Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Aye, Mate! Here be Pirates!

Episode Date: September 19, 2021

Ahoy ye mates! It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So I be thinking tis time to talk about the pirate life and how much of the legends of the pirates be true. Did they bury their gold? Did they fly the Jolly Roger? Did their dogs have scurvy? ...and did they really talk like this? So join me as I cast me pod on tis episode of Arrrverything Arrrverywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ahoy ya, Mates! It'd be international talk like a pirate day. So I'd be thinking, it is time to talk about the pirate life and how much of the legends of the pirates be true. Did they bury their gold? Did they fly the Jolly Roger? And did their dogs have scurvy? And most important, did they talk like this? So join me as I cast me pod on this episode of Arvary Thing, Arvaryware. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens.

Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday.

This episode be sponsored by Audible. This episode is sponsored by Audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is The Invisible Hook, the Hidden Economics, of pirates by Peter Leeson. The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late 17th and early 18th century pirates. With swashbuckling irrelevance and devilish wit, Peter Leeson covers the hidden economics behind pirates notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of skull and bones?

Why did they create a pirate code? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made them so successful? The Invisible Hook uses economics to explain these and other infamous aspects of piracy. Lieson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audible trial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes.

At this point, you might be thinking, Gary, are you a pirate? Because you speak really fluent pirate. Well, I'm not a pirate. However, I did take three years of pirate in college, and I did a pirate immersion program in the island of Tortuga. Moreover, when I was younger, I used to listen to pirate radio, and I pirated software. So I think that makes me pretty much an expert. So what's the deal with pirates?

There's a whole collection of things that we associate with pirates. Treasure, parrots, hooks, eye patches, skull and crossbones, and of course, a very unique way of talking. Piracy goes back as far as humanity transporting things by ship. As soon as people began sending things by ship, there were other people on ships who wanted to take their stuff. The first historical references in history date back to the 14th century BC when Assyrian pirates were documented in the Mediterranean.

Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and then had them executed. Piracy wasn't unique to the Mediterranean. There were pirates in East Asia on the coast of China and Japan, as well as plenty in Southeast Asia and around South Asia as well. The first military action conducted by the United States of America outside of North America, was attacking Barbary pirates, which attacked ships based in North Africa. However, for the purpose of this discussion, I am going to focus the rest of the episode on what is known as the Golden Age of Piracy, which took place in the late 17th and early 18th centuries

in the Atlantic Ocean. All of the stereotypical things we associate with pirates came from this period. While piracy was technically all over the place, it was the Caribbean that was the hotbed of piracy during its golden age, and there were several reasons for this. For starters, this is where the money was. The Caribbean was where the vast majority of European foreign trade was happening. There were scads of wealth flowing through the region, not to mention all the Spanish silver and gold coming through the Caribbean from South America. Second, there were actual pirate ports in the Caribbean from which they could operate freely,

ports like Port Royal in Jamaica, Tortuga in what is today Haiti, and New Providence in the Bahamas. The origin of piracy in the region can be pointed at the various European governments, especially England. They allowed ships called privateers to operate in the high seas, whose mission was to attack primarily Spanish merchant ships. The crown would take a cut, and the crew of the ship would get the majority of whatever they acquired. It was an easy, low-cost way for them to harass Spain. It was a short step from this to just attacking everything and keeping all of the money. Most pirates were former sailors on merchant ships or in the Navy. There were also a fair number of freed or escaped slaves who worked on crews as well.

In one case where we have data, the pirate ship Bartholomey Roberts was captured, and there were 75 black crew members on board out of 263. Despite their portrayals in movies, pirate ships were actually democracies. They were not run by tyrannical captains. In fact, they couldn't be. There was no law that you could hold over the heads of the sailors to enforce discipline. There actually was a pirate code. It was a type of constitution under which the ship was run under. Each member of the crew had to sign their name or leave their mark if they were illiterate in the book.

This wasn't just an agreement to honor the code, but also a form of commitment. If they were caught by the authorities and their name was in the book, they could be hung. Many pirates asked to be forced to sign, so they would have an alibi if they were ever caught. The code set out rules that the ship would be run under and punishments for crew members who violated the rules. It also set terms for the election of officers of the ship. More importantly, it established strict rules for the division of loot and booty. Everyone received an equal share except for the captain and quartermaster who received two shares, the master, the boatswain, and the gunner who received a share in a half,

and other officers who got a share in a quarter. That being said, the life of a pirate wasn't great. These were almost always exclusively people from the fringes of society who couldn't find anything else. Conditions were horrible on the ship, the food was awful, and there was disease around every corner. That was all on top of the threat of constant death if they got caught. When attacking a ship, pirates would usually use deception, flying false flags until they could get close. Then they would fly their pirate flag in the hopes that the ship would surrender.

There wasn't a single pirate flag, but many of them did have some theme of a skull, bones, or a skeleton. There are only two surviving 18th century pirate flags in the world. I actually had to see one of them at the Maritime Museum in the Oland Islands in Finland. The entire strategy of pirates was to not fight. As romantic as the idea of swashbuckling pirates swinging from ropes seams, that was exactly what they were trying to avoid. Occasionally, pirates would do horrific things to people on ships, precisely because they wanted to spread fear.

If people told stories of pirates, that was great for the pirates because it decreased the likelihood that anyone would fight back. and if no one fought back, then no one got injured or killed. Likewise, they always tried to fight if they had to when they had a numerical advantage. One thing that is completely fictitious about pirates is the concept of buried treasure and treasure maps. The pirate code and the distribution of loot amongst the crew basically prevented anything like that from ever happening. This trope comes directly from the Robert Lewis Stevenson book Treasure Island. There has never been a buried pirate treasure found anywhere.

What about peg legs and hooks and eye patches? This has a modicum of truth. Amputation was a very common way of treating wounds back then. It was either eliminate the limb or risk infection which could kill you. It's entirely possible that pirates would have had more limbs removed and eyes lost than normal people. Finally, let's address the big question. Did pirates talk like pirates?

If real pirates appeared today, would they fit in well on talk like a pirate day? The real reason why we think pirates talk like pirates can be traced entirely to a single person, Robert Newton. Robert Newton was a British actor from the 20s through the 50s, who starred in the 1950 Walt Disney film Treasure Island, playing the role of Long John Silver. Newton grew up in Dorset, England, and went to university in Cornwall. He basically took a West Country English accent, turned it up to 11, and added his own pirity stuff to it to make it his own. He reprised the role in a 1954 movie Long John Silver and then in the TV series by the same name. His performance was so iconic that he pretty much set the bar for what being a pirate was. The area of England that Newton got the accent from was well represented among seafarers,

and there might have been some pirates that sort of talk like that. But in reality, there would have been a wide variety of accents. International talk like a pirate day was established in 1995, by John Old Chumbucket Bauer and Mark Cap and Slappy Summers. It was just intended as a joke and it didn't get very far until 2002, when it was adopted by newspaper columnist Dave Barry. Robert Newton, of Long John Silver fame, has been dubbed the patron saint of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

In response to the day, December 5th was dubbed International Ninja Day to honor ninjas, which are the mortal enemies of pirates. Since then, international talk like. like a pirate day has grown into a thing. Big enough, I guess, for someone like me to do an episode on it. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com. And also remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you two can have it read on the show.