Dan Snow's History Hit - Pirates: Myths vs Reality

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

When it comes to our perception of pirates, Treasure Island has a lot to answer for. They didn't make their enemies walk the plank, they didn't keep parrots as pets, and they didn't bury their treasure. But that doesn't mean the golden age of piracy wasn't an era of swashbuckling rogues and sword fights on the high seas...In the first episode of our 'Pirates' mini-series, Dan explores the facts behind the fiction behind the likes of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd with Sophie Nibbs, the curator of the new Pirates exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.You can discover more about the exhibition and book tickets here.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Archive:Treasure Island, RKO Pictures, 1950Muppets Treasure Island, Walt Disney Pictures, 1996Pirates of the Caribbean, Walt Disney Pictures, 2007Treasure Island, Mercury Theatre, 1938Join Dan and the team for the first-ever LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

When I was a child, I was given a beautiful blue hardback book with a wonderful illustration on the cover. Inside was the story of a boy who finds himself on a ship, seeking a distant island with a map and a promise of treasure. He was befriended on that journey by a charismatic veteran sailor, an old sea dog. His name was Long John Silver. I loved it. The allure of the unknown, talkative parrots, hushed conversations on the Orlop deck, brigands on the high seas terrorising other mariners. Friendship and loyalty between lovable rogues, danger and discovery. I disappeared into that world, so far beyond my everyday.

I first heard words like fo'c'sle and musket and stockade and mutiny and marooned. I fell in love with 18th century history. I fell in love with 18th century history. I fell in love with the sea. The book that captured me, of course, well, it was Treasure Island. I'll say this, sir. I know every seaman in these here parts like the palm of his hand. Did you know Captain Billy Bones? Bones?

He was a pirate. From Orson Welles to Kermit the Frog Treasure Island has been adapted over 50 times for the silver screen And countless radio dramas I play many of them in the car to my kids to this day I've seen wonderful theatre productions most recently in Lancaster An outdoor theatre And that's not surprising because since it was published over 180 years ago, we have been obsessed with pirates. This ship cannot be crewed by two men. You'll never make it out of the bay.

Son, I'm Captain Jack Sparrow. Savvy? Join my crew and postpone the judgment. One hundred years before the mast. No one maroons me and gets away with this! Kill Jim and you'll have to kill me. Kill Gonzo and you'll have to kill me. Kill Squatchulani and Mr. Bimbo and you'll have to negotiate strenuously. These pirate movies are usually set in what is referred to as the golden age of pirates. It ran roughly from the mid-1600s to the early 18th century.

And these are stories of usually men who live outside the law. The Robin Hoods of the seas, romantic rebels, underdogs, they defy authority. They forge a new way to live in a world of hierarchy and constraint. And we've always been drawn to that. The big question, though, of course, is how much were these real pirates, Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, James Morgan, how much were they like the characters we know from the movies?

Well, for the next four weeks on Dan Snow's History Hit, right here on this podcast, you're going to find out. Every Monday, we'll be dropping a new episode of our Pirates series that delves into the real history of piracy. From debunking a few of the myths that just aren't true... I will have to break it to you that walking the plank probably didn't happen. Oh, no. Did they have pirates on their shoulders?

Probably not very likely. Has anyone ever actually found any buried pirate treasure? There is an example of Captain Kidd burying some treasure, and it was actually dug up and used as evidence against him. To tales of the most formidable pirates you've maybe never heard of. Cheng Yi Tsao ends up running thousands of ships and tens of thousands of men. So as ever, folks, the history is better than the fiction. You're going to love it.

Shake out those reefs, make fast those sheets, and let's double man the helm. We're going there. This is episode one. Pirates, the myths versus the reality. As you all know, I'm obsessed with maritime history. Anything to do with the seas, the navy, pirates, I'm there. So of course, my favourite museum in London is the National

Maritime Museum in Greenwich. This is the only place on the earth where you can see the very jacket, the very coat that Nelson was wearing when he was struck by that fateful bullet at the Battle of Trafalgar on the court deck of HMS Victory. This is my happy place. And they've got an incredible exhibition here which I really recommend you visit because you don't have to have kids to enjoy Pirates. No, you don't. So in fact, it really is an excellent exhibition, and we've teamed up with them to make this series. In that exhibition, you'll be able to see and learn more about the things that we cover in this episode and the ones coming over the next few weeks. Right now, I'm going to have a little chat with the exhibition curator, Sophie Nibbs, whose favourite thing when we were recording the series was just to take great pleasure from debunking my favourite

and slightly clichéd ideas and myths about pirates. Sophie, we just walked through the exhibition and it is fabulous, but I got lots of questions. I want to just drill down on this. Because we come to pirates so much as a cultural idea, through movies, through through books through song our conception of pirates as they exist which are sort of 18th century sailing tall ships around the spanish main you know the caribbean gulf of mexico stealing things there is accuracy there that is

based on reality it is it's absolutely based on reality i mean there were pirates and they were active in and around the Caribbean. They were active elsewhere as well. What's happened is that through this kind of curiosity and fascination with pirates, there's been embellishment through popular culture representations. And so what we think we know about pirates, if you dig down into it, there is some truth to that. The layers sometimes get a bit obscured and maybe a little bit embellished for entertainment purposes. And just through trying to make things exciting. That's what we do. That's what we do with Medieval Nights. Let's stick on this kind of Caribbean piracy of the Age of Sail.

The idea that there's swashbuckling rebels there. There's a bit Robin Hood going on in there. The fashion is fabulous. Is that a Victorian idea? Is this Robert Louis Stevenson? When do we see that all emerging? It's definitely got roots in Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson's book, definitely. Some of those ideas come a little earlier. There's a book that's very influential in terms of what we understand about pirates, which was a 1724 publication called A General History of Pirates, which is published under the name of Captain Johnson. And there's a nice little mystery there as well in that we don't actually know who Captain Johnson was. For a while, people thought he might be Daniel Defoe.

It's probably more likely he was a newspaper publisher called Nathaniel Mist who got into some legal trouble, needed to make some money and realised that pirates sell. So you've got this book that collects pirate biographies from real stories of piracy and real reports of piracy. But what's interesting about it is it comes with these illustrations. And the illustrations are very detailed and sometimes potentially quite over dramatic or they're a little bit embellished but you see pirates with these tricorn hats and the multiple pistols and the sort of sashes and flowing shirts that we now come to associate with them there would have been some reality in this but equally he's trying to sell books so you have these slightly embellished biographies sitting alongside these really vivid and exciting illustrations so that's where it seems to start

from a visual point of view and that's the 1720s that's 1724 properly contemporary really early that's a golden age of piracy you might say that's an exciting source yes yes let's come on to Robert Louis Stevenson and Treasure Island only because I have a particular fondness that when I walked around your exhibition I had a kind of Proustian moment. I saw some of the illustrations from that, the copy that I had as a child that was published in the early 20th century. How would you describe Robert Louis Stevenson's approach to piracy? Well, firstly, I don't think you're alone. And I think that a lot of people found their sort of joy of pirate adventure through Treasure Island, which is why we felt it was really important to have that in the exhibition. The book itself, so it

was published in 1883, and Robbie Lewis Stevenson creates this world of kind of adventure and excitement and danger and sort of brings together all of the different aspects of why we love pirates, which I think is why it's such a sort of influential book. I'm interested in the social structure of the 18th and 19th century, because this is an idea that young men and some women can go and achieve almost gentry status. They become captains and lords in their own realm. And there's something in that strict hierarchy of that period that's very alluring and exciting. Absolutely. I mean, in terms of society at the time, as you say, very kind of

strict rules, strict gender rules, gender norms, also class structure, very strict at that time as well. And a sort of real rise in kind of moral, this idea of kind of moral code and wrong and right. And so being able to escape all of that. There's talk about women joining pirate crews and things that are not as common, but there are stories. And even if those were stories, it's still inspiring to sort of children and people reading about this idea of freedom. And the pirate structure in terms of the financial structure, if you're talking about the Navy in a traditional sense, it's still got that very strict sort of class hierarchy in terms of who earns what and how people are awarded for their labour. On a pirate ship, you've got the captain takes two shares and the quartermaster takes a

share and a half, but then the rest of it is shared equally amongst the crew of up to kind of 50 pirates or something, which is actually at the time quite unheard of to have that sort of almost equal structure for everybody and everyone's labour being seen as equal. And that's a very appealing idea if the structure that you're living under feels a bit unfair, perhaps. And as you mentioned, women, also people of colour, there's opportunities for advancement in the pirate world. Absolutely. Hugely multicultural crews on board ships at that time and also on board pirate crews. Absolutely. When I saw those illustrations from the 1912 Howard Pyle's Book of Pir pirates, I was struck by things getting more flamboyant, aren't they? Yeah, I mean, Howard Pyle is a really strong visual reference.

I mean, Howard Pyle was an illustrator first and foremost. So his depictions of pirates are, as you say, kind of fantastical and colourful and there's sashes and billowing. You know, everyone seems to be in a breeze, you know, everything's billowing and everything's very kind of romantic, if you like. And you can see how his book was fiction but it's written in a way that people read it as a historical sort of fact largely because he used real names in real places and so then when he embellishes those stories people aren't quite sure what's real and what isn't which is why it sort of lends itself to you know Pirates of the Caribbean and when you start to look at Pirates on the silver screen

a lot of costume designers do kind of reference that book because it is just really visually appealing. They look great. They look like they're going to have an adventure. And so all of those kind of hoops and sashes and pistols and things, that then really just jumps onto the silver screen, as Hollywood's taking off in the 20s and 30s and 40s, with sort of finding them jumping from the page to the screen. Yeah, and as we discussed earlier, they just love having a great time. They do. When you see an image of that period from Henley Royal Regatta, they're pretty buttoned up and they look uncomfortable and hot.

You know who you'd be having a better time with, don't you? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. You want to roll with that crew. So Sophie, that's the myth. That's the vibe. It's the vibe we all still go with at Halloween and fancy dress and all that kind of thing. But what's the reality?

Let's dig into it. Take us back to the golden age of piracy. When was that? 1650 to around 1730 is sort of what people refer to as the golden age of piracy. And let's do the big history for a second. Why the Caribbean? Why that era? So at that time, you've got a huge European expansion of empire around the Americas, Africa and Asia. But you've got these competing powers who are looking for resources, colonies and competing for trade routes, competing for control of trade routes. So you've got a huge rise in maritime trade and these very powerful nations all competing for the same things. And so at that time, it was possible to make your fortune and to kind of go out to sea and to be involved in that.

And it becomes a very appealing and potentially financially lucrative thing to be involved in those trades, which is where you start to see piracy start to peak. Because as much as you can be part of the Navy and you can be legitimately involved in finding those resources and making money, you can also go and steal it. those resources and making money, you can also go and steal it. And so a lot of the piracy is around the same trade routes and it has its roots in a legal side of it, which brings us into the idea of privateering. Nations like England who can't be bothered to spend the money on their navy, they get freelancers in, give them a little piece of paper saying you're working for us, and then they just basically go and do piracy. They do, yeah. It's kind of you're legitimately employed by a nation. Let's say, as you said, England would have employed somebody to go and capture ships from other nations that were competing. So it might be that you were sent to the Indian Ocean to capture French ships, for example.

And your payment would be that you were able to keep what was on board that ship, which was often astronomical in terms of value and far exceeded what you would have earned if you had been part of the navy and so the appeal of that is quite high it's a dangerous thing to get involved in but the appeal and the payoff is potentially very high so you have these privateers that are furthering the kind of empiric aspirations of their nation it's only a short hop from there to doing it without the ticket right without the piece of paper precisely this brings in captain kidd who we actually feature in the exhibition we have his privateering license from 1695. He's issued it with a privateering license. He's sent to capture French ships. He finds himself with not enough to do and not enough money to make. And he captures an Armenian ship, which is flying under a French flag. He angers the East India Company and the local authorities in that area, news travels back to Britain and

his financial backers all want to distance themselves from him. And so because he's sort of swayed away from what he was told strictly to do and started trying to gain money for himself in other ways, he gets called a pirate and he's hunted down. He's actually put to death in 1701 and he's hanged and his body is actually displayed as a sort of warning to other people to not stray into piracy. It's hung heading out towards sea on the shores of the Thames and he's hanged and his body is actually displayed as a sort of warning to other people to not stray into piracy. It's heading out towards the shores of the Thames and it's displayed there for a number of years as a sort of warning to other people who might want to be involved in piracy. So you've got this kind of movement from legitimately being involved in this trade and then actually realising that piracy might hold a little bit more in terms of reward

financially. And then that puts you in danger of being captured and ultimately put to death. So it's a risky thing to get involved in, but potentially very lucrative. And just so people are aware, the Caribbean thing, which might feel like not one of the world's most dynamic economic regions today, that was where it was going on because of sugar, particularly all these islands growing fast like sugar. It was the wonder crop of the era. So there is money pouring from the Caribbean up towards Europe. There absolutely is, yes, in terms of tobacco, in terms of sugar, in terms of things that weren't being grown in Europe, but were absolutely seen as commodities and seen as things that people wanted to trade

and make huge amounts of money from. And also, geographically, there's lots of little havens to nip into, lots of little islands, and also lots of different jurisdictions, which is a bonus because you can slide between. There are Danish islands, there are French islands, Spanish islands, English islands. It's messy and you can see how in the cracks pirates could thrive. Yes, you don't have sort of one coast of the mainland.

You have these coves, you have places that you can hide, you have places that you can wait to attack and also escape, capture yourself. And also opportunities to stop off and to trade locally, so to fill up on supplies. And because as much as it's about getting gold and spices, it's also about feeding your crew and staying afloat on board your ship. And there's a price on your head on the French island. The Dutch island might trade with you or whatever. Precisely, yeah. It's a kind of complex system. And because of the vast wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, you've presumably got a big

pool of people that have been militarily trained so they can navigate, they can sail, and they can also fight. Yes, that's absolutely true. You have in the late 1600s and early 1700s, you have these conflicts, which meant that people were drawing up into the Navy and they were being trained. Privateer is also being used at this time as well. And then once those conflicts are over and the Navy is disbanded, you've got these very highly trained crews who haven't got other means of making money. They're not offered up other opportunities. They're not offered a kind of severance package.

They're just kind of said, thank you very much and goodbye. So you've got these people who want to find a way to continue to earn money. Piracy does provide an opportunity for some of those people. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. Rob-smacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. okay tell me about some of the actual people some of us might have heard their names they've been mythologized tell me about some of these actual pirates that really did exist

so i've mentioned captain kid already who existed and was quite a prolific pirate in and of himself. Obviously there's Blackbeard and Blackbeard is an interesting character because he did definitely exist. Some people like to think he was born in Bristol but again not really know. It might explain to Bristolians. Yes I mean precisely. I mean a lot of the interesting things around pirates is that we know that certain people existed but the details of their existence always become a little fuzzy and a little contested through their very nature. I mean, pirates didn't keep diaries. Pirates were not notoriously good at record keeping. So in terms of where they were born and exactly what they did, it always becomes a little complex. But

somebody like Blackbeard, for example, did definitely exist. He was definitely a prolific pirate, but he does turn up in popular culture in various guises or inspires other characters, which is an interesting notion in and of itself. There's also two pirate figures which have received quite a lot of focus recently who are Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who were two female pirates which would be very, very rare. There was also this idea that women being on board a ship at this time would have been considered by some to be bad luck and it just wouldn't have been a space in which women would have been very often sort of part of being on a pirate crew or any crew but they were able to join a pirate crew and they were actually considered to be very

kind of formidable fighters and very active in terms of the battles that they were in and they're interesting in that sense and they do provide this kind of figure of women being able to be part of something like this and something that may be a bit of equality on board a pirate ship that wouldn't necessarily have happened on land. They were both captured in the end, but they weren't put to death because both of them claimed to be pregnant at the time that they were captured. One of them died in prison, but the other one actually retired in, we believe, maybe went to North Carolina and sort of maybe saw out her old age. So there's also this sort of example of actually managing to retire as a pirate, which is something that's commonly done yes because i learned from your exhibition that blackbird

certainly did not retire no blackbird did not retire blackberry was captured and his head was actually displayed there was quite a common thing of once you'd captured a pirate if you were hunted down as a pirate a would meet quite a violent death but also there was this desire to use your violent death as a bit of a cautionary tale let's say to anyone who might want to be a pirate and so he is captured and killed and his head is actually displayed on the bowsprit of a ship as a sort of trophy but also as a kind of this is what's going to happen to you if you are a pirate there's a similarly grisly end for a pirate called Bartholomew Roberts who who was known to be incredibly brutal.

He captured a ship that was carrying enslaved people at the time, and he killed a huge number of them. And after this time, he was then hunted down. It was news of this kind of got back, sadly, largely probably not due to his brutal treatment of those people, but actually due to the kind of fact that he'd interrupted trade and he'd messed up your property yes i mean it's just horrific in many senses but he was captured it goes that his crew was maybe asleep on board the ship or potentially drunk at the time and they were able to sneak up on his ship um and there was a very kind of bloody battle in which bartholomew roberts's throat is shot out with a large piece of grape shot and they are big pieces. We've got one on display actually in the exhibition. And when you see the size of it, it gives you a sense of the kind of brutal death that he met.

Because his pirate crew didn't want him to be used as a cautionary tale, they actually took his body and threw it overboard. So his body was never recovered. But his crew was rounded up and put on trial. And many of them were found guilty of piracy and put to death. But it does sound like from your book from the 1720s, that even then, even contemporary with this happening, there was something slightly inspiring or glamorous about those pirates.

I mean, were those figures that you've talked about, were stories of them circulating? In terms of the stories of the adventure, I think that's sort of where that first fascination lies. It's a little bit like people, in a way, I mean, in terms of people wanting to listen to stories about crime and this kind of true crime fascination that we have today, let's say. So this idea of, A, I think the sort of horror and the violence of it, there is an appeal there to a degree

in terms of your distance from it, you're safely reading about it at home, you're not involved in it. And there's something kind of interesting around that for people. But on top of that, there is something about the stories of things that happen in the high seas. You know this thing that's got you know the sea is out there you know that these things are happening but it's a little bit distance from you. You're sitting at home and reading about it in this book that you've bought and it's about these places that you've heard of as you were talking about the Caribbean earlier. You know we're talking about these places that you know are out there but you've not experienced them yourself. You don't know what it's like to be sailing around a Caribbean island.

And so to hear stories of these often violent adventures, but these kind of adventures that are going on out there, there's something about the escapism of that that clearly captures the public's imagination, which is why that book has been published numerous times over and over and over and over again. And I wonder if it's a little bit like the way that we find fraud cases quite fascinating when they involve Goldman Sachs partners, because sometimes the rest of us think

it's sort of mildly amusing that the richest among us are getting taken for cleaners. I'm sure there's these cargos full of people or sugar or tobacco, they belong to incredibly wealthy people. And often taken by force. Well, I mean, if you're talking about the movement of enslaved people, obviously, in that sense, the contemporary view of that would be different to what it was at the time. But I think that you're looking at European nations that are actually going in and enslaving people, but also stealing natural resources and taking land. And so there is a sort of, you mentioned this idea of the kind of Robin Hood aspect of it. And I think that does play. Whether that's now a more contemporary reading is a little bit difficult to tell. I think that

might be that we look at that now in a sort of moral sense, which is what you see in some films and some kind of more contemporary readings. But, you know, there probably was an aspect of that historically too. So how does piracy work? How do they do it in the 18th century? I mean, you mentioned these shipping lanes.

Do you sort of wait off, for example, the north coast of Cuba and knowing that all the ships have to pass that way to get to Europe? Or is it going alongside people in port? How does it work? I think you would largely avoid port in the sense that that is a quite dangerous place. You risk capture potentially. So it would normally be somewhere. I think this idea of

waiting, as you say, sort of waiting somewhere where you know people are passing is definitely a tactic that was used. But one of the things that's interesting as well is that it would be about hiding in plain sight. So you would potentially fly the flag of the same nation of the ship that you're going to capture, for example. And that would allow you to get up quite close to them. They wouldn't see you as a risk. They wouldn't be sort of defensive. And then at the last minute,

you would then potentially raise the Jolly Roger and show your true colors and let them know that you mean business. So it's not always kind of going in all guns blazing, if you like, and showing that you're a pirate early door. Sometimes it would have been about sort of following a ship for a little while,

waiting until you're potentially at a time when there aren't any other people around and you're able to sort of sneak up on them. And so then it's last minute then saying, oh, you know, by the time that you've realised it's a pirate ship, it's a little bit too late. And I guess the other thing, you can't just tell a pirate ship at first glance because merchant ships were armed. Oh, absolutely. They were sort of sliding scale. You could sail into port with your cannon on deck you go no no we're just

we're trade sugar and um a pirate ship was largely no different to any other ship at the time because we do get that question a bit in terms of you know what was a pirate ship like and actually the answer is like any other ship that would have been sailing at that time i mean pirates often would steal the ships that they ended up using because rather than take a ship and unload the cargo, you just take the whole thing. It's far easier just to take everything than it is to start picking and choosing what you want to load onto your own ship. So as you say, yeah, I mean, ships would have been armed. It was necessary to as defence against piracy or competing nations anyway. So having pistols and blunderbusses and things like that does not necessarily mark you out as a pirate ship at all. And then where do you sell that cargo once you've stolen it? Is it a matter of, again,

that jurisdiction of going somewhere which will look more generously upon you having nicked something from their enemies? Yes, absolutely. I mean, you would know what ports you would be able to take that to. People aren't necessarily going to ask questions if you're trying to sell them spices or things that they would want. Sometimes they would have stolen gold or currency that was actually, I mean, at the time, the Spanish dollar was kind of considered to be a relatively global currency. Pieces of eight. So precisely, that's where the pieces of eight comes from.

It was eight reales, which means that when you needed change, you would actually physically split the coin into these pieces, which is where this pieces of eight comes from. So again, another one of those things that has a basis in reality. So, you know, sometimes it was things that you could just spend and use, but if it were talking kind of silks or dyes, indigo being something that was very sought after, then you would take that on land and you would trade it. Sometimes even not just selling it for currency, but actually, I mean, you might trade it for things that you needed on board the ship

as well. There's a lot of kind of bartering and trading around at this time, so it wouldn't have necessarily been unusual for a ship to come in and trade for goods. Has anyone ever actually found any buried pirate treasure? There is an example of Captain Kidd burying some treasure. Right, which we know he did. Which supposedly he buried some treasure and it was actually dug up and used as evidence against him. So he tried to hide his treasure, but was actually dug up and used as evidence against him. So he tried to hide his treasure, but it got dug up. But the story is that there's still some left that no one has ever found. That's the lovely sort of embellishment part of it. And wherever you choose to land on the fact and fiction of that, I like to think it's out there somewhere. So for all the billions of images, most of which I've read to my kids of sandy beaches and digging and treasure boxes,

they all derives from that one story. That seems to be where it comes from. Oh my goodness. Yes. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't keep digging, but it's sadly not as prolific as we might have hoped. Okay, just checking. You've mentioned ships full of enslaved people is one of the targets of pirates. Sometimes what they would kill those people, but other times, I'm right in thinking they would encourage them to join, they'd recruit those enslaved Africans to join their crew. There are examples of this. Anytime that a pirate ship captured another ship, there was a possibility to maybe join the pirate crew. If you were considered to be a strong and able crew member, then there might be an opportunity to escape, to be part of their crew. As you say, slave traders

is kind of massively active at this time and many nations being very actively involved in it. So when pirate crews would capture those ships, there are largely examples of those people potentially being thrown overboard or killed. There are examples of opportunities where people who had been formerly enslaved or had been on slave ships would have been given opportunities to join pirate crews. We don't have lots of lists of their names or examples of their lives, but we have a character called Black Caesar, who is thought to have been on board a ship with Blackbeard at one point. He's thought to have hailed from West Africa originally. His ship was captured and he joined a pirate crew and became relatively successful,

as is the nature of whose histories are recorded at this time. His story is potentially a conflation of a few other black African pirates active at this time. But there are definitely examples when you sort of see lists of pirate crews and trial records and things like that of names of people who definitely would have been from around that area. If you were somebody who had escaped enslavement, then going on land would have been incredibly dangerous. The risk of being recaptured was very, very high. the risk of being recaptured was very, very high. And so the opportunity to be on a pirate crew potentially was liberation for some people and meant that they were able to be an equal part of the crew and a way to escape. This is Dan Snow's history. There's more on this topic coming up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. To be continued... and popes who were rarely the best of friends murder rebellions and crusades find out who we really were by subscribing to gone medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts there's been a bit of a fashion recently to about how pirates actually were really interesting social reformers there's a rough form of democracy on board the ship is a lot about us projecting back or is there evidence of that at the time i think as with most things in the pirate story a bit of both and you do see in terms of the structure of pay and how people are rewarded for their labor that's far more sort of equitable structure than would have been common at the time. They did have compensation for people who were injured. Obviously, being physically injured or disabled as an active sailor would have been potentially the end of your career.

So they would have been taken care of, but also they would have been financially compensated, if you like, for that. And there were kind of pirate codes in terms of the way that they would behave on board and that sort of thing. But they were still brutal. If you weren't as part of their crew, then they would still throw you overboard and various other things. So there was still a kind of brutality to it and a disregard for human life. The sort of rough and ready punishments, I mean, this was an era of punishment at sea because the Navy is famous for its punishments. But things like keelhauling in treasure island we have someone who's been marooned is there evidence for any of that yes there is i will have to break it to you that walking the plank probably didn't happen oh no and i'm sorry about that but in terms

of violent punishments absolutely if you went against your crew if you didn't get actively involved in a battle for example marooning relatively common just throw you off the ship you're not useful to anyone people would be overboard. The punishments tended to be sort of quick and violent. You might be killed if you were involved in a conflict with your crew members, for example, or if you'd shown cowardice, people being tied under the ship and dragged along. And largely speaking, if someone was not of use to you, you would just maroon them. You would just throw them off your ship. You have to go to a lot of trouble keelhoeing someone as someone who's passed a lot of ropes under hulls in my time. So you tie someone's feet and hands and then attach ropes to different sides

and just drag them underneath the boat from one side to the other, right? Yes, it's a very violent and brutal thing to do. It doesn't seem to be a common occurrence. It's not just holding your breath, you also apparently get always terribly scraped by all the barnacles on the hull, so it's a very bloody and unpleasant affair. a common occurrence. It's not just holding your breath. You also apparently get terribly scraped by the barnacles on the hull. So it's a very bloody and unpleasant affair. What do we know about their eating, their medical? I mean, similar to just merchant ships

and ships at war at the time? Or is there something different about pirates? No, I think, again, you know, when we're looking at the story of pirates, it's common to say, what do pirates eat? And what do pirates... A lot of it is, as we've said, some of them are very highly trained sailors.

So it's things like getting up early in the morning taking care of the ship taking care of the sails preparing food there'd be somebody who would be in charge of preparing food food would be very basic often things that you know could last for a long time so preserved meats and things like that often not very well preserved meats but and you know you had the same risks of disease and injury that you had anywhere else i mean scurvy being something that would be a problem in terms of malnourishment and being out to sea for a long time. Injuries, infected wounds, that sort of thing. I mean, you would have somebody who would sort of tend to the wounded and a mixture of some helpful medical interventions and some less helpful medical interventions, which would be, again, common at that time. So it was a similar life to life on board any other ship and

actually sometimes quite strict in the sense that we've got examples of pirate codes one being attributed to Bartholomew Roberts who we've spoken about which suggests that you go to bed at eight o'clock and that you can't gamble because if you gamble that's likely to cause conflict and you're allowed to fight other people but not each other and also it's a distraction potentially from what you should be getting up to and if you're drinking after everyone else has gone to bed that's allowed but you need to do that up on deck so as not to disturb the people who are sleeping so actually as much as we like to think of them as these kind of rebellious characters they're going to bed at eight o'clock and getting up early speaking my language early to bed early to rise you'll capture

a juicy prize i would have loved that aspect of it. What about, did anyone get away with it? I guess by the nature of it, many of the pirates that we know about, the ones that crossed swords with the legal system, did anyone get away with it and retire tons of money and go and live happily ever after? You've got Captain Morgan, who is better known now as the face of a rum brand, but he's involved in sort of a grey area of privateering, pirating, but largely a pirate. And he retires and goes to Jamaica and he actually uses the money that he's made and buys a sugar plantation, which is worked on by enslaved people. That's where he sees out the rest of his days. So you do have examples of that. It's not as

common as you say. I mean, the ones that got away with it are probably the ones whose names we've never heard of because they would have slipped back into obscurity. Well, or transitioned to respectability. Yes, I was a trader out in the Caribbean. Well, absolutely. I mean, if you look at the fact that you've got these handful of pirate captains that we know of, but they're the head of a crew of 50 people. Some of those people would have been captured and put to death. And we have trial records from the National Archive which show the names of some of these people. But some of these people were acquitted as well. So those people, as you say, probably would have just then maybe gone and found a slightly less risky employment.

OK, so if we've reached that exciting time of the podcast, we're going to do the quickfire round. I've got questions I need answering here. Skull and crossbone flag, is that a real thing? It was a real thing, but they didn't all look exactly the same. So we've got a number of different designs. Largely speaking, they're going to have skulls, they're going to have daggers, sometimes they have blood. It's generally anything that can be considered a little bit scary.

So you're trying to intimidate the crew and presumably just make them surrender straight away. Yes, and in hourglass to remind them that, you know, time is ticking. Wow. Parrots, what's going on? Do they have parrots what's going on do they have parrots on their shoulders this largely comes from long john silver in treasure island there may have been animals like parrots that were being traded but in terms of having a tame one on your shoulder

probably not very likely oh man davy jones's locker what's that so davy jones is a kind of colloquial term for a sea devil and davy jones's locker rather than being a kind of colloquial term for a sea devil. And Davy Jones' locker, rather than being a kind of actual locker, is the idea of where the souls of drowned people go and potentially kind of shipwrecks and this slightly kind of ghostly, mythical place where those who met their end at sea find themselves. Ghost ship? Why is a ghost ship a thing? There is a notion of a ship with damaged sails that can never kind of reach um if your sails are damaged then you can't sail and you potentially can't get into port so it would suggest that you're going to meet a sticky end and so the idea of these ghostly ships that sort of

circle forever and can never come into port has sort of arisen in the public imagination but there are examples in so the black death so much period, ships on which everyone sort of dies of horrific diseases, no one left to man the story. So you would, ships just found sort of floating about. Absolutely, yes. If you had an infectious disease on board or there was extreme weather or something had happened, then you might find that the crew all die, in which case this ship might kind of continue sailing and then be discovered. There might have been an example where the ship would have been abandoned. So if a pirate crew had captured a ship and they had taken that ship, thrown the crew overboard and just abandoned their own ship as well.

So there's also these stories of thinking, you know, is this the mystery of an empty ship, you know? The black spot. Tell me there was the black spot. The black spot comes from Treasure Island. Oh my goodness. It's another thing that we have Stevenvenson to thank for agony or blame for when we find out that it's not the exciting truth my daughter gave my son the black spot once in a non-ironic way she just did this a bit of coloring and then just gave him this thing it was the black spot

i was so happy see inspire them young yes so you've immersed yourself in this exhibition. What have you learned about our obsession with pirates by the end of it? Why do we keep choosing them from this sort of random historical time period to inspire us and obsess us? I suppose what I've learned, actually, is there's not really one answer to that, which sounds like something of a get out on my part. But what's interesting is that people seem to love pirates for lots of different reasons. And everyone's got a pirate that they're particularly interested in or a story they'd like to know more about. But one of the things that really seems to come up for people when we talk about this exhibition is what's true and what's not.

And they want to know about the myths. And when you tell them that those myths are not true, you see the disappointment in their faces. And it's this idea that pirates represent adventure and excitement and possibility and escaping a sort of boring existence and a chance to go out to sea and earn your fortune wearing a fabulous outfit obviously and that seems to be the thing that appeals to people this sort of sanitized version of what they actually got we don't look too much at the brutal reality that's not what we're interested

in we're interested in escape of being part of escape, of being part of a crew, of being part of something. And also this idea of maybe a little bit of a Robin Hood-esque kind of stealing from the rich to feed the poor, maybe adjusting the balance a little of who has what and escaping that societal norm. Well, Sophie, thank you very much indeed. You'll be joining us later in the series to talk about the end of the Golden Age of Pirates. See you soon. See you soon. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for listening to this episode. Remember, we'll be dropping episodes of this series every Monday over the next month.

So make sure you hit follow in your podcast player. You would not want to miss one. No, no, no. Because you're going to want to stick around for the next episode in this series. If you thought the stories of Blackbeard and the Pirates of the Caribbean were wild, I mean, just you wait for the fleets.

Yes, the fleets, the floating kingdoms. We're going to talk about one of the most prolific and powerful pirates in the history of the world. The European navies begin to have a presence in Asian waters. If you come up against a pirate of the calibre of, say, Cheng Yi Shao, you have an organisation that is vast and powerful, but you as a European naval officer, you're operating at the logistical limit of your capabilities. So join me next Monday to discover more about piracy in the South China Seas, how it operated differently to piracy in the Caribbean, and hear about the incredible story

of her life from poverty to extraordinary power. See you next time, folks. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true.

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