Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - The Deadliest Pirate MANHUNT in Human History (DISTURBING Story) | Colin Woodard • 212

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Colin Woodard is an American journalist and author. He is best known for his book, "The Republic of Pirates" –– and is considered the preeminent expert in the world on the history of the Golden Age Pirates. - BUY Guest’s Books & Films IN MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952 EPISODE LINKS: - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/ - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Ajqn5sN6 COLIN WOODARD’S LINKS: - COLIN’’S TWITTER: https://twitter.com/WoodardColin JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ***TIMESTAMPS*** 00:00 - Pirates Rein (1750s), Origins of Pirates in the Caribbean, Henry Avery & Mutiny ☠️ 12:50 - Henry Avery’s Legend & Piracy Escape, Pirate Recruiting, Labor Market Crisis 💰 21:37 - European Countries Navy Pirate Strategy, Private Shareholding Companies Grow, Colonial Wars of 18th Century 🛳️ 27:08 - Colin Reporting Soviet Union, Fall of Berlin Wall 👀 35:55 - Pirates Pop Culture Imagery & Why, Rise of Piracy, Sailors Always Angry 😡 47:57 - Sailing Back in the 18th Century, Inventions, Valuable Trades, England to Nassau, Bahamas Trip, Most Wealthy Port in the Caribbean 🏝️ 58:41 - Henry Jennings Declared Pirates, Monarch Succession in England Issues, Inbred Jaw of Royals, 1707 United Kingdom Creation 🇬🇧 01:07:47 - Jennings & Benjamin Hornigold Pirate Rivalry, Vero Beach Shipwreck, Attacking Spanish, Charles Vane Pirate Legend 🌊 01:13:31 - Colin’s Deep Pirate Research & Visiting London National Archives, Tracking Black Beard’s Journey 🧔🏻‍♂️ 01:24:31 - Woodes Rogers Circumnavigation & Spanish Attacks, Black Beard, Pirates Living in Nassau & Rivalries, English/Spanish Ships War w/ Pirates 😵 01:37:01 - Pirates Reign of Terror & Brilliant Strategies, Pirates & Slaves (African Descent) Relationship, Carolina’s Colony ‼️ 01:45:17 - Biggest Misconception of First Colonies, Covenant Relationship w/ God (Pilgrims Mindset) 🦃 01:55:20 - Scottish & Irish War Like Culture, Encouraged to Settle in Places, Inequalities & Natural Hierarchies 😱 02:04:10 - Pirates & African Descent, Famous Women Pirates, Origins of the word Pirate 🏴‍☠️ 02:19:20 - Black Beards Bizzare TRUTH, Samuel Bellamy Story, Spanish Treasure, North Carolina’s Value 🫢 02:34:33 - Black Beard’s Story, Crazy Battle 🤺 02:43:01 - Charles Vane’s Tragic Death, Modern-Day Pirates 🤯 02:53:07 - Truth of Pirates of the Caribbean, Assassins Creed Accuracy 😯 03:01:49 - Find Colin 👇 CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman: https://www.instagram.com/alessiallaman/ ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 212 - Colin Woodard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So he's trying to get a final score of treasure. Can't do it. Raids off Charleston. He's working his way up the coast. So what does he do? He strategically ditches most of his crew. He takes his flagship, a giant frigate-sized vessel, and intentionally runs it aground, abandons all the crewmen he doesn't trust, jumps into a smaller vessel, and keeps only

his trusted allies, the majority of whom, by the way, are of African descent, and goes up. And where does he go? He goes to North Carolina to the like the cheapest, lamest colony out there, a place that has almost no people that's just been ravaged in a conflict with the indigenous people. A place that the Virginians look down on as a place where, you know, ne'er-do-wells and people of no consequence live, where there's not even really a capital. The government just moves around from village to village. But best thing they have for a capital is a little town called Bath. His crew almost doubles the population of Bath

when they show up and come ashore. And they're all armed and all the rest. So he's going out down Pabliko Sound and goes and attacks some French ships in the open ocean and brings them back to one of the barrier islands at the mouth of the Sound Ocracoke Island and is dismantling the vessels. He's raiding other vessels.

And all the treasure and proceeds is ending up in the collector of customs for North Carolina's barn under a pile of hay. What he doesn't count on is the ruthlessness of the governor of Virginia, who's going to have none of it. He conspires with the captains of the Royal Navy vessels there in Norfolk to set up two impromptu mercenary raiding parties. One set travels overland of soldiers to the Great Dismal Swamp, and they find him off Ocracoke Island in that sound.

He and his men have just had a crazy party on the ship, and they're drunk and hungover and don't even notice these small vessels approaching them. And then there's this enormous battle. What's up guys. If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. I really hope you're not going to tell me the pirates weren't like Captain Jack Sparrow. Please don't ruin me. In some ways they were were you'd be surprised at some of the parallels right jack sparrow and disney were drawing on some real things here and there okay yeah that's a better answer than i was bracing myself not totally disappointing okay all right so maybe there were some peg legs there were some some eyes poked out some guys coming in there walking

with boats underneath the water and breathing yeah flamboyant dressing you know costume stuff there's some there's some actual historical like backing for that perfect just if you don't mind just pull the mic like that a little bit so it's pointing at you there we go but we have the great colin woodard in here today with no second w by the way correct it's not wood word yeah so no relation to bob okay but you are the guy on the history of pirates. So if people saw the Netflix docuseries that came out, whose name I always forget what that was called. Lost Pirate Kingdom, I think. That's it.

That's it. So that came out, I think, like last year or something like that? Yeah, it might be two years ago now. Yeah, it was phenomenal. But you were one of the experts in that. And when you go through Wikipedia pages of some of the famous pirates, it'll start with like, according to historian Colin Woodard, like this, this is something that you broke wide open. But how did you even get into covering this? Like, what was the backstory there? It's so cool. It's such an

out there topic. Yeah. I mean, originally, I wanted to use the pirates for my own agenda. I'd written previous books that dealt with US colonial history and that to truly understand America and its problems and why it's the way it is, all the answers are in the colonial period, which Americans don't know very well. And I was trying to find a way to draw a mass audience into this weird colonial world that's not as you think it is, right? Your impressions of what you learned in school is not it and it's much more fascinating, bizarre and explanatory. You understand today much better. What could I use to draw a mass audience in, right?

Dinosaurs are too early, right? The pirates, right? They're perfect. They're occupying this golden age of piracy I write about, which is in sort of 1715 to 1720, 1725, is right in the middle of the colonial period. And these pirates were operating out of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, yes. But their range of operations was they were raiding ships all the way up to Newfoundland and New England and all the way down to the Spanish main, the coast of what's now Venezuela and Peru. And they're raiding – they're involved in raiding slave ships in the African slave trade. Many of them are from the old world.

Raiding slave ships. Because slave ships end up being perfect for use as pirate vessels. And in some cases, and we can get into that later, enslaved people were eager to join the pirates and had a degree of freedom they didn't have in a lot of other spaces then. So there were lots of reasons they were involved in that. And they were fencing their goods to all the colonial governors and various corrupt- Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds, and I have a list of things I like to have on set. It's just little things like two freshly cracked eggs scrambled with crispy hash brown, sausage crumble, and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new scrambled eggs loaded breakfast box. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?

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Groceries that over-deliver. Upted officials all over the place. So it bonded the whole transatlantic world together and all the themes. And I thought, oh, I'll draw people into this world, and then they will be captivated by it and understand it. But then when I started researching the pirate story, it itself was so much stranger than the received story that I just kind of got hooked on that. So I ended up going down the rabbit hole of pirate history because it's so fascinating by itself. Well, let's talk about where it began because as you just alluded to there, you have a real specialty in the golden era, that 17 to 15 to 1725 part that we're going to talk

about a lot today. But before then, it was kind of, it seems to me like a little bit of no man's land in a way, because you had guys who were privateers, which if you don't mind, I'll have you explain that in a second. But then you also had like the term buccaneer, which I always thought was just like a pirate. Like when, if I had to say, stamp it down on a map, this was the first day pirates began. When do you think that was? Yeah. I mean, there have always been pirates, right? The joke is it's the second oldest profession in the world. But there were pirates in ancient Rome. There were pirates in medieval Europe and in medieval China. There are pirates today.

What distinguishes this group of pirates I'm talking about is that these are the pirates that are responsible for all that pirate pop culture imagery, the skull and crossbones, the R, the peg leg. It's this one group of pirates I write about who all knew each other, who operated out of a shared base in the Bahama Islands and were active for just really a few years, but they were so effective and they were so different from prior pirates and the pirates that have come since that they captivated the popular imagination at the time and have really never let it go. And so that pirate crew, which I would say is distinct from other types of pirates, that really gets going in 1714, 1715.

We can talk about how in the aftermath of a great big colonial war. And it was keying off a sort of early inspirational figure named Henry Avery who had – his big pirate exploits were in 1696, 1697. And I'd say he's the individual in the figure that sort of creates the proof of concept and the role model for this next generation of pirates that kind of burst into fruition and, you know, alter the world and give us this sort of culture of the pirate anti-hero. What was Henry Avery's background? Like, where was he from? So Henry Avery's English, and he was, he'd served in the Royal Navy and was in the late 1690s, an officer on a ship that had been commissioned, it was kind of a business deal between some very powerful people in England and the Spanish government during a time of peace to create a trade expedition that could make a whole pile of money because it would be the first ones – the first English trade connected with Spain and be conducted going to kind of leave them to become sort of prisoners of the Spanish and not pay them. And he led a mutiny because they had been so cheated. Yeah, a mutiny.

And he seized the vessel that he was on in the harbor in Corona, Spain, and like escaped of, you know, under the guns of a fort and then sailed, you know, out of Spain and around the horn of Africa and started this crazy and kind of terrifyingly brutal raids of shipping coming in and out of the Red Sea. And his most famous capture that kind of vaulted him into mythology was capturing the treasure ship that belonged to the Grand Mogul of India, essentially the ruler of India at the time, his vessel that was coming, you know, from the pilgrimage to Mecca, loaded with all kinds of treasures and stuff. And some of the ruler's relatives, Henry Avery and his crew captured this vessel and, you know, a pile of treasure worth just staggering sums. You know, a king's – an empire, you know kings an empire you know an imperial fortune and the what made him sort of a mythological figure is he kind of got away with it right they took this treasure and his men's kind of scattered and well there was an all points bulletin out for him because um

the most powerful forces in england the most powerful interests were the English East India Company. And the East India Company was trading in India and the Grand Mogul was essentially the trading partner. Grand Mogul is furious. An English pirate has like attacked his ship and killed crewmen and raped some of his family members and stolen all his treasure. He's furious and is actually like sending troops to arrest English diplomats in India in the trading ports and it cut off all trade. So this is messed up global trade. It's messed up England's most important trade partnership. So Henry Avery is like the subject of the world's first global manhunt.

Everyone is trying to get him, right? The entire English empire, the grand mogulia you know capture this guy dead or alive so everyone's trying to find him and he is skedaddled out of the red sea and he goes all the way to like the last place anyone will be he thinks will be looking for him which happens to be nasa in the bahama islands why do you think people wouldn't look for him there this is out by where you know this is where yeah this is out in in the Caribbean, right off the coast of Florida, half a world away from where everyone's really expecting him to be.

And he goes there and shows up under the fort. And he goes to Nassau and the Bahamas are this impoverished backwater of an English colony. It's not a rich place. It's barely surviving. Later, it gets sacked in various wars. It's a third-rate colony and very weak and fragile. And English holdover is pretty weak too. And the governor is a weak man, at least morally. Henry Avery, claiming to be a man named Captain Bridgman and claiming to have

found this vessel he's sailing on out in the sea, you know, essentially says, hey, oh, you know, I've got a whole bunch of ivory tusks and rare gold and, you know, Arab coins and stuff. I'll give you a chunk of it and I'll sell you, I'll throw in the ship if you, you know, fence my goods and sell me some sloops, you know, some escape vessels. And, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, the governor essentially does that. So at the time when there's this global manhunt for Henry Avery led by London and the court of St. James, one of England's own governors is buying the goods and selling him his getaway vehicles. Exactly. That's how the world operated then. He's that moolah, baby.

You got it. That's it. They're not taking care of him enough. Right. You got it. That's it. They're not taking care of them enough. Right. You got it. Men scattered. They sold the Grand Mogul's vessel to the governor, who ended up kind of leaving it on the shores of what's now Paradise Island

in the Bahamas, but was then Hog Island. And they all skedaddle on small vessels. They go up the East Coast. Some of them end up in Philly. Some of them end up in Philly. Some of them end up in Rhode Island briefly. But they all seem to be circling back to make a backstage return to England. Everyone's looking for them over in the Red Sea. And they've snuck all the way around and land in Ireland and then transport over Ireland and are coming back to England. Henry Avery is last seen with a whole big pile of treasure and another man's wife at a crossroads in Ireland, apparently bound

towards the West country of England. And poof, he disappears. And it starts this mythology though. Here's like Robin Hood, right? A guy who stood up for his crew members. It was like, enough's enough. We're tired of being exploited. We're going to seize this vessel, seizes an incredible amount of treasure and disappears. And then rumors go about as to what happened to him. People speculate and it becomes this pop culture phenomenon in the 1690s and the early 1700s where all of the elements of entertainment culture of the era are all featuring the Henry Avery story. There are plays about him on Drury Lane. There's, you know, sonnets written about him, you know, histories of the great pirate Henry Avery. And in all of these, you know, sonnets written about him, you know, histories of the great pirate Henry Avery.

And in all of these, you know, they have these wild fantasies about where he is and what he's done with his treasure. And many of them circulate around, oh, he's gone to Madagascar and there he's built a pirate kingdom, you know, with streets paved of gold. And, you know, everything's absolutely wonderful. Like the hobos, you know, you know, um, what is that? The, the candy mountains, you know, the, the sort of fantasy, uh, land that the hobos sang about in their songs. Must've missed that one. Yeah. Well, this is like for sailors, this is like the fantasy Nirvana place, the kingdom of the pirates where, uh, everything's wonderful and they have incredible amounts of treasure and he's there and he got away with it.

And so this is the story that's percolating around when the young – when a group of young people and young sailors are growing up who are eventually going to lead this pirate insurrection and pirate republic in the Bahama Islands in the 1710s. That's wild, though, that I didn't expect the story to go to. He decides to go all the way back where he came from, and fades into anonymity, because then you see all these other guys who are in the Bahamas, and we're going to talk about them and who comes up and kind of takes control. But, you know, I think a floating question is obviously people look at pirates and they think okay criminal outlaw yeah pretty obvious but

how did what what types of people was henry avery recruiting to be on his crew was he just going to the local jail when guys actually didn't get hanged and let out and said all right join me or was he turning people who were law-abiding citizens and paying them enough money that suddenly they become criminals? Was it a mix? In Henry Avery's case, it was just circumstance. I don't think he was planning on going to piracy. He and his crew were being screwed over by the ship owners. And so they decide to mutiny. And so his crew is whoever was willing to join the mutiny. So it's a whole bunch of sailors who happen to be on the same expedition. We're all hired by the same, you know,

employers and they're getting, the employees are getting screwed over and they all rise up. So he ends up with who he ends up with. And from there on, because he made this incredible score of like the, you know, the greatest, you you know pile of treasure you could possibly imagine it's all reductionist from there right he's shedding people as he's trying to you know escape the manhunt and now when you say shedding people well he gets thrown him overboard no no no indication of that but say when they get to the bahamas um and he they sell their the the grand mogul ship to the governor, the party breaks up, right? Some of them go in one small boat and sail up to Philadelphia and then a few weeks later,

another group of them go. They break – the group breaks up and start scattering to go find their own path with their own shares of the treasure. And so when Avery's last – he's, he's sailing with a, you know, a half dozen people when he arrives in Ireland, and he quickly breaks company with them. And as I said, when he's last seen, he's with this one of the other crewmen's wife and is at a crossroads.

So it's down to just two people. She's later seen actually without him by another witness who shows up at a trial and is, you know, acting very sus. But, you know, where is Henry Avery? Oh, I don't know. He's dead. I haven't without him by another witness who shows up at a trial and is acting very sus. But where is Henry Avery? I don't know. He's dead. I haven't seen him lately. So I mean it appears that even – he was down to just himself at some point with a whole mess of treasure.

So – but the question is to how did the pirates recruit, the Golden Age pirates who had a choice in how to go about recruiting as opposed to just ending up by happenstance in piracy, some of them did exactly what Avery did. They mutinied against oppressive conditions on their vessel and seized their vessel. Others decided, this sucks, we're going to go enter piracy by stealing some small vessel at anchor. Or some of them started with these sort of super ocean-going canoes called periaguas. They were like giant dugout canoes with sails. And you could seat seven, eight, ten men on one of these. And you could have several of them.

And that was usually the starter pack for a lot of the pirates. Not only were they easy to acquire, but remember, this is the age of sail. The vessels you're pursuing to make your first scores and build your way up as a pirate are constrained when they try to sail into the wind, right? If you're a sailing vessel and you sail into the wind, the wind's going to be on both sides of the sail. It's just going to flap like a flag and you're going to be going nowhere. A sailing vessel has to go off the wind and point off the wind at some angle to catch the wind and start sailing. And square rig vessels, which many of the big ocean going ships of that era were terrible. They had to sail way off the wind. I mean, like, you know, 90, you know, 45, 50, 60 degrees off the wind. And so it had zigzag tacking back and forth if they were trying to go in the direction of the wind.

Incredibly inefficient. If the wind is really blowing, the waves and the wind are hitting the hull and pushing you further off to the effect that in a lot of conditions, ocean-going ships could make no progress whatsoever into the wind. That meant they compelled the sail in certain directions. The Paraguas could paddle straight into the wind super fast. They could go over reefs and things that the other vessels couldn't. So in the right- They could go over reefs? Throughout the Bahamas and the Caribbean, you'd have coral reefs that are, you know,

four or five feet under the water, three feet under the water. And this could break through them? They could go right, they're canoes. They have almost, they don't almost, they draw very little water whatsoever. Whereas say a Royal Navy frigate will draw 10, 12 feet. So you could, they're good for pursuing and capturing a vessel in certain conditions.

But then to escape, you can sail, you can take your Periaguas and float right over all these barriers that your pursuer, Royal Navy warship, for instance, can't follow you and has to go the long way around. By the time they do it, you've disappeared. So they were very agile vessels. So a lot of pirates would start with those. But your question as to how they recruit, sometimes your initial group would be, hey, this is a drag. Let's go out and make money a better way. We're all starving here. An important thing to understand about why there was this golden age pirate outbreak is it followed the conclusion of a colonial war, the War of the Spanish Secession it's called.

Yes. Can you please explain this? This was – Yeah. And this is important answering the question you had. So the War of Spanish Secession ends in 1714. And as I said, the Golden Age of Piracy kind of starts in 1715. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button,

please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. That's not a coincidence. There was this big colonial war, you know, England versus France and Spain and so on, like many of these colonial wars. Thank you. wherever they were throughout the world. You know, good luck. We don't need you anymore, right? And merchant shipping, you know, continued, but merchant shipping suddenly is like, oh, there's all these unemployed sailors everywhere starving. We're going to lower our wages by half. Or cheat you another way.

So suddenly the whole supply and demand, the labor market was crap for labor at the time. And you had all these, you know, people with a certain set of skills, right? They're naval sailors or former privateers, and we can get into who they were as well, who know how to handle ships, know how to handle ships in combat, have been fighting, in the English case, the Spanish throughout the War of Spanish Secession, and, you know, raiding their plantations and attacking their ships. And suddenly they're starving on, you know, the docks of Port Royal, Jamaica or wherever they are.

And a lot of them were like, well, this is a drag. Let's get back to being privateers. We don't have permission anymore, but let's go do it, right? When they did that, is the way – did I understand this right? The way it would work is that they'd have to get something called like a letter of mark from the royalty? Yeah. Here's the distinct – so in time of war, like during the War of Spanish Secession, the ocean is very big and the – No kidding. The big – yeah.

And especially back then, there's no GPS. There's no cell phone. There's no nothing. You can't tell what's going on out there, right? And so the Navy, even if you're England or Holland and you have a big Navy, your ships can't possibly be everywhere protecting your global empire shipping everywhere. It's impossible. And so a lot of the empires during time of war would outsource some of the problem to the private sector. They'd say, hey, tell you what, you know, if you want to go out and raid the enemy's shipping, here's your permission to do

it from the king. The king says, here you go. Here's your letter of mark. Good job. Good job. You have to pay me, you know, give me 15% head tax or whatever you bring in. But, you know, here, go on and attack enemy shipping. And so all the different empires did that. And those people would be called privateers. They were essentially legalized pirates or maritime mercenaries really who had been hired to go crush the enemy shipping. This sounds like the original military industrial complex. Oh, for sure. And a time of duress where they really had to outsource everything, right? Need some more, baby.

Let's go. And the demand for that was enormous. And that created an incentive for all of these private shareholding companies to be created. Back then, a shareholding company wasn't something permanent. You would create shares in a particular venture and go do the venture and then liquidate it. You know, like it's almost like a project. And so all kinds of private investors and merchants would get involved in this. They would get a privateering commission. You get a whole bunch of investors to go buy a vessel or rig out a vessel to be a small warship.

And then you'd go out in the English Channel and capture a couple of French merchant ships. And you'd bring them into port and you'd liquidate their cargo and you'd divide the profit among the shareholders, which would include the crew, right? You make that sound so easy though too. Just capture a couple of French ships, bring them back. It would be relatively easy given how stretched all of the navies of these empires were in time of war. Because remember, they have possessions in the Caribbean and South America and North America and Africa and some of them in Asia, in the East Indies. And they're trying to protect all of that. Almost impossible. And you add in the privateers jumping in with a profit motive and they were raiding all

kinds of stuff. So that was what a lot of them did and you needed permission to do that. But the war ends and suddenly all the privateering commissions are revoked and all these people who'd been making money and making a living as these private mercenaries suddenly had lost their livelihood at the same time that the Royal Navy was dumping all their sailors. So you can see how you have this huge social problem of this mass of people with a set of skills. Lockheed Martin time, baby. Let's go. was a lot of incentives for people to go, let's keep attacking the Spanish. We don't like him anyway. And the Spanish in the Caribbean were using pretext to continue seizing English vessels coming in and out of Jamaica and other ports. What was the basis of that? I think you got into some of it during that answer. I just want to make sure. I told you I'm a little slow today

because of all the food poisoning. I'm playing very injured but what was the the basis of that war was it a lot was it basically over a lot of the lamb they were all going to get or was this just like more typical english french and spanish don't like each other so they need a reason to fight a war well i mean ultimately all these colonial wars of the late 17th and early 18th century are about trying to nudge each other out of the way for control of the spoils of the emerging imperial systems they had, right? If we attack them and could get this colony, that would be great. But the War of Spanish Secession, the pretext for the war that drove them to fight each other was literally a contest over who would secede to one of the Habsburg thrones. When Spain suddenly had an opening, the king had died. What is that?

How does that work? The Habsburgs thrones? So the Habsburgs, they had different branches, right? The Spanish royal family were Habsburgs. There were Austrian Habsburgs. And your claim to the throne, if somebody died, somebody could say, hey, I'm really the next person who should be in line for the throne. Oh, look at my genealogy. I'm supposed to be. And they'd be competing arguments and often they'd be settled on the battlefield.

And so this is one of those where they were rival claimants. And for various geostrategic reasons, one claimant would have allies you know from one uh allied country against another but it's all balance of power stuff in the end they're fighting over you know how much imperial territory we can have but the the proximate argument was over who should be on the throne of spain and who's going to back whose claim very interesting i don't know anything about that i gotta look into that yeah i mean it's it's kind of like all those European balance of power wars, right? We are all these empires and if this empire grows, then we will shrink and therefore we have to team up with these guys to balance – keep everything in balance. But it's more or less that kind of thinking.

Well, you were saying right before we were on camera, a little sideways here, but I think this is kind of cool. You were living over in the Soviet block, like when communism fell. So you've done a lot of your early work was surrounding like European history and vis-a-vis politics, right? It was. So, I mean, I'm of the vintage. I graduated from high school in 1987. And back then it was Perestroika and Glasnov, Mikhail Gorbachev was maybe changing the Soviet Union. In my generation, we'd all grown up with the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear destruction and all that idea. And suddenly, there seemed to be a real thawing going on in the Soviet Union. And I thought that was interesting and maybe that would result in some kind of changes and would define our time.

So as an 18-year-old, I kind of gravitated in college to Soviet East European studies. And so happened my junior year abroad. I went to Budapest in his exchange program at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences. You went abroad into the belly of the beast. Into the belly of the beast. And it happened to be the fall of 1989. So when I arrived, it was communism. And while I was there, it of 1989. So when I arrived, it was communism. And while I was there, it all collapsed. Berlin Wall, fall of Ceausescu, Hungary leaving the bloc, Velvet Revolution. And as Americans, we needed visas way ahead of time.

You had to stand in lines at the Polish embassy to get your visa. And then you had to go to the Czechoslovak embassy to get a transit visa to take the train to Poland and come back three days later and pay. I mean, you didn't do anything spur of the moment. You had to plan everything a week or two ahead of time to go to these other Soviet bloc countries. But just by the luck of the draw, I happened to have the right visas and the right trips so that I saw a lot of those events firsthand from the late days of Ceausescu to the revolution to being in Berlin just a few days after the wall had opened up. And we were coming from Budapest, right? So we were coming to East Berlin. And then we had, you know, we had a East German transit visas to go visit West Berlin. But we were arriving with all the East Germans

who are going to see the West for the first time in their lives. And we're with them being pulled off the trains. And what was that like? Oh, Lichtenberg station in East Berlin, when we arrived was, it was so mobbed, the train had to stop well before it could enter the trains. What was that like? Oh, Lichtenberg Station in East Berlin when we arrived was, it was so mobbed, the train had to stop well before it could enter the station because all the platforms had become overwhelmed and people had filled the rails in between. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors.

So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. And so it was being pressed like sardines coming off all of the trains. Everyone's flowing towards the subway stations under the train station to go to the west. We just caught up in this sort of ocean of people just kind of flowing like sardines being sucked down the passages. Actually, in the direction where we weren't supposed to go there because you couldn't enter as a non-Sov bloc citizen but you know it was just chaos yeah what are they gonna do check you right right they're like you know goodbye you know holding up um you know other people's children so they don't get crushed kind of thing and yeah and and just flowing through with all

these people going to see the the other world on the other side of the wall for the first time so that was absolutely crazy then we get to west West Berlin and, you know, put down our bags and then get a visiting day visa to go cross Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin at the same time that all the East Berlinies are leaving. And it was, you know, all of those things were amazing and led me to stay, you know, to go back the next summer. And then as soon as I graduated, I went back to Eastern Europe to see how that was all going to play out. So I was there for most of my 20s, which was the

1990s. In Budapest? Budapest and later Zagreb and Sarajevo. I was covering the region and became a journalist because, you know, I figured out that being a reporter, I wanted to see what was going to happen. So you're there at the fall of the Balkans. Yeah, I was there for the whole thing and was the Christian Science Monitor in San Francisco Chronicles immediate post-war correspondent for former Yugoslavia. So I was there, you know, first elections and, you know, the city was destroyed, you know, when I first went to Sarajevo. You had to go in and out on – Did you pull that up on a map of Lesser Sarajevo? Yeah, I had to go in and out on – the airport was closed because it had been shelled and destroyed and was controlled by NATO.

So as a journalist, you could fly with the C-130s in who were doing the repositioning. So it's like landing in C-130s with a whole bunch of French marines and getting off in sandbags and machine guns and all that kind of stuff and then going into a city that was you know there were no windows you know the skyscrapers the top halves are all burned out because they've been shelled and you know water for one hour a day and um landmines and all the parks and you know it was it was you know immediate aftermath of that and you know i guess this is all important and that it shaped being in that region throughout the transition from communism from you know these countries that one thing to call it transition hell of a transition a super transition um from totalitarian regimes trying to become liberal democracies maybe in places where they'd never been liberal democracies or the last time they were um was in the 1930s which had its

own problems in Europe in that time period. All these separate ethnicities too who had all been put together kind of and now they're not. All their history of animosity and grudges and having done terrible things to one another had been put on ice in the Soviet period. You're all fraternal socialist allies. You're the Hungarians and the Romanians.

You're all now socialist friends with your big cousins in Moscow helping guide the way. That was all becoming thought out very rapidly. And yeah, there were all kinds of potential conflicts. And demagogues trying to use those situations to stay in power. There's a guy named Vladimir Mechiar who was trying to do it in Slovakia. There was Yan Ilyescu in Romania. And then Milosevic is the one who really succeeded,

I guess, in generating a whole little genocide and horror show war in the heart of Europe. In 1991, this kicks off. The post-Cold War peace was extremely short and was kind of the whole idea of a new Europe, a unified Europe was kind of born – still born right then. But for me, that was like a laboratory for propaganda, tropes of nationhood, how demagogues function, how you brainwash populations fear war othering people fascism i mean there were little fascist regimes you know like to friend your tujman's cray show when i was covering that so it was a laboratory for really understanding the way people and societies work

in um and the power of history and how history can be used and abused. Oh, yeah. And I guess I told the story because then when I went back to the U.S. and was traveling around, I started realizing that our own – the U.S. is kind of balkanized, right? We have separate – there were separate colonial projects and they had separate regional cultures and they ended up together in kind of an accident of history. And the pirate book and many of the other books I did early on were delving into colonial history and giving more and more of the background to kind of understand how history plays and influences events in contemporary US life, right? So that's the relevance of what was happening in the Balkans to what is happening now in the United States is unfortunately pretty closely linked.

Interesting. Well, if we got stuck on the Balkans, we'd be there all day because I'm so interested in that. Like that was something, it's a quick aside, like maybe two and a half years ago, I saw an old time cover from the NATO bombings in 99. Oh, Kosovo, yeah. Yeah. And I was like, what the fuck is that? And I went to Google and I went, I saw an old time cover from the NATO bombings in 99. Kosovo, yeah. Yeah. And I was like, what the fuck is that? And I went to Google and I went, whoa. And I started researching this.

And then I had my friend Beck Lover who lost 28 people in the genocide over there. He's Albanian but also has family from Kosovo who are Albanians obviously. And it just blew me away how much of that history we don't know about. And yet so many of our GWAT guys, our Global War on Terror, Navy SEAL Special Forces guys, you go listen to their stories. One time out of two, you're going to have a guy say, yes, on my first deployment, Kosovo, 99. And they all know about it. But it's not covered here. The genocide in Bosnia and what Serbia was doing to so many people, it's not really talked about. So that's definitely something I want to cover on future podcasts.

That's another – you and I were talking about some other topics you covered that are future podcasts. That might be another one right there. Happy to do that. But you also – the reason it's kind of relevant with the Balkanization was that there was an earlier point you made that I put a pin in where you talked about these guys viewing themselves as Robin Hoods. Yeah. of when the golden age, 1715 to 1725, of piracy was. To me, and correct me if I'm wrong here and making the wrong assumption, to me it almost seems like a prelude to the Revolutionary War in the sense that, okay, these guys, I think they were mostly pretty much just criminals who wanted money, but they justified it to themselves by saying, oh, we live over

here. We're getting taxed by these big royal rich people who send all their fancy little ships over here. So we're going to fuck them up, take everything and say it's ours now. And it's just redistribution and we're sticking up for the little guy. Is that – and then obviously in the Revolutionary War, it was like taxation without representation. We're not doing that. So is that fair to say? Well, there are links between the two. I think they're a little less direct than that. But what's

important about the pirate outbreak is – remember, this is 60 years before the American Revolution, a couple, three generations, even more before the French Revolution in 1789. This is a time when supposedly ideas of like freedom and democracy don't exist yet with the common people. And we never know what ordinary people think about stuff because they're not the ones who could read and write. They didn't leave us records. Nobody at the time cared what people of low station thought. So they didn't record it. So it's really hard to know. But with this piracy outbreak, we get a really good idea of what people thought because they were well aware that in the 1710s in the English imperial zone that things were getting consolidated. The

formation of the English upper class as we understand it in that class society was starting to happen in this time period. The old feudalism had mutual obligations of one sort or another. You may be born a serf, but you get to keep farming your land and there's, you know, there's the, the, the Lord, man or Lord has certain obligations to the serf center. All of that is starting to fall apart in the early 1700s. They have something called the enclosure movement where a serf family might have a 100-year lease to their right to the land.

But as each lease came up, suddenly in the early 1700s, the landowners were like, nah, we're not going to renew the lease, which was just not like part of the conception of people prior to that. Oh, okay. Well, proto-industrialization and woolen mills was creating a demand for large amounts of wool. You don't need subsistence farmers on your fief, right? You want to get rid of those 300 family plots and have one giant sheep field to grow a whole mess of sheep. And hey, you don't need 600 people to do that. You need seven shepherds, right? So that was suddenly happening throughout the countryside. When you hear about the, you know, those Dickensian vision, the 19th century of the cities teeming with all these poor people who have no jobs, the surplus population, the

social Darwinists call them, the surplus population are all the people who are being pushed off the land by this consolidation. And it created all kinds of power structures, you know, the adoption and evolution of a separate accent that the upper class would speak that would be different from other people. That wasn't really what was going on prior to that. So in the 1710s, this is right in the midst of all those changes. Life was getting much, much more precarious for ordinary people. And the people in the worst circle, you know, if you're pushed off the land, you go to the cities and try to somehow eke out a living there. If you couldn't even do that, the thing

of last resort was to go to sea as a sailor, because that was crap, right? It was incredibly dangerous. It paid poorly, your chance of surviving a sea voyage and coming back between disease and poor diet and pirate raids and accidents was really, really low. And in time of war, you'd be just seized by hooks for arms. That wasn't just pirates. That was sailors in general. Almost all pirates had been merchant sailors before. And merchant sailors were missing arms and legs and eyes because of the accidents on board ships, barrels rolling around, rigging falling. It was just an incredibly dangerous thing to do. You know, the trope was, you know, being a sailor is much like being in prison except with the added possibility of drowning. So I mean you don't be a sailor unless you got no other options. So when the pirates come along, they're already a subset of the people who are the dispossessed and the dispossessed of the dispossessed.

And they're all together on vessels, on the most sophisticated technology of the time period ocean going ships and these ocean going ships some technology yeah like you need a whole bunch of people coordinated together to move the rigging they do all this stuff and it's sort of like kind of a industrial proletariat ish kind of thing at a time before the industrial revolution and they're far from home they're far from from the cops. And if they get really angry, there's the possibility to just seize the vessel, right? And so radical democratic ideas, a lot of them, we see them with these pirates in this golden age pirates outbreak because they're really upset. And a lot of people are rising up and mutinying because they really do

feel that they've been screwed up. And they were. They were cheated all the time. They go to collect their wages at the end of a sea voyage and they suddenly be being paid in Jamaican pounds instead of pound sterling, which are worth half as much. Sorry. It doesn't say it. It has to be pound sterling. Not the – ship owners not packing enough food on the vessel.

So if your vessel gets waylaid, people start starving. I mean, all kinds of bad stuff happening all the time. And some people felt like they've been pushed far enough and we're going to fight back explicitly against the ship owners, the sort of, you know, ownership class. The man. The man. They're going to fight against the man. And what's really interesting about the pirate outbreak in that, and we're gonna take over the ship, and we're going to overthrow the top-down hierarchy of the ship,

and instead, we, the mutineers, are going to elect our captain. And we can, yeah, they elected their captains. So they were, they were, alright. They were in a rough shot. I'm gonna throw them a bone here and there. I think they're, I mean, they are definitely, if they're Robin Hood's men, they're stealing on behalf of the poor.

But they're the ones keeping the loot. That point is taken. But they actually were, yeah, democratically electing their captains and they could depose them and they voted the crew at any time that's outside of combat. During combat, you got to stick with it. And they'd elect a quartermaster, a secondary figure whose job was like a prime minister representing the crew to keep track of what the captain is doing. The consigliere. Yeah, exactly. But the consigliere owes his allegiance to the crew, not to the captain.

So he's keeping track of things for them, right? A little backwards. Got it. Yeah, sort of a reverse version, I guess. That's right. Their treasure, right? Remember, privateers were shareholding companies and the investors would typically take half of the proceeds of a successful raiding mission. And then the other half would be divided among the captain and crew. And the captain would typically get 14 or 15 shares. The first officer might get five or six. And the average crewman would get one or half a share.

On the pirate vessels, there was no owner, so you don't have to share that part. But within the, among the pirates, the captain might get a share and a half. Everyone else got a share. And they'd take off the top, they'd skim off the top, like sort of primitive disability benefits. You've lost an arm in combat?

Here, here's 40 pounds. So, you know, you died, you know, we'll send this to your widow before they divide up the treasure. I don't mean this as a joke. I mean this like kind of literally. It's almost like a little bit of a socialism type concept. I guess.

I mean you could say socialism or you could say democratic in the sense that they're – yeah, I mean they're going to – Like Bernie Sanders, democratic – what was it? Democratic socialist? That's it. You dress up socialism with a nice word. Well, socialism implies that you're using a government institution to regulate the inequities in society. You socialized it. These guys are just saying we're going to divide it up this way among ourselves.

So it's almost like – I got you. There's no institution, right? So you could call it that I guess. But it's kind of radical democracy. like um i got there's there's no institution right so i mean you could call it that i guess but in but it's kind of radical democracy but they actually sign ships documents which is how we know these things to sign up to the you know the basically the the constitution of the ship that this is how as a pirate yeah it's the pirates sign on and this is this is the deal

let's go exactly right and so so they were practicing kind of a radical roughshod democracy. They're benefiting from the treasure, but they were at a time when supposedly these democratic ideas didn't exist. They existed and they existed among this dispossessed of the dispossessed. Fascinating thing is their argument that – so they were saying we're Robin Hood's men. We're fighting the man. They've been screwing us over long enough. We're going to go take some back. All the authorities were like, no, these are the villains of all nations.

These are devils and the most horrible criminals imaginable. We have to round them up and wipe them out. The authorities had all the media and the newspapers and all that and were putting out all these warnings and trying to arrest pirates and such. They were not winning the war for public opinion despite all that. Time and time again on both sides of the Atlantic, ordinary people appear to be buying the pirates' argument

and siding with them. Because there's more of them. That's what's interesting. Well, they find the argument credible by the pirates. So, when like Cotton Mather, you Mather is raving about the pirates but at the same time admitting that there are many in Massachusetts who back them. The governor of Virginia is afraid to share intel with his own house of burgesses, the legislature of the colony which is made up of aristocratic people because he fears that the information will be leaked to the pirates the attorney general of south carolina uh survives a coup attempt when they try to uh bring a pirate to trial because a whole bunch of people in the town

like rise up against them and there's this book the general history of the pirates published in 1724 when some of the pirates were still around. During the golden era. During the end of the, it's kind of right at the end of the golden era. Which means it probably took them 20 years to write it too. It happened pretty fast. It's a fascinating book, but it's also the book from which basically every received pirate story you and the Disney Corporation and Robert Louis Stevenson ever encountered all come from this book. And it was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and it's still in print today.

And it is pretty sympathetic to the pirates' point of view on this. So what I'm saying is they were- Folk heroes. They were folk heroes at the time. We can argue as to whether it's rightly so or not, but what's fascinating is it means that the attitudes and leveling democratic anger that you see fueling some of the American Revolution was already there 60, 70 years before at a time when it's not supposed to be there yet.

And so it gives you – like when the Boston Tea Party stuff happens or the Boston Massacre, right? When the British soldiers fire on, who are they firing on? A lot of the people they're firing on are sailors, right? Or agitating. It's often sailors who are agitating and pushing for things in that early time period. So I think that's the tie is there's the anger

that's gonna fuel the French Revolution and in some ways fuel aspects of the American Revolution from below is already circulating around there. Yeah, the social aspect of it for sure. Yeah. But you talk about the brutality of the seas back then and you talk about how it's so – it was normal for guys to be missing a limb that not even pirates like you said and you know being i i think the phrase was being in the navy was like prison but you're on a boat or something right uh much like prison but with the added possibility of drowning yeah there you go there you go so if you don't mind like what what was it what was a standard trip like back then? If I wanted to go – forget pirates for a second.

Just if I'm with the British Navy and I want to take a trip from the west of the UK across to Nassau. How many – in the early 1700s, how many days am I looking at? What size of ship am I traveling on? How many people would be on this ship? Was it strictly using a compass? Or were there other methods they had? Like just, I'm always thinking about the background of that because I know nothing about it. Yeah, no, it's fascinating because remember what I said about sailing ships not being able to sail into the wind.

That meant you just can't, if you're trying to go there and the prevailing wind is coming at you, you just kind of can't do it with a lot of vessels. So sailing vessels were compelled to follow wind patterns. And they'd figured out by then that the wind tends to go this way and then down here there's a wind that goes this way. All these prevailing winds meant that if you followed a certain pattern, you could get from A to B, but you might have to go to C and D and E first. And so vessels were compelled to follow these routes. They knew the winds and they were using yes compasses and also, you know, sextants to get their bearing and, you know, keep time and figure out from the stars where you're at and all the rest to make sure that you're, that they were really good at being able to figure out where they were sort of north to south, but it was much harder for them to figure out how far east to west they were.

But between the winds and experience, they were able to do that. So the answer to your question is if you were typically trying to get directly from past Spain, down to like the Cape Verde Islands off Africa, which are Spanish possession or the Madeira, where you stock up on Madeira wine. And then you could catch trade winds that would carry you across the Atlantic at those latitudes to enter the Caribbean through the Leeward Islands and eventually to the Bahamas. It was almost like a conveyor belt. Like if you came and you arrived from the open Atlantic in the Caribbean, like down, you know, like Barbados and Martinique that side of the Leeward Islands, you could keep proceeding very easily with the winds all the way to Jamaica and the Virgin Islands and Florida and the Bahamas.

It was very hard for you to go backwards. So anytime it was almost like a one-way journey like a conveyor belt. Once you left Barbados, you're going to keep on going and then once you got to the Straits of Florida, the Gulf Stream and other winds would carry you up the eastern seaboard and then you could return across the Atlantic in that direction. But thus the triangle trade forms, right? The slave trade, you move trade goods and trinkets, you trade at the slave forts in Africa for enslaved people, you bring them with the trade winds across and you sell

them, then you take the exchange that for sugar and rum and the like, which you then bring the rest of the way, not only with the goods, but the sequence you did was governed by the winds. And so that would be so you'd be in a, be in a vessel that was going to make – some of those journeys needs to be relatively large to carry enough supplies to do it. And for the mathematics and the economics of the vessel, it needs to carry enough stuff to make it profitable over time for the shareholders. So bigger vessels if you're going to be compelled to take a long route. But this also means people often ask, how did the pirates figure out where the ships were given the ocean's big? Because of this, you knew where ships had to go

and there were certain choke points in world shipping where the intersection of the prevailing winds and the geography meant you knew that all kinds of ships had to pass through here and here. And one of the places that ships had to pass through here and here. And one of the places that ships had to pass through was between the Bahama Islands and the shores of then uncolonized Florida was a choke point. Which made Nassau such a perfect location. One of the reasons they ended up precisely there. Okay.

So roughly, as you said, it does vary based on if they have to go to B and C instead of just A to D depending on the wind on certain parts of the journey. But on average, how long would a trip like that take to go from England to Nassau? Well, let's say you were going from New York or New England to England or vice versa. You know, typically that's like a six-week trip back then. If you got to go down the coast of Africa and then to NASA and you're probably stopping on the way, you know, longer. I'm not sure if I've timed that, but I think you're talking, you know, four, five, six months anyway. You're going to be gone for more than a year by the time you finish the typical trade circuit if you're going to do the

circuit that's going to take you from England to the Caribbean via Africa. And because you kind of have to go to – I mean you could go to Madeira and pick up wine and then cross and a lot of vessels did that who weren't involved in the slave trade. But part of the reason they encouraged the slave trade is in the cruelty of the sort of capitalist economics of the era, you need to load that up with something and that was a compelling intersection of interests and profit that led you to – you already got to be down there for the trade winds. What are you going to carry across? And you said they're obviously sizable. They have a lot of supplies on them. So discounting like some of the slave ships and stuff like that, how many people might be on a crew for one of those?

Right. Well, more on a slave ship because disease and bad diet and all these things meant that the mortality rate of the crews was staggering. So they often were carrying twice as many crew people than they needed to make up for the half who they knew would die on the way. And I mean, much worse, of course, for the enslaved people chained in the hold where it was just atrocious. But I mean, the conditions were really bad. There was a reason that people were fed up being merchant sailors.

So in those cases, you're talking probably 40, 50, I think, on things like Le Concorde. Smaller vessels. It's lower than I thought you'd say. Yeah. Typical – like pirates are often raiding. Like if you're raiding a ship that's going to be going back to England carrying logwood or rice from South Carolina or sort of a typical ocean-going vessel. I don't know. You're probably talking 20 crewmen on some of those things at a merchant vessel.

When you get to a warship, much more because you're needing to man the guns and stuff. But, you know, you're talking, you know, one or two dozen is typically the number of people on a merchant vessel that the pirates are going to be encountering and dealing with. But you get up to, you know, 100 or more when you're dealing with warships all right so you had said the guy Henry Avery was the mysterious dude who ended up disappearing back into somewhere in the UK or Ireland after beginning this whole thing and and part of it was you said he laid the track works for Nassau and what that became as a haven and then after him i guess for the golden era you have these guys henry jennings and hornigold benjamin hornigold benjamin hornigold enter the picture what what were

their they were very different people but they were doing the same thing i guess what were their backgrounds and how did they end up in nassau yeah so the they're kind of the co-founders and rival founders of the pirate republic in nassauau. So that war ended, the War of Spanish Secession. You had all these people who for various reasons might want to become pirates. And some of them wound up in the Bahamas and Nassau. And one of the early ones was Benjamin Hornigold, arrived there with some of these periaguas, these canoes I described. He had three great big ones in a crew. You know, Blackbeard might have been with him at the time before he was known as Blackbeard. And they were operating out of Nassau. Why were they operating out of Nassau? Because during the War of Spanish Secession, the French and Spanish had sacked the English colony of the Bahamas twice and pretty much obliterated. It was

a failed colony. The fort was damaged. There was no, there's no imperial authorities there whatsoever. These early pirates, Hornigal and others arrived there before England bothered to send somebody to govern the place again. They moved in first. They're the ones who started shoring up the fort to defend the harbor and make it impossible to remove them. So the pirates moved into a failed colony and kind of took over the infrastructure and repaired it. Hornigold was one of the ones who did that. And he got there early and was sort of a, you know, he'd been a privateer previously. And he had a lot of gumption, a lot of reservations about attacking English ships. He was like, oh, it's cool. Let's go keep attacking the Spanish. We just fought a war with them. We

don't like them, but we're not going to attack English ships and ships from our own country. And that would create friction later on. But he was kind of – he had a sort of moral compass about what he was doing. He was trying to continue operating as a privateer. And the people under him tended to have a little bit more of a pirate honor code than some of the people who served under Jennings. Jennings shows up later. Jennings is from a wealthier background. He had a small, some kind of plantation or farm on Jamaica. He'd been a merchant captain and a privateering captain prior and during the War of Spanish Secession. It was worth a fair bit of money at the time, was a respectable

person in Jamaica. Did he have family lineage to power structures in the UK? Not that we know of. I mean, what we're able to put together from the surviving documents is that he had an estate that was worth quite a bit. He shows up in merchant shipping records and customs records, and sometimes in the accounts in the only newspaper that was around in North America at the time. Respectable and successful merchant captain, upward bourgeoisie. And Jamaica was the most important and wealthiest english colony in the caribbean that was the base of the royal navy's fleet that was where all the kind of money was that was the the chunkiest um colony in the english empire and he was there so he's you know

a very successful colonial you know middle upper middle class sort of person if you want to try to use today's terms on it um and he's, but he's involved in a political struggle, right? On top of all of this other stuff I've talked about, you know, there was a subset of pirates, including Jennings, who weren't the downtrodden masses I just described, right? Jennings is a pretty respectable figure. He's got an estate. He's got plenty to lose. What's he doing with all these disgruntled proles, right? What's up with that?

And there's a number of them, right? Paul Scrave Williams of Rhode Island who Sam Bellamy's sidekick and becomes a pirate captain and commodore himself was the son of Rhode Island's attorney general. Well, maybe that's not a total surprise. But his mother was descended from the Plantagenet kings of England, right? And he's in there on the piracy. There's all – A little corruption in Rhode Island politics? No, man.

Perish the thought. That would never happen. Perish the thought. So – but this gang of people, including Jennings, were involved in a political struggle that was going on because at the end of the War of Spanish Secession, the monarch at the time, Queen Anne, died. And this created a problem in England because during her reign, England had passed laws that said no Catholic can rise to the throne of England. We're going to be good Protestants now.

And Anne didn't have any handy Protestant relatives right around her. Her brother, who would logically have been the person to secede her, was Catholic and therefore was cut out of it. And so they started looking around, you know, vice president? Nope. You know, speaker of the house? Nope. They had to work their way down to like the deputy undersecretary of agriculture and the

pecking order of who was going to secede to the throne. Hey guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. They found some German princeling who is a distant relative of hers who didn't speak English and wasn't particularly interested in it, never been to England. You, you're going to become George of Hanover.

You're going to come back here and become king of England, creating the Hanoverian line that's still on the throne today. Isn't it fascinating though like on this how the English throne currently? Yeah. The old German thrones before Hitler and the Russian thrones are all Germans. The Habsburgs and yeah. I mean they're – yes, but all the – all of the royals of that time period in Europe were all interrelated. It's one extended cousinage. It's so weird.

Right. Which is how you end up with all these, right? You're trying to, if you're the aristocracy and money is inherited and title is inherited, you want, if you want to keep your resources within your family and keep your legacy going, you got to have all these strategic marriages with other people of your station.

Well, if your cousins are the only other people with your social rank, then who else are you going to go to? Right? So, and you end up with this inbreeding that leads to the fall of the Spanish monarchy essentially because the guy who assumes the throne at this time period is cognitively very disabled.

Like he's ordered his parents taken out of their tombs and is having tea with them. I mean, yeah. Things got really bad. Wait, they can't say no to him, I guess. Right. He's the king. So it caused all kinds of trouble for sure. Wasn't there a thing they had like a lock jaw or something that formed in some of these?

Can we pull that up, Alessi? Like the inbred jaw of royals? That's not what it's called, but just search that. Where some of them develop this like underbite or something. Recessive chins or something. Recessive genes or something. Yeah, that seems a bit familiar. Yeah. There it is.

Yeah, the Habsburg jaw, right on it, was a biological result from generations of inbreeding. In a bid to keep their power, the Habsburgs kept everything within the family. They relied on consanguine marriages and partnered close relatives such as first cousins or uncles with their nieces. Nice.

One of the many reasons that hereditary monarchy has some weakness as a form of government. So, and in this case, it did as well because a lot of people didn't like the idea that George of Hanover was going to become king. They felt that, you know, some people are divine right enthusiasts were like, no, you can't just pass a law. God wants the next person in this family to, you know, James should be the king, not George. And other people, the Catholics were like, this is an outrage to Catholics. Hey, why are you cutting us out? You know, we were the church before Henry VIII came along, but also Scots, including Scots lords, because at this time period, you know, the Stuarts, James

Stuart was the one who would have gotten the throne if he wasn't cut out because he was Catholic. The Stuarts had simultaneously inherited the thrones of England and Scotland, and that had led to a union. Since the same person had inherited both thrones, they said, why don't we become a united kingdom? Ooh. There it is.

United kingdom of England and Scotland and Wales. That had just happened in 1707 is when the United Kingdom was created by the Treaty of Union. That's right. That's – Just before this. Yeah. Seven, eight years before this, right? And the Stuart – it was okay with the Scots to lose their own throne and have it merged because the Stuarts, also spelled S-T-E-W-A-R-T, were the royal family of Scotland

who'd inherited the whole thing. Say, great. The George of Hanover was not a Stuart. You were deposing the Scottish royal line to head the new joint country. And so a lot of Scots Laird were furious in sort of nationalism kind of ways and they weren't going to let joint country. And so a lot of Scots Laird were furious in sort of nationalism kind of ways, and they weren't going to let this stand. And there was a plot afoot, a conspiracy, a global empire-wide conspiracy to overthrow George and put the rightful James Stewart on the throne. It was called the Jacobite plot and the Jacobite uprising,

Jacobite being from the Latin for James. They're going to bring him back from exile with his mother, Queen Mary of Medina in France, and bring him back and put him on the throne. And there was a conspiracy for 1715. There was going to be an uprising on both sides of the Atlantic. Armies would be raised and they would do this. And the uprising kicked off. And in England, there were battles and the 15, it's called. And the uprising was –. And in England, there were battles and, you know, the 15, it's called. And the uprising was –

There were actual battles. Oh, yeah. The armies clashing the whole nine yards. Wow. And there was another one later in 1745. But for our purposes, the 1715 uprising was a – they were going to back this event, the Jacobites, by having a Jacobite navy jump into action and seize and control Jamaica and the colonies for the stewards. And Henry Jennings and many of his other people appear to have been involved in this conspiracy. So they weren't becoming pirates.

They were trying to put a different family on the throne of England. The governor of Jamaica at the time was a guy named Hamilton, Archibald Hamilton, who was the brother of one of the leading generals of the Jacobite armies in 1715, and himself was furious about the Stuarts having been deposed from the throne. And he's the one who gave privateering commissions to Henry Jennings and his other pirates just ahead of this uprising to be sort of a white navy to fight against the Hanoverians. It's like setting up a shadow government all over the world in a way. But the uprising failed. And the moment it failed, suddenly the Royal Navy comes and arrests Governor Hamilton and sends him back in chains. And Henry Jennings and his fellow privateers were suddenly declared to be pirates. And Jennings and his men have to retreat.

Now that they're wanted, they retreat and end up in Nassau as well, where they encounter Hornigold and his sort of disgruntled proles suddenly are with Jennings and his sort of ruthless band of political refugees who are in the mix. And they form two nodes of power in Nassau that don't see eye to eye. Whoa. Okay. So that was actually way more than I realized with that. So when was – I think they – like I always look at some of these docudramas as they may dramatize some things. I'm sure from a historian's lens you're looking at that too.

But Hornigold and Jennings obviously didn't like each other. But when did they actually start fucking with each other as far as – not in a good way. Like they were stealing each other's boats, like taking each other's plunder. When did that really fracture? Pretty early on. So Jennings shows up. He – his first salvo in piracy is there's a treasure fleet that sails every year, a Spanish treasure fleet that sails from Cuba with all of the goodies from the empire.

And this is after the war. All loaded on this – after the war. And all of this stuff that's been held up by the war is all being loaded on a super duper treasure fleet, six, seven ships. And it's not only like all the stuff in the Caribbean. It's all the Inca gold where they're forcing Incas to mine mountains of silver and working them to death. All of that is being transported to Cuba to be brought back to the Iberian Peninsula to Madrid. incredibly exotic, valuable spices and other things in Asia are transhipped each year on a ship, the Alcapoco ship, that would cross the entire Pacific Ocean. It would reach port at

Alcapoco. It would move all this treasure by mule train to Veracruz and then be brought to Cuba. All the treasure would be massed and put on this treasure ships. And the treasure ships had to go through the Straits of Florida between the Bahamas and Florida. But no worry, because these are massive floating castles. There's no way you're going to attack them. In 1715, a massive hurricane came along and threw all the ships and shipwrecked them on what's now called the Treasure Coast of Florida. Wait, by like Vero Beach, right?

Yeah, exactly. They're all crashed there and destroyed. And word gets out all points bullet henry jennings moves in and all sorts of other pirates moving there to try to get this gold that's scattered in shallow water and on the beaches spain moves in quickly and is salvaging the gold and bringing in salvage camps and are gathering the gold together henry jennings lands his troops and attacks the spanish salvage camp and seizes the gold and brings it back to Nassau. So I told this story because – Did he like kill a bunch of those guys?

Yeah, yeah. There's some deaths and he basically – the commander of the Spanish is forced to basically surrender because he's outgunned. But this means Jennings shows up in Nassau for the first time with this huge pile of treasure, which buys him influence among the pirates. And Hornigold's already there and they're immediately clashing and Jennings is kind of pissing on him. And then Hornigold, you know, ends up raiding some of his ships with his Periaguas. And there's just bad blood between these two. And they have, Jennings is much more brutal and Machiavellian in the way he treats you know because he doesn't care about english ships especially if they're ships that are in service of

the hanoverian you know germans right ever exactly he raised he's feels very differently than hornigold who's you know not going to do that so anyway the people who are under them charles vane works under henry jenningsnings kind of a sociopath and blackbeard for all of his cultivation of an image of terror very effective um in practice actually is very reserved in his use of force so it creates two schools of thought of piracy and nassau that are clashing okay well maybe we should actually get right on that then because you just painted two very different pictures there of two pretty wild characters. The Charles Vane guy is interesting because in 1700s parlance, he has like a Peaky Blinders feel to it, right? Definitely.

And he's – Like the brother there. What's his name? Alfred the – I think so. Yeah, he's that guy. Yeah, he's like Like the brother there. What's his name? Alfred? I think so. He's that guy. But younger. He's like totally unhinged.

Born – like as far as being born in a horrible environment, he's born around violence, death of the harsh London streets and just becomes a gangster like as a kid. And then how does he end up as like a – as an actual sailor? I mean we don't know for sure where he came from. He kind of shows up as a pirate in terms of like documentary record he shows up as a pirate and he's um you know twisted and psychotic and torturing people and all the stuff that a lot of the other pirates um scare you into thinking they do but don't actually do charles vane does all of it he's the no what made him that way probably what you're describing in republic of pirates i described you know that we don't know where he came from, but the majority, statistically, the majority of pirates came from Wapping and these other sailors' neighborhoods in London that I described and just the pushing of people off the land and the conditions in those places and what it was like to be a sailor.

Maybe that's where he was from. We don't know for sure. But he was definitely a damaged individual and, yeah, all the rapacious and horrible things that the authorities said pirates were doing, Charles Vane was definitely doing. And he was a diehard. He was not going to back down. How did you do your research on a guy like that,

like to be able to know all this about him? Yeah, well, that's – so the reason that Republic of Pirates got a lot of attention is nobody had really gone back to – That's your book, Republic of Pirates. Yeah, Republic of Pirates. The link is in the description in our Amazon store. Everyone go buy it. It's – yeah, Republic of Pirates being the true and surprising story of the Caribbean pirates and the man who brought them down. But nobody – this book was published first in 2007.

And at that time when I was researching it, nobody had gone back to the archives to look at these pirates and who they really were in about 50 years. And between when the last historians had kind of looked at this and when I was researching it even in 2005, 2006, things that had been on microfilm were now being digitized for the first time. It was still kind of clunky but you could keyword search and get PDFs. Like you could search like every single newspaper published in England in the late 1600s or early 1700s, and there was an individual you were interested in, you could actually start keyword searching names, which you never could have done before, right? You would have had to look through every individual paper trying to find these things. So I was the first person to come along and start digging into those things

with that knowledge. And the problem is that there's very little primary source documentation for these people. It's not like the 19th century where you've got tons of diaries and newspapers and stuff. When you're dealing with the early 1700s, the resources are thin on the ground. It becomes a real treasure hunt to figure out what was going on. So what I did was I took each of these pirates, I created a spreadsheet. I located, starting with existing histories, every fact and date as to where they were and what they were doing from the moment they were born until they were died or captured and what the source was on it and whether we trusted the source or not. And what the movements of these – sometimes I would put their movements on a map to figure out where they were. It's like this person disappears for two months. They were last seen doing this.

The wind direction is like this. The wind direction is like this. The rate of the vessels like this. They would have had to pass this place. So then I went to the National Archives

of the United Kingdom, which is this... This is savage. This is good. Oh, it's fun. So the National Archives of the UK is an unbelievable place.

Like, you know, in Lord of the Rings when Gandalf, like, discovers that Frodo has this ring and he's wondering about it. You know, stay here, in Lord of the Rings when Gandalf like discovers that Frodo has this ring and he's wondering about it. You know, stay here,

keep it secret, keep it safe. And he runs off to Gondor and he goes and finds the super library and is digging in the library to figure out what this ring is.

This place is like that. It's like every single document. It's in London? Yeah, Q outside London and it's a single repository where all the Admiralty records, all the public records of England, the treasury records were all brought here to this one purpose built building.

Well, the ones they let be brought there. Oh, no. Everything. This is like their super duper. You don't think they got some secrets underneath that castle? Oh, I'm sure of that. Yeah. Everything that's publicly disclosable.

Right. But they've got the Magna Carta. Yeah, there's some good stuff in there, I'm sure. What that means is like all of our history, like New England's history and not so much New York City because that was Dutch. But New England's history, Jamaica's history, the Bahamas, the Carolinas, all of these English colonies, the copies of the records in the colonial places are often lost because the buildings were temporary and made badly and hurricanes come along. And the copies that were sent back to the imperial center often survive. So our history in general is there. That's crazy. And the entire like Bahamas, the colonial records of the Bahamas in every meeting,

they're all handwritten on paper. And here are the records that the scribe took at the meeting of the council of government of the Bahamas on this day. And you can go pull the customs logs, literally the logs written by hand by the customs official, every vessel leaving this port and that port, including the vessels the pirates are going to raid and the admiralty, right? The Navy. So the Navy's – basically all the intel assets the empire had to keep track of the pirates were the naval captains posted with their ships to guard the empire who are collecting information on the pirates and sending in letters, information. And you have the logbooks. You know where they – each Royal Navy vessel was. And you have the original letters and everything. All the original letters.

And nobody had really – people dug into some of the colonial – the government records nobody had really dug into the admiralty records yeah that's the building amazing place i've been back a couple of times including last year whenever i go through london it's like ah i want to find out whether i can find this document or that document so you can just go in yeah you need to pre-register but yeah you can go in you need to get a reader's card but anyone can get one and you got to follow their rules you. But yeah, you can go in. You need to get a reader's card. But anyone can get one. And you got to follow their rules. You can only bring in a pencil or whatever. But you can bring in digital cameras.

I just shot thousands of images. I was going to say. Oh, yeah. I've got laptops full of images. But yeah, no, this is all publicly available. Unlike going to the Library of Congress, because England's really old, they've got the Magna Carta. They've got all these medieval records they're worried about. When you ask them, hey, can you give me these records of a captain in 1715?

You just get the originals handed to you. I bet. Like do I need to wear gloves or anything? No, no. We got loads out back, right? So new. Right, exactly. So you have this sort of unmediated access to the originals in a way that a,

um, a newer country like ours would consider these things too precious. They'd be behind glass. So for a historian, it's unbelievable. That let me go in like, okay, did the,

who, where was the station vessel, um, in this Island where I think Blackbeard passed, it would solve a mystery as to where he is going. Who was the station? Was there a station? Yes,

there was. Who was the captain? The captain's name was Yes, there was. Who was the captain? The captain's name was this. Go pull the captain's letters for that captain, which are listed alphabetically by captain, not by ship. Go into those records and find the dates and see, was there a vessel described that he ran across that matches the description of Blackbeard's vessel? I may not say it was Blackbeard, but I know it's Blackbeard. So it was triangulating all kinds of data and information to – you know how like the old astronomers like would – they would be able to figure out that there was another planet beyond Jupiter because of the effect – the secondary you're looking for might have been in. And that could lead sometimes to an entire account of a given pirate and what they were doing

that you now know is that pirate that nobody knew it was before. Even if they ran into it, they wouldn't have known it was Blackbeard unless they'd already been tracing Blackbeard's route and knew where he was. So do that times a thousand with all the different data points building into spreadsheets and rearranging things and allowing you to take an account where you didn't know where it took place or when it took place. And sometimes the secondary information, be able to place it or know, oh, that can't be Blackbeard because we know Blackbeard was here. That's a misidentified part. Who could it be? Right.

Even if they're calling it Blackbeard, you know it's not. Sometimes there's wrong information you can figure out is wrong. So anyway. How long again did you spend in there when you were doing that? Well, I had to be super efficient, right? Because, you know, it's really expensive to go to London. So before I got there, I basically talked to everybody who'd ever been there looking at pirate stuff and found, you know, like what do we know and what do we not know and what to look at. And I had my sort of shopping list,

my punch list of everything I needed to go hunt and kill. And I just went in there and just hunt and killed with a digital camera. Like I didn't read everything. Sometimes I'd be skimming through, but I took thousands of images of all the stuff. So I was only there, you know, four days probably of just there from the moment it opened

to the moment it closed. But then I came home with stuff that took months. So a lot of your discovery is when you come back home. Right. Or much later when I had, because you have to go through the handwritten, sometimes the handwriting is terrible, and slowly transcribe it. Sometimes I would take snippets of things and, you know, put them up on, you know, social media. Hey, does anyone know what this says? And somebody would chime in who deals with documents in that period. Oh, that's this abbreviation for – to slowly decode these things and build – painstakingly rebuild the pirate stories. dude what was the name of the town again alessi not not the one here his town in in uk you're right about that but he's this british guy who was a mayor of a port town on the west of the uk and he found he found out like 20 years ago whatever it was that a lead that there had been

these trips allegedly but then were confirmed that people from his town took to the United States before Jamestown. And they set up this quote-unquote lost colony of Roanoke. Oh, right. And so the story goes that a few others documented – he went and found this – went back to return to the town in the UK. And then when they went back to the US to pick up their old buddies, they don't know they vanished. They don't know where they went. They don't know if they went and voluntarily made it with the Indians there,

or if they were killed by the Indians, whatever, because they were friends with a lot of the, the Indians. There was some cryptic word that they left on the wall, right? Yes. But he did,

and he probably did spend time in the National Archives in the UK. But it turned the last 20 years of his life into this odyssey where he's researching all this stuff. And he had a lot of the original documents, not sitting here, but like the pictures of them, like what you're talking about. He goes back and he finds nothing. There's no sign of them. Very, very interesting he talks about the houses all being taken down this is his words he says we found the houses taken down and the place very strongly enclosed with a high palisade of great trees with corteens and

flankers very fort-like and one of the chief trees or posts on the right side of the entrance had the bark taken off and five foot from the ground in fair capital letters was graven croatoan without any cross or sign of distress and this is late 1500 so he's probably dealing with like um at a certain point when you get uh into the late 1600s and and earlier sometimes like when i was chasing henry avery i'd be going a little bit earlier and suddenly the documents are on vellum yes which is dried pig like skin yeah and so and it's they start being written in latin like they you get back far enough and the language of state became latin instead of english so it's like poof i i don't read latin even the english that he was showing me it's like chinese and they forgot to press down on the page hard enough because it's not even written heavy enough to read right you know faded

away it just blew me away i'm like oh my god you guys so i can imagine like at least you're 100 years after that but still thankfully they're writing on paper but yeah oh yeah very time some some of their handwriting is beautiful and some of it is individuals like certain captains have terrible handwriting and that would be incredibly laborious trying to reconstruct what they're saying. It's pretty crazy though holding something that some guy on like a boat in the middle of the Atlantic road in 1705. Well, we may talk about this but one of my characters is this guy Woods Rogers who's the guy who brings down the Pirate Republic. And Woods Rogers was – his great claim to fame is during this war of Spanish secession, he was a privateer. But he wasn't one of those guys who said, oh, let's set up a, and used them to circumnavigate the planet at a time when almost— Circumnavigate the planet?

Yep. Go around the entire world at a time when very few people had even done it in order to raid Spanish shipping in what was called the Spanish Lake, meaning the Pacific Ocean. And specifically to try to capture one of these Acapulco galleons that I described to you that sailed from the Philippines with all the treasures. Which is literally what the pirates were doing. Yeah, but he had permission from his sovereign to do this, right? He's raiding enemy shipping in time of war, in this case, the Spanish. But he's going after, he spent two years to go around the planet to try and succeed in capturing the Spanish Pacific galleon. And he brings it backwards around

the world, eventually getting back to England with this vessel, which is just staggering. Anyway, I pulled his letters from his circumnavigation of the plan. He wrote a bestselling book about it. It was, you know, everyone was reading in 1712, 1713 about circling the world. And he's celebrated. At that time, yeah. He's been forgotten since, but he's pretty celebrated. He's going to use his political capital to execute his pirate plan. This is like that George Carlin joke.

It's a giant club and you ain't in it. You're looking at the other pirates and they're like, wait, that's us. They're like, no, no. he had he had the connection so it wasn't illegal right so yeah no he's celebrated and um and a hero when he returns because he he docks the spanish treasure galleon in the thames right so he's the greatest hero the river thames in london right in the middle of London. Yeah, brings it home. I always say Thames because I'm an idiot American. Sorry. You're from New London, Connecticut if you say that.

Yeah. So brings the ship back and it's like the greatest English hero of the War of Spanish Secession. I asked the Spanish – I went to the National Archives in queue and I said, hey, can I see his letters? And they said, oh, you have to go to a special room for that and i you know eventually i get notice on my on my computer that that's ready and i go to the special room and i you know they made me put on some gloves but there it is a box and i open up the box and there are all of woods rogers letters still tied in the original you know like like strings and i open them up and it's his letters from his circumnavigation that he sent home still you know sometimes the ink you can see where the spray from the from the sea had

struck the ink and stuff you're actually looking through the originals of this guy and it's like yeah here we go that's just gotta be I that's gotta I would I would nerd out over that so much I'd be like oh my god it's awesome No, and I've been back a couple of times to trace down more threads because it's just such a treasure trove there. Well, we left off with Hornigold and Jennings getting off on this tangents. We're going to come back to Woods for sure

because that's a big part of your story. I know you cover that a lot in your book as well. There's four main people you cover in your book. You cover Blackbeard. You cover Vane. You cover – Sam Bellamy. Sam Bellamy. And then you cover Woods.

Woods Rogers, yeah. Right. So three of them are pirates. One of them is – The man who brings them down. Apparently not a pirate but – The legal pirate who then brings back the pirates. Right. Where does the Rubicon get crossed to where Hornigold kind of becomes the old guard and his protege, Blackbeard, becomes the guy?

And what was that relationship like? Yeah, there's never a falling out at Hornigold's reticence to attack English vessels creates – remember, they elect their captains and can depose them at any time. So at some point, there's a calving of the crews, right? mutiny to take over. You start with a sloop you stole from the harbor and you go out and if you capture another vessel, you take their stuff and you try to recruit anybody on the vessel who's like, yeah, it sucks being a merchant. I'd rather hang out with you guys. It looks like a lot more fun. That's how they recruited their crews were from the volunteers from the merchant vessels they attacked. But if the vessel that they'd attacked was somehow bigger, better, faster, maybe better pirate vessel, they would keep that vessel and swap it. Give the captain and the crew who don't want to join you the inferior vessel and keep

trading up. And sometimes you'd keep an extra vessel. Like, hey, this is great. We'll have two vessels and we'll calve our crews and start having a little pirate fleet. Well, when the first calving came of Hornigold's crews, a lot of people joined Blackbeard and they were sailing in consort. Hornigold is kind of in charge, but Blackbeard had his own vessel and his own loyalists.

And then a point comes when Blackbeard has started building up enough of reputation where he kind of steps out and becomes fully fledged independently operating captain. And all this requires that, you know, the acquiescence of the company, of the crew. And so if enough people feel, you know, your charisma, your reputation is such that we want you as a leader, then when the time comes, a lot of people will go join with it. And then Blackbeard builds up his reputation and kind of starts operating independently from Hornigold. How big would his crew have been at the time where he starts operating independently? Oh, I think we actually know the precise numbers, but I'm going to recall

that it's sort of, you know, 30 to 50 on each vessel when they first metastasize. And then he quickly builds up to a great sloop, as they say. You go from a small sloop as a, you know, typically a single masted sailing vessel. You get these great sloops that they say. You go from a small sloop as a, you know, typically a single masted sailing vessel. You get these great sloops that are like sloops of war that would get to be pretty formidable, but also fast. He quickly ends up with one of those. And typically when you hear about somebody with a sloop of war, they have, you know, 80 to 100 pirates aboard. And, you know, like warships, they have a lot of crew, much more than a merchant vessel would have because you man the guns. But also many battles would result in boarding actions where the vessels come together.

And so you need a lot of people to storm and win the hand-to-hand combat to seize another vessel. So how many pirates total, regardless of crew, might be living on NASA during this period? Probably 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 at its peak. All right. That's more than I thought you were going to say. So there's a lot of different groups. There are a lot of different groups. And, you know, it's like you ever watch that series Deadwood about the town?

Well, that series showed a society out west living illegally. It's like a town that was built in the Black Hills of the Dakotas beyond the legal line of settlement and what should have been indigenous people's territory from the federal government's point of view. But there's all this gold there establishment is one power base and there's another guy who has a whole bunch of miners. There's like multiple power bases but from it comes order somehow. Like there's no formal government but sort of order from chaos because it's needed. That's kind of what Nassau seems to have been like too. There's several power bases shifting around. Things get done. The fort gets maintained because everybody needs the fort to be maintained to keep warships from coming and pushing them out. A network – what are you going do you fence your goods? You're a pirate. You can't just go into a port and fence it because you look obviously like a pirate. They worked out an entire supply chain. They got these sort of corruptible merchants in Harbor Island in the Bahamas, 50 miles to their north, to Carolinas or to Boston or wherever and sell those goods and then bring back what the pirates needed. How are the pirates getting gunpowder and things they couldn't get on ship supplies and stuff? They were buying them and ordering them basically from the Harbor Island merchants. So they had a whole supply chain to sustain them in this little pirate republic.

That all requires quite a bit of organization and order. So, but there's no like government, there's no one group in charge, but the factions need this to happen. So that's the impression you get from the, from the pirate base and Hornigold and Jennings are two nodes of that, um, of that contested sort of power bases. Remember sometimes one of them will be off pirating and he won't even be present and the other one will be around, but you know, so there's, you know, shifting energy and it's all based on charisma and reputation what what kind of precautions could or did these fleets take against pirates as this became a problem i mean it sounds like a lot of times it'd be one ship at a time traveling, but would they then try to travel in threes or something like that? When did that start to become a strategy on the high seas, if you will?

Yeah. I mean, the big government-sponsored treasure fleets and such would travel in convoy with warships. But in general, there just weren't the warships available to provide convoying duties for merchant shipping. If you start digging through the Admiralty records, even the handful of frigates that were assigned to defend England's possessions in the New World, they're in terrible disrepair. I mean one of the – the Virginia station know, you read the captain's letters and it's like, and you look at the log books, the ship can't leave for months.

It can't leave port because it would sink if it did. You know, the hull is rotted. They need new equipment. They can't get the things to repair the ship. There's no money to do it. The admiralty's restricted the budget so much after the war that they're pleading. They actually have to take crewmen from another ship because so many crewmen get sick just to sail home at the end when they're finally allowed to come back to England to

try to have the ship overhauled. So the state of the naval vessels is so bad, they're not even very good as guard ships, better yet having spare capacity to convoy ships around. So the merchant ships are kind of on their own. Smaller vessels, well, tough luck. Larger ones had to be able to defend themselves. But as a practical matter, usually, you know, the vessels are going point to point, and it's often impossible from the convoy with other merchant ships. So the largest ones try to be sort of armed mini frigates by themselves, especially the slavers, right? The slave ships are, they're coming across the Atlantic, they sell the people that they've

enslaved, and they have all of these valuables on board at that point and they need to defend themselves so often they had lots and lots of you know cannon and stuff if the um if you encountered one as blackbeard did before it's sold its cargo all the cannon a lot of the cannon would often be in storage in the uh in the ballast so there were all of opportunities. So in essence, the merchant ships were on their own and there wasn't much they could do about it. What was the name of the boats you said could cut through the reefs again, the smaller ones? Well, the Periaguas were the giant sailing canoes

that were really good at that. And if you had, to a lesser extent, if you had a small sloop or something, you might be able to duck and sail over a reef that a frigate that's pursuing you can't. But the Periaguas were the ones that, you know, they might draw one foot of water and you could really go places where you couldn't be pursued by anybody who wasn't in a canoe. Okay. So when pirates might be approaching in those type of vehicles, it's just the ambulance is the one thing that gets through here sometimes. Sorry. But when pirates might be approaching, you know, I would imagine at some point here as we get into the golden age and this becomes a thing, that there is a job, so to speak, on each ship of like pirate lookout.

Is that fair to say? Yeah. Oh, definitely. on each ship of like pirate lookout is that fair to say yeah oh definitely if they're on the prowl they'd have lookouts trying to spot the sails of potential prey right so when they when they see it coming if they if they're on a slave ship that has the cannons they're getting the cannons out they're trying to shoot them but like how how easy i always try to picture this because i'm trying not to just go to what the movies show but But like what does a takeover look like? How quick is it?

How easy is it? How often do the pirates get beat back and sent away? Right. Almost never. So the smart pirates, Blackbeard being the most famous example, tried to cultivate this image and reputation of terror. Like Blackbeard actually tied lit fuses in his beard so that there would be smoke and fire spitting out of them so he looked like some kind of devilish figure. They would have bandoliers of their grenades and their pistols

and they would often seize from wealthy passengers the passengers' clothing. So imagine sort of a Mad Max-like group of characters. Oh, yeah. They're wearing, you know, aristocratic women's wigs and, you know, ribbons and rich people's clothing, but all mix and match like war trophies. I mean, at a time when the clothes you wore were almost like your ID and showing what station you belonged to, this was totally shaking up the social order just visually. It was kind of scary and revolutionary.

And so they'd all be gathered together with all their weapons. And remember the pirate vessels had, you know, a pirate sloop might have 70, 80 pirates, 100 pirates on it. And the merchant vessel they're pursuing might have 10, 12 crewmen. And they're all these scary guys with all these weapons who are trying to look as fearsome and horrifying as possible. You're a crewman on this vessel. You're being pursued.

The pirates are, you know, closing in on you. Come right in, sir. Right. Exactly. You got it. And that's exactly the pirate strategy, right? So if the pirates can seize a vessel without a fight, it's a win. A, you didn't have to fight and you wouldn't have any chance of a stray cannonball knocking out one of the

masts you can't repair without a shipyard. You're not going to damage any of the cargo in the ship you're trying to capture, which is the whole point you're doing it. And maybe most importantly, you're not going to kill or injure any of the crewmen of the opposing ship because that's where your pirate potential recruits are. Once they capture the vessel, typically a number of people would volunteer. Yeah, they'd be like, hey, can we come with you? Right? But we've been screwed over. The food's terrible.

We haven't been paid in months. And we're watching you break open the Majira wine. Hey, can we come with you? And that's what would happen all the time. So the pirates don't want to fight for all those reasons. They get the crew, they get the cargo, they get the vessel undamaged in case they want the vessel, and there's no risk.

So they try to be as scary as possible. And why not? If you're the crewman of a merchant vessel, right? You're being screwed over for your wages. Your captain's probably a jerk? You're being screwed over for your wages. Your captain's probably a jerk. You're eating terrible food and it's not your cargo and it's not your ship. Are you going to get killed to defend the property owned by some shareholding company in Bristol? No.

You don't even know who the owners are? No. Right. So typically there would be no fight at all. Even some of the battles involving some of these armed slave ships, the slave ships end up surrendering without really a fight because they're totally outmanned usually by the pirates. Now, how did the pirates feel about slaves? Were they like, oh, you're joining us? Or were they like, oh, this is more cargo we can now make money on? Yeah, that's the fascinating bit. So there's a mixed and fascinating story with the pirates and people of African descent, right? This is early 1700s.

Some places are consolidating a formal race-based slave system like in the Carolinas. And other places, the link between, oh, you're this race, therefore you're enslaved or less human, that hasn't quite happened. Like the Bahamas is one of those places. The last really important colonial official in the Bahamas before the government collapsed during the War of Spanish Secession, his wife was African. And nobody comments about it. You just read the letters and it's like no one mentions a thing. The kids like marry into the Fairfaxes in Virginia. Yeah. Like it doesn't really matter then that cognitive dissonance is so interesting yeah and so so that whole thing is in transition some places it's consolidated other places it hasn't

north carolina it hadn't yet so what i'm saying is this is like this uh just like um back in england um a more despotic system was consolidating. The space for people of African descent already all over the place was starting to consolidate and move in. And Jamaica was a total slave state. Barbados was the ultimate English scary slave plantation society on which the Carolinas were colonized from and was modeled from. How do you – Wait, they were modeled from Barb was modeled from. You know, how do you – Wait, they were modeled from Barbados? I didn't know that.

Oh, yeah. The Carolinas and deep southern legacy culture comes from the English settlers of Barbados. So Barbados was this tiny island and the sugar – there was this sort of, you know, in the 1600s, the survival of the fittest battle between all the people ended up there. And the ones who won consolidated incredibly profitable slave-driven sugar plantations. And the profits from the sugar were absolutely staggering. And they measured out like slave gangs and chains and you make the profit in sugar against human lives, like the most Machiavellian immoral calculus. And they became staggeringly rich.

So rich that even though these people were born of poor station originally, their grandparents came to Barbados as indentured servants, but now they were staggeringly rich. Nouveau-Riche could go back and buy country estates back in England. Back in England, the legacy aristocracy is appalled at them. The Barbadians are here. They're like the uncouth people with all the money and staggering amounts of it. What they didn't have is land.

They were running out of land on this tiny island for more sugar plantations. So when the Carolinas colony opens up in the subtropical lowlands of the mainland of the Americas, the Barbadians come and colonize it. They're the ones who come in and found Charleston and bring a fully modeled West Indies style slave society to the subtropical lowlands in the Carolinas, which is right. Virginia evolved, would borrow that model are in the late 1600s and early 1700s, but that it's England. It started,

Virginia had started as like, uh, uh, replicating the, the gentry society of the English countryside, the Lord Grantham's right. The second, third, fourth sons of the English, you know, feudal families, the ones who work and inherit the estate at home. Normally they'd be like, oh, you've got to go into the priesthood or you've got to join the military. Tough luck. The new world being there meant suddenly they could imagine going to Virginia and creating a new manner for themselves.

And that's what they did. And so they were trying to recreate the big colonial – the big sort of manorial states of the English countryside, which is why you fast forward and you end up with you know washington and mount vernon and and thomas jefferson and much why are those there they're modeled on english country estates they couldn't find any um people to be the serfs they tried indentured servants didn't really work and so then they see the model being worked by the barbadians in the car Carolinas and they move to the slave system. But you got this tasteful, enlightened, gentry homes and slave manpower. In the Deep South, it's not that at all. It's West Indies, which is why it was called Carolina in the West Indies originally if you read the primary documents. Didn't know any of that.

That's crazy. Yeah. So that's all happening at the primary documents. Didn't know any of that. That's crazy. Yeah. So that's all happening at the same time. What are some – because you're obviously a historian of the whole colonial era. That's what, four of your books are on it or something like that? Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the biggest misconceptions in your opinion about the formation of the

colonies that we have in modern history um i think americans are really um amnesiatic and ahistorical people we don't know our history we're not particularly interested part of the ethos of the country is that the mythology is that we all came here and uh we're forward looking in the past doesn't matter we can came here and we're forward-looking and the past doesn't matter. We can reinvent ourselves and all that feudal – there's nothing good to be had of the feudal baggage of the old world. It's all about moving forward here, except there is a history and there is a past, and we don't look at it.

And so people think the received story is sort of like, oh, a bunch of people came here seeking freedom and fast forward to the American Revolution and on to creation of a free society. Except that's not what happened at all, right? There were these rival colonial projects that were set up at different times by very distinct groups of people. And some of them belonged to different empires. This area around New York City where we are today, I mean the reason you have Long Island and Brooklyn and Hoboken, all these are Dutch names because this was a Dutch colony.

This was New Amsterdam and New Netherland. The Puritans in New England were very different people from those lesser sons of English gentry that I just described who came to Virginia, who were very different from the Barbadian West Indies folks who came to the deep southern low country who are very different from the largely Scots-Irish borderlanders from Ulster and the lowlands of Scotland, these war-torn regions like Braveheart, that there be war here, there's no institutions, and there's no police,

you've got to defend your kith and kin yourself. Those people came into the southwestern Pennsylvania and then settled a vast – colonized this vast zone of the upland south and the lower Ohio Valley, like the lower parts of the lower Great Lakes. The upland south? the Shenandoah Valley, West Virginia, Kentucky, the western part of North Carolina, the eastern half of Tennessee, the north of Georgia where it's mountainous in Alabama, on into the Ozarks, on to the Texas Hill Country, the highlands where you can't grow cotton and sugar and the land is not suitable for that kind of large-scale agriculture to begin with is where the Scots-Irish who were herd-based culture were zooming down and also rafting down the Ohio River

into the lower parts of Ohio and Illinois and on into parts of Missouri, right? These are totally different cultures with different religious and ethnographic characteristics founded at different times, different ideologies, ideas about what the good life is or should be. And they didn't expect to be in a continent spanning country together. They had their own distinct identities. And there was this threat to all of them in a change in British

colonial policy in the 1770s. And they all formed an alliance to protect their own power structures and ways of doing things from this homogenizing threat. And they won. And they wound up in the United States together. But they're separate zones. And that explains – without knowing that, how would it make any sense that we ended up in the tensions of the antebellum period and the Civil War and reconstruction? Why are there red states and blue states? Why at a county level does these settlement tracks of these rival settlement streams match at a county level?

Election results today, per capita diabetes results, per capita gun deaths, homicides or suicides, reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. What were the infection rates like? What are the death rates like? I mean, you go on life expectancy that you see these tectonic you see patterns all the way we've run the data we have patterns all the way wow nationhood lab nationhood lab.org we do all of this data driven stuff analyzing these things in an effort to you know only by understanding the situation can we improve upon it which is what we really need to do. But people just don't understand the fracture. So that's what in the colonial period, you know, the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock we're a classical republic, meaning modeled on the slave

states of classical antiquity, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where a small subset of people have the privilege, the liberty to practice democracy and subjugation and slavery, the natural lot of the many, and the republic could only exist in that way. That was their ideology. And you group them in a country together with people who have totally different ideologies around New York City. You've got this Dutch heritage Hanseatic city-state. Hanseatic? Along the Baltic, there were all these independent – in the early modern period, these independent cities like what's now Gdansk or Hamburg or who were like their own little city government, city states based on commerce. And a lot of people thought you could – like a Singapore.

Yeah. A Singapore of its era. Makes sense. And New York City was kind of – it's different than the rest of the country because it has these commercial origins of being this global trading hub modeled on golden age Amsterdam. So that's the big misconception is that we are a fusion of all these things. That's why our institutions of government are so strange. Why do we have all of these checks on different regions and an electoral college and the House and the Senate

and protections for small states and big ones? It's because none of these regions trusted one another and wanted to make sure that they couldn't be bossed around by them. Yeah, and there's something that happens when you look at the frontier era, which is what we're talking about. You have different groups, in this case mostly from Europe, coming over, coming from some subset of different beliefs to put what they're saying are their beliefs onto land that they find, right? And we're going to set it up just like that here.

But the cynic in me also says it still provably comes down to the same thing that it always comes down to throughout human history, which is money. We want to get land because there's resources, because we can set it up, because we can use that to our advantage, because we can make money, and that's why our beliefs are better. Yes, in many circumstances, but not exclusively. How so? Certainly like the New Englanders become involved in commerce and making the buck. But the original drive that leads all kinds of peculiar characteristics in the greater New England settlement space – remember, they weren't coming to make money. Some others were.

The Dutch were here to make money. It was – New Netherland was a company town, part of the Dutch – West Indies company. But the early founders of New England were a group of people who thought that they were in a covenanted relationship with God like the Old Testament Hebrews and that the Calvinist God had sent them to the New England wilderness and they were charged on a mission to make a more holier, perfect society from their point of view on earth in the wilderness, the errand in the wilderness. And they would be punished or rewarded as a group for their performance, right? And so that meant that individual liberty was not as important as the

success of the community in those circumstances. If you messed up and you weren't washing your car on Wednesday like you were supposed to, then we're all going to get punished. So you patrol that. You throw people in the stock who don't wash their car on Wednesdays, right? It's the imperative. The imperative that for theological reasons, everybody reads the Bible. They needed that. So what do they do on the frontier? In the New England space, they immediately create a compulsory taxpayer finance public school at a time when in the other regions, there's no schools at all. There weren't public schools in the south until essentially after reconstruction.

They've been occupied by the Yankees after the Civil War. If your family could afford a tutor or to send you to Eaton in England or to Phillips, Andover, Exeter in New England, then great. But otherwise, you get no education. Sorry, you can't read. That was true of most of the world at that time period. So what I'm saying is that wasn't a profit motive. It didn't help them to make a profit to have these taxpayer financed public schools in 1650. But it created the most literate society probably on the planet in the late 17th century, which had all kinds of knock-on effects later. That meant that you could have people – an audience to read a newspaper and so you might

create a newspaper. It meant that you had a whole bunch of people who you had to read and you could create Harvard College and you could start – it allowed New Englanders to control the national story in the early republic because they were the ones with control of the media. They had all the printing presses, all the books. Even the publishing houses in New York were New Englanders coming down and setting up for the most part. The southern intellectuals who wanted to have their own say like William Gilmore Sims others, in their own letters, they're totally frustrated, right? They're trying to set up journals and write the story of their people in the deep south as a nation or whatever.

No one will read it. There's no market for it. They're having to go to New York to do it, like just the frustrations of it. So those are – they eventually can lead to all kinds of profit motives. But deep down, there are some fundamental cultural things that weren't necessarily about economics alone because that's only part of what people are. The Scots, Irish and the backcountry are a great example, right? So you're coming from a war-torn regions of the sort of British borderlands, the areas like where the lowlands of Scotland, the English marches meet or in Ul Ulster where Queen Elizabeth I sent Scots Protestants to crush the Irish rebels and hold down Northern Ireland for the crown like the first colonial operation. Those people were sort of like a warrior society. They were often recruited by the effete fondue-eating people in the port cities along the seaboard of the Americas to hold the frontier against the indigenous people, right?

Oh, we need some people to be our buffer. And who can we get who's going to be tough? And oh, those people we had hold down against the Irish. We'll have them go hold down against the Cherokee or whoever. And so they would intentionally put these people, encourage them to settle as a sort of like border zone people to be the kind of cannon fodder or buffer. And these were people who'd been doing that for generations and, you know, were there, didn't trust institutions, didn't trust the colonial governments behind them, didn't trust county government. You've got to protect yourself. Nothing good will come of government, right? It's going to be, you know, you've got to maximize your personal

freedom and autonomy and defend it or the powerful will take it from you, whether it's those meddling Yankees or the aristocrats down in Charleston and, you know, Williamsburg. And so that was a separate culture. And again, those are all motives that, I mean, yeah, sure, they cared about making money and their prosperity, but those drives are not economic drives they're like you know certain culture and value sets and sometimes they get tied and rolled into religion and stuff um transcend just the material motives well you know material motives absolutely especially once you start consolidating interest blocks around um profiting on things then it really takes off but yeah it's and i i that's a really good answer you gave right there it's i think sometimes also i'm looking at it from

the perspective of like the top five percent versus the 95 of these groups that come in right so the top five percent that sees power maybe have access to that money or whatever they they can have the luxury in some cases of having less concern about how they get the money, whereas the 95 percent may be the types that are going to rise up and be like, wait a minute, not on our watch. You know, fuck the Yankees, that kind of thing. the deep south Barbadian culture, right? That's an entire society organized around serving the interest of the few people on top, right? The ruling plantation families. It's an oligarchy in society and the laws and taxation. Everything are designed to protect this tiny group of people, not for the interest of the people.

That's right. Even setting aside the slavery, not even the interest of anyone who's not the oligarchy on top of it. Whereas you go to Yankeedom, incredibly intolerant in many ways, but the people who came and settled in that early period in fleet, they were surprisingly educated. They were family units, kind of middle class people moving as groups, setting up their own towns and replicating institutions from the beginning. It's like a sort of bourgeois, right? If you have those two different starting points, right?

Sort of oligarchic feudalism and a covenanted people with a middle class ethos. Those are two very different spots to start from in terms of power balances and how the economy is going to evolve and be formed. One is definitely extractive and the other one has potential to be moving in other directions to make your money. They end up filling – the participation of New Englanders in slavery is through dominating the shipping and becoming the merchants who are moving things around. So there's – they're all implicated in it. But it's I guess a higher – not the extraction model.

They're providing the higher services and logistics and banking and everything else to make it all work. Yeah, and I mean we've talked about on multiple occasions today the slave trade and how that worked and the shipping routes and how it even intersected with piracy. But it is really – I say hindsight bias obviously. We have the luxury of that now to be able to see like this is so horrible. But the fact that economically people would just make that Greco-Roman assumption like, okay, well, these people are less than. So we'll just chain them up and bring them here. That's just something I can never process through my head. You know, the idea of human equality was not there for sure. And, you know, all of these societies had all of these assumptions about, you know, the indigenous people and some of them considered the other, whether it's racial or religious or whatever. It can be gradations, but yeah, very unequal

and hierarchical assumptions. I mean, that's kind of what makes the arguments put forth in the Declaration of Independence and all that are kind of revolutionary because it's this sort of stated commitment, even if they didn't actually do it, to the idea that humans are somehow created equal with morally equal dibs on the right to survive, to not be tyrannized, to pursue your happiness as you understand it and access the government in 1770s whoa yeah well hold on there right you're right i mean we didn't do it but just the fact that that was put out there was um yeah bucking centuries of history and you know europe and elsewhere you know advanced civilizations you know we've humans have been doing this for 5 000 years and it's a whole story of subjugation and i'll talk you know like

individual freedom wasn't part of the conversation until about 400 years ago like i think it's like 3600 years of not that in the conversation oh yeah medieval period it wasn't that individuals had any dib it's like the society is a giant super organism and uh you know the the one hand is the tax man the tax collectors the other hand is the tax collectors, the other hand is the soldiers, and the feet are the peasants, and the head is the aristocracy running the show, and the heart is the, you know, the priestly class, right?

And that we're all part of one organism. You each have your place, and you would never leave your place because it's been ordained that that's where you are. And that's kind of the default assumptions that we've had to move forward. And again, it's an American-centric centric thought i think it's a good one by the way to to believe that like you can work your way towards the american dream or something

because everywhere else in the world even to this day it's like you're born into something no no you stay there yeah your station is fixed that's right this right. You're one day old and you're never going to be more than a coal miner or something like that. Right. In America, technically, that's not how it is. It's not to say those patterns don't still form on a larger percentage basis, but there's the opportunity for someone to go from zero to 100 in this country to this day, which is pretty cool. Right. At least that's part of our ideology is that that might be possible. And a lot of the – you tug on the threads of where did that part come from because obviously the early Puritans weren't

talking about that at Massachusetts Bay and the Virginians might be talking about it only applying to a small subset. But it's funny enough, the Dutch settlement zone around New York City, that's where you start hearing about the self-made people moving up in society. You don't say. Funny enough, right? become the most powerful families, the Schuylers and such here in this zone, you go back to their parents and grandparents when they arrived, they're all like nothing. And it was possible in New Netherland to work yourself from nothing to being the richest, most influential person in the colony in a lifetime at a time when that wasn't possible in a lot of places. It was possible in the Dutch zone because they didn't – they allowed for that. It was all about commerce, making the buck being more efficient and not a lot of those

constraints on what individual is going to be able to do each of those things. It wasn't very democratic. You didn't have self-government and the company told you what to do but it i think a lot of that um sort of material strain that you can um rise up and you know become something else and reinvent yourself and move upwards a lot of those footings come from this dutch settlement zone well we got into this talking about originally the the pirates and their view on slavery and how you said it was kind of a mixed bag, went both ways on certain things. Yeah. So we sort of set the landscape for it. Yes.

But so pirates, a third of pirate crews often were of African descent. That's my next question. Wow, that high? A third? So if you were a black person, you could be welcomed into pirate crews as an equal. And some of them rose to be officers and indeed pirate captains and commodores. Progressive pirates. That was entirely possible to do. And that wasn't true in a lot of places. And word got out that you could become an equal human in the pirate crews among enslaved people in Bermuda and Jamaica and Barbados and the other colonies. And we know that because when you go to the National Archives in Kew and you look at the

letters from the governor of Barbados, the governor of Bermuda, once the pirate outbreak, that's exactly what they're saying. The slaves have heard that the pirates allow people to join. They're waiting. There's rumor that my slaves and my colonial possession are going to rise up if the pirates come, that they're planning to make this a second Nassau. They were terrified of the existing order and incredibly destabilizing. And people run away. There were runaway slave societies like in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Jamaica, there were all sorts of people who'd escaped from the plantations who had an alternate society way up on the mountains that were, you know, for generations trying to live, you know, out there where they couldn't be captured. A lot of people were starting to come, maroons they were called, and were coming to Nassau and adding themselves to the pirate crews. So that's the

plus side of the ledger. The downside is also the pirates seem to there's all these instances where they capture a slave ship and they take all the enslaved people they find and sell them as cargo as things right or give them back to the slaveholder as if they were bales of hay so sometimes a crew that could include did this african pirates right so what's going on with that i mean we don't know for sure but one hypothesis that matches all the evidence we have goes like this that um whether or not you the pirates regarded somebody as a full-fledged human or his property was cultural perhaps rather than just racial what do you mean if somebody somebody was what they call the Creole,

somebody was of African descent but born and raised in the Americas, in the Caribbean, in the West Indies, knew the technologies here, spoke the language, they're one of us and can be human. And if they're literally somebody we just found in the hold

who's speaking some bizarre language we've never heard of from Central Africa, we other them and treat them as cargo right that it's cultural these these people are alien others and you know people black or not who are you know fellow sailors and you know no port royal and know how to operate this vessel are they're on the Right. And that seems to match. When you look at all the evidence and all the contradictions and you say, well, could this be true? It seems to match pretty well.

I mean, individuals are going to shift all over the place, but I think that was what's going on is people who are in the Americas were eligible, but there was a other ring of the people who were just arriving. Yeah. Who came from the same place originally the people who were just arriving. Yeah. Who came from the same place originally. Originally.

Right. Yeah. That's, that's crazy. But, you know, like as we know, you know, race is socially constructed and all that. So it's like, you know, the, they're foreigners as opposed to that, that, that sorting of status and peoplehood and race, again, was still in flux. In some places, it was locked down like Barbados. In other places, it hadn't happened yet.

And the pirates are operating in that sphere. All right. So mixed bag on the race issue there. Exactly. They're not there yet. Yeah. But, I mean, in some ways, they're progressive compared to the time period. Relative to what was happening around them, the possibility, the zone of freedom and the possibility of being free and equal was probably greater on the pirate vessels in a Nassau than almost anywhere else in the Caribbean basin of the Americas at the time. On the gender issue though.

Yeah. yeah is my understanding is that at the time there was no such thing as like a woman's sailor on any of these but for the pirates there were woman pirates yeah well that's the received understanding that we all have is that um women were considered bad luck on ships and that if you had a what yeah if you had a woman in the ship the ship will sink and you know that's this you can't have women crew members and yeah yeah there's a whole like nautical lore about that god um and that uh you couldn't have women crew members you know for both gender assumptions but also because of curse and folklore and stuff except that like when you go to the national archives in queue and you start reading some of the letters you know some people like people who were attacked by the pirates and stuff like the, you know, when Calico Jack Rackham goes out.

Calico Jack. Calico Jack goes out pirating. Now you know where it comes from. He, you know, one of the first vessels he captures, the testimony given at trial is from the master of the vessel, who's a woman. The master of the vessel was a woman. Yeah, it's like a, you know, a little coastal trading vessel with like two or three people on it or something like that. yeah it's like a you know a little coastal trading vessel with like two or three people on it or something like that but they gave her a small one she's in charge but she's in charge of it and she's sailing around and but this is again said

without any comment like it's not considered strange it's just um matter of fact that the master of this vessel was a woman who was so a little forgotten history there yeah so i think the situation was probably more porous than we imagine. And certainly the pirates did include some, a few women, most famously Mary Read and Anne Bonny, whose story was popularized in that 1724 book I mentioned, The General History of the Pirates. But they were people who really existed because they got brought to trial and there were indictments against them. They were in history. They were from the accounts that we have from the actual records. They dressed as men and swore.

Oh, they dressed as men. They dressed as – maybe that's not unusual and that would you try to be a sailor wearing a dress or whatever you're supposed to be wearing. Yeah, that makes sense. Dressed as men andursed and talked like the men and fought and had the weapons with them and they were just as scary and you know fierce as the as the male pirates and that's what we know from the from the accounts of their victims that made it to trial was mary the irish one or was that in uh i don't think we really know where either of them were from and that's a whole fraught thing. There's people who say that they have proof that – one of them – so they pled their bellies as they say at trial.

In other words, they were pregnant when they got brought to trial and they were found guilty of piracy but they couldn't be executed while pregnant. That was against the law. You couldn't execute a pregnant person. That's not true at all. executed while pregnant that was against you'd be against the law you couldn't execute a pregnant person you had to wait till they weren't pregnant anymore and then execute them but there's so uh one of them there's no account of them actually ever being they were imprisoned in jamaica there's no account of them actually ever no record of them dying or being executed or anything else this kind of poof from the records, which has led to all kinds of speculation and theories and people pulling up evidence to say, oh, she's really this person who ended up back in Charleston. This was her dad.

And no, that person was. And so there's a bit of a mystery as to whether Anne Bonny survived. Mary Read, we know where she was, died on this date and was interred in the cemetery in prison. I think died in prison of illness, if I remember right. But Anne Bonny is kind of a mystery.

And then there's the Anne Bonny child. Do they have a bloodline to this day? Depends on who you ask. So, well, there's, I'm going to be speaking off the top of my head, not having thought about this in a few years. And we're going to judge you on every word. Right. So somebody has claims, this is a little murky but the general story is somebody has claimed

that they have all the records proving that they or somebody they know is descended from ann bonnie and here's the chain it involves this person and that person but no you can't see the records yourself um they're over here no they're over there where did you find i found them here no i found there there's um uh alleged records that are quoted from but nobody has been allowed to review the actual things to see for themselves and judge their provenance and the as i recall shifting stories as to where they came from and when so it's a bit of a mystery but um seems a little sus how did the two of them gain respect and how much power did they end up getting as pirates like did they have their did they get to a point where each of them had their own crews like how did they rise up as a woman yeah from the historical records as opposed to sort of um you know mythic stories laid down in

the general history what we know is that they were, um, uh, and Bonnie came with her husband to the pirate Republic. Her husband, James Bonnie was one of the pirates there. She was there for a number of years as part of this pirate society. She only pops up once or twice in the records, but we know that they were there.

Um, and then, uh, towards the end of the, uh, piracy outbreak, Calico, Jack Rackham decides to steal a vessel in the harbor, the fastest sloop in the harbor. He's going to grab it and go on a pirate rampage. And he takes Anne Bonny and Mary Read with him.

It's essentially the three of them, I think, or maybe there's five pirates. But they're a large chunk or the majority of the crew. And they take off on this little vessel and start raiding vessels around Jamaica – the approaches to Jamaica. And carries on for a little bit and they're – all those accounts of them wearing men's clothing and threatening people and having – being competent in battle and scaring everybody. They don't actually have to fight anybody or kill anybody because the terror campaign works. Everybody surrenders. But they end up getting caught and brought to trial in Jamaica ultimately

and end up in prison. So you work your way backwards from that information and you know that they somehow had combat skills. They somehow knew how to be pirates. They wanted to set out on their own with Calico Jack and go out and do all of this stuff. We don't know why, but they were there and, you know, wanted to trying to picture this because it's still like the Wild West over there. You have a basic governor of the island set up, but it's not like they have a police force working 12-hour shifts or stuff. And as you said, on the seas, it's wide open and it's generally an easy job for them to take something. So it's not like they're the ones getting taken. So is it the kind of thing where like when they're laying their head to bed at night, like there are some soldiers or something that come and get them based on a tip or how did that usually go down?

Yeah. So if you're in Nassau, you're pretty safe because the fort's protecting things so they could sleep easily. So that was their home base and their sanctuary. But anywhere else out there, you're always in danger. And the time you're in most danger is when you need to maintain your vessel, go ashore, get more water and stuff. You know, the underside of wooden sailing vessels back before copper-based bottom

paints, kelp and seaweeds and stuff would start growing all over the bottom and quickly make your vessel slower and slower, which means you could get caught. You can't maneuver. You can't catch other vessels. You had to occasionally bring the vessel at low tide on a beach with the right angle and careen it. You had to tip it over, let the tide go out. So it's exposed and then laboriously clean all the stuff that gunk had been growing on the hull off it and then refloat it again. You have to do that every few months or you're going to get caught and killed anyway. So also if you had any damage from a storm or damage in battle or something wore out, you need to go actually like remove mass or you need to shift cargo.

Or you captured another vessel and you need to transfer all the treasure and hey the vessel has cannon on it we need to move the cannon under our vessel we need to make our vessel able to accommodate 12 guns instead of 10 cannon we need to get the ship's carpenter working what i'm saying is there's all kinds of times when you're out you know for months or weeks you know operating hundreds or a thousand miles from nassau where you need to hide out and do your rest and recuperation and water and maintenance and all that. And in those times, soldiers may get you.

The dangers is that a Royal Navy vessel or somebody happens upon you in your hiding place. And so a lot of the captures are there, they're happened upon while they're trying to recharge their batteries, basically. Most of the big pirate captures were in those circumstances well so i just thought of this i should have asked this like at the outset but when did what was the the historical basis of the term pirate like when did we first start actually using it oh i mean i think that word's been around for hundreds of years i'm not sure i mean that'd be like you know go Oxford English Dictionary and look for the etymology. Meaning before these people.

Yeah, way before these people. No, the pirates, one form or another, it existed for centuries. In the English language, where did the term come from? I'm actually not sure. It's probably – I mean the word is very similar in Spanish. And again, there have been pirates in the medieval period and in the ancient world and all the rest so yeah i'm gonna see unless he's pulling up yeah let's pull up the word pirate originates in the 1300s yeah you're not kidding from the latin word pirata meaning sea robber and was also a latin

synonym for the word peril in greek the word came from pyratis meaning one who attacks pirating is distinguished from the historic concept of privateering which is you already went through all that okay so when they had like you said there were literal piracy laws when these people are being brought on to trial so it was already a term at that point oh yeah but it stretched back way before yeah the golden age pirates aren't bringing but what they bring that's new isn't piracy itself. It's the argument that we're not just mere pirates in the sense that we're criminals. The argument is that we're doing this.

We're Robin Hood's men. We're doing this for ideological reasons as well. We're not simple brigands. We're leading a social revolution against the man who's been ruining our lives. And that sets them apart and causes so much of the public to back them and agree with them. It makes them much more dangerous.

That ethos that you actually have runaway slaves streaming in and the threats of slave rebellion terrorizing the governors of Bermuda and Jamaica and elsewhere, that's all because of this additional ethos that's beyond, hey, we're just common criminals. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean you mentioned that Blackbeard cultivated this aura of being a terrorist, but in reality, he didn't – do you say he didn't kill people at all? Yeah, that's the amazing thing. So yeah, he's incredibly scary. He has these lighted fuses going and smoke bug above his head

and he's got all these weapons and his crew are all wearing their wearing their trophies but you actually go back to the records and remember all the records we have of blackbeard's career as a pirate come from his victims so they're not sympathetic to him at all these are the people who give depositions after blackbeard's captured their ship and and stole their stuff and you maybe let them go whatever, but it's all from the victim's point of view. There is not a one documented instance of him killing or harming anybody prior to his final fatal battle with the Royal Navy in 1718. Zero. As opposed to like Henry Jennings who did kill people. Henry Jennings did, yeah, and Charles Vane would be pretty sadistic.

Yes. But Blackbeard especially, not a one. We probably have documentation with an eyewitness account of 20 probably, at least 25 vessels captured. Whoa. Yeah. And you start comparing that to the world they operated in. I mean this is an era when a kid stealing bread in London, it's a capital offense and they execute them. People are going around collecting orphans and forcing them to be human chimney sweeps, climbing up chimneys until they fall to their deaths or whatever.

I mean it's a brutal time period. And when you actually look at how discreet people like Blackbeard and Bellamy and hornigold the various extents were about the use of violence it becomes even more impressive because it's such a violent time period even in the ordered legal use of violence or so such a brutal time so the reason i bring that up is because then my question is some of these guys not the henry jennings of the world but other ones do you see an argument for them kind of legitimately being robin hood type figures and not just being evil pirates yeah i mean i uh yes i mean they are it's not like they're stealing the stuff and giving it to the poor i mean they're they're considering themselves to

be the representatives the poor so they did no type of redistribution to other people um but they did share equally in many ways yeah among their among their society of pirates they're redistributing for sure um but you know it's not they're uh i mean i don't think they can be a mechanism for it for them to steal the money and like go find paupers in some village ashore because they get captured but but um you know that their incentives um their selfish incentives and their ideology probably overlap. But yeah, absolutely. Especially given the way that they revolutionized and leveled and democratized government in

their own ships is pretty interesting for that time period. And Sam Bellamy literally claims to be Robin Hood's man. He says those words in a famous speech overheard by one of his captives. Well, we actually have to talk about him. We haven't talked about him a ton today. He's come up like intermittently, but this was the guy from Cape Cod. Yeah. Is that right? Widow fame. The widow is his famous ship and wreck that was destroyed in Cape Cod. What was his full backstory yeah so uh he came from the west country of england people have located his his likely birthplace

and parents and name and all that kind of stuff like a lot of these pirates you first like appears in the historical record beyond his his just birth dates uh when he enters piracy um but he came with a whole backstory in cape cod folklore going folklore, going back a couple centuries, there's a story that Sam Bellamy came to Cape Cod from England and that he met a local girl, Maria Hallett, 16, 17, 18, something like that. They fell in love, and then he set off to find his fortune and then was trying to return to her um after getting his pirate fortune when his ship is destroyed off cape cod

um and she goes that sounds a little cleanly tied together yeah well it's nice nice folk story right so um what we do know about sam bellamy we don't know if he was in cape cod but we do know about Sam Bellamy, we don't know if he was in Cape Cod, but we do know that he appears in the historical record right after those – that Spanish treasure fleet in 1715 is destroyed. Yeah, on the treasure coast of Florida. And he is among the people who show up to try to pick and salvage Spanish treasure. How did he get involved in that? Did someone like pay him to do that? He shows up with another guy, Paul's Grave Williams, who I mentioned before,

who's the son of Rhode Island's Attorney General. And actually, Paul's Grave Williams' stepfather is a Scotsman and family involved in the Jacobite uprising. And they're also embedded in a family in Block Island in Rhode Island involved in all kinds of fencing of pirate goods and they're deeply involved in the underworld trade.

Wow. All the way up there fencing. Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. So Captain Kidd with his treasure when he was on the run previously, a privateer forced into piracy, he ends up in Block Island and in Newport to fence his goods as well. There's a well-known – the sort of Cayman Islands in the time period to go have your goods and your bankers and stuff. These guys weren't Italians?

Not at that time period. Damn. Rhode Islanders. So they weren't the first up there because i know today i a couple guys named vinnie and paul up there there's there's also gardener's island was also where kid and uh and uh bellamy and paul scribblings end up which is uh gardener's island yeah you know the forks on the end of long island there's uh two forks of land spit and there's an island right in the middle of it gardener's island g-a-r-d-i-n-e-r-s

g-a-r-d-i-n-e-r-s yeah you can even find it with the right keyword searches your audience can find stuff from the new york times just a few years ago of the lord proprietors of the gardener's island the last of whom i think only recently died so the gardener's island proprietors just yeah the king gave this island to a particular family and that feudal grant was passed down as a noble title until very recently. Oh, this is like prime real estate. The prime real estate in one family has controlled it for like 400 years and – How many people live on it? Oh, I don't think anybody other than the families and their retainers and things, I'm pretty sure.

Oh my God. I know more about this island in 1715 than I do about now, but I know that the 14th proprietor, whoever he is, is like a New York Times article from seven, eight years ago about the battle over the inheritance of the island. This sounds like True Detective season six. So Captain Kidd came here and deposited his treasure. These are like the bankers, right? These are the bankers to the mob were involved back in the previous generations there. And Sam Bellamy and Paul's Grave Williams are all tied up in that. So what I'm saying is there are places people knew they could go on underworld black market banking systems or offshore kind of banking and protection where you could keep your stuff in your Swiss bank account, so to speak. It would be kept for you by various protection where you could keep your stuff in your Swiss bank account, so to speak.

It would be kept for you by various individuals who you could trust. So the pirates would go way up there. They'd go way outside. Oh, they were raiding all the way to Newfoundland. They were regularly – so there's seasonal – it might be based in the Bahamas, but you'd be up raiding ships in the approaches to Boston and New York Harbor and the Caves of Virginia. In the summer and stuff. In the summer.

And then, you know, you don't want to be around the Bahamas in hurricane season. So you time things in that way. And then you'd be off in Spanish Maine and other times a year. And they moved around. Yeah, they had a – their theater of operations extended, yeah, from Venezuela to Newfoundland. But they're so far away from their base, their safe base of Nassau. Now, like you said, there's some little places like Gardner's Island or something where it's like, okay, you're a friend here. But, you know.

You're constantly looking for pirate hideouts. And there were a lot of them, right? So you could go. There were little islands in the Caribbean island chain where people knew that you could hide out. But also the Cape Fear area in North Carolina. There's a lot of lore and stuff where pirates would go into those creeks and stuff and you could hide out where your mask couldn't be seen from the sea and you could do your R&R there. And especially the coast of Maine, a lot of these pirates ended up there.

Sam Bellamy was trying to get to Maine when his ship went down off Cape Cod. We know that because he was traveling in a fleet of ships that he was leading and the other ships that survived the storm all ended up on the Maine coast and Monhegan and Damarsco Island trying to find each other. They've been scattered by the storm. Others had gone up to eastern Maine, headed towards the Canada border. Why would you do that? Well, because like Cape Fear, these were places that eastern half of today's Maine had been contested for centuries between France and England. It was sort of a no man's land. And in this time period, there'd just been this continent spanning war between England and France. And this was a place where there was no government authority. It was no one other than indigenous people kicking around to see what you were doing and hundreds of islands and

and coves and places to hide out and so they would go to places like eastern maine or like cape fear north carolina where they knew that they could hide do their r&r without any authorities being around north carolina had also been um had a devastating uh colonist v indigenous people uh conflict and uh was you know depopulated by European colonial officials. When was this? That war concluded 1710 or 12, if I remember right. It devastated North Carolina, which is part of the reason,

if we get into Blackbeard's story, that Blackbeard would be welcomed in North Carolina when he decides to try to set himself up as a sort of Tony Soprano-like figure. Right before Blackbeard though, you said Bellamy obviously dies in that wreck. Yeah. So Bellamy – so what we know of his story, he and Paul's Grave Williams show up in 1715 salvaging treasure. He ends up in Nassau. He serves in the cruise with Hornigold and ultimately sets out on his own and is able to capture one of these swift frigate-size slave ships. He captures it after it's unloaded at slaves when it's loaded with treasure.

And so he has this incredible treasure in the holds and he captures the ship and goes on a brief reign of terror and is headed northward. He captures a ship in the Caribbean and he and Paul's grave Williams and his fleet are headed north to hide out in Maine and off the Cape Cod, they get hit with a storm, much like the Spanish treasure fleet did. And the ship is destroyed, and Bellamy and most of his crew are killed in that. A few people survived, but not many. And he wasn't that old when he died, right? Oh, he was like 27 or something like that.

Wow. Yeah. He was already running like a fleet. Yeah. So the lore goes that he died trying to get back to Cape Cod to see Maria Hallett, which seems a little pat. But the late Ken Kinker, a historian who studied the Bellamy wreck 18, 19 in this time period, whose family owned and operated the tavern in the area in East Ham,

which is exactly where a sailor would show up and maybe meet somebody. And she died consistent with legend at an older age, unmarried without kids at a time when that was pretty unusual. So that's enough coincidences with the folk story to lead you to not completely dismiss the folk story because some specifics are there you know who knows it's only passed down in oral tradition but you know i think there's something to it probably um at least in general terms well looking at these mats we've been pulling up with some of these places be it like a gardener's island which sounds like some old world backdoor you know boardroom type shit like

you think about all these different places we got cape fear up there right now yeah where there's still some mystery around them and there still is like these underbellies that could exist and again you heard me mention a few minutes ago not to get like too stereotypical but i think like true detective season one did an amazing job showing that making louisiana this like the actual place like a character because they're like these places are off the beaten so did the latest one with jody foster in alaska that was very place driven oh yeah yeah yeah the place is the star of the show i'd say yeah and and that's that's a pretty cool thing but like these are more modern day type things where this is still this way. I had this other guy in here, Tim McBride, who was a pirate, but he's a modern day pirate.

I mean, he was like the biggest mover of pot in the 80s in the United States. And it was out of this little place in Florida. If we scroll down a little, you just go down to Florida called Chokoloskee Island. It's below Naples on the West Coast. It's go, yeah, actually, yep, yep. There you go.

And this little area, when you listen to him describe it, he was in his 20s, the godfather of this whole operation. It's just this off thethe-beaten-path, quiet little town. They pull in pillars worth of weed and put it on all these little boats and scatter around like little roaches and hide it in their little houses and then give it to the Cubans. I'm like, this is today. Not today, but not that long ago.

There's still these things. The pirates walk among us. Yes, exactly. It can still kind of exist in small ways, which seems crazy in a world like we have right now. Yeah. Well, yeah. There's definitely that sort of the underworld of things that aren't legal that people move into.

Absolutely. You know, which eventually leads to, you know, once you get really organized into the organized crimes and the kits and all the rest. Oh, yeah. Now, you were saying there was some of Blackbeard's story you wanted to get to a few minutes ago. Oh, Blackbeard. You're talking about Cape Fear and stuff with him.

Right. So Blackbeard, you know, sometimes people ask, you know, who is your favorite pirate is sometimes a question that comes up. And I usually go at Blackbeard because what I find really interesting about him is he's clearly the thinking person's pirate and he's you can see how he worked out his performative um you know terror terrifying person image in order to secure what he wanted and when you're watching like uh his movements and you're tracking his movements through the records and you figure out that he learned information x at this moment. And then what did he do next?

He suddenly goes off and does this thing. He's always like planning ahead and trying to work out the angles several steps ahead of time. And when the golden age of piracy is clearly coming to a close, when it's clear that NASA on the Pirate Republic's days are numbered. Blackbeard has this audacious scheme. So in short, the Woods Rogers, the hero of the War of Spanish Secession, decides to use his political capital that he's gained by capturing the treasure galleon and becoming a hero to approach the king in the court with a plan that goes, you know, hey, I'll take my private frigates I built to circumnavigate the world and you back me up with some Royal Navy vessels and I'll go take out these pirates for you.

And if I do it, you'll make me governor of the Bahamas if I can hold the place. And the only thing I need from you is to pardon the pirates. To issue a pardon, anyone who will agree to step down from piracy and surrender without a fight will be absolved of all their criminality for piracy. So he was kind of playing both sides. Well, he wanted to divide and conquer. He wanted to weaken the pirates enough to take control of the place. Of course, the pirates could go back into piracy. So once you've taken control, you're in a vulnerable situation.

But word got out that the king had issued this pardon. Here's, oh my gosh, all these pirates who had thought that they had stepped off into a life of criminality that would almost certainly end in the noose or, or death suddenly had a second chance where they could take all their ill-gotten gains and return to society. Incredibly tempting. Well, when this news reaches Blackbeard, he's not in Nassau, he's out on patrol when he encounters this information. And what he does next, he tries to get one final big score because he's been unlucky. All the ships he's captured have like tar in them and hides. Did you uncover this part in your research? I'm sorry to cut you off.

Or was this something someone else had found? Well, I would say following the track day by day to reassemble where he was at and what he's learned was new. Different chunks of information were known, but I don't think they were ever strung together. I think what I added was stringing them together in a better way and adding more beads along the way that shows you the string. So some of it was there. Okay, so you were saying he finds out this information. Yeah, so he tries to go into the Gulf of Mexico and capture this massive prestige treasure ship,

and he's just unlucky. He ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he's got to figure out what to do then. And his crew is really angry because they don't have lots of money. They need to accept the king's pardon pretty quick or the deadline will run out and they'll lose their chance. Wait, accept the pardon? All right, now I'm confused. There was a decree then that was said just –

If you go show up at a governor, show up at an English governor, he can give you a pardon for your crimes and you have to step down from piracy. It wasn't like if Woods actually captured you or something. Now you get it. It's like, no, no, here's an announcement like an APB. In advance, if you all will surrender, you can keep your treasure and we'll call it even. But from now on, you can't be pirates. That's the deal, right? But everyone has to go to a governor, an English governor, and accept a pardon.

So he's trying to get a final score of treasure. He can't do it. Raids off Charleston. He's working his way up the coast. So what does he do? He strategically ditches most of his crew. He takes his flagship, a giant frigate-sized vessel, and intentionally runs it aground,

abandons all the crewmen he doesn't trust, jumps into a smaller vessel, and keeps only his trusted allies, the majority of whom, by the way, are of African descent, and goes up. And where does he go? He goes to North Carolina, to the cheapest, lamest colony out there, a place that has almost no people, that's just been ravaged in a conflict with the indigenous people, a place that the Virginians look down on as a place where, you know, ne'er-do-wells and people of no consequence live, where there's not even really a capital. The government just moves around from village to village. But the best thing they have for a capital is a little town called Bath

in North Carolina, which is kind of in the Northeast. You probably even have to Google search it. It's way up Pamlico Sound. And he goes there and finds the governor and basically works out a deal. And the deal is, hey, you know, give me a pardon. And in exchange, you know, I'm just involved in the sanitation business, right? You know, everything's fine. I just found this big parcel of treasure in the ship floating out at sea. Here, I'll sell it to you and you can keep the proceeds. And yeah, that'll be great, right?

So he sets himself up to basically have the protection of the governor to claim that he's now just an ordinary citizen in North Carolina. And North Carolina is so impoverished and so lacking in any people of like soldiers and stuff to defend the colony. Suddenly, like his crew, like almost doubles the population of Bath when they show up and come ashore. And they're all armed and all the rest. So he works out this deal. And they're all all armed and in all the rest so he works out like they're all they're all like african-americans too some of them are yeah a lot of and and north carolina again was also one of those places like the bahamas where where that um consolidation of the race thing race and slavery had to have south carolina totally north carolina was still north

carolina was a and the bahamas had the same proprietors and it was – Got it. Okay. Makes sense. So that allowed for that as well to be occurring. So he's going out down Pabliko Sound, which you see on that map, and goes and attacks some French ships in the open ocean and brings them back to one of the barrier islands at the mouth of the Sound, Ocracoke Island, and is dismantling the vessels. He's raiding other vessels. And all the treasure and proceeds is ending up in the collector of customs for North Carolina's barn under a pile of hay.

And so he's basically worked out to be a protected – he's bought the cops and he's bought the mayor and he's kind of running the show there. Good businessman. Perfect, right? It's better than piracy. I've got piracy with government protecting me. What he doesn't count on is the ruthlessness of the governor of Virginia who's going to have none of it.

A politician ruthless? Come on. Carolina, but furious at Blackbeard's raids, which are imperiling shipping just to the north at the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay and to the Virginia colony. Yeah, the capes of Virginia. He conspires with the captains of the Royal Navy vessels there in Norfolk to set up two impromptu mercenary raiding parties. One set travels overland of soldiers through the Great Dismal Swamp, south from Virginia, to attack Bath from land, while another set uses a bunch of sloops

and sails down around Ocracoke Island to come in up Pamlico Sound and trap him so that there'll be no escape. And they find him off Ocracoke Island in that sound. He and his men have just had a crazy party on the ship. And they're drunk and hungover and don't even notice these small vessels approaching them. And then there's this enormous battle.

There's a boarding action. And all the stuff in the Errol Flynn pirate movies is all borrowed from this crazy battle. Just that? Yeah. There's sword fights. And there's a dashing lieutenant of the royal navy vessels and he and blackbeard are engaged in a fight and and then eventually blackbeard uh and his crew actually lose and uh and he's killed and beheaded and his body brought back

to um they beheaded him on the ship right there yes and they kept it they put the head in the bow sprit and brought them brought it home to Norfolk. It's a good touch. Put on a post on one of the shores of what's now Norfolk. So much for the – Blackbeard Point, I think it's called today. Fitting. Yeah.

But so much for the pardon. Exactly. Unless that didn't work out. And all of that was incredibly illegal, right? And doing any of those things and the proceeds from the seizing of Blackbeard's vessel, right? North Carolina was like, no, you can't just take the stuff and bring it to Virginia and divide it among these Royal Navy crew people. It resulted in lawsuits and everybody got in trouble and the dashing lieutenant was – wasn't promoted to captain for another 35 years. Yeah, so it caused a whole brouhaha. But essentially, yeah, the ruthlessness and the governor of Virginia led to Blackbeard's demise

just when he thought he was safe. But he planned it out, right? He figured out a whole scheme to set himself up. He tried, didn't work out. What happened to the sociopath, Charles Vane, whatever became of him? Yeah, so when the end for the pirate Republic comes when Woods Rogers and his, uh, frigates and several Royal Navy vessels all arrive in Nassau

Harbor, uh, there's been a previous visit by the Royal Navy to get some pardons, but essentially there's this moment where everyone's not sure what's going to happen. And he, he comes ashore and most of the pirates are going to accept the pardon at least in the short term. Some don't, especially Charles Vane who's like – not only refuses to do that. In the middle of the night, he sets a merchant ship on fire and sails it right at the Royal Navy vessels to try to catch some of the giant fireball, fire ship and destroy them. And then takes off in a sloop out the back and he's pursued and charles vane refuses all that and you know uh keeps rampaging like a barbarian to the bitter end refusing to give up piracy or surrender in any form and then he gets killed and then he gets killed that's usually how it goes the can or the kill merry life for a short one yeah yeah so that concludes like the golden

era that 1715 1725 ish era right so i mean woods rogers comes ashore in 1718 it's a long battle because a lot of the pirates are going back into piracy his all of his soldiers he brings with him are catching tropical diseases and falling over and dying and he's he's vulnerable the whole time then the war resumes with spain and i mean it lasts on a knife's edge and pirates like vane and others are still out there returning to piracy but yeah as a threat to the empires which the republic of pirates had become it's kind of over in 1718 and the last tendrils by 1720 in the Caribbean are gone. And by 1725, even those who escaped to the Indian Ocean, the African theater, have been pretty much rounded up. So are you saying this is kind of the end of piracy of the skull and crossbones variety where the pirates were arguing that they were fighting the establishment were Robin Hood's men, that's where that reaches its end.

Now, there'll be other pirates later. Yeah, how did it transform? Pirate Republic was gone and there was no longer this haven. Individual pirates could just be picked off eventually. The storm takes them out or they need provisions and can't get any and they can't maintain their vessel and they can't sell their stuff. They don't have an infrastructure, the infrastructure of state to allow them to fence goods and protect themselves. So eventually, they get unlucky or they slink off and slink off, you know, um, and, and disband their company and disappear into the woodwork. But either way, you don't have that kind of, um, empire hobbling

threat to Congress. Really ever again. Right. Ever, ever again in the age of sale. So that, you know, that, that the, um, the pirate Republic, cause it was straddling that key sea lane that basically if you were in the eastern half of the Caribbean – sorry, western half of the Caribbean and Mexico and that entire basin and you wanted to go back to Europe with your stuff, you basically – because of the direction of the-sized vessels like the WIDA and like Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, they had the Royal Navy on the run, right? Their ships were as big as any Royal Navy frigate attached to defend the posts in the Americas and their ships were better maintained in the Royal Navies and they had more men for boarding actions. I mean they were running the show for a brief period of a couple of years. The commerce of the empires was paralyzed.

It was an actual threat, not only to the British colonial space, but the French and the Dutch and everyone else. That would never be the case again, where you had an actual destabilizing of the empires of that sort. There's only like a two-year window where it was really threatening to shake things up.

1717 and 1718 would be the times when things got so bad that huge numbers of ships are being grabbed all at once trying to leave New York or leave Virginia. And just making it almost impossible to keep the affairs of the empire and commerce and the mercantile system going. Yeah, because when we talk about, I mean, fast forward to today, you hear me mention Tim McBride and things like that. But when we talk about like pirate, you know, in I guess more of the folklore sense today, it's all in like Somalia, not even here. And that's, you and I were talking off camera, that's just because there's a tight international shipping port there. It's a tight international shipping port there. It's a very, very poor area.

So economic incentive says that there's going to be bandits and the bandits come and they take the shipping. And they've got just like the pirates in the Bahamas in the Golden Age, they've got a sort of failed state base in each circumstance. So in Indonesia and the straits there were that piracy would rise up. You have a, you know, commerce coming in and out of large parts of Asia has to go through those Straits and in parts of Sumatra that have, you know, beef with the Indonesian government there, the pirates are considered heroes and local people, you know, rating and settling scores to help the local population who were oppressed. And in

Somalia during all of the, that period of piracy, right. There's another failed state where, um, outside like, you know, European, uh, fishing vessels, offshore factory freezer vessels have been coming and scooping up all their fish illegally and wiping out the livelihoods of all the, like, you know, ordinary artisanal fishers of that area. And you had the collapse of the state and the pirates are going to move in and settle some scores, right? And bring all this stuff ashore in this place that had been destroyed by the outsiders. Well, we'll show the outsiders. We'll go take their ships.

And so they had entire towns that are – the pirates are kind of running and where they were supported and have all of that shore side support that you need in order to be a lasting threat. And yeah, it start damaging shipping and all that kind of stuff. And I don't know as much about the current stuff in Yemen with these groups who are back by

giving weapons by Iran, but look what they've done to global shipping. What I don't know is, is there locally there in their place? Do they have the backing of the people in quotes locally for some reason or not? I don't know. But if they are to be sustained for a long period, you probably need that kind of like social support mechanism. They have Iran.

They have Iran, but you need like the central government in Yemen to either be happy with them or be so dysfunctional that they can create their own like pirate nest with all of that necessary infrastructure to sustain themselves. Yeah, I don't want to mess this up trying to explain this as not the expert on it, but I had my friend Ji warwick in here recently who's like two-time pulitzer winner he knows it oh my god he's done the middle east for the last 25 years of his life so he put on this master class of like the state of the middle east where's iran's nuclear program these days i'm really concerned about that and i've been watching it for boy about 15 years and for the longest time the concern was that well, Iran says it doesn't want a nuclear weapon, but gee, they're sure accumulating a lot of fissile materials, the stuff you make that explodes in a nuclear bomb. In the last three years, we've seen a pretty big change with

Uranians. They're now making not just the low enriched uranium, they were pretty good at making the stuff you could put in a nuclear power plant. Now it's high enriched uranium, 60% enriched. It's very, very close to weapons growth so we're telling the world that you know wink wink we could make a bomb if we want to and that's not just a bluff anymore they've got we spent like an hour and 10 minutes on on syria 50 minutes on Yemen, you know, 50, 60 minutes on Iran,

and then 45 minutes on Israel and Gaza and all that. And so when we were going through, and he was tying them all together, which is pretty cool, but when we were going through Yemen, he talked about how it's, it's such a, I mean,

this is not a good comparison, but you were talking about how when the US was colonized and stuff, there were all these different sectors and beliefs. I want to say it's a similar type idea with some radicalism obviously and some outer nation funding that happens in Yemen. But like there's no real – from my understanding and correct me in the comments if I'm misinterpreting this. There's not a core central control there it's kind of insane so my takeaway would be based on some of the piracy talks we had about what they're doing on the high seas is that yeah they they do have a clear base in some area of the country to be able to do that by those ports and that's that's the formula to becoming for pirates to become a threat of you know more geopolitical rather than local

right you know consequence right now at the beginning of this conversation you were starting to ruin my life and so maybe stop i'm sorry on some of the on some of the pirates of the caribbean stuff but we got to go all the way there oh yeah yeah because i grew up on that shit i loved it it's great movies but i know it's hollywood what what are some of the biggest things they got really wrong i know we started to talk about it earlier but like from an expert opinion what what did they get wrong and and then what parts did did they get most right well i mean the first movie is the quote the one that starts closest to something reality ish and then they just you know they keep going after the movies

often to sort of like, you know, sort of supernatural, you know, they're not even trying to be real anymore. But if you go to the first movie, the general idea of here's a base, there's rapacious, you know, you know, interests out there.

They had it be a, you know, a company like the British West India or East India company or something like that. And that the, the, that the Jack Sparrow character is kind of poking at that Robin Hood, like the Jack Sparrow is wearing these sort of flamboyant clothes and that's real. Right. Like the pirates would, you know,

Calico Jack and others would, would be wearing wealthy people's clothing and as a statement right to kind of throw people off so some of that is sort of real and that um you know that that twist of the anti-hero has definitely some reality to it so you know they start with things that are real-ish and then they keep on going down it becomes a video game pretty quickly where it's not trying to be the fantasy parts obviously i know aren't aren't real but like some of the basis of how the crews operated where where they were doing it obviously they got that right but you know you want some of that to be true well Well, I mean, they all have mixes.

I mean, like Black Sails is, I mean, Black Sails, the Starz series, started with a much more historically recognizable Nassau as a pirate base. And a lot of the same characters, they have Hornigold in there and Calico Jack. I never saw it. Yeah, it came out in like 2014 um and it lasted like four seasons but that one has uh is it combines being um a uh true ish pirate republic of the sort i just described and they've brought in a bunch of characters who are from the robert lewis stevenson treasure island but much earlier when they're young people. And that later they're going to become,

so it becomes a prequel of Treasure Island at the same time it's a story of this pirate republic. So it's kind of interesting in that respect. Assassin's Creed 4 I did consulting on, which is a video game. Oh, shit. Right, that Ubisoft series, one pretense is they set it in different areas of history and they try to make the setting as historically valid Oh, shit. produce what Paris looked like in 1789 to such detail that when Notre Dame burned,

guess who had the best digital rendering of Notre Dame for the rebuild from? Ubisoft had. It's a French company, but they actually are rebuilding it using Ubisoft's giant scans they made for the game because they wanted to be that accurate. That's cool. Isn't that wild? Yeah. So they-

They brought you on. They brought me on because- When was this? This was 2015 or 16, I if i remember right um but they brought me on to do sort of consulting for it because they had recreated with blackbeard and bellamy and all these characters hornigold uh set in uh nasa and following pretty closely the actual history so you know some um productions and pop culture stuff has gotten really captivated by the idea of this pirate republic.

It's not just a bunch of people sailing around. It's like a whole society you can play with, which has all kinds of dramatic utility, not to mention budgets. I mean, to be able to have a setting on land for stuff to happen and not have it all be out on ships um is also um freeing in terms of how are you going to film this thing for season after season so it sounds like obviously they care a lot about accuracy but what does that look like for you do you come on and you're sitting like in the writer's room are you on their digital like sitting in the in the back rooms creating it

digitally with them no it was uh uh so there was a lead writer kind of darry mcdevitt who uh actually like wrote the like they hire actors to come in and like yeah play the things and they have that you know the the thing with a video capture to move around and stuff he's a person like writing the cut scenes and writing the lines and all that and the environment so i was largely like script consulting, looking through all the details of what was happening, what was being mentioned, when events occurred, would people talk – say this kind of thing or that kind of thing, all those sort of details. would have been said no no that secretary wouldn't use that handbag in august 1964 should use this one right it was that level of trying to get anything that was wrong out there you know you know i'd find references to a town that didn't exist yet or that had a different name in that time period they wanted to get that level of detail right did you lose any battles like did

you have some stuff where you're like wait no it's got to be like this and like no no there were little things with game mechanics like in nasa, they didn't have docks and things to dock on. They were just using the beach. So they'd have to row cargo ashore, which is kind of a pain for them. All the transfers had to be – you couldn't just tie up your ocean-going vessel. But they weren't able to do that because they needed the dock as the recognizable way to port yourself from the local setting to being on the ship again. Like that was the visual cue to you that this is your portal to to being on the ship again like that was that was the visual cue to you that this is your portal to get back on your ship so things like that would be would shift

around yeah are you looking to do some i mean i know you wrote this a while ago but are you looking to do some more historical research on pirates again yeah i can't um i can't quite let go i mean i went back the following year and we added a bonus chapter a few years in with some more details that I discovered. And I went back yet again. I've got another, you know, I was in London about 10, 11 months ago. And I've got, you know, another hundreds of images that may track down into solving some more mysteries about this person or that person. But yeah, I need a few extra weeks to sit down and transcribe all these things to really dig in.

But yeah, it's always fascinating. And I try to keep an eye out on all of the discoveries and scholarship that anyone else is making to keep current on what's known and being found. I think the big discoveries that remain to be made about these Golden Age pirates probably lie in the French and Spanish records. Why do you say that? Well, I mean, the English ones,

I think we've probably mined most of the ore that's out there. You know, I've been pretty thorough in three trips and other scholars have done that. And it's in English. So it's, you know, in the National Archives in the UK are quite accessible. You know, people can go get a reader card and go look have done that. And it's in English, so it's, you know, and the National Archives in the UK are quite accessible.

You know, people can go get a reader card and go look at these things. Spanish records and the French records aren't as easily accessible. Even if you read Spanish or French, you've got to know, like, how it was written and dealt with back then. It's apparently a whole sub-discipline

to really understand the languages it's written and all of that. So you need much more specialized knowledge and the archives are more difficult to kind of gain access to. But those who have those skills, I don't to do that kind of stuff. We'll get you a translator.

Right, well, we need special translators. And, but, so we have the accounts of English victims and English authorities. Remember, they were attacking Spanish and French vessels and operating sometimes outside of where the sensory apparatus of the English state existed. But the French state and the what are the French naval officers saying happened on that week? You know, there was a raid on Martinique that Blackbeard didn't burn half the town. I've never seen the French account of that raid. It might be some really interesting things in there. You got to start drawing your lines here again.

Oh, yeah. I have the paper. Like, I know what my questions would be, but it's, yeah. So I think there's a lot to be discovered there, probably especially Spanish records because just a lot of the geography that they were operating in was in the Spanish realm. And I think that those are the records that have been least dug at by scholars. So stay tuned on that. And you're working on another book right now that's I think the fourth of that series about the colonialization of America.

Yeah. So the sort of regional cultures of our country. The original book was American Nations, a history of the 11 rival regional cultures of North America. It has a couple of follow-on books that develop things, but it's dealing with like the, what is the real backstory and problems of U.S. nationhood in our story?

Who are we? Why are we vulnerable in the ways we are? Why are there red states and blue? Why is there a disagreement on some of the fundamental things that most other societies agree on the big picture stuff about how balance of church and state and individual liberty and common good there's a general reckoning that we don't have here um the new book is dealing with like very specifically data driven like how the existence of these regional cultures explains current hot button issues from gun control through climate change and everything in between very very cool very data driven because the um the think tank project i founded uh called nationhood lab uh we actually dig into county level data. We can do the regional stuff and do comparisons over time. And it's actually like driven by numbers.

Yeah. Very cool. And that's coming out 2025? Yeah. Probably summer, early fall. All right. Well, I love that topic. I also love the Balkans topic. So we have some other things to talk about in the future. But Colin, I really, really appreciate you doing this and also bearing with me today. I know, obviously, I've been a little under the weather with this. No problem. You did awesome. And this history is so fascinating.

So we will put your book in the Amazon store link down in the description so everyone can go get it right there. Make sure you do. I did actually – I told you I didn't get a chance to read it, but I did read like the first couple chapters today, which doesn't count, but it's very good so far. So obviously it's taken you a long way to being the expert on the topic. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing all that with us. Thanks. It's been a pleasure. We'll see you again on another topic. Alrighty, sir. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the watching the episode before you leave please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button

on the video it's a huge help and also if you're over on instagram be sure to follow the show at julian dory podcast or also on my personal page at julian d dory both links are in the description below finally if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes use the julian dory podcast playlist link in the description below thank you