(lively bright music)
- Welcome to Hilarious Helmet History.
The show where your cultural historical misconceptions are
even sillier than my helmet.
This week I'm wearing the helmet of the scurvy seas.
A pirate hat.
Because we're talking about pirates.
The outlaw rock stars of sailing.
Also, I'm speaking English so when I say pirates you're
probably picturing white European pirates.
Such as this famous, crazed international criminal.
Or instead of him, Blackbeard.
That other guy.
Anyway you're wrong about these people.
Though you do know how they really looked, you're wrong
about almost all the important stuff.
And you're super wrong if you think white European pirates,
your favorite kind of pirate, were more than a blip on the
historical radar.
They barely even existed.
Let's start with one and two here.
You are kind of right about pirates.
Because almost all pirate lore and pop culture comes from a
kind-of right source.
In 1724, the hit bestselling book A General History Of The
Robberies And Murders Of The Most Notorious Pyrates defined
pirates in the minds of Western audiences.
It defined pirates on its own.
And as the main historical reference for Peter Pan and for
Treasure Island.
The 1950 movie version of which took a joke version of a
regional British accent.
- Smart as paint you be.
- And made it so global and so annoying
it's got an official made-up Internet holiday.
All that came from this one book.
And this book had a mystery author, writing under the pen
name Charles Johnson whose real identity is a mystery to
this day and Charles Johnson listed almost zero sources.
He made lots of stuff up.
However, according to Under The Black Flag, a book by actual
historian David Cordingly, some of Johnson's book is
accurate.
Because Johnson wrote it in pirate times.
He used current newspapers as sources.
And he tracked down eyewitness accounts of a few key things,
such as the crazy style of the famed pirate Blackbeard.
So because our dominant single source for pirate stuff is
kind of accurate our concept of them is kind of accurate
too.
For instance, Johnson said white European pirates dressed
like guys of their time.
And if you Google that era.
If you google "guys in King Charles The Second England", the
guys will look pirate-y to you.
Even the fancier guys look like fancy-pirates.
Also pirates often lost hands at sea.
Many famous pirate captains had Ahab style peg legs.
When raiding a ship, pirates really swung over, armed to the
teeth.
Even eyepatches might've been common and in a way that's
cooler than you think.
Because if you have two working eyes, an eyepatch is an
old-timey night vision goggle.
You wear it over one eye all day, that eye gets used to
darkness, it's born in the dark.
Then at night, you flip the patch up, boom
you're half of a Bane.
And speaking of movies, the navies that pirates fought
against were even bigger (beep) than The Pirates of the
Caribbean movies make them out to be.
The real British Navy kidnapped people, worldwide, to force
them to work as British sailors.
It was a system called impressment.
And that not impressive system got three out of four of its
victims killed, within two years of capture.
Compared to that global government body-snatching, you got
to root for pirates, right?
'Cause they didn't work for The Man, man.
They were outside of The Man's mans.
Like free mans except that they did work for The Man.
Most pirates were The Man's entry-level employees.
You see Spain's navy rode their Christopher Columbus
discovery and gold buzz into the 1600s.
They dominated the Americas.
The rest of Europe got jealous.
So around the 1630s, France, England, and the Netherlands
hired officially licensed pirates, called privateers, to
attack Spanish ships.
And kept hiring them and kept hiring them.
Britain even did stuff like conquering Jamaica, in 1655, to
create more ports for British-backed pirates-not-pirates.
Europe's kings didn't agree to cut that out until the 1690s.
At which point they downsized their privateers.
And those unemployed guys stayed in business, as the true
pirates you're a fan of.
Which means those British navy guys who hate Jack Sparrow,
they're mad at a phenomenon Britain's government created.
Also, the kings crushed that phenomenon as fast as possible.
By the 1720s, the major pirate captains were retired or
dead.
So almost no pirates lived as true skull and crossbones
style outlaws.
Even that skull and crossbones flag is kind of made up.
In his book Life Under The Jolly Roger, historian Gabriel
Kuhn says the first recorded use of a skull and crossbones
was in 1700.
About 25 years before piracy's ended.
Before that, the actual pirate attack flag was bright red.
The French called that color "Jolie Rouge", and the English
mangled that into the term "Jolly Roger", because words are
hard.
And pirates almost never did the romantic pirate stuff.
They aimed to steal boring stuff like food and medicine, not
cool impractical gold.
When they did get gold they spent it because gold is heavy,
and burying treasure is weird and stupid.
Also movies claim that pirates built tons of lawless island
party towns.
In actuality they built one of those, called Port Royal.
It existed for a few years before being hit by an
earthquake, then hit by a tsunami, then hit by diseases that
killed the survivors and spilled the drinks or whatever.
Even pirate raids probably stunk, as drama.
Cordingly writes that in pirate times, the average merchant
ship had a crew of 10 to 18 people.
The average pirate ship had a crew of at least 30 and up to
200 people.
A pirate attack was unfair.
The merchants usually just surrendered.
And pop culture says pirate crews were super co-ed, full of
female first mates and captains played by the hottest babes.
And I'm so sorry, that's not true, this is Charles Johnson's
fault.
He spent a lot of pages on Mary Read and Anne Bonny, two
female European pirates.
But they were practically the only ones.
And a lot of writers romanticize piracy as a space that was
so full of freedom, it was full of diversity.
But white European pirates came from that culture and that
era.
They practically never hired non-white people as anything,
but manual labor.
And pirates treated captured slave ship cargo as cargo.
Because pirates were mostly (beeps).
Also, reminder, they were mostly not outlaws.
And most importantly, if you love Jack Sparrow type outlaw
badass rum pirates, I'm telling you, that was barely a thing
at all.
There were more than a couple of them, for about 35 years.
Timeline-wise, Western history has more than three times as
many years of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball teams.
Many of them with much cooler outfits.
Now, if you wanna talk about pirate traditions in other
parts of the world, hell yeah, that history is epic.
If you watch this YouTube show, you know about Japan's
wokou.
Who were samurai pirates.
If you listen to the Cracked Podcast, you know about China's
long tradition of massive pirate fleets
often led by women like Ching Shih.
And we could do a whole 'nother Hilarious Helmet History
about the so-called Barbary pirates, who conquered the
Mediterranean, then founded a North African country
that lasted into the 1800s and fought two wars against the
United States.
Yeah.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both fought pirate wars.
And somehow there is not a Disney movie about that.
Even though I keep sneaking both of those Hall of Presidents
president-robots onto the pirate ride with me.
Which is a crime, I'm going to jail, this is our last
episode, sorry.