Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Great Polycules of History, the show
Speaker 1: that's usually cool people who did cool stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy and with me today is this week's guest,
Speaker 1: Mariam Roacheck. Hello. He faked us out on the Polycule
Speaker 1: last week, so I know our last episode. Is that
Speaker 1: called a cliffhanger? Is that a bait and switch? Depends
Speaker 1: on if you delivered today. We'll see. Yeah, we'll deliver today.
Speaker 1: Sophie as our producer. Hi, Sophie, how are you? I
Speaker 1: am wow? How are you good? Do you know the
Speaker 1: Nick Cave song sixteen feet of Snow or something like that?
Speaker 1: No should I This is a song where he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm buried under sixteen feet of pure white snow. It's
Speaker 1: about cocaine. But since you're currently buried under snow, are
Speaker 1: you gonna make a joke the sixteen feet of snow
Speaker 1: that is my backyard? Yeah? Exactly. You two are buried
Speaker 1: under cocaine, much like Nick Cave. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: my dog fucking loves it. But that makes that sounds
Speaker 1: that sounds bad, especially with that Cocaine Bear movie that's
Speaker 1: coming out. What there's a movie called Cocaine Bear that's
Speaker 1: it's actually just straight up called that. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: based on a true star. Oh, it's about someone smuggling
Speaker 1: or is it about bear that gets into some cocaine?
Speaker 1: So like a bale of cocaine fell off of an airplane,
Speaker 1: I guess yeah, and it ended up in the woods,
Speaker 1: And what really happened is some a bear got into it,
Speaker 1: and I think die die? Yeah, because sorry, cocaine isn't
Speaker 1: good for bears, um only people. Yeah, I don't basically
Speaker 1: don't do drugs. I don't know why I'm pretending like, okay,
Speaker 1: yeah I was, But then the movie is like, what
Speaker 1: if instead of dying, the bear became a cocaine fueled
Speaker 1: bear monster? Just yeah, which is like, well that would
Speaker 1: have been more interesting in I love living in this world.
Speaker 1: That makes no sense anymore. I can't wait till the
Speaker 1: first Ai movie. Okay anyway, Ah, that's what definitely what
Speaker 1: we're talking about today. So if that first DAI movie
Speaker 1: came out and we watched it without paying, what would
Speaker 1: that make us pirates like today's Wow, and by heroes,
Speaker 1: I mean thank you. You wouldn't download a galleon. No,
Speaker 1: if movie pirates were serial killers to the same degree
Speaker 1: as Colden Age Pirates. I don't know the world will
Speaker 1: be different. That would be the movie. Instead of Cocaine Bear,
Speaker 1: it would be movie pirates acting like regular pirates. You
Speaker 1: download a movie and then all of a sudden, you
Speaker 1: fucking okay anyway you download the movie by showing up
Speaker 1: outside of her brothers and being like, give me that
Speaker 1: Batman movie, or I will burn down all of your shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I already killed three of your kids. Ian as our
Speaker 1: audio engineer. Our theme music was written forced by young
Speaker 1: woman where we last left our serial killers, our heroes,
Speaker 1: the Golden Age had just kicked off, and the pirates
Speaker 1: are building themselves a counterculture. Let's talk about that culture
Speaker 1: and how they worked. They are specifically and consciously Okay, actually,
Speaker 1: once again everyone's making this up. But there is like
Speaker 1: some shit like that people sort of know when people
Speaker 1: are able to kind of like best case. I mean,
Speaker 1: historians aren't like like pop history writers like me suck
Speaker 1: and like aren't trustworthy, but historians like try to figure
Speaker 1: things out. What about that time everybody decided that Daniel
Speaker 1: Dafoe wrote I keep wanting to say, well, Limb Dafoe,
Speaker 1: by the way, different guy decided that Daniel Dafoe wrote
Speaker 1: all the Pirates stories. Yeah it's a good point, Okay,
Speaker 1: so but theoretically best I'm able to parse together this
Speaker 1: seemingly near consensus. Actually I would be like the consensus
Speaker 1: of all the different writers, but they all just completely
Speaker 1: disagree with each other. They all lived in blood, and
Speaker 1: then they're like, no, they were like kind of mostly
Speaker 1: nice and only occasionally killed people. Like it's just fucking
Speaker 1: I don't fucking know, Okay, So they specifically and consciously
Speaker 1: we're looking to invert or subvert everything they knew about
Speaker 1: the cultures they were from that much, I do believe
Speaker 1: every ship seemed to develop its own social norms, because
Speaker 1: I mean, these are the fuckers who put the chaotic
Speaker 1: and chaotic neutral or evil. They had a chaotic culture.
Speaker 1: When pirates voted, which they did all the time, the
Speaker 1: losers of an important vote would leave the ship, so
Speaker 1: that the pirate crew stayed in consensus with itself. But
Speaker 1: most of the time the losers were like born no
Speaker 1: bad blood, so they would just be like given one
Speaker 1: of the ships in the fleet, because like, if you
Speaker 1: steal ships for a living, you got a lot of ships,
Speaker 1: and so good at it. Yeah, okay, fair enough, and
Speaker 1: if you're not, you're dead. So most of the pirates
Speaker 1: you meet are either untested or good. Well, I've stolen
Speaker 1: a ship one time and I'm still alive, so you're
Speaker 1: a fucking good pirate. The losers are born no bad blood,
Speaker 1: and they often go and start a new venture and
Speaker 1: so this like and therefore they like bring a ton
Speaker 1: of the culture with them, so their culture spreads really
Speaker 1: organically chaotically. It's a sort of a hydra or an amiba.
Speaker 1: It gets called a hydra, but I think an amibas
Speaker 1: some more accurate. And the first thing pirate crew will do, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly a new pirate crew will do is that whenever
Speaker 1: they whether they start by mutiny or splitting off from
Speaker 1: an existing fleet, which also sometimes happens if they take
Speaker 1: a prize, and they're just like all right, even though
Speaker 1: they don't have a vote, They're like, fuck it, a
Speaker 1: bunch of us are going to go start over there.
Speaker 1: They elect a captain, they drop their articles, the pirate constitution,
Speaker 1: which is like the list of rules. It also just
Speaker 1: talks about like how money is going to get split. Usually,
Speaker 1: like the captain gets about twice as much as everyone else,
Speaker 1: but only twice as much. And the quartermaster gets like
Speaker 1: point one point five and the ship's cook gets one
Speaker 1: point two five and shit, and it talks about what's
Speaker 1: communal and what isn't, and then they all write down
Speaker 1: the rules and then they get really fucking drunk and
Speaker 1: they start shooting cannons off, which sounds fun. Not recommendable,
Speaker 1: but fun. Yeah, get drunk, play with cannons. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: don't stand downside. I know, I wonder whether there's like
Speaker 1: like the black powder pistol. I mean, now you probably
Speaker 1: still shouldn't suck around with them when you're drunk, but
Speaker 1: it's like, no, definitely don't, but it does seem like
Speaker 1: harder to anyway. Yes, yes, the gun where you have
Speaker 1: to pour the gun power into it from like a
Speaker 1: random bottle while you're drunk, is definitely safer. One for me,
Speaker 1: one for the gun, the one for me, one for
Speaker 1: the gun. So they create this culture, and it is
Speaker 1: a specific counterculture. There's like a couple thousands of pirates
Speaker 1: and they fucking know each other. Like I one an
Speaker 1: article I read, I think it was being pretty accurate.
Speaker 1: It was like, well, there's a click of pirate captains,
Speaker 1: and that's where the cult, you know, that's what it is,
Speaker 1: because it's just like twenty to eighty of them, you know,
Speaker 1: captain like fleets and ships or whatever. At any given time,
Speaker 1: most pirates drop their Christian names and take on new names.
Speaker 1: On shore, they wear crazy elaborate rich people clothes because
Speaker 1: they can, because they stole those clothes from crazy elaborate
Speaker 1: rich people. From Steven Snelder's book The Devil's Anarchy. At
Speaker 1: a time when seamen generally wore blue jackets, checkered shirts,
Speaker 1: long canvas trousers, or baggy breeches, red red waistcoasts where
Speaker 1: red waist could you try and say it? Red waistcoats,
Speaker 1: and scarves around their necks, pirates added all kinds of
Speaker 1: plundered silks, velvets, and brocades to their outfits. They probably
Speaker 1: didn't do this like on deck all the time. They
Speaker 1: probably did sometimes no one really knows, but people are
Speaker 1: kind of like they probably were a little more practical
Speaker 1: while they're like climbing around rigging and ship you've climbed
Speaker 1: around rigging, I have. And contemporary tall ships don't use
Speaker 1: quite as much tar on everything as they did back then.
Speaker 1: But you get a little bit of pine tar on
Speaker 1: some of your clothes, you're gonna not want to do
Speaker 1: that again if you like those clothes. So I had
Speaker 1: like a cool stolen brocade silk coat, I would probably
Speaker 1: not wear it while climbing around in the rigging. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's good to know. You're ruining my dreams. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can do it. You just have to make sure
Speaker 1: you steal some more cool coats. Yeah, that's true. You
Speaker 1: probably have your like, well, this is the really expensive
Speaker 1: one that was going to go to the English King
Speaker 1: that I wear when I'm in the rigging and it's
Speaker 1: all fucked up. And this is the other one that
Speaker 1: was going to go to this English King that I
Speaker 1: wear on shore. It's all a way to taunt society.
Speaker 1: It's also probably because they like think it rules. They
Speaker 1: wore heavy gold jewelry and basically just costume levels of clothing.
Speaker 1: They mostly wore them around town. There's no specific history
Speaker 1: of them actually wearing earrings. And then actually I were
Speaker 1: kind of curious if you know more about this. What
Speaker 1: I've been able to read is that it pre dates
Speaker 1: They predate the Western sailor tattoo culture by a fair amount,
Speaker 1: but they might have had tattoos anyway, based on the
Speaker 1: idea that European traditional tattooing hadn't actually completely gone out
Speaker 1: of gone away at this point. And then of course
Speaker 1: they're heavily influenced by the indigenous people of the Caribbean.
Speaker 1: What I what I have read, and that this could
Speaker 1: be wrong, but what I've read suggests that tattooing was
Speaker 1: pretty widespread among sailors at that time. But we have
Speaker 1: more record of pirate tattoos because if you were wanted,
Speaker 1: all of your tattoos got written down. It makes sense, okay.
Speaker 1: And if you were not, if you were just some guy,
Speaker 1: nobody was like making note of your tattoo twos because
Speaker 1: who gives a shit. But if you are somebody who,
Speaker 1: like the government, would quite like to kill, they are
Speaker 1: going to have a detailed description of you, which, if
Speaker 1: you are tattooed, would include your tattoos, because it's all
Speaker 1: they have, like photographs of you. No, okay, so I'm
Speaker 1: actually yeah. I read one article that was like Western
Speaker 1: sailor tattoo culture comes in later in the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: like the middle or the end of the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: But the fact that because the most trustworthy history we
Speaker 1: have on the pirates is the criminal records, the court
Speaker 1: records and all that shit. And so they're naming the tattoos,
Speaker 1: I'm probably like, I know, we also have an extensive
Speaker 1: list of every tattoo that the bounty mutineers had. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like they were in trouble, so somebody took the
Speaker 1: cho you know when, took the time to like write
Speaker 1: down all their tattoos. I think the book I read
Speaker 1: was wrong or or I'm wrong. Now my money is
Speaker 1: on you being right. I appreciate that, like just talking it.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, I mean I just read it
Speaker 1: like a million different random ass books that all disagree
Speaker 1: with each other and come up with what makes the
Speaker 1: most sense. That's how I write these, especially this episode.
Speaker 1: Just read a million books that disagree with each other
Speaker 1: and then agree with the ones that agree with me.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's how you do history. Yeah. While the
Speaker 1: Royal English Navy was at this point early eighteenth century
Speaker 1: on an anti buggery campaign, there is no evidence that
Speaker 1: any single set of Pirate articles banned browing down with
Speaker 1: the bros. So you know, and of course, you know,
Speaker 1: as we talked about last time, you can't look back
Speaker 1: and say like they were gay because the wrong way
Speaker 1: of looking at it. Pirates were notorious for fucking ladies.
Speaker 1: They were also notorious for raping captives, and they also
Speaker 1: almost certainly fucked each other a lot. Whatever doesn't make
Speaker 1: them straight, doesn't make them gay, make them pirates. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there does seem to be like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: there seems to be evidence that the pirates were fine
Speaker 1: with whatever your preference was. Heterosexually hadn't been invented yet anyway,
Speaker 1: So and it seems to be telling that like throughout
Speaker 1: the time, most most buccaneers and pirates, if they retire,
Speaker 1: which the smart ones do, the ones who lived to
Speaker 1: be old do. Um, they don't go back to Europe.
Speaker 1: They join non European cultures because European culture sucks and
Speaker 1: because well a lot of them are like, um, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, all of the buccaneers and privateers and shit
Speaker 1: are also included within this like overall, not like retiring
Speaker 1: back to ye olde England. But yeah, mostly they retire
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the ocean or the end of
Speaker 1: a rope. They are very accepting of disability, which makes
Speaker 1: sense because they fight people with swords for a living.
Speaker 1: Many pirates did in fact have peg legs. The articles
Speaker 1: make it clear. The articles, like their constitutions, um make
Speaker 1: it clear that people who are disabled in the course
Speaker 1: of their you know, job, would be compensated and would
Speaker 1: be allowed to stay with the pirates or leave as
Speaker 1: they wanted. Yeah. I remember seeing articles that list like
Speaker 1: what amount of money you will get for the destruction
Speaker 1: of any given limit, Like at the end it includes
Speaker 1: like ears. Yeah, it real. It goes very very specific there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like the longest part of it, Like the constitution
Speaker 1: would be like and this is what's going to happen,
Speaker 1: and then it's like here's the long footnote, the list
Speaker 1: of Yeah, totally. I saw it referred to as the
Speaker 1: first Western social security system, and it wasn't a society
Speaker 1: of one against all. And I think this is the
Speaker 1: biggest thing that Hollywood pirates are kind of wrong about maybe,
Speaker 1: is that within the ranks of pirates there's a sort
Speaker 1: of collectivism and anti authoritarianism and an incredible amount of
Speaker 1: generosity not universally right, And you absolutely have like captains
Speaker 1: who will like shoot one of their fucking crew members
Speaker 1: and just are like what I'm captain often. That same
Speaker 1: Beard famously once shot his first mate in the knee
Speaker 1: during a game of cards and then said, well, if
Speaker 1: I don't shoot someone every once in a while, my
Speaker 1: crew will forget who I am. Yeah, which is like
Speaker 1: not a overly collectivist approach to hang out with your buddies.
Speaker 1: Didn't you get voted out? I can't. I don't know.
Speaker 1: He got beheaded, that's right. Um, yeah, that's like a
Speaker 1: version of voted out. No, I'd like, yeah when I
Speaker 1: whenever I read about not all of them, but like
Speaker 1: I read about pirate captains who will be like particularly authoritarian,
Speaker 1: and then the crew will like mutiny instead of like
Speaker 1: most pirate crews just vote, you know, but if you're
Speaker 1: an authoritarian one, then they mutiny and then like kill you.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's Blackbeard was not beheaded by
Speaker 1: his now yeah yeah, yeah, but um, I didn't really.
Speaker 1: I think he had kind of gone all the way
Speaker 1: sort of back around sound an authoritarian where it became like, wow,
Speaker 1: we really actually shouldn't mess with this guy. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's probably effective too, which you know, yeah but anyway, no, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: hard on his luck. Pirate could be given a whole
Speaker 1: fucking ship. You could be like hanging out in a
Speaker 1: pirate port and be like, oh, it was like it sucks.
Speaker 1: Don't want to be a pirate, but I don't have
Speaker 1: a ship anymore. I'm like having a rough time. People
Speaker 1: might be like like, they'll they'll give you the ship
Speaker 1: off their back. Eh, and uh, now that's something we
Speaker 1: should bring back to tall ship culture. Give people the
Speaker 1: ship off your back. Just giving people ships, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, if you see a person down in
Speaker 1: the port who looks bummed out, just be like half ship, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then the person's like thanks, and then the cops
Speaker 1: come running. You're like, I mean that wasn't mine, but
Speaker 1: you can have it. I'll cut the rope that attaches
Speaker 1: it to the shore or whatever. It's yeah, fast up, um.
Speaker 1: And you're on a tall ship and they have speedboats,
Speaker 1: you're in trouble. They stood up for each other against
Speaker 1: their collective enemies aka the entire world. A port that
Speaker 1: would hang some pirates might get cannonaded and burned to
Speaker 1: the ground by avenging pirates from a completely different crew.
Speaker 1: Most stayed sort of Christian, some were Zealots, Protestant mostly,
Speaker 1: some were kind of this like weirddest thing that they
Speaker 1: have going on that I didn't really learn as much
Speaker 1: about as I kind of wanted to. And then others
Speaker 1: were like blasphemous as hell and basically Satanists just like
Speaker 1: an intentional inversion of Christian values, or at least we're
Speaker 1: presenting that as part of our like we're scary demons
Speaker 1: from hell. Fuck you give us your stuff. And they
Speaker 1: changed the nature of the like the idea of home
Speaker 1: to basically be wherever they were, which fucking rules, and
Speaker 1: it specifically disrupted a lot of nationalist ideas. Not all
Speaker 1: crews were all mixed different nationalities, but a lot of
Speaker 1: them were, and they would speak different mixed languages full
Speaker 1: of cuss words. They really did cuss a lot, apparently. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is like something that you see people writing about
Speaker 1: in history, is like how these people swear a lot.
Speaker 1: But then if you actually like look at what the
Speaker 1: people how the people were swearing, it looks very tame
Speaker 1: by today's standards. It's like ninety percent blasphemy. So it's
Speaker 1: like all these people are like shocked, and then it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody said, god damn, You're like, yeah, it's disappointing, I know,
Speaker 1: and then like basically called them like dunder heads or something,
Speaker 1: you know, like their sense of hierarchy and authority did
Speaker 1: not line up with Western civilizations. Sometimes they are understood
Speaker 1: as protodemocrats and their captains are generally electable and recallable.
Speaker 1: Obviously not always as we talked about, but I read
Speaker 1: and it's convincing that it's better understood anthropologically, something more
Speaker 1: kin to the way that tons of culture has handled
Speaker 1: authority before the development of the state, and specifically the
Speaker 1: carib people, and the ways that anthropologically that makes this
Speaker 1: comparison electable and recallable. Their power rested on merit. The
Speaker 1: power was controlled by the community to various degrees. Their
Speaker 1: primary task is to keep between the people on the
Speaker 1: ship and or be involved in like war fighting stuff.
Speaker 1: The captain takes the largest share of the treasure, but
Speaker 1: they don't end up enriched by this. They specifically are
Speaker 1: expected to be the most generous people and if you
Speaker 1: want to learn like all about this shit, read David
Speaker 1: Graber's stuff. And the only time their authority is considered
Speaker 1: absolute and unquestionable like overall, is in combat, and most
Speaker 1: of the time the captain didn't even get the captain's
Speaker 1: quarters because they weren't better than everyone else. And the
Speaker 1: captain's quarters, I think sometimes we're like literally cut off
Speaker 1: the ship. But I don't know. That didn't quite make
Speaker 1: sense to me. Don't do that, Yeah, like as somebody
Speaker 1: who likes ships, don't do that. I think they mostly
Speaker 1: just use them for other stuff. And there were exceptions
Speaker 1: to a lot of this. Definitely don't Sorry I call
Speaker 1: bullshit on that. I don't. I don't believe that the
Speaker 1: cutting the thing off the ship, yeah, you know that
Speaker 1: one like structural integrity to worry about. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: could see just like turning the what would have been
Speaker 1: the captain's quarters into like a general party central and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: letting people sleep elsewhere. I think it was a symbolic
Speaker 1: language that did not necessarily carry across the centuries that
Speaker 1: particular piece. And so they're not like a president or
Speaker 1: even necessarily exactly like a captain of a ship in
Speaker 1: a Western sense, although they're a way closer to that
Speaker 1: and often are that, but a lot more like the
Speaker 1: role of chief as is described in a lot of
Speaker 1: stateless societies, and as likely as an a coincidence, they
Speaker 1: literally got the word buccaneer from the ship that they
Speaker 1: learned from the carib people about how to smoke meat
Speaker 1: and hang out in hammock and use a dugout canoe.
Speaker 1: And then one thing that history seems to claim back
Speaker 1: then but is not true, is that they would be
Speaker 1: like and also the Caribs were cannibals. But I believe
Speaker 1: that that is not the case. It is not true,
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, I don't know. There might have
Speaker 1: been some guy somewhere doing something, but my understanding is
Speaker 1: that what would happen is like Europeans would show up,
Speaker 1: you know, heavy quotes, exploring the Caribbean, and they would
Speaker 1: go to any given island and be like, hey, what's up.
Speaker 1: We've heard that you guys eat each other over here,
Speaker 1: and the people would be like, oh, yeah, no, that's
Speaker 1: the next island over. Yeah, they do that over there.
Speaker 1: And they would also say the same thing about like hey,
Speaker 1: where's their gold. They would be like, oh, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: over there, it's on that next island over, Which is
Speaker 1: how like Columbus ended up like bumbling around from island
Speaker 1: to island like because everybody would just be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: all the stuff you're talking about it's definitely over there,
Speaker 1: and they would head off to the other island where
Speaker 1: they would be told, oh, yeah, the gold and cannibals,
Speaker 1: it's definitely the next island over. Yeah, And so they
Speaker 1: would never run into either of those things because that
Speaker 1: wasn't really a thing. No, that makes sense, And I
Speaker 1: mean it's like, I you know, I read a history
Speaker 1: book that was like, and the pirates got their cannibalism
Speaker 1: from the Carab people. But the Carab people, I don't
Speaker 1: believe we're cannibals, and so there's a lot of I
Speaker 1: guess it's the way of being Like, doesn't mean the
Speaker 1: pirates didn't get their cannibalism from the fictional idea of
Speaker 1: the carib people that was in circulation. Oh that's a
Speaker 1: really good point. Yeah, totally. So they create this egalitarian
Speaker 1: murder society and it only extends the bros, white bros
Speaker 1: almost exclusively. Although time for history argument time there were
Speaker 1: noted black pirates who were free and equal on their
Speaker 1: ships and were like notorious for never giving up during
Speaker 1: fights because capture might mean return to slavery. There's an
Speaker 1: argument about overall to what degree African sailors on pirate
Speaker 1: ships were in one of three different categories, seen as
Speaker 1: equals or you know, pirates right, or whether they're essentially
Speaker 1: there is like kind of like hired servants in a
Speaker 1: way that indigenous people often works will get to that,
Speaker 1: or as slaves, and my guesses was a mix of three,
Speaker 1: and it was different on different ships because there seemed
Speaker 1: to be sources sighting dire actually all of these positions
Speaker 1: in different places, different times. Edward England was an irishman
Speaker 1: who was one of the only pirates who actually Classic
Speaker 1: Jolly Roger a terrible name for an Irish guy. He
Speaker 1: changed his name to England. Why I don't know, because
Speaker 1: he was like one of the most egalitarian pirates, one
Speaker 1: of the only English Irish pirate captains. He changed his
Speaker 1: name to England has probably hated enemy like four times over.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe he was like everyone's picking a
Speaker 1: really like scary name, right, like John Death over there,
Speaker 1: I need a fucking scary name the British. It's like
Speaker 1: one of those scariest people I know. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: actually one of the only people who flew the classic
Speaker 1: Jolly Roger as we know it today. And I just
Speaker 1: think it's cool that one of that that particular flag,
Speaker 1: that version of the Jolly Roger, the scollm Bone, was
Speaker 1: flown by one of the more directly anti racist as
Speaker 1: compared to the incredibly racist pirates which were more common. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Indigenous people, particularly the Mosquito people, were on board. Apparently
Speaker 1: most ships separate. They weren't. They were basically hired to
Speaker 1: be there. I don't know whether it was equal shares.
Speaker 1: I straight up don't know, but most ships would have
Speaker 1: folks there who basically were there as like scouts and
Speaker 1: then as turtlers, and they would catch turtles and feed
Speaker 1: the crew. We're just going to pretend that they caught
Speaker 1: turtles and would feed the crew, and those are two
Speaker 1: separate things. Yeah, totally, they would catch turtles, hang out
Speaker 1: with the turtles because the pirates were sort of boorish company,
Speaker 1: and then feed fish. Well, turtles, as we know, eat pizza,
Speaker 1: so they probably just the turtles would share their pizza
Speaker 1: with the pirates. That's probably how it went. That is
Speaker 1: actually how all pirates fed themselves traditionally, and is totally
Speaker 1: not put in here by the Turtle Lobby, who is
Speaker 1: our primary sponsor, but it does make a lot of
Speaker 1: sense that you that they would want to have like
Speaker 1: people on board who just like knew where the fuck
Speaker 1: they were, because this is also like before you know,
Speaker 1: any kind of a lot of like modern navigational equipment
Speaker 1: or even like good maps. So if you were sailing somewhere,
Speaker 1: especially somewhere like near land, it would be really good
Speaker 1: to have somebody around who actually like knows the waters
Speaker 1: you're in and can like tell you where not to sail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: although I do want because I think that's almost certainly
Speaker 1: true for a lot of it while they're in the Caribbean.
Speaker 1: But these are like all they're going all over the
Speaker 1: fucking world. Us they were just called guys. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so hard to fucking know how they all related.
Speaker 1: But but um, but turtles. Did you know that turtles are?
Speaker 1: I don't know any turtle facts, U, but there are
Speaker 1: primary sponsors. So listen to these ads about turtles and
Speaker 1: we are back. So Honestly, the pirates in general just
Speaker 1: kind of like messed up boundaries about what it meant
Speaker 1: to be free or unfree, and even like the individual pirate,
Speaker 1: even the white French pirate guy, like you know, there's
Speaker 1: like all of these things about they lived so free,
Speaker 1: they all had voting rights or whatever, right, but like,
Speaker 1: especially by the end, most of the pirates by the
Speaker 1: end are getting their start because pirates attack their ship
Speaker 1: and are like, you're pirates. Now, this is like how
Speaker 1: America spreads freedom. Yeah, there's a lot of comparisons. There's
Speaker 1: no one who's such a big part of us myth,
Speaker 1: you know, and so like I think it was like, look,
Speaker 1: we're taking this ship and we're not going to kill you,
Speaker 1: but you can't go anywhere until we're in the middle
Speaker 1: of the ocean, you know. And so a lot of
Speaker 1: people who like come like some people like sign up
Speaker 1: right away and or like sign me the fuck up.
Speaker 1: Fuck yeah, fuck these people, and then other people are
Speaker 1: like I don't want to and basically like who hang
Speaker 1: out as prisoners until they get to shore or like
Speaker 1: I'm sure it goes different every fucking time, you know.
Speaker 1: And I think and I actually don't know as much
Speaker 1: about this, but you probably know more about it. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like how sailors were in general at that point, right,
Speaker 1: you have it all these like what's the name for
Speaker 1: the assholes to go around the docks and find drunk
Speaker 1: people and make them be press gangs? Press gangs. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you, I mean that would be only like
Speaker 1: you were only going to end up on a navy
Speaker 1: ship that way. But like, yeah, people were definitely working
Speaker 1: on ships that they did not wish to be working on. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Freedom is not a binary thing, and between slavery and freedom,
Speaker 1: you know, even within like different types of enslavement, there's
Speaker 1: a millions of different things. And I don't know whatever
Speaker 1: pirates real omplicated about all this shit. They did, however,
Speaker 1: work as little as possible, which rules Pirate ships were
Speaker 1: crammed overflowing with people. Often five times as many people
Speaker 1: would be on pirate ships as the equivalent sized merchant ship,
Speaker 1: because when you fight people with swords for a living,
Speaker 1: it's nicer when there's more people on your side than
Speaker 1: the other side, which meant less ship work for everyone.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a big if you've got time to lean it,
Speaker 1: you've got time to clean culture overall, and they get money,
Speaker 1: they'd hit the shore, they'd hang out in party till
Speaker 1: the money was gone. They'd spend it on booze and
Speaker 1: gambling and hiring sex workers. Then they go get money again,
Speaker 1: very drink and be merry for tomorrow we die, which
Speaker 1: apparently the life of a regular sailor around this time
Speaker 1: is like roughly as dangerous as the life of a pirate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because there's all these pirates out there. Okay, fair, No,
Speaker 1: I mean being a sailor it was incredibly dangerous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you might as well not do it for government
Speaker 1: or whatever as they put it, but you might as
Speaker 1: well do it in a context where you will get
Speaker 1: a lot of money instead of very little money. And yeah,
Speaker 1: to to go get ship faced whenever you feel like it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I will argue that the smartest pirates are the
Speaker 1: ones who did not get on the boats and lived
Speaker 1: on shore and sold them things like booze and sex,
Speaker 1: because apparently the average pirate lasted about two years on
Speaker 1: sea before dying or retiring. Makes sense. Yeah, But also
Speaker 1: if you retire after two years, you have picked a
Speaker 1: great career. That's also a really good point. And as
Speaker 1: I said before, you know, there's like this thing that
Speaker 1: broke Spanish rule in America and like change the face
Speaker 1: of everything or whatever. It's like four thousand person subculture
Speaker 1: at its like fucking peak. And I think that there's
Speaker 1: a really good Margaret Mead quote about pirates. Never doubt
Speaker 1: that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
Speaker 1: the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Speaker 1: I yes, the great topebag quote. Yeah, and that's exactly
Speaker 1: what she was talking about. Yeah, exactly. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: talk about one of my favorites. There's this guy named
Speaker 1: Sam Bellamy, Samuel Bellamy or Black Sam. None of these
Speaker 1: guys are black, literally in England, I think at the time,
Speaker 1: being called black ment you had black hair. It's the best.
Speaker 1: I think that's I think that's right. Yeah, he got
Speaker 1: into piracy because he was trying to support his pregnant girlfriend,
Speaker 1: who later winds up known as the Witch of well Fleet. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's very cool. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Speaker 1: Goes like I love that. Oh yeah, no, this guy rules,
Speaker 1: and he's like, I mean, I also love that he's
Speaker 1: like going off to do piracy to support his pregnant girlfriend. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a that's the honorable thing to do, right there. Well,
Speaker 1: first he tries to go be a treasure hunter, um,
Speaker 1: to like go find a shipwrecker whatever, and it just
Speaker 1: doesn't pay. And so he's like, all right, I'm signing
Speaker 1: it up as a pirate and I got to eliminate
Speaker 1: the middleman when it comes to plundering shipwrecks. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: just like you know, rob bosses instead of being robbed
Speaker 1: by bosses, seemed like a better strategy. Absolutely, So he
Speaker 1: joins up with this guy Hornigold and who black Beard
Speaker 1: is serving under it this time when Hornigold he's too
Speaker 1: much of a patriot to attack British ships, so the
Speaker 1: crew is like, sucks, and the crew agrees, so they
Speaker 1: vote him out and they vote in Black Sam, who
Speaker 1: black Beard actually serves under for a little while, I believe,
Speaker 1: and the asshole Hornigold later he gets accepts the King's
Speaker 1: pardon and then he becomes a pirate hunter. Fortunately he
Speaker 1: wrecked himself on some coral and did a dying Black
Speaker 1: Sam's flag. I do know a story that I have
Speaker 1: read about Hornigold, and I don't know if this is true,
Speaker 1: but I like it. I don't know any stories besides
Speaker 1: these for Gold, so it was very horny for gold.
Speaker 1: But there's a story that his ship once chased down
Speaker 1: some like random merchant ship, which like immediately was like okay, okay,
Speaker 1: we surrender, Like these guys are very dangerous and then
Speaker 1: a very apologetic Hornigold steps on board and is like, listen,
Speaker 1: we're not really going to rob you that much. I
Speaker 1: just I need all your hats because my crew got
Speaker 1: drunk last night and they threw all the hats overboard,
Speaker 1: and so just like, please give me all your hats
Speaker 1: and I will leave and we will say no more
Speaker 1: about it. And I have no idea if this is true,
Speaker 1: but I love it very much. I mean, there's definitely
Speaker 1: like it seems like it wasn't like, oh, there's pirates.
Speaker 1: They will absolutely attack us. I think it would be
Speaker 1: like sometimes they like hang out with you and party
Speaker 1: and sometimes they murder you, and sometimes they do one
Speaker 1: and then the other, you know, like yeah, sometimes they
Speaker 1: just need your hats. Yeah. So Hornigold the hat pirate
Speaker 1: turn pirate hunter. He racks himself, he dies. Black Sam
Speaker 1: is the captain. I don't know the overlap of time here,
Speaker 1: but you know, Black Sam gets elected in as Hornigle's
Speaker 1: voted out. And his flag is the classic Jolly Roger
Speaker 1: the skull and bones. That's two for two for the
Speaker 1: cooler pirates using this flag that I'm aware of so far.
Speaker 1: He saw himself as a Robin Hood quite consciously. His
Speaker 1: crew was not the only crew that called themselves Robin
Speaker 1: Hood's married men. He carried four dueling pistols in his sash.
Speaker 1: He never wore a powdered wig, which is what a
Speaker 1: lot of the pirate captains were doing at that time. Instead,
Speaker 1: he grew his black hair long and tied it back
Speaker 1: back with a black satin bow. He was famous for
Speaker 1: being merciful to those he captured. At one point, they
Speaker 1: capture this ship and he's like, all right, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna take stuff and we'll let the captain keep his ship.
Speaker 1: And his crew is like, now we're going to burn
Speaker 1: the fucking ship. And he's like, all right, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not the authoritarian leader here, so I
Speaker 1: guess we're burning in it. And at that point, this point,
Speaker 1: Black Sam gives the ballerus speech in pirate history that
Speaker 1: is probably made up, but it might be within his
Speaker 1: character or maybe yet a fucking chronicler, I don't know,
Speaker 1: or maybe like sometimes the line between fiction and fact
Speaker 1: is a little hazy, and it doesn't super matter if
Speaker 1: he really said it, because we know that people believed
Speaker 1: he said it. Yep, yeah, Okay, here's the quote, though
Speaker 1: you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those
Speaker 1: who submit to be governed by laws which rich men
Speaker 1: have made for their own security. For the cowardly whelps
Speaker 1: have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get
Speaker 1: by knavery. But damn ye altogether, damn them for a
Speaker 1: pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for
Speaker 1: a parcel of henhearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do,
Speaker 1: when there is only this difference. They rob the poor
Speaker 1: under the cover of law forsooth, and we plunder the
Speaker 1: rich under the tection of our own courage. But there
Speaker 1: is no arguing that such sniveling puppies who allow superiors
Speaker 1: to kick them around around deck at pleasure henhearted numbskulls. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that fucking rules. Yeah, it's such. It's I love the
Speaker 1: balance of like sneaking puppy, henhearted numbskulls, and they rob
Speaker 1: the poor under the cover of law, and we plunder
Speaker 1: the rich under the protection of our own courage. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's like some absolutely amazing lines in there, and then
Speaker 1: some yes stuff that sounds like what a grandmother says
Speaker 1: to avoid swearing. I know, but this is the grandma
Speaker 1: that has just captured your ship and is about to
Speaker 1: set it on fire with you on it. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I'm a sneaking puppy. Yeah. And so he was incredibly successful.
Speaker 1: Him and his crew did really well. So he turned
Speaker 1: around and headed back home to New England to the
Speaker 1: aforementioned pregnant girlfriend, presumably at this point now a mother,
Speaker 1: the Witch of Wealth Fleet. But in seventeen seventeen, just
Speaker 1: as he's about to make it home, his ship was
Speaker 1: caught in a storm and sank. Many of the men drowned,
Speaker 1: many were captured and hanged, but Black Sam's body was
Speaker 1: never found. This isn't this isn't like, this is actual
Speaker 1: this part um. Black Sam's body was never found. There
Speaker 1: was a body that people assumed for hundreds of years
Speaker 1: was him, but they DNA tested him again it against
Speaker 1: this his descendants, and it wasn't him. I Like, So
Speaker 1: what you're saying is he could still be out there
Speaker 1: with his witch that Yeah, I'm going with that vision exactly.
Speaker 1: He's just like in the woods witch like thriving. I know,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's cool. I'm down. I know. The sad
Speaker 1: part is The reason she's called the Witch of wealth
Speaker 1: Leet is because she was pregnant and wasn't married. They
Speaker 1: chased her out of town into the world. Actually, you
Speaker 1: don't actually have to be a witch to be pregnant
Speaker 1: and not married. You don't need to know any magic atvolved. Really,
Speaker 1: you can get pregnant entirely naturally. I've tried and it's
Speaker 1: not working. I mean, being a witch wouldn't hurt in
Speaker 1: some situations. Wait, Margaret, you're not a witch. No, I said,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get pregnant and it's not I thought
Speaker 1: I thought you were sick markets not a witch. And
Speaker 1: I was like, wait a time. You might need to
Speaker 1: witch harder in this particular situation. But there are witches involved.
Speaker 1: In mind. This is enough me talking about sex, all right,
Speaker 1: So as I literally blush, let's talk about pirates and
Speaker 1: slavery again. Oh we were just giggling. I know the
Speaker 1: pirates they fucked up the slave trade, but not in
Speaker 1: a good way. In a lateral way. They entirely disrupt
Speaker 1: the slave trade. Everyone involved in the slave trade is
Speaker 1: fucked over by the pirates, including the African people. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they treat the African people the way they treat the
Speaker 1: European people that they capture or they forced summon to
Speaker 1: be in pirates, they kill others, they set some free,
Speaker 1: but also other times they treat African people as cargo.
Speaker 1: To quote Gabriel kun. The threat that Golden Age pirates
Speaker 1: posed the slave trade, however, did not come from the
Speaker 1: pirate's struggle for equal rights or an early abolitionist conviction,
Speaker 1: but from interrupting its routes, stealing its quote cargo, and
Speaker 1: making its ventures more costly. In fact, it was not
Speaker 1: even a threat that affected the slave trade per se.
Speaker 1: It only affected the government sponsored and protected slave trade,
Speaker 1: trying to protect its monopoly. And further, he says, Gabriel
Speaker 1: Kuhn says, whenever their exact role, the buccaneers and pirates
Speaker 1: were overwhelmingly of European origin, and along with their and
Speaker 1: along with their fellow European settlers, took possession of lands
Speaker 1: and resources that they stole from other people. A history
Speaker 1: of genocide still haunts the Caribbean, and so does the
Speaker 1: buccaneers and pirates part in it. And so I think
Speaker 1: that's just like a that's like worth fucking knowing, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think part of The reason that I have gotten
Speaker 1: like burned out on talking about pirates in the past
Speaker 1: is that a lot of people who are less interested
Speaker 1: in nuanced than you have like tried to come at
Speaker 1: me with this very idealized vision of like leftist pirates
Speaker 1: who were attacking slave ships for the purposes of freeing captives.
Speaker 1: And like, yeah, like you said, that happens sometimes also
Speaker 1: other things happened, And like the idea that pirates were
Speaker 1: the sort of unified abolitionist force is just like wildly
Speaker 1: a historical and like and sort of you know, that's
Speaker 1: an that's not a a neutral myth to perpetuate, totally totally,
Speaker 1: It just and like, and the abolitionist pirate who's quoted
Speaker 1: and muddies at all is Captain Mission, who's entirely fictional. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy is not real. He is not real. That's
Speaker 1: cool that he was an abolitionist, but he didn't exist, ye,
Speaker 1: which is not a point in his favor. No, Um,
Speaker 1: there's some cool people who didn't exist. Yeah overall Robin Hood, Yeah, totally. Uh.
Speaker 1: But let's talk about the end of the era. We
Speaker 1: will get to the Polychuel. I really were just holding
Speaker 1: it out till the end piracy takes a little break,
Speaker 1: a little a little nap at the turn of the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, because there's speaking of taking a little break.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, did piracy need to hear from its sponsors?
Speaker 1: I believe piracy need to dear from its sponsors. And
Speaker 1: I'm really hoping it's the gold or gambling. What I
Speaker 1: actually hope it's gold because I think gambling and the
Speaker 1: sports gambling is it? Well, okay, the idea of sitting
Speaker 1: around with your friends and gambling because it's fun and
Speaker 1: no one's specifically there to take a cut. Whatever. I
Speaker 1: don't give a shit. It's like a bad idea. It's
Speaker 1: a problem for some people. Other people have fun with it.
Speaker 1: The idea of a fucking group that just basically like
Speaker 1: takes money from people who need the concept of a
Speaker 1: big reward because their life is hard. It's not my
Speaker 1: favorite thing. Here's some ads, hopefully not randomly for gambling.
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, go ahead. Oh do you want to hear
Speaker 1: a gambling story from one of the ships that I
Speaker 1: worked on? Yes, I was working on a ship and
Speaker 1: we were like hitting a patch of like really bad
Speaker 1: weather and we didn't have to be anywhere for a while,
Speaker 1: so we were just kind of waiting it out. But
Speaker 1: we were waiting it out, you know, in the water,
Speaker 1: like we were not at a port. So we were
Speaker 1: bored out of our minds. And this was like at
Speaker 1: the time when like poker was on television a lot,
Speaker 1: and that was like a very big new thing. So
Speaker 1: we were all like, we're gonna play poker. We're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna play some cards. So we like found some cars.
Speaker 1: We had to like cobble together three decks to get
Speaker 1: like the actual proper fifty two cards that are supposed
Speaker 1: to be in there, which makes gambling with poker there
Speaker 1: are three different decks anyway, you know. Then we like
Speaker 1: found objects to use as chips, and then we like
Speaker 1: all sat down around a table. There were like four
Speaker 1: of us, and we're like, all right, yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: gonna be aces wild Texas. Hold them. Like we just
Speaker 1: started saying all these poker words and we shuffled the
Speaker 1: deck and then like we all looked around and waited,
Speaker 1: and finally somebody said, anybody here know how to play poker?
Speaker 1: Y'all bad pirates? We played good fish hell yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: take it back, all right, here's some ads and we
Speaker 1: are back much like piracy is back from its little
Speaker 1: nap that it takes at the turn of the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: because there's this big fuck off war called the War
Speaker 1: of Spanish Secession from seventeen o one to seventeen fourteen,
Speaker 1: and a whole bunch of pirates are like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: whole war against all nations thing like freedom, independence forever
Speaker 1: or whatever, Like give me the fucking letter of Mark.
Speaker 1: I want my like king's permission again. Yeah, you would
Speaker 1: at least like to take one country off the list
Speaker 1: of countries trying to kill you. Yeah, that's true. I
Speaker 1: remember I'm playing risk or whatever. Yeah. So for a
Speaker 1: little while they're like, you know, soldiers and privateers and shit.
Speaker 1: But then seventeen fourteen peace breaks out and suddenly they're
Speaker 1: all outlaws again, and this time there's even more of
Speaker 1: them because a bunch of them were soldiers and now
Speaker 1: they're not well. And a thing that happens every time
Speaker 1: like peace breaks out in that era is that not
Speaker 1: just people who had been privateers, but people who had
Speaker 1: been regular as sailors in the navy suddenly don't have
Speaker 1: a job too, and like they have a single marketable
Speaker 1: skill and he is doing violence on ships yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: which is very marketable at the time. It's the right
Speaker 1: time and place to be good at sword and gun
Speaker 1: and ship. Yeah, are you good at violence? Do you
Speaker 1: not get motion sickness? Here you go? Yeah, not particularly
Speaker 1: interested in living a long time. Well, so they're all
Speaker 1: outlaws again, and this time there's more of them. They're
Speaker 1: scouring the whole ass ocean looking for people to rob
Speaker 1: their rating off the west coast of Africa. They've got
Speaker 1: a little shitty spot as colonial as fuck on Madagascar,
Speaker 1: part of the whole thing. We were talking about this
Speaker 1: off Mike a little bit earlier about how like people are, like, oh,
Speaker 1: they had this pirate utopia on Madagascar that was also
Speaker 1: a lie from Captain Mission. Absolutely did not have that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had a colony on Madagascar where they kept enslaved
Speaker 1: people until I think the native people basically just fucking
Speaker 1: killed them all and drove them all off, which rules. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. Actually the actual cool people like um. But
Speaker 1: they're at war with every nation on Earth, and much
Speaker 1: like every other time, going to war against all nations
Speaker 1: on Earth usually goes badly. The state wanted them gone
Speaker 1: ideally dead. There are pardons offered executions are offered. Expediated
Speaker 1: justice is offered. Aka, we catch you, We're gonna fucking
Speaker 1: hang you there. We don't need to send you back
Speaker 1: to England to do it, or France or whatever. They
Speaker 1: send an infiltrators to join pirate cruise to snitch them out.
Speaker 1: It's oh no, yeah, wait that is. It is baffling
Speaker 1: to me that we don't have movies about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the information I have about that is one of the
Speaker 1: man I can't remember as Mary Reader and Bonnie right
Speaker 1: now at the top of my head. One of them
Speaker 1: dated so Joman for a while. They have sellouts who
Speaker 1: get caught and snitch. It's like the destruction of every
Speaker 1: social movement I've ever covered. There's a divide and conquer
Speaker 1: pardons for some, bullets for others well, and rope and
Speaker 1: cannons and all kinds of stuff. By seventeen twenty two,
Speaker 1: the most powerful pirates are dead or retired. And this
Speaker 1: is the year that Captain black Bart Bartholomy Roberts is killed.
Speaker 1: He's considered the most successful pirate of all time. Let's
Speaker 1: really quickly talk about him, because he's fucking weird. He was, yeah,
Speaker 1: the one who hated fun. Yeah. I almost called him
Speaker 1: to kill Joy in the script, and then I was like,
Speaker 1: I will not do that to my good family name,
Speaker 1: even though that is the definition. Okay. So he died
Speaker 1: at forty after four years of piracy, having captured more
Speaker 1: than four hundred ships, which is some fucking impressive math.
Speaker 1: That's one hundred ships a year. Yep. Before he was
Speaker 1: a pirate, he was a Welsh slaver. They don't refer
Speaker 1: to him as a slaver there, like he was a quartermaster.
Speaker 1: He was a second mate on a slave ship. The
Speaker 1: word for that job as slaver. Like how like how
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman farmer or whenever? Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he was a Welsh slaver whose ship was taken
Speaker 1: by pirates. So he becomes a pirate and soon gets
Speaker 1: elected captain. He's a quote about like, well I better
Speaker 1: be a if I'm going to be a pirate, that
Speaker 1: I must be a captain because he's a fucking aristocratic
Speaker 1: suck or whatever. It wasn't a sky, I know, And
Speaker 1: I don't think he even was an aristocrat because he
Speaker 1: was just like a fucking but whatever. Fuck him. He
Speaker 1: kept the captain's quarters. He made people serve him tea
Speaker 1: because he didn't drink, but he also made people serve him.
Speaker 1: He was a zealous Protestant, so no gambling was allowed
Speaker 1: on the ship. He made a rule that it was
Speaker 1: a death penalty to bring a woman on board disguised
Speaker 1: as a man. We'll talk more about that later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my eyebrows just did like eight things. Uh huh, But
Speaker 1: that would be a great ship to have, no idea
Speaker 1: how to play poker on. He hated the Irish because
Speaker 1: they were papists. Papists, I think it's papists, But like,
Speaker 1: what do I know? You're the Catholic here, I know,
Speaker 1: but what do I know about it? I'd like hold
Speaker 1: up during the pandemic in a cabin in the forest
Speaker 1: and suddenly cared about the religion of my ancestors. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't fucking know anything about it, just learning about
Speaker 1: it now, and it's all from books. So sometimes he
Speaker 1: captured slave ships and set the captives free and they
Speaker 1: joined his crew. About a quarter of his crew as
Speaker 1: African at the time. It was capture and death as
Speaker 1: eighty five, I believe black pirates on board. Another time, well,
Speaker 1: that is a lot of people so eighty five was
Speaker 1: a quarter of the people on the ship. Oh yeah, No,
Speaker 1: pirate ships were rolling around with like four hundred fucking
Speaker 1: people on a galleon. It was literally five times what
Speaker 1: was necessary what a merchant or I think even what
Speaker 1: a lot more than five times? Yes, no, they would
Speaker 1: like that's like fifty times they rolled fucking deep. Another time,
Speaker 1: he captured a slave ship and he set it on
Speaker 1: fire with all of the human cargo on board because
Speaker 1: he did not care. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, um would
Speaker 1: not have approved. Okay, and um, anyway, he's dead, he
Speaker 1: dies in battle. He's thrown overboard fully dressed, which was
Speaker 1: his like thing that he always insisted that he immediately
Speaker 1: be thrown overboard fully dressed, leading to the suspicion that
Speaker 1: he immediately raises a suspicion in my mind. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: also never grew a beard, mum, and he had the
Speaker 1: whole thing about like better not let any women come on,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, mmm, I like, for a little while,
Speaker 1: I used to always be like, whoa the most successful
Speaker 1: pirate is probably secretly a woman, And I'm like, this
Speaker 1: guy sucks fuck him. Yeah, that's what I was thinking,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, yeah, no. His death marks the end of
Speaker 1: the end of the Platinum era of piracy. I think
Speaker 1: we agreed on the Pieces of eight, right, the Pieces
Speaker 1: of eight era of piracy, especially because it was eight
Speaker 1: years long. Well done. For four more years the pirates
Speaker 1: are They're not fighting for plunder, They're fighting for survival.
Speaker 1: They get more and more ruthless, They lash out like
Speaker 1: a dying beast. Their ranks are no longer filled with
Speaker 1: former privateers, but increasingly it's captured merchants who are forced
Speaker 1: into it. You get the most, the most murdery, tortury,
Speaker 1: bad pirates. Basically, I do have one question about the
Speaker 1: This is a question I've always had about this, and
Speaker 1: you may you may have some insight into it, the
Speaker 1: whole idea of people being forced to be pirates when
Speaker 1: their ship is captured. It occurs to me that, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, if you are a pirate ship, you
Speaker 1: probably don't want people around who hate you and are
Speaker 1: not committed to, you know, not stabbing you in the back, right,
Speaker 1: And if you are a pirate who is arrested for piracy,
Speaker 1: it makes a lot of sense to say, oh, I
Speaker 1: was forced into piracy. Yeah, my bad. So I'm curious
Speaker 1: if we have any reason to think that that is
Speaker 1: like largely true or not true, because like I can
Speaker 1: I can see why that might enter the you know,
Speaker 1: why why people might say that, more than I can
Speaker 1: see why people might actually do that. No, that actually
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense. You get a lot of
Speaker 1: like pirates who take the king's pardon and then go
Speaker 1: back to piracy. You also get a lot of pirates
Speaker 1: who like get put on trial and are like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: I swear that guy who's gonna kill me if I
Speaker 1: didn't do it. I was just a captured sailor And
Speaker 1: they're like, oh okay, and then they let them go,
Speaker 1: and then they're like sick and they steal the next
Speaker 1: boat out of town. So yeah, no, I I don't know.
Speaker 1: Someone knows a little bit more about what indentured piracy
Speaker 1: looks like. M But that's a really good point. Edward
Speaker 1: Lowe is a particular terror who tortured people and beheaded
Speaker 1: people and shit. But in seventeen twenty three or twenty
Speaker 1: four he was probably mutinied by his crew for being
Speaker 1: a piece of shit, and he was left adrift, picked
Speaker 1: up and hanged. By seventeen twenty six, there's only about
Speaker 1: two hundred or so pirates left, and by seventeen thirty
Speaker 1: the last Golden Age pirate, a French Olivier Lebouse. I
Speaker 1: don't know. He was hanged on the beach. His tombstone
Speaker 1: is still visited by admirers almost every night to this day.
Speaker 1: And what about women, What about those women pirates? You
Speaker 1: promised me a polycuel That's like, okay, that is what
Speaker 1: I was thinking. Yeah, if I were an actual historian
Speaker 1: instead of a read pop history books and craft together
Speaker 1: the most accurate narrative I can, girl, i'd research more
Speaker 1: about the women who worked on the shore and see
Speaker 1: if there's a story about women and power there. But
Speaker 1: I don't know that story. The story I know is
Speaker 1: about the two women who were known to be pirates
Speaker 1: during this time, Mary Reid and Bonnie. The fact that
Speaker 1: both of them were on the same boat at the
Speaker 1: same time really implies that it's quite possible there were
Speaker 1: a lot more women on a lot of other boats besides.
Speaker 1: And also they were on this like part of this
Speaker 1: tiny fucking crew. I think it was like fifteen people
Speaker 1: on the fucking Someone knows the number, and I don't
Speaker 1: because I didn't write it in the scriptum, you look
Speaker 1: like you're about to No, I mean, I just I
Speaker 1: let's let's talk about these two first. But then I
Speaker 1: would love to talk more about people assigned female at
Speaker 1: birth ending up on ships. Yeah, representing various different genders. Okay,
Speaker 1: well I'll give you a cue. That was a thing. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: because it's like the fact that they're on the boat
Speaker 1: at the same time that said. Okay. The counter argument
Speaker 1: is that a lot of pirates get murdered by the state,
Speaker 1: and being murdered by the state is a fair effective
Speaker 1: means to determine what your body looks like. But we
Speaker 1: also know that that fun hating black bart specifically made
Speaker 1: a rule no bringing women disguised as men. There weren't
Speaker 1: a lot of rules on pirate ships. That is an
Speaker 1: oddly specific rule to include. It's like a I don't know,
Speaker 1: no sneaking up behind me and clapping really loud, but
Speaker 1: while I'm while I'm loading my gun, like it's like,
Speaker 1: clearly that happened, and so yeah, that is a I
Speaker 1: am you have given a talk about this very subject,
Speaker 1: and I am curious. Yeah, I did a I was
Speaker 1: on a panel on queer sailors while back for a
Speaker 1: museum here in New York City. We can include the
Speaker 1: link to that talk in the show notes. I think
Speaker 1: we have that technology, but it wasn't specifically about pirates,
Speaker 1: but I think we can assume that, like some of
Speaker 1: the things that were true of sailors true of pirates,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that was like true of
Speaker 1: sailors and ships in the in the age of sail
Speaker 1: is that there were a lot more afab people on
Speaker 1: board than people typically think. And like part of that
Speaker 1: was any time a ship was in port, there were
Speaker 1: women coming aboard. Sometimes they were sex workers, sometimes they
Speaker 1: were girlfriends or wives or family. Usually they would leave
Speaker 1: when the ship left port, but not always. Often they
Speaker 1: were supposed to leave but wouldn't. And there's like definitely
Speaker 1: records of that being like an issue of that being
Speaker 1: sort of an accepted like thing that people turned to
Speaker 1: blind eye too, because there was a lot of domestic
Speaker 1: labor that they, like captains were kind of okay with
Speaker 1: having somebody around to do someone's going to wash the
Speaker 1: blood pants exactly. But there was a also a this
Speaker 1: is sort of a half baked idea that I've come
Speaker 1: up with your your previous guest, Hugh Ryan probably would
Speaker 1: like have a lot to say about this half baked
Speaker 1: idea that I have, But basically my ideas, you know,
Speaker 1: insofar as sex and gender are social constructs that have
Speaker 1: and continue to evolve over time and in different cultures.
Speaker 1: In the like seventeenth eighteenth nineteenth century, in the you know,
Speaker 1: European countries that were participating in in this like age
Speaker 1: of sail that we're talking about, there was a gender
Speaker 1: called sailor where somebody who was a sailor had a
Speaker 1: particular like form of accepted gender and sexual expression that
Speaker 1: overlapped with, but was not analogous to the gender of
Speaker 1: like man and boy, and could often and was a
Speaker 1: was a form of gender identity that was like much
Speaker 1: more fluid in terms of sexuality, where Like, if you
Speaker 1: were a you know, man on land, it might be
Speaker 1: very expected that you would, for example, not have sex
Speaker 1: with other men, and that expectation didn't necessarily carry over
Speaker 1: to sailors, yeah, who were much more likely to be
Speaker 1: openly having sex with other men. But it also included
Speaker 1: people who were assigned female at birth, and the fact
Speaker 1: that they were taking on the role of sailor could
Speaker 1: like help them to get away with that in a
Speaker 1: way they would not have been able to get away
Speaker 1: with it on land. And part of how we know
Speaker 1: that this happened is we have like specific records of
Speaker 1: people that were Usually what would happen is somebody would
Speaker 1: like get a really dire injury, and they would often
Speaker 1: be somebody who had a reputation for being like this
Speaker 1: really tough guy who like, oh, yeah, did you hear
Speaker 1: he like got shot in the leg that one time,
Speaker 1: and he like treated it himself, wouldn't let the doctor
Speaker 1: nare in, you know, and then at some point he
Speaker 1: would be really sick or really injured and a doctor
Speaker 1: would examine him and be like, oh, and when this happened,
Speaker 1: it often happened in the navy, So they would find
Speaker 1: somebody in the you know, in the British Navy who
Speaker 1: had been serving for years and had a really great
Speaker 1: reputation and then like, oh, whoops, turns out turns out
Speaker 1: this person was assigned female at birth. What they would
Speaker 1: have said at the time was this was a woman
Speaker 1: disguised as a man, and then they would be like, well,
Speaker 1: this person can't be in the navy anymore. But also
Speaker 1: they kind of rule so we like definitely have a
Speaker 1: few records of the captain basically saying like, well, shit,
Speaker 1: here's a pension out of my own pocket. You did great,
Speaker 1: it's been great having you here. We're going to put
Speaker 1: you ashore now. And then the person would go ashore
Speaker 1: and he would like, I'm gonna say he becaus like Frankly,
Speaker 1: historians are very open about needing very little little evidence
Speaker 1: to assume that somebody is SIS, So I'm going to
Speaker 1: accept very little evidence. Um, actually, it feels like a
Speaker 1: lot of evidence to assume somebody has trans as a
Speaker 1: man exactly. Yeah, I think we'll take that as a sign.
Speaker 1: But he would like go back to land and write
Speaker 1: a book about like the time I ran away to
Speaker 1: See and people would love it and they'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: that was so cool, Like tell us again about the
Speaker 1: time you ran away to see. And part of the
Speaker 1: narrative was almost always well, I ran away to see
Speaker 1: to chase my boyfriend, who is real. He goes to
Speaker 1: another school, he's from Canada, And that part of the
Speaker 1: story never holds up because they're always like, oh, I
Speaker 1: joined the Navy to find my boyfriend, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: the Navy, the one that has thousands of ships and
Speaker 1: you have no control over which one you'll be assigned to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you would have much better like finding him
Speaker 1: if you just like hung around on land in the
Speaker 1: last place he saw you. Yeah right. And also the
Speaker 1: other thing casting suspicion on the I went following my
Speaker 1: boyfriend thing is that like often these people had like
Speaker 1: a strong reputation for being womanizers and patronizing sex workers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of them that we have a really good record of,
Speaker 1: which means the sex workers are good to keeping a secret,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. Or also sometimes these people married
Speaker 1: and their wives had no idea either, because like sexual
Speaker 1: marriage is an awkward thing sometimes, yeah, exactly. But one
Speaker 1: one of them that we have a really good record of,
Speaker 1: he was injured at sea and then like retired on
Speaker 1: land and got a job in a shipyard, like working
Speaker 1: with a bunch of other people who are like probably
Speaker 1: mostly sailors who had gotten injured and retired on land.
Speaker 1: And at a certain point, if I'm remembering right, it
Speaker 1: was because like somebody that he had dated or who
Speaker 1: had wanted to date him was mad at him, circulated
Speaker 1: a rumor that he was a woman, and he gets
Speaker 1: confronted by like the guys at the shipyard and they're like,
Speaker 1: is this true? And he according to his account, this
Speaker 1: is like what he wrote down. He like, He's like, well,
Speaker 1: this is it, and he confesses everything to them and
Speaker 1: tells them his whole story and they go, yeah, I
Speaker 1: knew you couldn't be a woman. I told all the
Speaker 1: guys he wouldn't be such a ladies man if he
Speaker 1: were secretly a woman. Will tell them all you're a
Speaker 1: real dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, and just like goes
Speaker 1: back to work. Yeah. So there really did seem to
Speaker 1: be something at the time where the way that people
Speaker 1: were men at sea allowed for more fluidity in terms
Speaker 1: of both sexual expression and in terms of like what
Speaker 1: you're assigned sex at birth might or might not have been.
Speaker 1: I think that makes a lot of sense. I want
Speaker 1: to posit the possibility that pirate culture, and it's like
Speaker 1: part of its conscious inversion of Western civilization, which it
Speaker 1: it did a lot of different things with might have
Speaker 1: had to women dressed as men but not passing and
Speaker 1: not be expected to pass. And I'll make that case
Speaker 1: with Mary Ren and Bonnie in a second. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and and this goes to part part of what I
Speaker 1: think drove the gender of sailor to be different from
Speaker 1: the gender of man. Again, this is just like a
Speaker 1: thing I made up, and I don't know if anybody
Speaker 1: would anybody who knows things about gender theory and history
Speaker 1: would agree with me. But like, is that often sailors
Speaker 1: were really young, So like you might not have a beard, right,
Speaker 1: and people might not give a shit, right, because that's
Speaker 1: not part of what they're like thinking is when they're
Speaker 1: looking at you and deciding, like, is that a real sailor?
Speaker 1: Because is that somebody who belongs here? I wonder whether, um,
Speaker 1: the average age of a Golden Age pirate is twenty seven,
Speaker 1: off the top of my head, which I'm guessing is
Speaker 1: older than the average age of the average navy sailor
Speaker 1: in the same era. There would be older sailors on ships,
Speaker 1: but there would also be like ridiculously young people on ships. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: so like people who were like children by any standards, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but they would be participating fully in a lot of
Speaker 1: like the stuff that was happening on the ship. So like,
Speaker 1: if you're like looking around at a crew thinking like, well,
Speaker 1: is there anybody here who doesn't belong A face without
Speaker 1: a beard on it is not going to stand out. No,
Speaker 1: but that's not the Oh let me let me tell
Speaker 1: you about this story and Bonnie Mary that you've heard
Speaker 1: a million times, but let me let me get your
Speaker 1: take up. But I feel like you're going to tell
Speaker 1: it better more than almost anything else in the Book
Speaker 1: of Pirates. Their lives are likely embellished earlier editions wink wink,
Speaker 1: nudge nudge that they were fucking each other later editions
Speaker 1: or like, yeah, they're totally fucking The first edition had
Speaker 1: engravings of them in men's clothing. Later editions had them
Speaker 1: vests and coast coats open to their bellies like somewhere
Speaker 1: between like tits out and just lots of cleavage, both
Speaker 1: pieces of art rule. Don't get me wrong. The author
Speaker 1: goes at great length to be like, oh, and the
Speaker 1: story about these two totally not made up. I know
Speaker 1: this one. It sounds crazy, but it's totally true. Why
Speaker 1: do I know more than anyone else was able to
Speaker 1: get from court records about these two people Because I'm
Speaker 1: good at my job and ask the right questions and
Speaker 1: so definitely didn't just make it up. Yeah, this author
Speaker 1: anonymous author doth protest too much or ah, wait, what
Speaker 1: if I can't remember which one survives the story? What
Speaker 1: if she wrote the book about pirates. I assume that
Speaker 1: both their backstories are made up. There's an emphasis in
Speaker 1: both stories about them being from broken homes, about having
Speaker 1: their parents dressed them up as boys in order to
Speaker 1: get around infidelity, claims, shit like that. That was another
Speaker 1: excuse that people often cooked up in there, like why
Speaker 1: I had to run away to see as a man? Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: oh well I was my mom dressed me as a
Speaker 1: boy because of reasons. Yeah, anyway, I've been dressed as
Speaker 1: a boy ever since. Yeah, definitely not a man, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely not just like an eighteenth century trans dude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there's there's arguments about how they presented on board,
Speaker 1: and everyone is really certain of their arguments. Some folks
Speaker 1: claim they passed as men, others claim that they lived
Speaker 1: openly as women, and others as um And this is
Speaker 1: this is actually what I believe based I could be wrong,
Speaker 1: but based on other history, like Isabel Everhart see the
Speaker 1: episode on her and just centuries later a different culture,
Speaker 1: but she's like presenting as a man and not passing,
Speaker 1: and no one thinks she's passing and no one cares
Speaker 1: because she's presenting as a man and they're accepting her
Speaker 1: as a man. I believe as possible they were accepted
Speaker 1: as men despite not fooling anyone. One survivor of their
Speaker 1: attacks verifies this last theory from my point of view
Speaker 1: by basically being like, yeah, they were addressed as men,
Speaker 1: but they had like huge tits. You could totally tell
Speaker 1: they were women. And that wasn't from the Book of Lies.
Speaker 1: That was a survivor's account of an attack. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so like, because the other stuff will be a little
Speaker 1: bit like a lot of the history is like they
Speaker 1: totally went into battle with their tits out to scare dudes,
Speaker 1: which nothing scarier than tits. I know, I mean to
Speaker 1: some people, but I you know, whatever, if they did,
Speaker 1: more fucking power to them. But there's definitely a story
Speaker 1: that I've read about one of them that like she
Speaker 1: would fight men and then just as she killed them,
Speaker 1: she would flash her tits at them so that they
Speaker 1: would know they were killed by a woman. Yeah. Have
Speaker 1: you thought for a second about fight logistics? Yeah, like, like,
Speaker 1: gotta be really precise with your killing this dude to
Speaker 1: be like, oh, he's definitely killed enough that he's not
Speaker 1: going to stab me while I'm unlacing my shirt. But
Speaker 1: he's definitely not killed enough that he's gonna see these
Speaker 1: boobs later. Come on, this didn't happen. No, But the
Speaker 1: fact that I don't know, it just sounds like they
Speaker 1: didn't bind, Like yeah, which they could have. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe they did and it wasn't enough, or I you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but like or maybe that victim later
Speaker 1: was like making some shit up. I don't know, but like,
Speaker 1: so that's my guess at least about how they lived.
Speaker 1: So Mary Reid, or she was known more often Mark Reid,
Speaker 1: was born in England. You can't fault anyone for that,
Speaker 1: specifically if they declare war against all of the world,
Speaker 1: including England. Eventually born in about sixteen eighty five, Supposedly,
Speaker 1: she starts cross dressing super young because her mother had
Speaker 1: married a sailor and born him a son and did
Speaker 1: the thing that sailors did at the time, which is die.
Speaker 1: So she started sucking someone else and then she got
Speaker 1: pregnant had a daughter, but she still wanted the money
Speaker 1: from the mom. Wait, she got pregnant and she wasn't married.
Speaker 1: She oh, which probably Um, she still want a child
Speaker 1: support from the dead husband's mom, so she like lies
Speaker 1: and claims that this is her son. The reason that
Speaker 1: this doesn't necessarily hold up to me is like, why
Speaker 1: would because I assume Mary Reid went by Mark read
Speaker 1: because it's almost the same fucking name, right, um, and
Speaker 1: that is like a classic transfer cross dressing thing to do.
Speaker 1: But why would she have a boy's name as a
Speaker 1: kid that was her brother? Like unless her mother, Yeah,
Speaker 1: wouldn't she have been going by the name of whether
Speaker 1: she was pretending to be Yeah? Also was the brother dead? Yea,
Speaker 1: Oh okay, sorry, you probably said that. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I did, so. She she's probably starts again. This
Speaker 1: is the according to the myth version. Once she's a pirate,
Speaker 1: we feel like we know a little bit more about
Speaker 1: what actually happened. But her backstory whatever. Um. She started
Speaker 1: working as a footboy, which is a coach attendant more
Speaker 1: or less. Um. At thirteen, she joins the army that
Speaker 1: joins the navy. Right, yeah, yeah, I could I see
Speaker 1: what you're saying about. You know, what a surprise, they're
Speaker 1: not all beardy. She starts fucking this other soldier, they
Speaker 1: get hitched, They use a bunch of money. When she's
Speaker 1: like supposedly, she's like, I've been a girl this whole time,
Speaker 1: and everyone's like, oh ha ha, that's so great. Here's
Speaker 1: a bunch of money. And so they go and they
Speaker 1: open This is what actually would happen, because people were
Speaker 1: just like, I mean, it's so cool. You just wanted
Speaker 1: to kill some French guys, Like okay, what a could
Speaker 1: fault you? And so she starts pretending she's a girl
Speaker 1: when she opens the inn. And then her husband died.
Speaker 1: No one says, how at least that I've found And
Speaker 1: since we're making shit up whole cloth, I say she
Speaker 1: poisoned him and then went back to being Mark Reid
Speaker 1: and joined the crew of a merchant ship and then
Speaker 1: thank fuck, it was captured by pirates and she joins
Speaker 1: up right away. She pirates for a while, she has
Speaker 1: her fun, then she takes the king's pardon, and this
Speaker 1: is in seventeen eighteen or seventeen nineteen, and she becomes
Speaker 1: a privateer for a minute, but she doesn't really like
Speaker 1: taking orders, so they mutiny and become pirates again. In
Speaker 1: seventeen twenty, she joins the crew of Calico Jack Will
Speaker 1: get to him a second, and Bonnie, he had a
Speaker 1: very good flag. Tell me about it in a moment
Speaker 1: when we get to him. Sure, and Bonnie, she's like
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen years younger than Mark Reid. And the
Speaker 1: thing about poor people as no one really records their birth.
Speaker 1: She might have been born in sixteen ninety seven. She's Irish.
Speaker 1: She's probably born to the serving This we actually heard
Speaker 1: backstories a little bit more verifiable because her dad's rich.
Speaker 1: She's born to the serving woman of a lawyer who
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to be fucking the aforementioned serving woman, but
Speaker 1: her dad claimed her because he didn't like his wife.
Speaker 1: So they moved to London. Then they move and supposedly
Speaker 1: start dressing Anne as a boy named Andy. Maybe that happened,
Speaker 1: and then they moved to the Carolinas, which is now
Speaker 1: the US South or Carolina rather. When she's eighteen or nineteen,
Speaker 1: she falls in love with a bad boy, a small
Speaker 1: time pirate named James Bonnie. And this guy is gold digging.
Speaker 1: He wants the lawyer dad money. Wait wait chives BONDI
Speaker 1: or oh my god. I was like I was like,
Speaker 1: I was like, wait a second, that's too good. Let's
Speaker 1: just go with James Bondy. Okay, yeah, all right, So
Speaker 1: James bond do you just say he was gold digging though, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's gold digging. I know he's oh shit. Okay. So
Speaker 1: because her her lawyer turned plantation owner now in the
Speaker 1: Carolina's huh oh, he wants that dad money. But too bad,
Speaker 1: she gets disinherited because she's dating a pirate. It is possible,
Speaker 1: you'll get that. Yeah, it is possible. I don't believe it,
Speaker 1: but we'll go with it. She sets fired or dad's
Speaker 1: plantation and revenge. It's also possible she stabbed a girl
Speaker 1: when she was thirteen. It's also possible that's made up
Speaker 1: so her failed gold digger James Bondy. They moved to Nassau,
Speaker 1: which is a pirate town. Soon enough, the piece of
Speaker 1: shit husband starts snitching on pirates to the new governor.
Speaker 1: This is the aforementioned Infiltrator into the Pirates. Anne isn't
Speaker 1: happy about this, does not approve of marrying a pirate.
Speaker 1: Only'd find out does she stab him in the back metaphorically? Okay,
Speaker 1: by fucking this way, cooler, non snitchy pirate Calico Jack
Speaker 1: Calico He's trying to be kind of upstanding here. He
Speaker 1: goes to the husband and is like, look, I'll give
Speaker 1: you money if you just divorce my girlfriend, and James
Speaker 1: Bondi is like, no, I can't do that. So she's like,
Speaker 1: all right, well fuck you, and so she just skips. You.
Speaker 1: Haven't done a voice for anybody in this story, but
Speaker 1: Dan's Bondi's shitty first husband gets a voice yea, and
Speaker 1: so she joins. She runs away with her way cooler
Speaker 1: pirate boyfriend and becomes a pirate herself, divorces her husband,
Speaker 1: and Mary's calico Calico Jack. We don't know his backstory
Speaker 1: because he wasn't a woman. Included in the Eat, Prey,
Speaker 1: Love of Pirates. In order to sell copies, no one
Speaker 1: bothered to make up a backstory for him. He was
Speaker 1: probably born in sixteen eighty two in England. He was
Speaker 1: quartermaster to a guy named a pirate named Charles Vane.
Speaker 1: Quartermaster isn't just the person who looks after the supplies.
Speaker 1: It's sort of the sergeant who goes between the crew
Speaker 1: and the captain. One day, Charles Vane is like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're going to run from this big ship instead of
Speaker 1: taking it Calico Jack is like, we shouldn't run that,
Speaker 1: you're a coward. So it was put to a vote
Speaker 1: about whether or not Captain Vane was a coward, and
Speaker 1: the crew decided that Captain Vane was a coward. All
Speaker 1: these pirates of released sick last names anyway, especially Nathaniel missed,
Speaker 1: who isn't a pirate, but we've decided it now he
Speaker 1: should have been yeah, really, you know what he did.
Speaker 1: He missed his call? Oh god, dear, okay, okay, now,
Speaker 1: so all right, and that's why. And that was the
Speaker 1: last time Miriam was invited on this podcast. So the
Speaker 1: dissenters are given one of the ships so vain and
Speaker 1: like the like fifteen people are so out of the
Speaker 1: like hundred people on the ship, fuck off him. One
Speaker 1: of the other ships in the fleet. Calico Jack becomes captain.
Speaker 1: He then takes the King's pardon in seventeen nineteen. But
Speaker 1: then he meets Anne Bonnie and he's like, damn girl,
Speaker 1: you want to go be pirates and she's like, fun, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do, And so they go have to go be pirates,
Speaker 1: and now all three are on board together. And the
Speaker 1: story and the Eat Prey Love version is that Mary
Speaker 1: Kalico's wife, is like, you know, this new guy is
Speaker 1: hot and goes to Anne and is like, what's up.
Speaker 1: You want to bone I'm secretly a lady and Anne
Speaker 1: is like, alas, I cannot for I too, am secretly
Speaker 1: a woman. And then they some way for us to
Speaker 1: have sex. You know, they gaze longingly at a Parasoian
Speaker 1: scissors and they become historically close friends. I call bullshit
Speaker 1: on that, as does basically every historian who's read it.
Speaker 1: I think they become a power trio, although Mary is
Speaker 1: possibly fucking another guy on the crew, but I don't think.
Speaker 1: I mean everyone in the crew's fucking other people on
Speaker 1: the crew. They're pirates, yeah, and on pirate ships people
Speaker 1: fuck each other like many polycules. It was not to last.
Speaker 1: While they were being gay and doing crime in a
Speaker 1: very literal way, the crime part got them in trouble.
Speaker 1: Like literally, this only lasts a couple of months. This
Speaker 1: is like the great thing, and like like I was
Speaker 1: all set to have this episode be like and this
Speaker 1: is where I finally doing more research about Mary and Bonnie,
Speaker 1: and then I'm like, there's no information about them. It's
Speaker 1: all lies. And they were together for like three months. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: they had like one weird summer vacation, like yeah, totally
Speaker 1: not have a career. No, I mean they did separately
Speaker 1: before all three of them got together. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: can I tell you about Calico Jack's plass. Oh it
Speaker 1: is the fucking pirate classic. It is a skull over
Speaker 1: two crossed cutlasses. Sick fuck. Yeah, yeah, no, it's he
Speaker 1: nailed it. Like he was a shitty pirates as you're
Speaker 1: about to get into. He was not good at his job,
Speaker 1: but he fucking ruled it flag design. I mean like
Speaker 1: he just wanted to dress nice, get drunk and fuck
Speaker 1: a bunch of people, and who amongst us being a
Speaker 1: pop star hadn't been invented yet. He's like to be
Speaker 1: a pirate. Yeah, he went down in history for fucking
Speaker 1: some famous ladies. So they only last for a couple
Speaker 1: of months. It gets referred to as terrorizing fishers on
Speaker 1: the Jamaican shore before a pirate hunter gets them. That's
Speaker 1: such like low grade piracy. If you're terrifying fishers, like,
Speaker 1: come on, I think they're terrified like the Navy or something.
Speaker 1: I know. But the thing is is it refers to
Speaker 1: as terrorizing fishers I'm sure they robbed a fuck town
Speaker 1: of fishers, but they also get caught because they're drunk
Speaker 1: with some fishers. Yeah, the Turtlers specifically. Actually, the version
Speaker 1: of the story I've always heard is that Anne, Bonnie,
Speaker 1: and Mary Read were the almost people on board. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so they're clearly terrorizing some fishers and chilling with other
Speaker 1: fishers because most likely, either the night before they get caught,
Speaker 1: the crew stays up late drinking and partying with some Turtlers,
Speaker 1: or it's literally the day that they are caught they're
Speaker 1: drunk with some Turtlers. Either way, possibly Halloween Day seventeen twenty,
Speaker 1: the crew is either drunk or hungover, except for Mary
Speaker 1: Read and Bonnie and some other guy. They're attacked. All
Speaker 1: the men except the anonymous guy for the Wind are
Speaker 1: hiding below decks, and again this is the legend depart
Speaker 1: but whatever, its fucking This is the part where I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm into the legend at this point. Yeah, no, I Bellie,
Speaker 1: don't care if this part is true. It's part of
Speaker 1: the story. Mary Ann and the anonymously got anonymous guy
Speaker 1: defend the ship. Mary Reid is fucking furious, so she
Speaker 1: starts firing shots into the hold, killing one of the
Speaker 1: cowards and wounding another. They lose because there's literally three
Speaker 1: of them, and every one of them is too busy
Speaker 1: shooting at the guys who won't fight. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: mad about that, which I can understand. You know, Congress
Speaker 1: in the face of battle has been a capital offense
Speaker 1: in almost every army that's existed. It's also just very annoying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone's captured. They're all put on trial. The two women
Speaker 1: plead their bellies aka, you can't kill us, we're pregnant.
Speaker 1: The men are sentenced to death. Supposedly, Anne gets permission
Speaker 1: to go to her husband's sell somehow or another, and
Speaker 1: her last words to her husband fucking rule. Yes they do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: had you fought like a man, you need not be
Speaker 1: been hanged like a dog. That's the part where I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's true, but that's metal as hell. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Mary Reid died of a fever in jail, probably before
Speaker 1: she had her kid, because there's no record of the
Speaker 1: kid being buried. And Bonnie she disappears from the historical record.
Speaker 1: Maybe she was released, maybe she escaped, probably not, but
Speaker 1: you know, I'd like to imagine she's probably hanging out
Speaker 1: with the Witch of well Fleet. There's a death record
Speaker 1: in seventeen thirty three of an Ann Bonnie in Jamaica.
Speaker 1: It's spelled a little differently, but who fucking knows. This
Speaker 1: spelling hadn't been invented yet either. Yeah, that's probably her.
Speaker 1: Other legends say that she moved to South Carolina and
Speaker 1: lived till seventeen eighty two. I hope she lived long.
Speaker 1: Who fucking knows. That's the pirates, that's what I got.
Speaker 1: I also, I don't know that we have any reason
Speaker 1: to think they were actually pregnant. I remember they got inspected.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, is there a I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 1: fucking gynological science of the early eighteenth century. I think
Speaker 1: it would. I mean, it depends, like how pregnant a
Speaker 1: person is, whether that could be diagnosed by, you know,
Speaker 1: presumably like some local midwife, yeah, groping their belly. But um,
Speaker 1: I sort of suspect they just were like, but we
Speaker 1: were ladies on a pirate ship, of course we're pregnant.
Speaker 1: And everyone was like, that's probably true. Yeah, more power
Speaker 1: to them if that's the case, you know, because one
Speaker 1: thing we do not have a record of is either
Speaker 1: of them giving birth? Like yeah, it's a good yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, No, you've convinced me they're fucking liar. En.
Speaker 1: They deserve to die in jail because they lied. That's
Speaker 1: the only thing they did wrong, not the just yeah,
Speaker 1: terrorizing fishers, that is. I hadn't heard that phrase before.
Speaker 1: And that's that's kind of a bummer. That's not the like,
Speaker 1: that's not the glamorous pirate life you want to imagine
Speaker 1: for the No, the queer poly pirates of everybody's fantasies. No. Uh,
Speaker 1: it turns out people who do crime for a living
Speaker 1: usually suck. But so what does everyone else? I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think of it as like not that they
Speaker 1: were doing crime for a living, but that they were
Speaker 1: participating in the capitalist extraction of wealth from colonized places
Speaker 1: but illegally, it's like not that surprising that they sucked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's been another moral complexity unique on behind the
Speaker 1: cool people or what's this podcast called cool people who
Speaker 1: were bastards? I think it's called cool people who were bastards. Honestly,
Speaker 1: that sums up that sums up pirates because they were
Speaker 1: definitely cool. Yeah, like the esthetic flawless. The stuff they
Speaker 1: did very badass, very dangerous. Like. They were definitely not cowards.
Speaker 1: They were definitely like people with some like very very
Speaker 1: cool skills and very cool like ability to just like
Speaker 1: plunge into battle and all that shit. But they were
Speaker 1: also bastard. Yeah, so I think that works here. At
Speaker 1: the end of all things, you guiding the plug like
Speaker 1: you're reading that the talk if you want to hear
Speaker 1: more stuff about um sailor gender and also here's some
Speaker 1: gay sea shanties. Um, you can follow up with that
Speaker 1: link that will be in the show notes. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: have another podcast. It's called Live Like the World Is Dying.
Speaker 1: You can listen to it wherever. Wherever you're listening to
Speaker 1: this fucking podcast, um, unless you're listening to it on
Speaker 1: a website that only has this on it. I don't
Speaker 1: think that exists, So you can go listen to it.
Speaker 1: It's about how to live like the world is dying.
Speaker 1: I go for very literal titling, much like eighteenth century
Speaker 1: people who write books. Sophiaio, your next podcast title better
Speaker 1: be like fifty words long and include a semicolon, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Will that work? Sure? Yes, I got permission. A true
Speaker 1: and accurate history of the anarchists who in so doing. Wherefore,
Speaker 1: all right, bye everyone, see you next week. Bye. Cool
Speaker 1: People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
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