Historian Answers Pirate Questions

I'm historian Angus Konstam.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Pirate Support.

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@str8grubbin asked, Where did the pirate accent come from?

'Cause there's no way in hell

that people really talked like that.

It was invented by the actor Robert Newton

when he did the Walt Disney film Treasure Island

back in 1950.

He used his native Somerset accent and embellished it a bit,

and that created the sound of the pirate, essentially.

Hardly worth dividin', is it, George?

It's a great accent, but it's just one actor's view

of what a pirate would sound like.

Pirates would've come from just about any port

in Britain or Europe, or even Colonial America.

When Robert Newton chose that accent, he'd no idea,

60, 70, 80 years later, people are using it

as the established pirate accent.

Thank you kindly, doctor. You came in the nick of time.

It shows you the power or the impact

of that film at the time

and how it captured people's imaginations.

At @Corbienest asks, Why are pirates called pirates?

Pirates really comes from a Greek word

which means to attack or to rob.

Pirates existed as far back as the Ancient Egyptians,

and then when the Romans came along, there were,

peirates essentially meant a sea robber.

They had whole naval patrols out

trying to hunt down pirates.

Famously, Pompey the Great organized a sweep

through the Mediterranean

to capture all the pirates he found.

And they were using the term then,

so it's kind of stuck.

@LukaDonMuse says, What's your favorite rule

of the pirate code?

We have a few examples of pirate codes.

Now, they're really codes of conduct within the ship

to govern how the pirates operate on board the ship.

I like the fact that they're very democratic.

For instance, how any plunder is held

in common by the pirates and divided up.

They also have ones that give you an idea

of what life was like on board,

basic things like no candles

while you're gambling and drinking blow decks.

That's a very sensible one.

Knock over a candle in a wooden ship,

and all hell breaks loose.

@shawmrome1 asks, What do pirates do for fun?

We don't know an awful lot about what pirates did on board,

but we have a few records from merchant captains

taken prisoner and held on board pirate ships.

There was a lot of card playing

and an awful lot of drinking.

Pirates, essentially, every time

they looted a ship with drink on it,

they would lay into the stuff.

Ships carrying things like Madeira wine

was regularly imported to Colonial America.

Pirates were well-stocked with drink.

But also an awful lot of just lying around looking bored

because they were waiting for a victim.

That involved a lot of long passages at sea,

doing very little.

gr8Sambino, I wonder if pirates

really did use wooden peg legs,

or is this just common folklore?

They must have gotten seriously bad splinters.

Often, people with peg legs were used as kooks,

just as Long John Silver was in Treasure Island.

Peg legs are probably the only kind of prosthetic available.

As for splinters, yeah, I'm sure that happened.

@Wheelie_Average, What's the most famous

nonfictional pirate through history?

There's a lot to choose from.

Probably the instant iconic pirate is Blackbeard,

Edward Teach, instantly recognizable.

He did things like blockade Charleston,

which really upset the apple cart in Colonial America.

People didn't know where he was going to attack next.

And for a short period, merchant ships wouldn't go to sea

for the risk of being attacked by pirates.

His parents owned a plantation in Jamaica.

They were well off,

but he got the bug when he was a privateer.

He obviously liked it, he was good at it,

and so when he grabbed the chance,

he went out pirating on his own account.

@Luka4337 says, Weren't pirates democratic

and overthrew bad captains?

Pirates were very democratic.

At the time, we're speaking about the early 18th century,

it was a very strained, constricted sort of lifestyle,

ruled by the church, ruled by laws.

Pirates were rebelling against that.

They were rebelling against tyrannical merchant captains

who could have them flogged

or even killed without any recourse to the law.

They could vote in a captain they liked

and vote out one who didn't suit their needs,

and that happened several times.

If the pirates weren't happy, they'd call a meeting.

And they would decide if the captain should stay or go.

Pirate captains like Charles Vane

were deposed by their crew.

He and his crew that supported him

were shoved onto this other ship

and told to fend for themselves,

while the pirates elected a new captain,

in this case, Jack Rackham, and he sailed off

to continue his piratical career somewhere else.

@HoneyNutBerrios says, Pirates never actually

made people 'walk the plank.'

There's no real evidence that pirates ever did.

It came largely from JM Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan.

JM Barrie used the whole plot device of walking a plank

to add dramatic impact to his story.

Because pirates wouldn't bother sticking a plank out

and making people walk it, except in fiction.

Normally, a pirate would just cut your throat

and throw your body overboard,

and there's plenty of examples of that happening.

Pirates could be nasty.

Some, like George Lowther, made a name

for being almost psychopathically vicious.

And they would often pick on the captain of a ship

that they captured, as a figure of authority,

and they'd often torture him just to make his life a misery

before killing him and throwing him overboard.

@rorst3 said, So you're telling me Jack Sparrow

wasn't a real pirate?

Well, no, he was a character,

beautifully played by Johnny Depp.

His inspiration for it was largely Keith Richards

from The Rolling Stones,

'cause he just liked that crumpled but dynamic look.

Johnny Depp just took that, embellished it, and ran with it,

just like Robert Newton did

all those years before with Treasure Island.

He's actually basing his look not just in Keith Richards

but in real pirates.

Look at the hair.

That's straight from Edward Teach, from Blackbeard.

He's got a captain's coat,

the kind of fancy coat that a pirate captain would wear,

albeit kind of shabby.

This is the sort of thing they'd steal from a boat.

The whole thing is kind of exaggerated, but underlying it,

there's a sort of real pirate look in there.

Another thing with Johnny Depp is he's always a bit drunk.

Pirates did steal a lot of rum from ships.

@bethec0wb0ys makes a good point, and he says,

How am I supposed to pay attention in class

when gay pirates exist?

There were gay pirates.

Bartholomew Roberts, probably the most successful pirate

in terms of the number of ships he captured,

was definitely a gay pirate.

His partner was one of the crew and was equally ferocious.

In a very constricting society,

being a pirate was a great place to be.

You were part of the that pirate crew,

and they all looked after each other very well.

@Fisherwick_PB asks a great question.

What's the difference between a privateer and a pirate?

In time of war, governments give privateers

a letter of mark, basically a license

to become a licensed pirate.

For instance, during Queen Anne's War,

anyone could go get letter of mark,

and if they had financial backing,

they could gather together a crew for a ship,

buy a ship, and go off hunting.

Anytime that ship was captured,

it was taken back to port and legally sold.

The government would get its cut, about 20%,

and the rest was sheer profit

shared between any shareholders in the enterprise

and then amongst the crew.

The trouble is, when the war stopped,

those licenses were terminated.

A lot of pirates had spent a lot of time

learning the skills.

They didn't want to go back to the drudgery

of being a regular merchant seaman.

They decided to keep going.

A pirate attacks any ship regardless of nationality.

They're just there to hunt the seas.

At about 1713, 1714, there was an immense upsurge of piracy,

mainly in the Caribbean and the American seaboard,

but also over in coasts of West Africa,

the Golden Age of Piracy,

a modern term for a deadly problem.

@Marcotix says, Why is it trying to drink off rum

while watching 'Pirates of the Caribbean'?

Rum and the Caribbean kind of go together,

the main trading good

of large parts of the Caribbean was sugar.

Sugar was used to make rum.

And now we associate rum with pirates,

largely because they operated a lot of the time

in the Caribbean, captured rum, and drank it.

@CharlotteMari_ says, Get outta here with your misogyny.

There are plenty of female pirates in 'One Piece'

who were inspired by real life female pirates.

There are not many examples of female pirates,

but in the contemporary, very strict society

of the 18th century,

that whole idea that women would become pirates

and go to sea,

that was truly shocking and sensational, so people loved it.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read were part of a pirate crew,

one of Captain Calico Jack Rackham.

They both dressed like men,

and fought and drank,

and did all the things other pirates did

Anne Bonny was recruited first.

She was probably the lover of Jack Rackham.

At least that's what the records suggest.

And then Mary Read, who was a friend of hers,

joined as well.

They weren't just going along for the ride.

They were full-on cutthroat pirates.

And they, in the last battle before they were captured,

were the only ones who were able to put up a real fight,

mainly 'cause the men had all been drinking.

When Jack Rackham's ship was captured

off the western end of Jamaica,

they were taken to Port Royal as prisoners

and thrown in the jail.

It was a sensation that shocked the world

that women would be pirates.

Almost all the crew were taken away and hung,

but Anne Bonny and Mary Read,

they both pleaded that they were pregnant,

and they managed to throw themselves

on the leniency of the court, and they got away with it.

@YahavSal says, How does one get an access code

to become a pirate?

How do you become a pirate? You needed to be a sailor.

Land lovers were of no use. Pirates were merchant seamen.

If they mutinied against a nasty tyrannical captain

and took go over a ship,

that was one of the first access codes to becoming a pirate.

The other one is, once pirates were at sea,

they captured a merchant ship.

They'd often ask the crew, Do you want to join us?

That's a big step, though,

because once they do, they couldn't go home.

They couldn't go back to their families.

That was it. They were a pirate until they died.

@whalefan69 asks, What did pirates do before sunscreen?

We have accounts of them using tallow,

the stuff they used to grease ropes.

They often put that on their faces

to block themselves from the sun.

But what pirates tended to do is have a very big straw hat.

@fyslairby4 asks,

Has any pirate treasure been found?

Buried treasure, that's a modern invention.

That was a main plot in Treasure Island,

written by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Pirate treasure, well, there probably is some out there.

It's probably lost by accident.

Because anytime they captured a ship,

often it didn't have treasure on board.

They were capturing the regular merchant ships of the time.

So they would have things like rum or sugar or clothing.

The only occasion when treasure was buried that I know of

is when Captain Kidd came back to New York

from his pirating exploits in the Indian Ocean.

And he wasn't sure how he'd be received,

so he buried his treasure on the coast of Long Island,

just outside New York,

and then went into the city to see the governor.

It didn't really work out for him.

He was immediately arrested.

He was interrogated

and had to reveal where the treasure was.

Here's one from @quora.

What's an average pirate's life expectancy?

Hollywood seems to give the idea

that they can be old and grizzled.

Life expectancy at the time,

we're speaking about the early 18th century.

For a seaman, it was fairly short.

A lot of pirates were young, teenagers or in their 20s.

You knew you were eventually going to be captured,

hunted down, and executed.

So the chances of being old and grizzled

and retiring as a pirate, kind of slim.

@TSMoorhouse says, I wonder why pirates

are associated with parrots and what started the trend.

Parrots are exotic creatures. They're novelties in Europe.

Any seamen in the Caribbean

would pick up things like parrots and take them home

and sell them as exotic pets.

@vergiloflimbo said, I wonder why

they gave Blackbeard his name.

He's not the only one with a black beard,

or was he the only one at the time?

Here's a picture of Blackbeard at the time.

He was described with a great big beard.

He had it tied up often with ribbons.

He also had bits of burning slow match,

used to fire guns, basically burning cord,

stuck under his hat to make him look more ferocious.

So he looked kind of satanic,

and that's exactly what pirates wanted.

@brewminate asked, What did pirates wear?

What we've kind of established nowadays as the pirate look

was essentially not worn at the time at all.

It was created by an American artist, Howard Pyle,

in the late 19th century,

who did a lot of illustrations for kids' books.

Before he did these children's books,

Howard Pyle studied Spanish guerrillas.

And he had lots of sketches of them

with headscarves, the whole look.

And he said, right, that's a great look for pirates.

Here's an example of what pirates actually dressed like.

They wore the clothes of seamen at the time.

They were, after all, sailors.

So they'd have shirts. They'd have sun hats.

Very popular is the tricorn, like this.

I wish these came back into fashion. I love these things.

But that's not that practical on a ship.

What they'd often wear is something like a wooly hat.

You see them wearing little bowler hats

or hats like this,

sensible, comfortable clothes, even shorts.

@DesertTacSol asks, What sort of weapons did pirates use?

Of course, they wanted to capture a ship

without having to fight on the decks.

There's a risk they could be killed.

The ship could be damaged that they're trying to capture,

and all that plunder on board

would be lost to them if it sank.

When pirates captured ships,

they often took the guns from it

and kept them on board their own ship.

So essentially, they had the best weaponry

and all that they could lay their hands on.

The main thing to stop a ship would be a cannon like this.

They normally keep the heavy guns down in the hole,

where the ballast is,

and then they bring them up when they need them.

But you also have little swivel guns like this

on the rails of the ship.

They're kind of anti-personnel weapons,

and you would blast out musket bowls

and bags of shot from these things that were designed

to spray across the decks and kill people.

When you got alongside, you needed things like these.

These are granados, essentially little metal balls

filled with explosives.

Like a modern grenade, there's no pin to pull.

You just have to light the fuse

and throw it and hope for the best.

You have swords, axes, pikes, boarding pikes, cutlasses,

muskets, and even long muskets like this.

So the whole range of weaponry was available to them.

Imissbluey says, How the hell did pirates build

such awesome ships?

Why are criminals so creative?

Pirates didn't build the ships.

They stole them, much better.

Often pirates would start small

with a single-mastered sloop, or even a canoe.

You would build up your crew.

You would often trade ships for bigger ships.

What they did, though, is they embellished them.

Take Blackbeard, when he captured this French slave ship

called La Concorde of Martinique,

he took it to a deserted aisle.

He converted it to make it a better pirate ship,

and that meant cutting down the decks,

so it was one big platform,

so the pirates could attack from anywhere.

He added more gun ports.

He essentially blinged up the ship

so it was the perfect fighting platform for piracy.

slmorrison9, Did you know that pirates

helped free slaves in the 1700s?

I don't remember seeing that in any history books.

Well, yeah, they captured slave ships.

The Caribbean was essentially an economy

that demanded the use of slaves.

But what the pirates liked was attacking them

off the West African coast,

because they had trade goods,

and they often had things like gold dust on board.

And when they did capture one with slaves on board,

if there were seamen, they'd recruit them.

Otherwise, they put them ashore.

So it was kind of a reprieve for people who were captured.

They managed to get a taste of freedom

thanks to the pirates.

Of course, being dumped on the shore

wasn't the end of the story.

Because often, in West Africa,

the coastal communities were the ones

who had actually gone out as slave hunters

and sold you into slavery.

So you'd probably have some other challenges to face

once the pirates have set you free.

Some pirate crews, like the ones of Bartholomew Roberts,

had a lot of Africans on board.

And a lot of them were former slaves

who decided to join the pirates,

and the pirates accepted them because they could fight.

About a third of the crew could be Africans.

@edwardj61972059,

What's the name given

to the skull and crossbones pirate flag?

The original pirate flags were known as the Jolly Roger,

from the French joli rouge.

The red is a warning sign, but so, too,

is the use of skull and crossbones,

hourglasses to show that your time's running out.

Skeletons and skulls are signs of death.

They often have ones with pirates drinking with the devil.

It's all designed to intimidate.

And you see a flag like that coming,

it means this is the fate that's going to happen to you.

We're gonna kill you, unless you surrender.

@TheVictor_2 says, Did pirates have pirate bathrooms

on their pirate ships,

or did they just [beep] over the side

when they were at sea?

At any ship of the time,

there wasn't really much in the way of bathrooms.

The naval word for a toilet is the head.

And at the front end of the ship,

that tended to be the place

where the crew would use as their bathroom.

So they did [beep] off the side.

@quora makes the very sensible question of,

Did pirates live in the water,

or did they have homes to go to?

Pirates make the choice to be a pirate.

You and your pirate crew are a floating community.

Once you became a pirate, that was it.

You'd cut ties from everything you knew from society,

your family, your friends, everything,

until either you get a government pardon,

and you can walk away scot-free,

or else you're captured and, usually, hung,

like Bartholomew Roberts, who was captured and killed.

His crew were taken back

and tried in a mass trial and executed.

That was a signal as much as anything else

to other merchant seamen not to become pirates,

or else you will face the same grizzly fate.

@Jeff_Gill says, Why do so many pirates

have to wear eye patches?

It's a dangerous business being a sailor.

Sometimes you get your eye poked out.

Yes, you'd wear an eye patch

if your eye was damaged or knocked out,

probably not like this one with a skull and crossbones on.

That's a kind of modern bonus.

There is an idea that eye patches are useful

for saving an eye for use in the dark.

It improves your night vision.

But there's no real evidence that pirates did that.

The most likely thing is somebody's had their eye poked out.

That's all the questions for today. Thanks for watching.

This has been Pirate Support.

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