Stuff You Should Know - How Pirates Work

Episode Date: December 29, 2009

Although today's pirates aren't storming the coast of Florida or other eastern states, piracy is still around in this modern age. Join Josh and Chuck as they look back at the history of piracy -- and its successors -- in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone out there, if you want a great looking website, then you need to head on over to Squarespace. Especially if you're selling something, Squarespace is everything to sell anything. They have the tools you need to get your business off the ground, including e-commerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. Whatever you sell, Squarespace has merchandising features to make your products look their best online. So head on over to Squarespace.com slash SYSK for a free trial and when you're ready to

launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Filing a simple return for free with the help of a TurboTax expert feels pretty good. Get live help from tax experts who will help you file your simple return, answer your questions if you get stuck, and do a final review before you file. And if you qualify, it's all free until March 31st. See if you qualify to file free at TurboTax.com. TurboTax Live Assisted Basic is for simple tax returns only. Offer subject to change.

Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. All right, and welcome to the podcast, ahoy, et cetera. I am Josh Clark with me is the Laffy. What was that little laugh? I just, I was joking.

I thought who was going to be the first one to do it and I didn't know you were going to literally lead in with that. Sure. Yeah, I like to surprise you. That's a good one. It's hard to amaze me. I'm glad you did it. Chuck said he wasn't going to do that.

I know. And what? I last like 30 seconds. Such a pushover. I haven't announced you yet. That's Chuck Bryant. Right, sorry. Ahoy, et cetera.

Yeah. This is Stuff You Should Know, the pirate edition. I think we should be done with the pirate talking. Yeah, that could get really annoying. Yeah, you want to know what is probably the most annoying day of the year? Some kind of pirate day. September 19th talk like a pirate day. Really?

Yeah. Yeah, I think I remember that because Strickland came, was like slinging ours all over the office. Strickland and T-Dub are being into pirate stuff. Tracy. Yeah. She wrote this, right? Yeah.

This is a great article. Yeah, she's good. I must say. She's the keeper of the How Stuff Works voice. She is indeed. Yeah. She's the sage on that Led Zeppelin poster with the lantern. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. That's what I think of it, Tracy. Except for the lantern. Except with Star Trek earrings. Speaking of off comes your head. We're going to get into that, Chuck, because we're talking about pirates. Whenever pirates got caught, people loved to cut off their head and post it as a warning to other pirates.

Yeah, that's gross. Yeah, it is. You mean to define pirate, Josh? Can you really define pirate? Sure. It's someone who uses a boat to attack another boat with the intent to kidnap, steal, or otherwise do harm. Bing bang boom end of podcast.

But that's not all. Oh. There are a few other criteria. Boy, I can't do that. Please stop. There are a few other criteria. It must be for private gain using a private vessel. And it's for gain.

Like it can't be like Greenpeace coming up on like a whaling ship or something. They're not pirates. And they operate outside of a government authority, because back in the day, they used to, governments used things, people called privateers. Yeah. And a lot of pirates started out as privateers, which are basically government licensed pirates. They had like a letter of mark that said, this guy's allowed to go pirate, do whatever to say the French.

Or the Dutch. But the problem is, or maybe the Spanish. During times of not war, peace, I think is the way that most people put it, peace. Peace. Thank you. During times of peace, these privateers would be out of work. And they'd be like, well, I have one skill. And so then they turned to piracy.

Right. Or they could have just gone and been like regular seamen and not gotten paid all that much. And who wants to do that when you can plunder and get the loot? Right. One of the reasons that people engaged in piracy from early on is the same reason that they do now, the economy a lot of times. When things are down, just like anything else with theft, and we talked about shoplifting

and stuff like that in other podcasts, the crime rate goes up. Not one hour ago. The crime rate goes up. So poverty led to an increase in piracy over the years. And not just, it's not only when times are tough, when times are really good too, and there's a lot of trade on the high seas. Well, yeah, sure. The opposite will attract pirates as well.

Yeah. The golden age of piracy, which we'll get into. And piracy actually has a very long, hardy tradition that dates back at least to the fourth century BCE. Yeah. The Luca? Yeah. I'd never heard of that.

I hadn't either, man. They attacked boats off of the coast of what is now Turkey in the 14th century. Yeah. A long time ago. Yeah. That's a very long time ago. That's as many as 34, 3500 years ago. It seems like almost since there were boats on the high seas, there was piracy.

Yeah. Tracy makes that point too. As long as people were plying the high seas with goods that were worth stealing, people stole them in boats. Yeah. Piracy. You might have heard of the Corsairs. Uh-huh.

Famous pirates. That was 15th and 16th century. Mm-hmm. And of course, they were the Barbary Pirates. The Barbary Pirates. Which actually, I wrote an article on the Barbary Pirates, they were America's first terrorist threat. Oh, really?

Uh, Jefferson was the one that had to deal with them. And they actually got their start from the Redbeard brothers, who were Turks, but they went down to North Africa and I think converted to Islam. And they used to kidnap and torture and murder Spaniards. And Spaniards did the opposite. But these two brothers, the brothers Barbarossa, which means Redbeard, gave the start to the Barbary Pirates. Wow.

They were very successful for, I think, over a century. Did not know that. Yeah. And then of course, the Buccaneers, the lousy, stinking Tampa Bay Buccaneers, are named after the pirate Buccaneers of the 17th century. Yeah. So that's just a, I mean, there's a lot more history in this article, but that's an overview, if you will.

It is an overview. And it's not just European or African. No. The Chinese used to like to pillage the pirate after the Han dynasty around 220 BC. They used to like to pirate. Sure. Yeah. I'm trying to get this word out as a verb now, too.

I like that. And also I decided the new Rick role is Dion Warwick performing, Do You Know The Way To San Jose. Wow. Yeah. I've been, I've been, it's worked so far. I did it to Robert Lamb and he was like, that's good. Where was that going anywhere?

Okay. So Josh, what do you think of when you think of a pirate? What comes to mind? What mental image do you get? I think of a guy with maybe a tricorn hat. A tricorn. It's called a tricorn. Oh, okay.

Some hoop earrings. What are those called? Hoop earrings. Okay. A parrot that says things like pieces of aid and dead men tell no tales and stuff like that. What else? A peg leg, usually.

Sure. Or a hook for a hand. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. I think of very weathered, scarred skin, tattoos. I think of Johnny Depp. Yeah. What about the clothes?

Those, you know, a ruffled shirt and a little fruity. Long coat. Yeah. A long coat. A leather, probably. And I also think of a nice long sword, maybe a flintlock pistol, and furries also come to mind because usually if you run into a furry, there's someone dressed as a pirate nearby.

Well, Josh, you want to talk about if that's real or not, all that stuff you just named? It is real. Yeah. And the Golden Age of Piracy, which is, this is the, when we think of all those things, you're thinking of the Golden Age of Piracy. Right. And actually, I was surprised after reading this article how short it was, but I guess we'll get to that in a minute, right?

Yeah. What was it, like 50 years or so? Between 1690 and 1730. Okay. Yeah. 40 years. Yeah. And that's when you might have heard of people called Blackbeard.

Yeah. Calico Jack. You ever heard of him? Yeah. He was, you know, he was controversial. I know he was. Because you know why? I do know why, but I want you to know you.

Because he allowed women pirates. Not only did he allow women pirates, he had a pretty torrid affair on the high seas with one Anne Bonny. That seems like a good reason to have a woman pirate. Yeah. They had a kid together, which was born in Cuba. He stole her away from her husband and she basically was this housewife who went into a life of piracy and she and another woman named Mary Reed were aboard Calico Jack's

ship, right? Yeah. Once the crew found out that they were women, they accepted them because I think Calico Jack was like, if you don't cut your head off. Sure. But don't accept them too much. Right. Exactly.

Because I'll cut your head off. Right. So they dressed as women when they were just sailing and then when they were about to start fighting, they would dress up as men and apparently they killed as many people on as anybody else on that ship and a witness for when they were both caught later on, a witness who testified against them said that they swore and cursed with the best of them. Good for them.

Yeah. Women's lib. Yeah. Way back in the Golden Age of Piracy. Yeah. So one of the reasons it was the Golden Age back then, Josh, was from what you just said. That was when the seas were really flying around between Africa and America and Europe. Have you heard the theory that African slaves, Africa was tapped for slavery simply because

of a trade wind? Really? Yeah. That went from the East Coast to the United States right down to, what is that, Western Africa. Interesting. Yeah. It just took you right down and that's why Africans became slaves because it was so easy

to get there. Interesting. Yeah. Although the Portuguese already had a lock on the slave trade by the time the colonists started or the English literature, we didn't make that up. So lots of boats with sugar and rum and startingly it wasn't like big trunks full of gold coins usually. Right.

That did happen but it was more like goods. Yeah. There was one specific ship that went down actually and the pirate's treasure that you hear of a lot is pretty much personified or emblematic of this one called the Wida. It was a pirate captain Sam Bellamy ship and it went down in 1717 off the coast of Cape Cobb, Massachusetts and it had literally chests of gold and jewels and things in it when it went down. But normally they pillaged sugar, rum, molasses, stuff that you could turn around and sell

in bulk to somebody and say like Port Royal or whatever. So the Golden Age I mentioned it was big for two reasons. That's what we think of when we think of the traditional pirates because the Golden Age was so big and because of books like Treasure Island and Peter Pan. That's why we think of the pirates is what you described earlier. It's like Santa Claus being our conception of Santa Claus comes from a 1931 illustration from a guy who was paid by Coca-Cola. So let's go over those real quick.

The flag that you often think of? The Jolly Roger. Did you do any additional research on this? No, did you? Tracy kind of traipsed around that one. Oh, okay. It's a little sticky. Is it?

And this is definitely a family friendly article. Okay. Can we mention it? No, we can't but anybody can type in origins of Jolly Roger in Google and find it themselves and we would bear no responsibility whatsoever for that. So that flag made its first appearance in the early 18th century, Josh. And before that, there's a little known fact by me at least, and this makes total sense. Pirates would fly up false colors basically to mislead other ships that they were dangerous.

Yeah, and that makes total sense. Yeah, that's the smart thing to do. Yeah, smart guy. It's like the Jolly Roger, which I also found out from this one, often had a skeleton, not just the skull and crossbones. It was a black flag with a white skeleton. So it always struck me as weird because you're like, hey, I'm a pirate and I'm coming after you.

But it turns out they did do that purposely because in a lot of ways pirates were so feared that the ship would just be like, okay, you're a pirate here. Take our stuff. Well, yeah. Best case scenario, what they want is for the ship to immediately surrender. So that's what the pirates are really looking for. Yeah, because then you get the cargo. You get whatever stuff is on board, money maybe, and you get the ship.

Yeah. And apparently it wasn't hard to flip a crew over to piracy. I think there's a really thin line between legitimate seamen and a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy. If you captured a crew and said, I need you guys, they'd say, okay. Or what they probably said was you have a couple of choices. You can become a pirate or we can shoot you in the face or maroon you on this island. Yeah.

I love that word. What, maroon? Yes. Really? Yeah. I just think it's a great word. And of course that means to strand on an island. Sure.

A deserted island. It doesn't really work if you drop them off in Haiti. But you find a deserted island, drop off the crew. Sometimes they would leave them with supplies and other times they'd leave them with nothing and you just leave. And it's pretty much a death sentence. Pretty much. Yeah.

Their clothes, Josh, that you described are, you know, could have been real because they basically wore what people wore at the time, but a lot of times they would get the clothes from that were maybe being shipped to rich, wealthy people. Or the captain's clothes. Yeah. So they would have like fine clothes, like the ruffled shirts and all that. Parrots? True or not true?

I don't think it's true. Not necessarily, she says. They did capture parrots to sell them, but that's from Treasure Island. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Hooks and pegs? Yeah.

Yeah. That happened? Do you know why? No. Because being a pirate was dangerous. Oh, yeah. Okay. And you'd get your arms and your legs blown off many times.

So there were probably some peg legs walking around, stumping around. But that was also from Captain Hook and Treasure Island. So a lot of these things are fictional, but may or may not have happened. And flintlock pistols? I think that's true, but they didn't work very well at sea. Yeah. But they still used them when they could. At the very least, you could club somebody in the head with it.

Yeah, they're big. Oh, yeah. And then along with, obviously, the swords and daggers and all that stuff that you're familiar with. Right. And Chuck, we are focusing on the Golden Age of Piracy. I think we should say one of the reasons that gave rise to it was the War of Spanish Discession.

All right. What I was talking about about the privateers. Right, yeah. And that happened many, many times. The War of Spanish Discession gave rise to the Golden Age of Piracy because there were so many privateers. But the United States used to give letters of mark to pirates that actually were privateers that turned pirate.

The British did it. It happened, I think, well into the 19th century. There were privateers turned pirates. Yeah. Another falsehood. They are often depicted as steering these huge galleons. They would often attack these galleons, but a galleon isn't great if you're going to be in a pirate because you want to get in and out.

It's all about speed. In fact, modern pirates use speed boats, mainly, which we'll get to in a minute. But they usually used smaller sloops and schooners so they get in and out quicker. But no less cool. Or they could have also used a brigantine, which it's like a larger version of the schooner. It could hold about 150 men and probably about 30 cannons. Not bad. No.

You could do some real damage with that. So what's life like on a boat, Josh? It's s***y. It is indeed because they're not feasting on fine meals and drinking fine wines. I guess if they pillaged some, then they could. But when that's gone, dude, they're eating spoiled meat. They are eating water tainted with algae. Which you could eat, actually, if there's enough algae in it.

They drank it and they ate their water with a fork. That's how bad it was. And they ate something called hardtack. Yes. I've never heard of that. You know what another word for hardtack is? What? Sea biscuit.

Really? Is that where that comes from? Yep. I'm learning all kinds of things. That's like a really hard cracker and they took that out to sea because it didn't spoil as fast. Yeah, but I'll bet it was hell on teeth. Well, yeah.

And they also said that it was, you know, when you're out to sea for that long, it's like weevils crawling around and that's gross. Yeah. So you're not exactly happy and probably after a couple of days of eating hardtack and spoiled meat, you are really, really ready to go butcher a crew to get your hands on their food. Yeah. I imagine that you had no trouble persuading your crew to go after each and every ship

you came upon. I would think so. You know how they did that? How they came up? You want to talk about how they did their thing? Yeah. Let's talk about that. Usually at night, they would sneak up on the stern side and they would throw up the grappling

hooks and they would climb aboard and try and get them to surrender as quickly as possible. Right. Like you said, the ideal confrontation was one where the other ship just gave up immediately without a fight. Sometimes that didn't help or it didn't work. So they would have to fight and they would, did you say grappling hooks? Yeah. The grappling hooks to get up.

So they board. Right. And you'd want to actually keep your ship out of cannon fire range so that you would just get in a few boats and swim over to it or row over to it and then climb aboard. And then the massacre would begin. Right. If not a surrender, then the massacre would begin. And they would disable the rudder too, which I didn't know, which is pretty smart.

Yeah. Straight away so they couldn't steer away or anything. Right. But you could still tow it, I imagine. Yeah. I guess because the ideal situation is to get the boat. That's why they didn't want to bombard them with cannon fire because you want to take the boat and everything that's got on it in one piece.

And plus even if you don't intend to take the boat, you don't want to sink it before you can get to the cargo. Yeah, sure. Right. So yeah. But there was cannon fire. That did happen when all of us failed. Right.

And I think Tracy said they also fired a grape shot. Have you ever heard of that? Uh-huh. Whether it was like small little cannon balls? It looks like a little bunch of grapes actually. Then they would spit, like, spew out like a shotgun? Yeah. I think so or else they're molded together.

I think they do spit out like a shotgun, but they're like that big around. Like they spray? You're in trouble if somebody hits you with a grape shot. And actually they would go for the guy at the wheel. Was their first shot if they shot at the other ship? Yeah, the guy steering. Apparently when they did capture crew, if they weren't in the mood to turn them, there were several things they could do aboard the high seas.

One thing I read about was they would tie somebody to the mast and just throw broken bottles at them until they got bored with that. That's fun. That was one thing. Key hauling. Oh, keel hauling. That's so, this sounds awful. Yeah, keel hauling is when they tied a rope, they're big on the rope, and they would throw

you overboard and drag you under the keel boat, which pretty much mean you drowned. Yeah, and along the way were cut up by the barnacles that were stuck to the ship. And they would do this to their own guys. Apparently there was a strict code on the boat with the crew, and if you disobeyed the code you would be treated just like the enemy would be. One thing that is fiction is walking the plank, Chuck. I did not know that either. Yeah.

This is like the totem pole. I'm just, I'm learning. The catch was the low man on the totem pole. That was all, that's all just made up for books, right? Walking the plank. Yep. That's disappointing. So, let's see what else, Chuck.

Oh, Tracy made a really excellent point that I hadn't thought of, but if you have two ships and they're the same type of ship, how does one catch the other? If you're using sails and oars, same number of oars, same wind, apparently if you were a decent pirate you would beat your ship every once in a while and then clean off the hull and the barnacles off the hull to make it slide through a lot faster. Remember, we were talking about ships that are being outfitted with that ooze that resembles a pilot whale skin? Yeah, yeah.

The pilot whales keep barnacles off and this ooze is the aim of the ooze is to keep barnacles off of these ships. To then go faster, or more efficiently at least. Then go faster and yeah, I think it was going to cut fuel consumption by like 20% or something. Right. Consumption. Consumption. Yeah.

So, that is how you would catch up to somebody else. You could also offload cargo, store it, maybe bury it in North Carolina. Uh-huh. Yeah. Gotcha. And, yeah. That is an interesting point I never thought about that because they have the same wind. That's right.

Wow. Are we done with old pirates? Seems like it. Okay. Modern times? Yeah. Well, between the 19th century and the 21st century really and all of a sudden we have pirates again.

Yeah. I mean there's probably a little pirating here and there. Not like we've been seeing lately. Yeah. This one could almost call this the second golden age of piracy Josh. If one were so inclined. You know why? That it's flourishing again.

Economy. Much for the same reasons that it flourished back then. Economy is bad. Shipmasters have been reluctant to report them. Who? Shipmasters. Oh. Shipmasters are reluctant to report the attacks because it can take a long time and be expensive

and hold them up. Sure. So they'll just let it go. Undone. And they, because of the economy, they're staffing crews with smaller uh, smaller crews. Right. The ships with smaller crews. And the best majority of modern pirate attacks are happening in the Gulf of Aden and they

are being undertaken by Somali pirates and one of the reasons why the pirates are getting away from it is because Somalia is, as far as I know, the one nation on the entire planet that doesn't have a functioning central government. It's truly lawless. Right. Great place for pirates to hang out, right? Yeah, I would say so. Um, where?

They're land-based these days. Well, they're hugging sure more. Right. But they have their operations based on land. Oh, right. Well, I mean, they did the same thing during other ages of piracy. Like the buccaneers all hung out in Port Royal. Oh, they did?

Yeah. Okay. Um, so the, the, the other reason the Gulf of Aden is such a hotspot for piracy apparently 10 or 11% of all of the world's oil goes through the Gulf of Aden, which is a relatively, relatively narrow stretch, um, between, uh, the Middle East and North Africa, North Eastern Africa. Um, and it's 250 miles wide and it's like that for 900 miles. So it's like a bottleneck. Yeah, your trap.

And then you're going right alongside the only country on the planet without a functioning central government. There you have it. Yeah, I think 8% of all of the goods shipped, um, globally go through the Gulf of Aden as well. Really? Yeah. So there's a lot of cash that flows through that, that Gulf.

Wow. Yeah. So you know how they operate nowadays? I do. Kind of just like they used to, except with rocket propelled grenades. Yeah. They have RPGs, but they will do the same thing. They'll get a smaller boat and it's faster boat.

They will sneak up on the stern and the dead of night with their grappling hooks and board the ship. And, uh, of course now they have, you know, a crew of like that one incident earlier this year was like six or eight guys, wouldn't it? Yeah. So not as hard to overtake a ship these days when you have machine guns and RPGs and a crew of six that you have to overtake. Are you talking about the Marysk, Alabama, the one where the Navy came in and the snipers

killed the guys? Yeah. He did a little two tap. I would imagine so. Yeah. Uh, but they're not after cargo, which I didn't know. I thought like it depends. Well, I guess it does.

But Tracy made the point that they can't overtake these huge cargo ships because they don't have the means to, to get rid of all that stuff. So they're usually after, uh, like smaller equipment on the boat and personal loot. And sometimes they carry a lot of money and safes. And I found it interesting because I think she wrote this in like 2005, maybe 2006. And it seems like 2007 or eight was when things really changed. Remember the, um, the, uh, cargo ship filled with Russian tanks. Oh yeah.

Um, the cargo, the tanker filled with oil that was held. Yeah. So, so they are going after the cargo now, they're just holding it for ransom. They're not trying to fence it. Like you can't fence a hundred Russian tanks or a container ship full of oil, but you can hold the hostage and get money. You can hold it ransom and get money for, you know, to, to release it. And that's what they've been doing successfully.

Yeah. I never followed up, but I did remember hearing about a, uh, couple that was sailing around the world and they were, um, kidnapped by pirates. I read something in the New York times that was this year, I think, but I never found out what happened to them. Like a wealthy couple. Do you remember that guy who, um, was, he had like a walk on part as a, and I think is like, uh, I don't remember what he was, but it was on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Oh yeah. And he, uh, killed some couple for their yacht, but this wasn't him. No. Okay. He wasn't a pirate. He was a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. Chuck. Yeah.

Let's say we are aboard a cargo ship filled with oil and pirates are heading our way with RPGs, um, rocket launchers, AK-47s, what do we do? Well, if you see them headed, I'm not really sure. I know what you can do beforehand. You can not discuss your route while you're in port. Yeah. Like you can't go to the bar and say, yeah, we got a shipment of diamonds. We're going to be taken to the Straits of Hormuth.

Right. And I'll bet. What that guy? Oh, that was good. That was the, the jackass shipmate who has a loud mouth. That was a perfect impression. And you know what? I'll bet that rule of thumb is as it goes back to the lucka.

Yeah, I bet. I bet so. Yeah. You just keep your mouth shut. Yeah. We've learned that a lot on the show. I know. If only we could, um, keep constant watch, obviously, beat someone up in what's it called

the crow's nest? Sure. Looking out. Uh, avoid bottlenecks, which unfortunately with that one route you're talking about, it sounds like it's kind of hard to do. Right. It's impossible. Yeah.

And, uh, search your ship, you know, make sure no one's stowing away. Sometimes pirates will already be there. Yeah. As stowaways. It's like surprise. Uh, call for help. I think there's, uh, there's systems now that monitor where your boats are if you're a cargo boat.

Ship lock. Ship lock. There you go. What do they do? It's like low jack for your ship. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, there you have it.

Um, the, but yeah, if we, if you do see some pirates coming aboard, if you ever happen to find yourself commanding an oil tanker and you see, uh, you see pirates coming toward you, you do call for help. As Chuck said, you, uh, also want to sound your alarm, turn on your lights. You want the pirates to know that you've seen them. So there's no element of surprise. Which scare them off? Yeah.

It may actually deter their attack. Sure. Because, you know, you're a huge cargo ship and they're like five guys, um, a lot of ships, especially tankers have their own fire hoses, like the big kind, um, and you can spray guys as they try to come up the side of the ship. Big kind. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm just like, don't put your thumb over the head.

It's not like a garden hose. Yeah. Um, and, uh, if you aren't transporting oil or any kind of flammable material, there's actually, um, a new kind of technology that electrifies the whole. I heard about that. So you, the guy tries to climb up. He's like, surprise. Yeah, exactly.

That'd be awesome. Oh, it would be. If I had that system, I would go through that, uh, shipping channel you were talking about and I would just like camp out in the long chair in the Gulf of Aden. Yeah. Just smoke a cigar and crack a beer and be like, can I get it? Yeah. So that's pirates.

Is that it? That's it. I, that I'm sure that is not it at all. It's the tip of the iceberg. Even as far as Tracy's article goes, there's still more that we didn't touch on. But yeah, it's such a rich, beautiful history book and years and corsairs and swashbuckling et cetera. We weren't touching on a film and TV at all because if we mentioned a hundred pirate things,

we would get an email saying, I can't believe you didn't mention pirate X from movie XYZ. Right. And actually there's a little graph that Tracy had made for this article that is, it's our 10 favorite pirates, but we're just going to go ahead and break the news that this is Tracy's 10 favorite pirates. Who's her favorite? I didn't see that blackbeard. Blackbeard's number one for historical pirates and then fiction, Dread Pirate Roberts.

Who's that? That's the guy from Prince's Pride. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And the guy from Fireflies in there too. I like Jack Sparrow. I didn't like, like those movies weren't the best ever, but he was pretty awesome. We just fell into what you said we weren't going to do. Yeah, but come on.

All right. Well, we welcome your emails. We'll give you the email address. You can send your angry pirate emails too in a second. You can type in. No, let me say this. No email with multiple Rs will be read or answered too. As a matter of fact, I think we should have a spam filter that if R appears in the email,

it just automatically deletes a room and see it, okay? If you want to learn more about pirates, type that word in pirates, pirate, something like that into the handy search bar at howstuffforks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Yes indeed, Josh. Today we have a listener mail. I am going to call Jerry was amazed by this email. Awesome. And I was too.

Hey guys, I was listening to your podcast on hostage negotiation and you had a little back and forth at about the 10 minute mark that made me laugh a little bit. This isn't the one, is it? This is the one. Wow. So should we play that now? Yes. Let's.

I love doing that. It's usually just a regular old domestic scene and the worst ones, man, the worst ones of those you see on the news where you see some dudes got a baby acting as a human shield. Who does that? You've never seen that? No. Oh man. It's the worst.

Watch some of those cop shows. A baby as a human shield? Yeah. Like a gun to the baby's head. These guys, it's like the dad is out of his mind and on drugs or something and he'll have his baby and it's just, it's the worst thing in the world to watch unfold. Okay, Josh, this is from Danny and here's what Danny has to say about that. Yeah, this is the one.

In 1987, I was one of those babies. We were living in Queens, New York at the time and my father barricaded himself on our top floor apartment for hours. He was holding me and threatening to jump out of the window with me in his arms if the police got too close. He didn't have any elaborate demands other than wanting my mother to not take me away from him in a custody dispute. The police used a negotiator to try and distract him so the SWAT team could do their thing,

but they deemed it too risky to try and assault with him dangling me out the window like Michael Jackson did. Yeah. That's not in there. I just threw that in. Eventually the negotiator started playing to his religious beliefs, good tactic, and got him to let a priest come into the apartment. They were finally able to take him down without brute force.

You can imagine how much I appreciate the art of hostage negotiation. No kidding, Danny. The story made the cover of every New York newspaper that day and I have all of them saved, odd souvenirs I guess. Thanks for the great show. I know. So I couldn't believe this happened to Danny and I wrote him back and I asked what happened to his dad and I have not heard back from him so I'm not really sure.

But dude, Danny, glad you're around, man. I know. I am too. That's just mind-boggling, actually. It turns out people do use babies as human shields. And they listen to stuff you should know 20 years on. Yeah, that's crazy. If you have an absolutely nutty, mind-boggling, real-life story, Chuck, Jerry, and I are always

interested in those. If you're a Somali pirate, then you listen to the show. Sure, why not? Let us know. Let us see your view. We don't hear your view very often here in the West. So let us know what life is like for you. Somali pirate, human shield, or anything else.

Let us know. Let us know in an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

It's ready to travel in 2023, and since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours and European Riffer Cruises. And right now, through January 30th, use promo code HEART20 to receive 20% off your tour. That's promo code HEART20 through January 30th. Visit gateonetravel.com for more information or to book your tour.

That's gatethenumberonetravel.com. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. The South Dakota Stories, Volume 1. She was a city girl, but always somewhere else in her head. Somewhere where bison roam, rivers flow, and people get their hiking boots dirty. Like actually dirty. So one day she fled west and discovered this place of beauty, history, and a delicious

taste of adventure. But before she knew it, she was driving away with memories to share and the hopes of returning. Because there's so much South Dakota, so little time.