warn against the pirates, at least there was some measure of freedom and a chance to become very rich. And so this is one of the reasons why pirates, and even during their own age, there was a certain romanticization of it. And like I said, in many cases, the life in the British Royal Navy was even worse. So it’s like, wow, going into legitimate service sucks, but how about this? So when pirates weren’t fighting either each other or the people they were pursuing, oftentimes they were surrounded by the sick and the dying. There was lots of disease on the ships. There was scurvy, tropical diseases, malaria, dysentery, syphilis. Rats and roaches and beetles were common, as I mentioned.

CW: Worms. Lots of worms, you said.

BR: Yeah. Lots of worms. Food was mostly fish and meat. There were no fresh fruit and a chronic lack of water. And of course, as many listeners probably know, the reason that the British sailors were called limeys was because they realized that lime prevented scurvy in citrus. And so at one point, this is actually one of the bits of epidemiology. People were like, well, there’s this disease that really seems to especially afflict people out on the oceans and I wonder why that might be. And someone finally figured out it was due to a lack of citrus. And so then they started requiring and actually giving out citrus to the British sailors.

0:51:00
CW: One of the first public health outreach things I can think of. Yeah.

BR: Certainly one of them, yeah. But again, the water was brackish. As I said, a lot of it was called hardtack biscuits, which is sort of rock hard, stale bread type stuff with black headed weevils and stuff. So just, you know, pretty, pretty damn miserable. The occasional lightness, you know, they would be, they would, you know, sometimes, you know, they would play games, they would roll dice. But in general, the life of a pirate was neither glamorous, nor particularly exciting, nor particulaly exciting, nor lucrative.

0:51:37
CW: So that song, The Pirate Life, for me is just chock full of misinformation.

BR: It is.

CW: Well, as crappy as that experience sounds, you know, there’s always a bigger fish, or there’s always a worse life. And there were a lot of people for whom life was pretty crappy in the 17th and 18th centuries. And some of those people were women. So I did want to touch on a couple of things about women in piracy, because for some women, it actually, it worked out for a little while anyway.

0:52:12
BR: Yes, in fact, some of the most interesting and illustrious pirates were women. So who do you have for us?

0:52:18
CW: Well, women in the sea kind of, I mean, it’s a bigger picture. And so I want to ease back a little bit and talk about, sailors were kind of superstitious as a general rule. It makes sense because they were kind of isolated. They had crappy lives, lots of worms. They were at the mercy of the elements. And if you had a storm, you could die pretty instantly in the cold water. So they had fears and fears lead to superstitions. So women were considered bad luck on ships for quite some time. And there were stories of men on ships throwing women overboard because they thought they were the cause of the bad weather that the ship was enduring.

BR: That’s sketchy to me.

BR: Yeah. There’s also stories of women hiding their gender to sneak aboard and work as a sailor, both in the British Navy or on a pirate ship. And in a really weird contradiction of superstition, women were bad luck on a ship, but the sight of a bare-chested woman was supposedly good luck. So your bare bosoms, if you were a female of voluptuous nature, was supposed to calm down the sea. Some writers claim that the belief was that the appearance of a naked-breasted woman shamed nature into calming down, it like soothed the savage beast of the ocean. Now, this…

0:53:47
BR: Maybe, but was this like something to appease Triton?

0:53:50
CW: I mean, no, that’s not, not, didn’t mention Triton or Krakens or anything like that.

0:53:55
BR: Okay, all right.

0:53:56
CW: It apparently, the idea tracked all the way back to ancient Greece. The historic dockyard Chatham out of the UK stated that medical writers believed women’s bodies were quote-unquote wetter than men, and so they kind of were more linked to the ocean. And they cited Pliny the Elder writing in his work Natural History around the first entury of the common era, and I’ll quote him here – in the first place, hailstorms, they say, whirlwinds and lightning even, will be scared away by a woman uncovering her body, while her monthly courses are upon her. The same, too, with all kinds of tempestuous weather, and out at sea a storm may be lulled by a woman uncovering her body. So…

0:54:46
BR: I would like to point out that this is a testable claim.

0:54:52
CW: Any half-naked women who want to go out on a boat with Ben, please write in. I’ll put you in touch.

0:54:55
BR: You know where I am.

0:54:56
CW: Women can’t really win for losing here. So you’re a woman in the 1700s, you’re not allowed on a ship, you’re only reluctantly taken as a passenger and you might get tossed overboard if things go south here. And however, if you are on a ship, you’re deemed useful if you’re naked. So yeah, there you go. Anybody interested in how this affected artwork on ships, you can look into a long involved historical dive on figureheads, the elaborate carvings on the prow of a ship. You know what I’m talking about here. There used to be animals, symbols of the state’s power like unicorns, you know, lions, dragons. But right around 1780, the trend started becoming voluptuous half-naked female figures on the prow of a ship. So you started seeing sea nymphs and sirens, female goddesses like Athena or Minerva, and of course, mermaids. So setting aside all the elaborately carved T&A that you had at the front of these ships, let’s talk more about flesh and blood women. The topic of rebellious women secretly hiding their female features and enlisting in the Navy or otherwise getting on board sailing ships is really surprisingly a well-covered area in maritime history and certainly in fiction. Many of these individuals might have identified as trans men today, reading about how they lived. And it sort of makes sense if you want to get away from a hometown or a society or a place where everybody knows you because you’re born into a certain family, you know, you really could just sort of cut your hair, put on trousers and join a crew. And you’re in a completely different place with different people. And as Ben was talking about people being press ganged, they don’t necessarily ask a whole lot of questions. They need bodies. Women of course, were at a disadvantage pretty much with everything. They couldn’t learn any skills beforehand. They couldn’t apply for officer school or anything like that before, you know, shipping off. They just pretty much had to try their luck. Plenty of females, however, found their way on board as unskilled labor and picked up things along the way. There’s a plethora of books covering this. I’ll run down a quick list here. Women Sailors and Sailors Women, an Untold Maritime History by David Cordingley. Also by David Cordingley, Seafaring Women, Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways and Sailors’ Wives. Then we have one published by Johns Hopkins, Iron Men, Wooden Women, Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700 to 1920 by Margaret Crichton. Female Tars, Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by Suzanne Stark. And then we have Pirate Women, The Princesses, Prostitutes and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas by Laura Suk Duncombe. And Salt on Your Tongue, Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie. Now, that’s just a handful of the semi-academic work on the topic. And I myself, in my early days in college, I was moved by a children’s book, young adult fiction, by an author called Avi. The title of the book was The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. Have you guys even heard of this particular book?

0:58:26
PR: I’m not familiar.

0:58:27
CW: Ah, well it’s a middle school level book and it came out in 1990 and won a Newbery Award and right around the early 90s I was in college and I happened to luck into a perfect job for me as part of a teacher training program. I was able to read young adult fiction and then I had to write worksheets and activities around the book. So I got paid to read a bunch of really cool young adult fiction. And this was one of them. And of course, tells the tale of a young prim and proper girl, and she has to make a long voyage as a passenger and the crew doesn’t want her there. And there’s hijinks and murder and mutiny. And in the end, she ends up just casting off her whole role as a prim and proper young lady and leaves her family and runs off to have a life at sea. So sorry for the spoilers, everybody, but that’s how that book ends. So today, women still make up less than 2% of the seafaring workforce, and most of them can be found on cruise lines. Go figure. The British Royal Navy only started letting women serve on battleships in 1990. And while in the U.S. we have had women as nurses and aviators in the Navy for most of the 20th century. Women serving aboard active battleships were not a thing until 1994. So like this is all in our lifetimes that women are becoming more accepted as part of a naval environment. And I mean, it just it kind of blows my mind that if I had wanted to join the Navy and serve on a battleship right out of high school, I would not have been able to, even with the immense power of my water calming boobs, which I got to tell you guys were pretty awesome in my 20s. But so all this is to say that female pirates are, of course, compelling as a narrative. We love stories of female pirates. They are crossing more boundaries than anybody else. The male pirates are breaking the law, but female pirates are breaking the laws. They’re gender bending. They are twisting society’s expectations of them. They’re, you know, running away and joining the circus in such a grand way. And there’s plenty of stories. Some of them go way, way back. Some were actual queens, not just successful pirates who were given the nickname of Pirate Queen. We could do a whole show on just these ladies, and maybe we will someday, but for right now, I’m just going to hit on a couple. These stories of female pirates were by necessity mixed with myth and folklore, just as tales of male pirates were, because no first-person account from a female pirate exists. They are pieced together from accounts when women were sentenced and hanged, or they were rumors or second-hand tales. We don’t have any verifiable accounts of their day-to-day lives, but we can assume that the farther back a story goes, the more hands have been into it. So bear that in mind when you hear tales of female pirates. A lot of people may have reshaped the story along the way. If we go way, way back, there’s Ladgerda the Viking pirate, sometime before the Middle Ages. Some sources go back to the 12th century. Some go back to the 6th century. Lagerda, if I’m saying that correctly, I don’t know Norse very well, but Lagerda was a fierce fighter who decided to murder her ex-husband after saving him, as you do. Ragnar was his name. He fell for her after seeing her prowess in battle. He ended up marringing her but then divorcing her to marry a Swedish princess. He ended up in a civil war back in Denmark and Lagerda swooped in with troops and saved him and then killed him because she realized it would be a lot easier to rule his land without him. And I can’t argue with that. So now she sounds pretty much like an all-around warrior, shield maiden, Valkyrie type, you know, trope in Viking mythos. But she’s brought up in a lot of these tales about female pirates because, well, with Vikings, there’s a bit of a crossover. I mean, you pillage one town on a boat and you’re stuck with the label pirate. So there you go. Moving forward in the start of the 19th century, there was a Chengyat-shao. And I hope I’m saying that right. There’s different ways that I have come across to say it. But she, Chengyat, was so successful as a pirate that she was basically able to force the Chinese government to pay her to stop pirating. She secured pensions for her crew, which was pretty sizable. During her career, which was the first decade of the 1800s, she forbid raping any female captives and made it punishable by death. A lot of these female pirates got into the game by marrying into pirate life. Then they ended up becoming more memorable when they outlived or out-pirated their husbands. So that’s a pattern I came across here. That was definitely true for Chengyat Tsao, who had started as a prostitute and either married or she was assumed to be the wife of Chengyat. She did all the books for him, however, and made the fleet rich and powerful. She was that pirate accountant I was talking about earlier. So after his death, she took over his fleet and the commanders voted for her. They were kind of okay with the idea of a woman leading them. It was interesting. One of the things I came across was these were not like imperially trained men. These guys were pirates. They were from all over the place. They were from the country. They were from the boonies. And where they were from, when a fisherman died, his widow took over the fishing boat. So having the widow of their pirate commander take over was no big thing for them. So she took over after his death and she also took his adopted son as her second-in-command and her lover and ended up marrying him. So Extra Credits History has an excellent little piece on her that you can watch by the way if you’re curious and want 10 minutes of entertainment of infotainment about the pirate queen Chengyat.

1:04:32
PR: And just testament to women in piracy that like that must be one of the only times in recorded history that pirates got a pension out of the deal.

1:04:37
CW: Yes indeed. Yes indeed. And then moving into the actual golden age of European piracy, there are two standouts that I should mention, which would be Mary Read, an English pirate, and Anne Bonney, who was born in Ireland, but she was raised in South Carolina. This was back when it was still a colony. What little was known of them comes mostly from Captain Charles Johnson’s book, published in 1724, A General History of the Pyrates, spelled P-Y-R-A-T-E-S. And it definitely might be mixed with fiction, but it’s what we have. So bear that in mind. Mary Reed was born in 1685 and she began dressing as a boy from a young age. Her mother had two kids. First, she had a legitimate son. And then after her husband died, as they do, she had Mary, who was the result of a secret love affair. And one of those kids that just kind of appears after a woman spends a season in the country visiting friends. So the legitimate son died, as happens, and in order to keep getting financial support and inheritance from her late husband’s family, Mary’s mother had her dress as the dead brother and passed her off as the son. And apparently that worked. Mary kept up the habit and eventually joined the British military as a teen while dressing as a boy. Now, while serving, she fell in love with a Flemish soldier and married him, and then they opened an inn called the Three Horseshoes in the Netherlands. But her husband soon died, as they do, and she moved to the West Indies around 1715. While working on a ship there, it was taken by pirates and she joined up with them. Around 1719, she took a pardon from the king and was commissioned as a privateer. Then she later joined the crew in mutiny. Fast forward, she ends up joining the crew of Jack Rackham or Calico Jack, where she also sailed along with Anne Bonney. Now Anne, who’s the other pirate of note here as far as American history goes, was a bit younger than Mary. She’d been born around 1700 in the county of Cork. Also an illegitimate child, she was born to her father’s mistress. She was spirited, shall we say, as a young girl, she stabbed a servant girl. And then as a teen, she allegedly beat a suitor half to death when he tried to rape her. So good on her. Her father brought her along to the colonies right before her teen years. And she decided to marry a sailor slash small time pirate named James Bonney. Anne took his last name and the two of them moved to the Bahamas. Now in the Bahamas, Nassau was kind of a pirate gathering place. It really kind of the descriptions of it remind me of Florida for Kearney’s Gibb town, Gibb town in Florida. But back in the day, it was Nassau in the Bahamas. She was a social kind of person and she hung out in the taverns and that was where she met Calico Jack and fell head over heels for him and became his lover and part of his crew. Allegedly, Jack tried to offer James Bonney, her husband at the time, some money to divorce Anne, but he refused. They took off anyway. She was able to get a divorce at sea apparently, and she later bore Calico Jack, a son, in Cuba. Now, except while she was visibly pregnant, Anne was still trying to pass as a man while on board, serving as part of the crew. And with Mary Read joining the crew, she wasn’t the only woman doing that. There’s a bit of shipping that then goes on with the story, and I’m not talking about pirate ships. According to tales, Anne Bonney confessed her gender to Mark Reed, which was the male name that Mary was going by, because she was attracted to Mark Reed. Then, surprise, Reed reveals that, well, I’m a woman too. And that might have been awkward, and it might have been the start of a script for an adult film, but Bonney confessed Reed’s secret to Calico Jack, who was Bonney’s lover, and also getting a bit jealous by this time because the two of them had been spending a lot of time together. So it didn’t matter for very long because the whole gang was arrested in late October 1720 off the coast of Jamaica. The story goes that the male pirates on Calico Jack’s crew were actually too drunk to fight. And this was very upsetting to Anne and Mary. Everybody got captured. Jack was hanged immediately, and apparently Anne’s last words to Jack were like, if you’d have fought like a man, you wouldn’t be hanging like a dog right now. And Reed and Bonney both claimed to be pregnant and got a delay in their sentencing for that, which was, of course, going to be hanging because they were pirates. This was actually known as pleading the belly. Mary Reed died before she could give birth, however. The cause was noted as fever, but it was likely complications from the pregnancy. As for Anne, her fate is a little bit more murky. One source said that she was not ever executed, and some rumors state that she got a reprieve and was in and out of prison, or she managed to get back to America and lived in South Carolina until her death in 1782. But again, they’re just rumors.

1:10:05
BR: Interesting.

1:10:07
CW: Now, it is unfortunate that a big part of the tale of these two female pirates is how they died. Ben, do you want to speak to how pirates tended to meet their ends? Because, as you said, they met them often and early.

1:10:22
BR: Typically what happened would be that because piracy was such a concern to all the major governments, they put out the warning that the penalty for piracy was death, as we talked about, specifically death by hanging. So oftentimes after the pirates were hung, they would be put in gibbets, they look sort of like coffins, but they’re open to the air, and you’re sort of putting these things, and they would be hung outside many cities, including London on the Thames, as a warning to other pirates. So many, many pirates were hanged over the years. It’s estimated that between 1760 and 1776, over 400 men were hanged, so about 40 a year. So it was quite a lucrative industry there of, well, not money making, but certainly a very busy industry. As you might imagine, this served as a bit of a deterrence to pirates.

1:11:28
CW: I can’t imagine it made the public areas smell all that great either.

1:11:32
BR: No, no. The goal was deterrence. And so you know if you see the decaying body of a pirate and you have to go by it on the London Bridge for example, or you know you might think twice about becoming a pirate.

PR: Yeah, kind of the Vlad Dracul school of intimidation.

BR: Right, exactly. But of course one of the most famous pirates that never got a chance to be hung and that would be Blackbeard.

PR: Yeah, so I guess it’s only fitting that the the bearded member of the crew Talk about the most famous beard of all arguably and that is Blackbeard. So Blackbeard was Possibly born in Bristol, England around 1680 His name was Edward Thatch. Some people spell it Teach Not sure what would be what the accurate one would be. He may have served as a sailor or a privateer during the War of Spanish Succession, which was also known as Queen Anne’s War here stateside, before turning to the high seas larceny in the last golden age of piracy. So this is right at the tail end. Blackbeard’s pirate career probably began in 1717 while serving as second in command to Captain Ben Hornigold, based in the pirate haven of Nassau, as you mentioned earlier Celestia, being kind of the, what was the Florida town?

1:12:59
CW: Gibb Town, it was the Gibb Town of the high seas.

1:13:02
PR: The Gibb Town of the high seas. So together they attacked, plundered merchant ships off the eastern seaboard of colonial America. Blackbeard later met gentleman pirate Stede Bonnet and took over command of his sloop, The Revenge. Now, this story may start sounding familiar to you, those of you who like the show, This Flag Means Death, which is a show that is loosely based on their relationship and the piracy that took place when they met.

1:13:39
CW: So I love the looser stories based on the original loose stories based on what we actually know about pirates.

1:13:46
PR: Yeah. And, you know, honestly, the more I read about Blackbeard in researching this episode, the more I feel like Taika Waititi’s portrayal of Blackbeard may actually be more accurate than some of the versions I’ve actually heard, you know, through the rumors and stories about him.

1:14:05
CW: Well, that’s great. Okay.

PR: Yeah. So when he took command of the Revenge, it was said that he captured 15 ships in a matter of three weeks. Now, that is like unprecedented piracy for a single ship. And he continued to just terrorize the colonies, attacking ships bound for eastern seaports including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, the Chesapeake, and Charleston. He gained an absolutely fearsome reputation. He used his image to his advantage above all else. He was described as wearing a sling over his shoulders with three brace of pistols hanging in holsters like bandoliers and stuck lighted slow matches under his hat. Slow matches are like the cord used as a fuse in cannons. And I don’t know how true that part of it is, just having lit fuses on his face. But hey, you know, he was…

CW: The man was a walking fire hazard.

PR: Yeah, exactly. But despite the fearsome reputation and appearance, there is no account of him ever harming or murdering a single person at all.

1:15:15
BR: He was sort of a gentle beard.

1:15:17
PR: Yeah, well, and so that it just it’s amazing to think of just when you think of fearsome pirates. I mean, Blackbeard probably is number one with a bullet on any list. And also the guy with the reputation. Well, his reputation was fierce, but the record just seems to have no case of him actually killing or at least harming someone seriously.

CW: So it was like the power of PR. His marketing team, his hype guys had built him up so much that Ships just surrendered and he didn’t have to massacre anybody?

1:15:53
PR: Yeah, I mean there must be something to it. Especially, I mean if you look at stories like 15 Ships in 3 Weeks, you have to imagine that by the time he shows up to, you know, you’re number 16, you probably just don’t want to deal with it. You’re like, okay, just take it.

1:16:10
CW: Take it, take it bye.

1:16:12
BR: Yeah, that was the modus operandi. I mean, that was, that’s how all pirates wish they could be. Would, you know, because, think about it, I mean, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna board a ship, and you’re gonna, you know, get aboard, and you’re gonna get into a firefight, and, you know, they had weapons and cutlasses and things like that. Boarding a ship and taking treasure ran a risk, ran a very real risk and that’s one reason that traditionally the first person on the ship, usually it was a suicide mission, but the first person who was on the ship got their choice of treasure and the choice of the weapons. But yeah, so in every case the pirates just like Blackbeard, they wanted to see the white flag, take the stuff, and be on their way. So anything else was just a potential risk.

1:16:59
PR: Absolutely. So yeah, Blackbeard continued his success all over the US coast, or all over the colonial coast, and captured a French frigate that had been converted into a slave ship. Some of the slaves joined his crew, the rest he put ashore. He renamed the ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which of course is his famous ship. Fitted her with 40 guns, making her one of the most powerful ships in the entire Caribbean. He continued to attack ships and settlements all over from the Gulf of Mexico all the way around the American coast. And Spanish sailors nicknamed him the Great Devil and truly became the most notorious and feared pirate at the time in the West Indies or Cuba and Caribbean. So Blackbeard eventually after just lots and lots of piracy and just really a momentous career for a pirate. He ended up moving up the east coast of America looking for a hideaway and he actually ran Queen Anne’s Revenge aground entering a shallow inlet and it sank. By this point his crew was over large and unruly so there was just a lot of them and he was having trouble keeping them under control and some speculate that he may have actually purposely sank it just to disband the crew and basically increase his own share of their plunder. So he marooned the most discontented of his men. They were actually later rescued by Stede Bonnet, his old partner. They sailed back to North Carolina and actually received a royal pardon from the governor in a general pirate amnesty that had been offered by the British government. Blackbeard wasn’t happy with civilian life. He just didn’t want to do it. So from his new base at, I think it’s pronounced, Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks, he soon returned to piracy, robbing two French ships out at sea. Now Alexander Spotswood, the Lieutenant Governor of the neighboring colony of Virginia, was outraged at the prospect of having Blackbeard operating on his doorstep. And although North Carolina was out of his jurisdiction, Spots would organize an expedition to kill or capture him. So Lieutenant Maynard of the Royal Navy caught Blackbeard by surprise at his island. And unfortunately in the battle that ensued, Blackbeard was overpowered and killed. It’s speculated that he was probably between 35 and 40 years old. As far as pirates go, he did pretty well, I guess. But again, there just are no precise records of most of his voyages or attacks, so there’s not a real good way to know for sure. He was definitely on the older side for a pirate.

CW: Between 35 and 40 just does not sound old to me anymore.

PR: No, I mean that’s younger than any of us I imagine, but for a pirate, you know, 40 was probably a pretty ripe old age.

CW: See, when I think about like portrayals of Blackbeard, I think of like zero-mostel type old character actors that were in their 50s or 60s.

1:20:19
PR: Yeah, exactly. No, he was, you know, old for a pirate, but not old. And, uh…

BR: He had an old soul.

1:20:27
PR: Yeah. But, you know, I have to say, you know, I, I’ve always known about Blackbeard and I’ve seen the depictions of him and I just was very tickled to find that, you know, truly he wasn’t quite the evil menace that, that everyone thinks because his reputation is what, what told the story of him. Uh, while the reality was, you know, he, he was not an exceptionally violent person and didn’t kill anyone as far as we know, which is pretty remarkable for a pirate that has his record.

BR: In many ways, the death of Blackbeard sort of signaled the beginning and the end for pirates. As I mentioned, there had been a war on piracy going on for many years. Well, of course, the Golden Age of Piracy was only about 10 years. But it was just it was such a problem for so many governments, finally something had to be done. So as Pascual noted, Alexander Spotswood issued a proclamation on November 24th, 1718, offering a reward for pirates including Blackbeard. Pretty quickly, the piracy, the plague of piracy came to a fairly abrupt end. It’s thought there were about 46, between 40 and 50, pirate attacks in 1718, and that was reduced to six by 1726. And this is accomplished in several different ways. One, as we’ve talked about, are executions. So, you know, you kill 400 pirates, you hang them, you do this in a public square, then eventually people get the message that this is maybe not a viable career path. In addition, they were also issuing pardons, and this is something else that Pascual mentioned. So there were, it was a multi-pronged approach. So we’ll kill the pirates, the ones who don’t, the ones who won’t give up, we’ll kill them. The ones who do give up, we’ll issue pardons, and they would also issue rewards for pirates, sort of turning the bounty on the pirates. And in addition, they would also begin increasing the patrols and escorts of the ships. So it actually became more and more difficult for pirates to find rich ships that really made it worth the risk. So that sort of brought the golden age of piracy to a close.

1:22:48
CW: And all’s well that ends well, I guess.

1:22:51
BR: Yes, you know what? Because this is a skeptical podcast and because this is Square and the Strange, I will end with two little myths about pirates. One of them is that they didn’t really bury treasure. It was done on very rare occasions but for the most part, pirates didn’t bury treasure mostly because number one, the interest rates are not really worth doing and more importantly, they weren’t investing these things. They wanted their share of the treasure now because in the next port, they could spend it in the whorehouses and bars. Pirates were not in for the long haul for the most part. They were wanting their share of the treasure to go on with it.

1:23:34
CW: You know what, there’s so many similarities between pirates and carnies…

BR: And and and and rock stars and roadies, so this is all we’re all coming full circle here.

1:23:41
CW: Yeah, you earn some cash at one one carnival, and then you spend it before you get to the next one.

1:23:46
BR: Yep, yep, and the last myth. I will debunk you you guys can probably guess what it is – we not talked about walking the plank.

1:24:01
CW: Oh, yeah.

1:24:02
BR: Yeah. So, for the most part, there’s no real records of pirates making people walk the planks. It may have been done a couple times, but for the most part, pirates didn’t stand much on ceremony. If they want somebody to go over, they’ll just push them overboard. You don’t need to make a big deal about it. You don’t need to, like, stab at them from the back. They didn’t bother with that. Just throw them overboard. We’re done with it.

1:24:28
CW: All right. Direct, effective. Okay.

1:24:31
BR: Just how they like it.

(MUSIC)

1:24:32
PR: So, as always, that was a fantastic topic. My timbers are officially shivered now.

CW: Mine too, mine too. We got, you know, I feel like we’re coming in, we’re coming into Halloween season, my favorite time of year. I know you have a love for Halloween too.

PR: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Our yard is about to go off in about a week and a half of this recording.

CW: Yeah, yeah. Everybody’s like, Oh, look at the calendar. The October is almost here. And our first episode of the official, you know, October season will be about vampires. We have a vampire specialist we are going to talk to. And I feel like it’s just, you know, it goes perfectly well because pirates are a little bit Halloweeny and vampires are a lot Halloweeny. And and then we have one more episode, which we’re not going to tell you about until we get closer to it. But looking forward to Vampire Lore for the first episode of October.

1:25:46
PR: Super exciting. Yeah, spooky season is upon us, everyone. And, you know, I think it’s fair to say that this is a podcast that our fans of spooky. So brace yourselves, because this should be a great episode.

1:26:02
CW: Oh, and I’m also rubbing my fingers together here. I’m also assembling the October Skepticrates. The September ones are going out very soon. I was a little late putting those together, but not just by a couple of days here. The October crates are always a favorite, and I’ve already gathered some really cool Halloweeny stuff to put in the Skepticrates, which isn’t a crate. You don’t get a giant pirate chest of booty. It’s what I can fit into an envelope or a very small like package thing so that our costs are kept within reason. But I’ve got some stuff that will be going out to lucky patrons and not lucky patrons, generous patrons who subscribe at the $5 episode or above, get a crate from me every month. So like and click and share and subscribe. I guess you don’t have to do any of those things. This is a podcast, but tell your friends, leave us a review, drop us a buck or two, and we’ll see you next time.

1:26:59
Everybody take care.

1:27:00
See ya.

1:27:01
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1:27:06
Amy Frusciaro-Kelly, Dr. Angela Matkey, Elizabeth Leggett, and Laura Ellis. Thank you for your continued support of our podcast. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, or just throwing us a buck or two, please visit Squaring the Strange on Patreon.com and browse our selection of patron rewards. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here, and we are grateful to our generous friends who help us bring you quality content. If you are short on cash and want to just give us moral support, remember to recommend us to a friend, mention us on social media, or give us a review on your favorite podcast dispenser. If you have comments or topics you’d like to see covered, come join our community on the Squaring the Strange podcast discussion group on Facebook. Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC. Copyright 2021. Theme music provided by Shriek Back, additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Additional support by Ashley Romero, Robert Sandin, and Alicia Jarvis. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any other affiliated organizations and employers.