Flaming beards, brutal torture... and women who went into battle topless
Yo-ho-ho indeed! A bottle of rum was the least of the perks that the luckiest 17th Century pirates might expect. Some ships insisted upon equal shares of all plundered treasure to all crew members, down to every last golden doubloon – woke progressive politics gone mad, centuries in advance.
Though the booty was sometimes not so much the wooden treasure chests of fiction: often it was more practical. ‘Most of the pirates’ plunder,’ writes Rebecca Simon in this zesty and eye-opening history, ‘was made up of items they could sell at a high price: textiles, wines and spices.’
And unlike life with the navy – press-ganging, brackish drinking water, starvation rations, flesh-tearing floggings – pirate captains ensured their crews were healthy. On the menu on buccaneer craft were frequently ‘Beefe, Porke, Pease, Fish, Oyle, Bisket, Beere’ and butter, brandy and oats. Not to mention Madeira, avocado and lemon and orange, to stave off skin-rotting, toothloosening scurvy.
In addition, some pirate ships offered compensation for crew injury (just think how much Long John Silver might have claimed – and incidentally, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is credited for its veracity).
Pirates never stop beguiling our imaginations because these men (and sometimes women) lived lives that were both transgressive and weirdly romantic. They were free of obligations to any state, and they roamed the oceans that they chose.
Of course, they were rough and drunken and terrifyingly brutal to those they raided. One torture technique – called ‘woodling’ – involved wrapping a cord around the victim’s forehead and tightening it so far that ‘eyes bulged out, big as eggs’.
But amid the violent mayhem, there beat poetic hearts. Captured pirate Joseph Halsey, sentenced to death at 23 years old, wrote to his mother: ‘…I am only going out of the world a little sooner for it, and I am in hopes to rest with my Maker… this world is only a small space of time for man to dwell in.’
In some ways, this is also a story about the dawn of European empire building: the pirates who haunted the Caribbean and the coasts of Africa were a weird inversion of state-sponsored ruthlessness. Rather than conquering lands, they plundered the conquerors (sexier, more amoral versions of Robin Hood).
Each pirate ship was its own anarchic realm, answering to no monarchs but simply to its own crew. This went for punishment as well as reward. And the conventions of religion often gave way to pagan myths: ghost ships, seductive female spirits and the fear of a living death beneath the waves.
Rebecca Simon has combed a variety of sources to paint a colourful and evocative portrait of that ‘golden age of piracy’ in the late 17th and early 18th Century. Here are the pioneering female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who wore ‘Mens Jackets and Long Trouzers and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads’ and who discombobulated their enemies by flying into battle with their breasts exposed. She explores the reality behind marooning (the most feared of all fates, to be left naked and provision-less on a bare rock), walking the plank (rare) and keel-hauling (dragged beneath the ship, being sliced to pieces by barnacles in the process, also rare, but nightmarish when it did happen).
She does not flinch from the cruelty and lust – ‘rape was an unfortunate reality among pirates’ – but there is also a fascination with lives lived on blue waters outside of the rules.
There were the crewmates who formed intensely close bonds that looked like marriage. Simon records the shipboard affirmation of two such men, who wanted to leave their worldly goods to one another. ‘Be it knowen to all men… that Francis Reed and John Beavis are (entered) in Consortship together.’ We learn of the reality of such legendary piratical figures as Henry Avery and Stede Bonnet. Blackbeard’s theatricality is enjoyably analysed: when launching attacks, his beard was literally smoking, thus burnishing the idea that he had ascended from hell.
Crews came from a variety of backgrounds, though they were united, as an observer wrote, by a ‘defiance of Heaven and contempt of Hell.’ The rare occasions when all prayed as one to their ‘maker’ involved terrifying storms for, as Simon notes, the abiding terror for any pirate was drowning. Yet many ships also made an effort for Christmas: tropical plants served for Christmas trees and boar’s head for lunch.
And the Jolly Roger grinning skull? There are theories this might have been a tribute to a fierce Tamil pirate captain called Al Raja. Though Simon also notes that ‘Old Roger’ was a nickname for the devil. Ultimately, pirates represent a dark yearning in us all: a wild holiday from conventional morality.