Professor digs up treasure with truth about pirate life

Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Thursday, August 3, 2006

Marcus Rediker enjoys a good pirate movie. In fact, he's even hoping to make one himself. But if the University of Pittsburgh scholar eventually gets his pirate story on the big screen, it won't bear a lot of resemblance to Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean series or the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of yore.

Certain Hollywood pirate myths - buried treasure, walking the plank and routinely swinging onto the decks of other ships for fierce hand-to-hand combat - will have to go by the boards. But other elements - peg legs, rum and parrots, for instance - could stay in his film, as long as they were put in the proper context, as befits a man who has spent 30 years studying the story of the pirates who roamed the Atlantic in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

Rediker, who has taught history at Pitt for 12 years and written several books about maritime life in the 1700s, knows he has to tread carefully when he tries to reshape people's ideas about pirates. Thanks to children's classics such as Treasure Island and all the movies that they have spawned, he knows that "people grew up with a fantasy life about pirates, so when I talk to people about my research, I can see in their eyes that childhoods are at stake."

Pirates didn't bury their treasure, he explains, because they didn't expect to live long enough to make it worth saving. And while some creative buccaneer may have made an enemy walk off a plank into the ocean, pirates generally tried to avoid violence, Rediker said. If they could get a merchant ship's crew to surrender in fear by raising the Jolly Roger, that meant the pirates could take what plunder they wanted with minimal loss of life.

If the crew resisted them, though, or its captain had a reputation for brutalizing his sailors, pirates would often wreak punishment that made the plank look like a walk in the park. Mutilations, floggings, shootings and hangings were not uncommon in those cases, and provided lessons in terror that increased the chances that subsequent crews would surrender without a fight.

And what about the Hollywood artifacts that contain a kernel of truth? Peg legs, eye patches and missing hands were common, not just for pirates, but for all sailors of the era, Rediker said. The opportunities for maiming were numerous. Most cargo was carried in heavy casks that could be dislodged in storms; equipment could plummet from the rigging; and, in a battle, the amount of shrapnel created by a cannonball tearing through a wooden ship was truly horrific, he said.

Rum was indeed the drink of choice for sailors of the time (in its watered-down form it was known as grog). Parrots, like the one on Long John Silver's shoulder, or monkeys like the one in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, were common sailors' pets, Rediker said, "because those things were symbols of having been to exotic lands."

The biggest thing missing in pirate films, he said, is a sense of why men became pirates in the first place. It wasn't just the lure of a criminal lifestyle, he said. And unlike the Errol Flynn movies, few pirates were romantic aristocrats who'd had a reversal of fortune.

"Real pirates were not aristocratic," Rediker said. "Real pirates were rough and rugged working people who put their lives on the line in hopes of having a different way of life and getting money in ways they could not expect to get in normal British or American society."

In the late 1600s, many pirates got their start as privateers working for England and the Netherlands, attacking the merchant vessels of France and Spain. But in the last and biggest wave of piracy, which lasted from 1716 to 1726, many pirates were sailors who had mutinied in protest against poor pay, execrable food and brutal discipline.

For sailors on slave ships, joining the pirates also meant avoiding death from African diseases, and the possibility of having to fight a slave rebellion.

The relationship between slaving and piracy is another slice of history that Hollywood has ignored. Pirates liked capturing slave ships because of their size and configuration. While the pirates may have wanted the slave ships, most of the time they didn't want the slaves because they had no way to sell them. If they happened to capture a slave ship, the pirates often would ask many of the slaves if they wanted to join.

Pirate crews not only came from all nations and races, Rediker said, but included a smattering of women, the most famous of whom were Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who joined the crew of Calico Jack Rackam in the West Indies. Bonny and Read originally went to sea disguised as men, something a couple hundred women may have done over several decades, according to records of the East India Co.

The final golden period of piracy that included Bonny and Read was also the era of Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, and the most fearsome pirate of them all, Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts, whose crews captured more than 400 ships in just four years.

One of the most fascinating lessons he learned along the way, Rediker said, is that pirates created for themselves one of the most democratic societies of the time. Because they had lived under the harsh thumbs of often aristocratic captains, pirates were determined to elect their own captains. They also drew up "articles" that specified how they would live together, and voted on whether crew members had violated those rules and how they should be punished.

The only time pirate captains had unquestioned control of their crews was when they were on a raid. The rest of the time, a raucous, argumentative form of democracy prevailed.

The 2,000 or so pirates who operated in the Atlantic in the early 1700s disappeared almost as suddenly as they arose. The beginning of the end came in 1722, when "Black Bart" Roberts was killed while fighting a British man-of-war near Africa and much of his crew was captured. At the same time, many pirates were being captured and hanged in mass executions in America and Africa.

The risk of dying young was something of which every Atlantic sailor was aware; those who went into piracy were under no illusion they would live a long life. The skull and crossbones on the Jolly Roger were borrowed from a symbol that captains entered in their logbooks whenever a sailor died, Rediker said.

"Pirates understood that mortality ruled in the world in which they lived," he said.

Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service