FACTORALY - E43 PIRATES

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Being a pirate seems so romantic. Someone who refuses to follow the well-beaten shipping lanes and goes their own way. And that's kind of true. Except for the death and destruction... This episode looks at the body that clothes the Jolly Roger (see the episode on Flags) and what happens beyond the parrot and eyepatch. (Sounds like a pub!) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

G'day Simon! G'day Bruce, how are you today? I am feeling fabulous, thank you very much. How are you? I am also feeling pretty darn good, thank you very much how are you i am also feeling pretty darn good thank you shall we tell our dear listeners at home just in case there's anyone here who's stumbled across us by mistake shall we tell them who we are and what we're doing nah they know okay fine stuff it no all right then okay so welcome to three fourorily! Getting better at it. Yep, we are. I'm Bruce Fielding.

And I'm Simon Wells. And we're here to talk to you about stuff. Yes, we are. Gosh, beautifully put. Bruce and I are professional voiceover artists, but we are also nerds. We love facts, we love trivia, we love useless information. We love sitting in a pub and boring our friends with exciting and interesting at least to us factoids and knowledge i've in fact i've just given us i've just given a talk um at nerd night nerd night yeah that does sound like fun on defection and two-stroke motorcycle engines. Standard. Good. Yeah.

And so with all of this knowledge buzzing around our brains, desperately waiting to be unleashed upon the poor, unsuspecting public, this is Fact Orally. So what is this week's subject, Simon? Well, this week's subject, Bruce, is something that I'm going to find very, very difficult to talk about in my own voice. I do like a good accent and I do like a good character voice. And this week we happen to be talking about pirates.

Yeah, do you know what? When I was thinking about this, I thought it would be very hard not to go into the accent. It would be impossible to not slip into it at some point or other. Yes, thank you very much, Robert Newton. Oh, very good. Right, that's someone I did a little bit of research on. So, okay, so pirates. Gosh, where do you start?

Pirates have been around since forever. The definition of a pirate is someone on a ship who attacks other ships in order to steal whatever's on the ship yeah so basically a mugger for ships yes a naval mugger and they've been around since forever they've they've been around you know the ancient greece had a problem with piracy anywhere that has a trade route carrying goods to and fro gets pirates. So they're from everywhere. They are from absolutely everywhere, all parts of the world. And here in the UK, they're from all parts of this country.

You got Scottish ones, English ones, Welsh ones, Cornish ones. But for some reason, as soon as you say pirate, at least in my mind, they sound like they're from the West Country. And this is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset were very good places for pirates. There are lots of seaports. There's lots of good access to trade routes going to and fro. Lots of opportunities to intercept vessels coming in and out of the country.

There are also a lot of conveniently placed little coves and inlets and hidden away areas that are good for sort of stashing your smuggled goods before having it taken away overnight by road. And therefore… That's smugglers though. That's smugglers. It is. Well, there's an overlap between the two, but these things all sort of tie in together. So there were quite a lot of pirates in the West Country, but not an overwhelming number. But essentially, the man you've just mentioned, Robert Newton, was an actor from Dorset. And in 1950, he starred in a Disney movie of Treasure Island.

And he played it with his own local dorset accent and he played long john silver and it was very very stereotypically piratical i'm going to use that as if it's a real word it is a word is it yes that's okay then it's normally about behavior piratical behavior piratical behavior. Piratical behaviour. Well, there you go. I'll use it then. So yes, he was playing Long John Silver in his own real West Country accent. He had a particularly drawn-out arrr, and he was

sort of the first person in Hollywood sense, at least, to particularly characterise that. And it's just stuck, and that has just become the archetypal image of how a pirate sounds yeah so what's what's a pirate's favorite letter of the alphabet i don't know what is a pirate's favorite letter of the alphabet well you think i'm going to say r i did think you were going to say r but i'm going to say c c where's a pirate's favorite place to go for a drink?

A bar. In a bar. Did you hear about the time Captain... No, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. This is where we're going. Did you hear about the time Captain Bluebeard was cast adrift in the Red Sea?

No. He was marooned. Shall we start off with rules? Go on, then. You think of pirates as being a bit anarchic. A little, yes. A little. But they had very strict rules of piracy.

They had codes. They signed up to articles when they joined a pirate crew. They actually had to agree to various different things. Okay. So they would agree to, for example, that there would be no fighting on the ship. Only fighting was allowed on shore. Okay. And you weren't allowed to gamble on board either. So the kind of vices, I mean, it was actually quite a strict.

It wasn't as strict as being in the Royal Navy. You didn't get lashed or anything. Yeah. But, you know, there was a division of loot. Who gets what? And it was pretty much even shares for everybody. The captain and people didn't get extra. They got the same as everybody else.

Chores, who gets to do the swabbing of the deck and the yes um tying of the lines and stuff you know so you basically signed up to agree to be part of a very democrat i mean it was so democratic being a pirate that they actually elected the captain oh really yeah i didn't know that so in fact one of the only people who wasn't elected was the quartermaster right okay but you needed somebody who could read and write yes of course yeah so so the quarter people who wasn't elected was the quartermaster. Right, okay. Because you needed somebody who could read and write. Yes, of course, yeah. So the quartermaster, who was like the second-in-command to the captain, was a very important role.

But, yeah, they even had workers' compensation. Really? So if you were a pirate signed on with a pirate ship, if you got injured, you know, you didn't go to like an ambulance chasing lawyer to try and get your compensation. You actually got, for example, on some ships you would get,

like for the loss of a right arm, you would get 600 pieces of eight. Wow. Which is about £45,000. Good grief, really? Yeah. Left arm, you get less. You get 100 pieces of silver less, about 500.

Right leg, 500. Left leg, 400. So they're very right-centric. Yes, of course, yeah. If you lost an eye or a finger, you've got 100 pieces of eight. I mean, a piece of eight is about 50 quid. So you can work it out from that. Right, OK.

How much money they got. So if you did get injured, if there's a claim. Have you been injured in an act of piracy that wasn't your fault? Exactly. So you would get compensated. Wonderful. And when you landed, you know, literally the loot was divided up amongst the whole crew,

regardless of what your status was. Right. It was very fair. I mean, also, you know, you didn't have to be male to be a pirate. No, of course. No, there were a number of be male to be a pirate. No, of course. No, there were a number of quite infamous female pirates, weren't there? There were. I mean, there was a pirate called John Calico Jack Rackham.

Yes, I've heard of him. He's the guy who invented the skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger, who you may have heard about on our episode about flags. Yes, I was going to say there's some crossovers here. You've already mentioned pieces of eight, which I know we discussed on our episode about flags. Yes, I was going to say there's some crossovers here. You've already mentioned pieces of eight, which I know we discussed on our episode about money. Yes. Because the coins were actually you could snap them apart into eight pieces. That's right, yes.

Yeah. So Calico Jack Rackham was a pirate. He wasn't a great, actually he wasn't a very good pirate to be fair. Okay. But he did hook up with Mary Read. Okay, yes. Who was another pirate. In fact, well, he hooked up with Anne Bonny. Right.

And Anne Bonny was a pirate who, she dressed as a man, basically. Okay. And although she had a relationship with Calico Jack Rackham, when they captured a ship, they also captured one of the people they captured was a woman called Mary Read, who was also sort of dressed fairly boyishly. So Mary Read and Anne Bonny were very good friends. And in fact, Mary Read was caught and executed as a pirate. And Bonnie, nobody knows what happened to Anne Bonnie. We know that she wasn't executed. Okay.

But we don't know what happened. We think that she probably just disappeared into America at some point. Right, okay. They were both captured at one point and both found to be pregnant. So they were both released. Oh, really? Yeah. But they weren't the most successful of female pirates.

There were more famous and successful pirates. I mean, Grace O'Malley or Gráinne, now I'm trying to pronounce it in Irish. It's Gráinne O'Wally. Very good. So anyway, Grace O'Malley, she actually had a meeting with Elizabeth I about getting a pardon.

Oh, really? Wow. But she was basically one of the most feared pirates on the Irish Sea, on the North Sea. Wow. She was very, very good. Not quite as good as Ching Shih, though. Ching Shih was very successful. She basically ruled the Guangdong Pirate Confederation. Right, okay.

So she was in control of 400 junks with 60,000 pirates on board. Good grief. So this woman was basically, she ruled the waves around the South China Seas. On her own, she had 24 ships and 1,400 pirates directly under her control that weren't part of the Guangdong Pirate Confederation. So she was really successful. But you could easily be a woman pirate. It was very, very inclusive to be a pirate. Wonderful. You mentioned the golden age of piracy. So as we've established, piracy has been going on forever and is still going on today, especially around the South China Seas. It's still quite rife today. doing this research, lasted from about 1650 to about 1720.

And that's the era that, you know, I particularly imagine piracy. You know, great big wooden ships, fellas wearing tricorn hats, eye patches, hooks for hands, all that sort of stuff. That was sort of from the late 17th to the early 18th century. And purely that's because of all the trade, all the sea trade that was going on at that time. You know, there were ships going back and forth from America having discovered silver and gold. So Spanish vessels, galleons, were going back and forth on these trade routes, taking the riches back home and being intercepted. It was just plentiful bounty for pirates at the time. So you had pirates that had sort of specific routes. You had certain groups of pirates dedicated to particular areas. So the reason we have a film franchise called Pirates of the Caribbean

is because a lot of pirates hung out in the Caribbean because of those ships going from America back to Spain. You had pirates who just hung around the Indian Ocean. You had groups of pirates called the Corsairs. Corsair was an old French term, guerre de course meaning running war okay and um they they were sort of largely based around north africa uh you had the barbary pirates who get their name from the berber people who lived in north africa and lots of these people were they sort of started off as privateers, which meant they were actually employed.

They were actually state sanctioned to intercept vessels, you know, in a time when sort of every country was at war with every other country. Well, so the privateers were basically mercenaries at sea. Yes. And they gave a percentage of their treasure that they got from the pirates or from the Spanish or from whoever. So the crown sort of gained a commission on what the privateers did. But buccaneers is different. Ah, go on. What do you know of buccaneers?

So buccaneers were people who attacked land-based. Oh, is that right? Yes. I hadn't got that. So they would attack cities and towns. Oh, I see, rather than ships. Rather than ships. Oh, right, okay.

So that's how you became a buccaneer, was by attacking a land-based target. I found that the word buccaneer came from the word boucan. And a boucan was a grill that you found on a on a ship that was used for smoking meat okay um which formed a large part of their their diet at the time so that's where buccaneers came from but yes this idea of people actually being you know you have that sort of unruly unregulated complete lack of respect for authority image of a pirate so to actually find out that a lot of them were originally state sanctioned and employed by local governors to run these interferences was um quite a surprise for me well in fact one of the ways that you could

stop yourself from being hanged as a pirate um was to ask for the act of grace i don't know whether you've heard about this. It was a royal decree. It wasn't actually an act of parliament. But it was a royal decree by George I that said you could be pardoned for piracy. And it came out in about 1717. So that, you know, ending in the 18th century was this act of grace. It was one of those things. And actually a lot of the pirates who signed the agreement of the act of grace

went out to become pirate hunters themselves. Oh, right. Okay. So it was basically a snake eating its own tail. It was the pirates hunting pirates. As opposed to, well, I suppose that's the same thing but in reverse. There was a fellow called Captain Kidd, William Kidd, who was a Scottish chap who was employed to go and hunt pirates.

He was sort of a fairly well-respected chap. Captain Kidd, pirate hunter. Exactly. It's also the name of a pub in London. And yes, he was employed to go and hunt down the pirates. And he had a bit of a falling out with the government at the time. He came foul of a couple of political issues that were going on at the time. And he eventually decided to turn and join the pirates. And he was eventually captured and hanged, not hung. And there's a there's a spot in london um we we both rather like going

for a stroll around london and exploring the history there's a place in whopping in london called execution dock which for quite a long time was um the execution site for the pirates you had a lot of ships sort of coming in and out of the port of London, offloading their goods. And for a while, pirates would be executed at execution dock and their bodies hung from the banks of the River Thames to have the Thames wash over their body with each rise and fall of the tide. Well, the other thing that the execution dock did, which is actually not very nice, what they would do is they'd put you in a cage at low tide. Yes. And just leave you there.

That's not nice, is it? No. As the tide rose, you would basically drown. There's a pub in Wapping called the Prospect of Whitby, which has a hangman's noose hanging outside the back of the pub in sort of fake homage to this practice. So the other thing that pirates are famous for is treasure. Of course, yes. So what do you think was the most valuable thing that a pirate could take from a ship?

Oh, gold coins. Wrong. Right, okay. Sugar. Yes, sweetheart? Sugar. Sugar was the most valuable thing that you could take off a ship. Really?

It was incredible. I mean, It was almost more expensive than gold. Huh. So if you got a good ship coming out of the Caribbean laden with sugar from the plantations, you were really well off. Wow. Everybody was very happy to have sugar. How interesting.

And they didn't bury their treasure either. You know, the gold and silver and all that stuff. interesting. And they didn't bury their treasure either. You know, the gold and silver and all that stuff. Yes. So they didn't bury treasure. They didn't make maps. No. They basically divided it up amongst the crew, and the crew took whatever share they wanted

and did what they liked with it. Yeah. There are so many elements of the imagery of piracy that are just made up, or if not made up, then at least popularised by fiction, particularly Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Yes. It's the go-to, isn't it? Absolutely the go-to.

One of my favourite books of all time. I love Treasure Island. So Treasure Island was written chapter by chapter in a magazine, much like Sherlock Holmes originally was. And this was in 1881 to 1882 in a children's magazine called Young Folks. And it was published under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola. And in that we have Long John Silver, who has a peg leg, has a parrot on his shoulder. He has a treasure map on which X marks the spot. All of this stuff, it's just fiction. It's just made up in that story.

Well, is it? Because parrots were very valuable in Europe. So pirates would often carry, like macaws, these beautiful flamboyant coloured birds from the Caribbean back to Europe. Right. And sell them in Europe. They had to be quite careful about how they sold them because basically if you're selling a flamboyant bird,

it's going to draw attention. Of course it is, yeah. I wonder how he came by that parrot. So they did used to have parrots um on ships and stuff as well oh okay i just thought that one was entirely made up interesting had monkeys as well did they yes monkeys parrots and the old cat to keep the the rat population down yes of course yes gotta have a ship's cat haven't you yes other bits of imagery have very, very specific origins as well. I was looking at the pirate's hook, you know,

thinking about Captain Hook from Peter Pan. And there is one fellow in particular who's a Turkish pirate named Oruk Reis, hopefully pronounced correctly, who was working on behalf of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s, so quite early on. And he was one of two pirate brothers, and he lost his arm at sea. And he visited a doctor in Egypt who replaced his missing bit of arm with a metal hook. And it sort of became a little bit of an infamous, you know, if you were a pirate,

if you had a reputation preceding you, if your name, if your image could instill fear and dread into the hearts of the vessels you were attacking, then that's half your job done, isn't it? Well, Blackbeard never used, I mean, Blackbeard, for example, because I think we mentioned on a previous episode that he put like tapers in his beard. So he's like wreathed in this smoke.

Yes. And he would like appear from this smoky kind of, and this evil person. And he was actually quite evil. Yeah, yeah. He actually just had to show up. Yes. And when people saw his specific flag,

which I'll put in the show notes at um factorily.com factorily.com that's the one um they just surrendered the reputation went before him yes brilliant so yes this this chap made quite a thing out of his his hooked hand and you know it sort of became a a symbol you know run away from the guy with the hooked hand. Another bit of imagery. This one's rather up for dispute, so I'm not going to lay too much door in this. The idea of an eye patch.

You would assume that... You scratch your eye with your hook. Exactly, yes. You accidentally itch your eye with the wrong hand. You're out at sea, you're fighting, you're having a bit of a swashbuckle your eye gets injured you get an eye patch probably a common occurrence that's what i've always assumed there is a suggestion this has this has never been proven no one has ever found written documentation to this effect but it some people say it's quite plausible that eye patches were actually used to accustomize one eye

to the darkness of being below deck okay so you spend all day out on on deck in the bright sunlight you go below stairs and all of a sudden it's pitch black and it takes you quite a while to adjust to the darkness um and allegedly it was suggested that if you're having a fight on a ship and you suddenly have to go below deck that could be quite detrimental because it takes quite a while for your eyes to adjust so you put one eye patch on so one eye is always prepared for the dark so you nip below stairs you take your eye patch off or just switch it to the other eye yes and that eye is automatically ready to fight in the darkness and quite a few sources i've read say this is totally totally plausible and probably what happened but we haven't found any written evidence to the fact so we can't say for sure look it's

apocrypha it's fine it's true it must be true yeah yeah we'll take it we'll take it. We'll take it. So what do you reckon that pirates ate when they were at sea or drank? I mean, drinking pirates, you kind of, I think you'll have an idea about what they drank. I mean, if folklore is anything to go by, it would probably have to be a bottle of rum with a yo-ho-ho. But I bet you're about to say, no,'t uh well kind of right so what there's a word that you probably do know grog grog yes i know grog was was a pirate's favorite drink right and it was basically it was rum lemon sugar, and water. Oh, that sounds all right. Which we now call like a rum sour. Yes.

So the pirate's drink of choice was basically a cocktail. And they ate basically because they were at sea for so long. Yeah. They would eat a lot of fish, obviously. Yes, obviously. But they also had a thing called salmagundi, which you may or may not have heard of. I've not heard of that. It's something that I did when I was a student, which is I made a stew at the beginning of the week.

And I would top it up during the week with vegetables. Because I'd start off with lots of meat. And then I would gradually add other things until it became a point where it's just a vegetable stew. And then sort of start again so the salmagundi could be going for for weeks and it was basically a pot full of a stock yeah plus whatever you had so you chuck a bit of meat in it you chuck a bit of fish in it whatever you had you would just chuck it in your salmagundi and and that would be your food how wonderful that was if you ran out of turtles

obviously well obviously yes yes what turtles were so delicious that they actually didn't get back to the uk for years and years and years because they would bring them back in on ships and people go i'm a bit peckish fancy a bit of fancy bit turtle and so there were no turtles brought back to to europe for ages they just ate them before they got home. They got eaten before they got home. So there were two reasons why turtles were very good. If you turn them upside down, they just lay there. They don't try and walk around the deck or anything.

And they're very delicious and very high in protein. And they have a water sack in them, which is virtually pure water. So you have a water supply and a food supply in a turtle. So there would be turtles you know like this idea of turtles all the way down yes okay yes we turtles all the way up they would stack turtles in in the stores to uh to have to have to eat how bizarre never in a million years when i've imagined pirates stacking turtles. Now, we've spent quite a lot of this episode talking like pirates.

Let's have a quick chat about International Talk Like a Pirate Day, shall we? September the 19th. That's the one. Yes. If we had timed this better, we would have released this episode on that date. But you can listen to it again on that date, so it's fine. Yes, exactly. We'll remind you. We's fine we'll remind you we will remind you now everything has an international day of something or other these days so i just assumed it was a very recent thing that was made up out of the blue

it actually goes back to 1995 and it was created by two fellas from o in America called John Bauer and Mark Summers, whose piratical names are Captain Slappy and Oi Chum Bucket. Of course they are. And these two fellas were just messing around one day. One of them got an injury whilst they were having a game of racquetball, and he fell on the floor and started screaming because he was injured. And he started going and the other guy started joining in and talking like a pirate and the two of them just decided wouldn't it be fun to have an international day where we talk like the pirate um interestingly this happened on the 6th of june 1995 So they decided not to make that day International Talk Like a Pirate Day

out of respect for the Normandy landings, which were being commemorated at the time. So they chose a different day and they decided to pick Mark Summers' ex-wife's birthday purely because it would be an easy thing for him to remember. But yes, the fact that this... I only became aware of international talk like a pirate day a handful of years ago.

I had no idea it stretched all the way back to 1995, let alone that it was actually invented by these two fellas in America. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you mentioned Treasure Island. And one of the things in Treasure Island was the black spot. Do you remember the black spot?

The black spot. Yes. You have to say it that way. You have to. It's a requirement. So the black spot, if you received the black spot, that means you were dead. It's like a warning to say, we're about to kill you. You should get your affairs in order and you're going to die.

It was the equivalent of receiving a mafioso horse's head on your pillow, wasn't it? Yes. It's not just pirates. It was basically sailors, but they had masses of superstitions. So, I mean, the reason why there's a figurehead on a boat is because, and it should be a naked woman on the bow. And the idea of that is that calms the sea. And if you carve it with the eyes open, then she'll guide you to safety.

So other things that are good luck. It's good luck to spit into the ocean before you sail. If you throw coins into the sea as you leave port, that's a small toll to Neptune. Right, okay, yeah. Cats were lucky. If you were born on a ship, you were said to be lucky.

Generally what they would do is, because if you're a female giving birth on a ship, they would want somewhere private for you that was easily swabbed down. You'd give birth on deck but you would be sheltered from the eyes of the crew by being laid down on a bed between two cannon. Okay.

So if you were a boy and you were born on a boat, you would be a son of a gun. Oh, no, stop it. No, that's too good. Really? Yes. Well, that's too good. Really? Yes. Well, that's just, I'm having a hard time processing that.

But there was also bad luck. I mean, it's bad luck to, even today, it's bad luck to step onto a boat with your left foot. Okay. You have to put your best foot forward. Your right foot has to go onto the boat first. Yes. And you shouldn't cut your nails or your hair at sea either. You had to wait until you got onto dry land to do that okay um and you never started a voyage on a friday because that's the date that christ was crucified um and similarly um oh there were things like um if you were walking if you were traveling to the ship um if you saw somebody with uh red hair ginger hair that was bad luck unless you spoke to them first oh right and then that's good luck okay that's fine whistling on board a

ship the never never whistle on the ship i've heard that yeah um the naming of ships is quite interesting as well so if you if you name a ship after an engaged woman that's bad luck because the ship will become jealous of the engaged woman and if you were going to change the name of your ship it's actually bad luck to change the name of a boat but if you have to you write the soon-to-be exorcised name on a piece of paper yes fold the paper and place it in a small wooden box right then you burn the box oh you scoop up the ashes and you throw them into the sea on an outgoing tide and then you can rename the boat that's terribly specific wow yeah they're also i mean things like pigs you weren't allowed pigs on boat you weren't allowed to say the word pig on a boat.

Really? You weren't allowed to say the word drown on a boat. Hang on a tick. Wasn't Captain Pugwash's ship called the Black Pig? Could be, but it was bad luck. He'd have had trouble saying the name of his own boat then, wouldn't he? Yes. The punishments on a Royal Naval ship were pretty bad.

I mean, you know, flogging and a cat in nine tails and stuff. The punishments for pirates were quite significant as well. Were they? I mean, you hear about walking... Nobody ever walked the plank. It was really unusual. Yeah, I looked into that earlier on. Walking the plank is over-popularised. Yeah, absolutely.

So that didn't happen but what they did do would they keelhaul you know that well they wouldn't keelhaul you that was the one of the worst things that they could do but there were things like you know sewing your mouth shut oh yuck yeah so that that was a punishment if you if you said something that you shouldn't if you talked out of turn. Yeah. Not nice. But, yeah, keelhauling, basically because the keel of a ship is covered in very sharp barnacles. Yes, of course, yes. They would give you a rope that went under the ship and drag you under the ship.

Because you're buoyant, you would be hitting the keel all the time and be cut to pieces yes by all the barnacles on the bottom of the ship which was i mean you'd effectively die and and on the verge of drowning as well yes you could drown or die of blood loss crikey so so not fun um one of the worst things they could do is maroon you you talked about marooning at the beginning oh it's come full circle so yes so marooning was basically they would leave you on a small island with enough food and water for a few days. Yeah. And then just leave. Right.

And not care what happened to you. So you'd probably die of thirst or exposure or whatever. Yeah. So it was pretty much a death sentence if you were marooned. Cranky. You know what? This pirate life is beginning to sound less and less enjoyable. I know.

It's definitely not pugwash, is it? Definitely not pugwash. Well, I can't exactly say that's all the facts we've got on pirates because there are millions, millions more. But I think we've probably reached the amount of time allocated to us for discussing them yes uh so i think that will conclude our episode of fact orally on pirates it will except for obviously we have to ask people yes we do could we do it in a pirate accent maybe? Subscribe. Like. Give it a five-star rating and a great review. And please share us with your friends.

Arr. Arr. Well, thank you all very much for listening to another fun-filled episode of Fact or Really. Please come again next time. We'll see you soon. Cheerio. Bye now.