Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with your
Speaker 2: Richard blakemore with us as book enemies of all.
Speaker 3: What made you write the book? Richard?
Speaker 4: I've been teaching a course on the history of pirates
Speaker 4: at the University of Reading in the UK for some
Speaker 4: years now, and it really came out of teaching that course,
Speaker 4: those conversations with students thinking about all these issues around piracy.
Speaker 4: And I freely admit that when I designed the course,
Speaker 4: I thought, you know, people think pirates are call I'll
Speaker 4: do a module on pirates and there'll be a way
Speaker 4: to kind of.
Speaker 5: Get into other more serious historical topics.
Speaker 4: And actually the pirates took over the module in the
Speaker 4: way you would expect pirates too.
Speaker 5: They just proved to be so interesting that we end
Speaker 5: up spending all the.
Speaker 4: Time talking about the way piracy develops and kind of
Speaker 4: key individual examples, and I think also the significant world
Speaker 4: history because it is a really important period in the
Speaker 4: growth of international trade of connections between different parts of
Speaker 4: the world, and piracy plays a really big part in that.
Speaker 4: So having kind of taught that for a few years
Speaker 4: that was really where the book came from, wanting to
Speaker 4: try and share some of those ideas. And the starting
Speaker 4: point for the book and the module is that image
Speaker 4: of pirate that we have in our heads that we
Speaker 4: spoke about at the start of this show. I'm kind
Speaker 4: of wanting to say to people, if you've seen pirate films,
Speaker 4: if you've played games, if you're aware of this image,
Speaker 4: this idea in our culture.
Speaker 5: And you want to know where that comes from. You
Speaker 5: want to know the.
Speaker 4: Real history, You want to know the why is that
Speaker 4: one moment.
Speaker 5: That we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 4: Why do we think of pirates in this way when
Speaker 4: there have been loads of other.
Speaker 5: Maritime plunderers throughout history. So trying to explain why this
Speaker 5: one period in history has.
Speaker 4: Come to be the image of pirates, why it's so important,
Speaker 4: That's really what I'm trying to explain in the.
Speaker 3: Book, Roger, where did the parrots come from?
Speaker 4: The pirates? So I have not found any evidence myself
Speaker 4: of pirates specifically owning parrots. There's at least one buccaneer
Speaker 4: called William Dampier who travels around on plundering voyages.
Speaker 5: Whether he would have denied being.
Speaker 4: A pirate, he would have claimed what he was doing
Speaker 4: with legal but he is sort of attacking shipping outside
Speaker 4: of the normal rules of war and things like that.
Speaker 4: And he's also because he's trying to fashion himself as
Speaker 4: not a pirate. He writes a best selling book about
Speaker 4: his voyages in which he talks a lot about animals
Speaker 4: and natural phenomena because he travels around the world. He
Speaker 4: spends thirteen years and circain navigates the globe I think
Speaker 4: three times in his life.
Speaker 5: And he mentions parrots.
Speaker 4: He mentions parrots talking in one of the places that
Speaker 4: he visits. Whether he then owned a parrot, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think that the way it becomes associated very firmly
Speaker 4: is in Treasure Island.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: This book published in the eighteen hundreds, quite a long
Speaker 4: time after the moment of piracy in history that we
Speaker 4: are talking about, and Treasure Island is I think one
Speaker 4: of the other key landmarks here.
Speaker 5: It's the most popular book.
Speaker 4: I think it's there are more films and adaptations of
Speaker 4: Treasure Islands than there are of any real pirate. It's
Speaker 4: been such an influential.
Speaker 5: Piece of culture.
Speaker 4: But Robert Louis Stevenson, when he wrote that he was
Speaker 4: inspired by Another.
Speaker 5: Book, which was written in seventeen twenty.
Speaker 4: Four at the time the pirates were active, called The
Speaker 4: General History of the Pirates.
Speaker 5: It's very well known amongst people interested in piracy.
Speaker 4: It's probably the most influential book that historians use. And
Speaker 4: so although Robert Louis Stevenson was writing fiction with Treasure Island,
Speaker 4: he was drawing on these stories that were circulating at
Speaker 4: the time of piracy. And that's another big theme of
Speaker 4: my book is that piracy is not just about what
Speaker 4: pirates are doing, because whether you are a pirate or
Speaker 4: not depends upon who your friends are, It depends upon
Speaker 4: legal issues, upon the stories being telling about you, like
Speaker 4: William Dampierre trying to tell stories about himself. And so
Speaker 4: the most famous pirates, people like Blackbeard and Bonnie, Mary Reads,
Speaker 4: bar Pani, Roberts, they are all featured in this book,
Speaker 4: The General History, published in seventeen twenty four, and it's
Speaker 4: from that book that a lot of these famous stories
Speaker 4: about pirates that then kind of become definitive and get
Speaker 4: picked up by Treasure Island and so on.
Speaker 5: Later.
Speaker 3: Were there any women pirates or were they all men?
Speaker 5: So that we know of two within the kind of
Speaker 5: period we're talking about.
Speaker 4: We know of two Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid, who
Speaker 4: again are very well known.
Speaker 5: They're discussed in the General.
Speaker 4: History, and interestingly, they're the only two pirates who are
Speaker 4: not captains, who get their own chapters, who get their
Speaker 4: own illustrations. They're prominently talked about on the title page.
Speaker 4: So the writer of this book clearly thought that these
Speaker 4: two women made a significant story.
Speaker 5: That would appeal to readers. And we know for certain
Speaker 5: that these two women sailed on.
Speaker 4: A pirate ship, were involved in piracy, were tried and
Speaker 4: sound guilty of piracy, but were.
Speaker 5: Not executed because they both pleaded that.
Speaker 4: They were pregnant, which meant that you would not be
Speaker 4: executed for the term.
Speaker 5: Of the pregnancy. And then one of them.
Speaker 4: Died in prison from a fever, and the other we
Speaker 4: don't know but probably was not executed.
Speaker 5: So we know about those two.
Speaker 4: Women, and it's interesting how in the record of their
Speaker 4: trial they do come across as really determined fearce, you know,
Speaker 4: more piratical than their male comrades in some ways. But
Speaker 4: then there's a lot of stories about them from this
Speaker 4: General History book which I don't personally believe to be
Speaker 4: true at all, because there's no other evidence, and the
Speaker 4: way in which these stories are being told about them
Speaker 4: is really to try to make broader points about how
Speaker 4: women should behave and kind of saying that these two
Speaker 4: women are behaving in a really bad way. They're sort
Speaker 4: of accused of being sexually promiscuous and all sorts of
Speaker 4: things like that, and so I don't think we can
Speaker 4: take any of that to actually be true.
Speaker 5: The story worries about the two of them and their
Speaker 5: lives on ship.
Speaker 4: We know, for example, the stories talk about them dressing
Speaker 4: as men and hiding their identity, but we know that
Speaker 4: they were known as women from the start of the
Speaker 4: voyage or very early on in the voyage, so it
Speaker 4: seems highly unlikely, and people outside the voyage knew that.
Speaker 4: So it really seems highly unlikely that they were actually
Speaker 4: pretending to be men on this ship and hiding in
Speaker 4: a way that the stories are told. I think there's
Speaker 4: also a really interesting point though, because the story of
Speaker 4: those two women is so sensational because people assumed that
Speaker 4: women didn't go on ships and they had to pretend
Speaker 4: to be men, and we do know of other women
Speaker 4: who did that, who dressed as men to travel on ship,
Speaker 4: but also women were traveling on ships, women were emigrating
Speaker 4: to the Americas, women were traveling on ships.
Speaker 5: They were involved in trade.
Speaker 4: They were you know, their husbands were sailors, or they
Speaker 4: were family connections. Sometimes they were investors. Sometimes they often
Speaker 4: we were talking about black markets earlier. Often women have
Speaker 4: a really crucial role in selling plunder and other commodities.
Speaker 4: So I actually think there's a much much bigger role
Speaker 4: for women in the maritime world than we normally assume.
Speaker 3: Was there a police patrol that hunted down the pirates.
Speaker 4: Usually not, and this is part of the issue through
Speaker 4: this period. Indeed, one of the reasons that plundering really
Speaker 4: develops is because imperial governments are happy to sponsor plundering
Speaker 4: because they haven't got their own naval resources. No one
Speaker 4: really has a substantial navy until the very end of
Speaker 4: the period we're talking about, and that's one of the
Speaker 4: key changes that brings about that extreme surge of piracy
Speaker 4: in the early seventeen hundred that we mentioned. The empires
Speaker 4: in Europe build up much bigger navies, which gives them
Speaker 4: greater control. They no longer need to rely on piracy.
Speaker 4: You get naval patrols being established in Jamaica, in the
Speaker 4: Chesapeake Bay. You get expeditions sent to Madagascar, but even
Speaker 4: then navy ships are rarely as quick.
Speaker 5: Or as maneuverable as pirates.
Speaker 4: It was I wanted to clarify, I said the length
Speaker 4: of a football field. I'm at half a football field,
Speaker 4: and we were talking about the lengths of ships earlier,
Speaker 4: so so shorter than I had suggested, but sort of
Speaker 4: on the east coast of the Americas, even the smallest
Speaker 4: navy ships can't get into the creeks and the bays
Speaker 4: and the places that the pirate ships can hide. So
Speaker 4: often the actions being there are expeditions against pirates, but
Speaker 4: the expeditions are being organized by local colonial merchants in smaller,
Speaker 4: fast and maneuverable ships. So the expedition that captures what
Speaker 4: kills black Beard, for example, it's led by navy officers,
Speaker 4: but it's actually ships from Virginia who are which are
Speaker 4: sent out because they have the kind of small and
Speaker 4: maneuverable vessels. So there are efforts to crap down on piracy,
Speaker 4: but they're rarely completely successful.
Speaker 2: Is it conceivable that there was a wealthy individual who
Speaker 2: fronted the pirates, owned the ship and did it for money.
Speaker 5: Definitely happened.
Speaker 4: It definitely happened on many occasions in the early in
Speaker 4: the late sixteen hundreds, that was the most common situation,
Speaker 4: right because, as I said, most people who were carrying
Speaker 4: out plunder were trying to do it legally. A really
Speaker 4: good example here is a guy called Lord Bellamont who
Speaker 4: is the governor of New York in the sixteen nineties,
Speaker 4: and he invests in and bats and helps politically with
Speaker 4: William Kidd's voyage. William Kidd is again a very famous
Speaker 4: name in pirate history, and Kid is sent out to
Speaker 4: capture other pirates. He's sent out as a pirate hunter
Speaker 4: to the Indian Ocean. But when he arrives, I mean
Speaker 4: he always denies this, but he does turn to piracy,
Speaker 4: and by the time he gets back, political circumstances have changed.
Speaker 4: What Kid did in the Indian Ocean as well known
Speaker 4: because of reports, and Bellamont is actually the man who
Speaker 4: then arrests Kid, possibly to save his own neck because he's.
Speaker 5: Been involved in this voyage.
Speaker 4: And Kid is sent back to London and tried and executed.
Speaker 4: But so investors in pirate voyages. Is all plundering voyages
Speaker 4: very common in that really extreme surge with black Beard
Speaker 4: and Bonnie and Reed Kaliko Jack. In the early seventeen ten,
Speaker 4: it's much less common merchants. The laws have changed. Merchants
Speaker 4: might get prosecuted for themselves, so they're.
Speaker 5: More careful about what they're doing.
Speaker 4: But even then, some merchants are going to the Bahamas
Speaker 4: to trade with pirates, and black Beard and many other
Speaker 4: pirates actually get pardons from some colonial governors. I think
Speaker 4: black Beard is pardoned in North Carolina and then he
Speaker 4: goes back to piracy. So there are questions about the
Speaker 4: relationship between even black Beard and some of these colonial
Speaker 4: authority figures.
Speaker 2: Today there are modern day pirates Richard in the United States,
Speaker 2: for example. What they do is steal the cargo of ships.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, so, I mean this.
Speaker 4: Is a really interesting distinction where we have this historical
Speaker 4: image of piracy which is fun, which is in games
Speaker 4: and films and you know, theme park rides and everything,
Speaker 4: but actually plundering at sea has never gone away. It
Speaker 4: doesn't stop after seventeen twenties, which is sort of the
Speaker 4: end of the period I'm dealing with. You still get plundering,
Speaker 4: you get spikes of piracy in times of war, and
Speaker 4: you see, it's very interesting to compare some of these scenarios.
Speaker 5: So a well known example is.
Speaker 4: Somalia in the early twenty first century, around two thousand
Speaker 4: and nine twenty ten, and there you have some similarities
Speaker 4: in that there's a breakdown of politics during the civil war.
Speaker 5: There's an economic.
Speaker 4: Crash because the territorial wars in Somalia not being protected,
Speaker 4: so there's overfishing, there's very possibly dumping of materials, all
Speaker 4: sorts of things going on, and so fishermen in Somalia
Speaker 4: who can no longer support themselves turned to piracy and
Speaker 4: start capturing ships. And again that kind of economic incentive
Speaker 4: is a big feature of historical piracy. There's also, just
Speaker 4: as there was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in
Speaker 4: the early twenty first century, there's a big legal dispute
Speaker 4: in the United Nations about how best to deal with this,
Speaker 4: how do you who's responsible for stopping piracy, who has jurisdiction.
Speaker 4: That's a big problem in the tenth the eighteenth century,
Speaker 4: and still a big problem in the twenty first century.
Speaker 4: But there are also differences in the way they operate. Obviously,
Speaker 4: not just technology, but also ransom and capturing of individuals,
Speaker 4: which which does happen in some historic episodes of piracy,
Speaker 4: and a lot of these pirates in the present day
Speaker 4: are also connected with sort of international gangs for finance
Speaker 4: and all sorts of things like that, so it's not
Speaker 4: exactly the same. But I think it's really interesting how
Speaker 4: we have compartmentalized in our brains between sort of historical
Speaker 4: piracy which is kind of safe and fun, and then
Speaker 4: the presence of violence at sea still being a feature
Speaker 4: of life today.
Speaker 3: Did the cargo ships have armed crew members once piracy
Speaker 3: started really getting big.
Speaker 4: Yes, absolutely, so all merchant ships were carrying weaponry in
Speaker 4: order to prit themselves, partially because of pirates, but also
Speaker 4: because of the maritime war. And I think this is
Speaker 4: another key point of the period the sixteen hundreds of
Speaker 4: seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 5: There are more periods.
Speaker 4: Of war between England and Spain, France, then Neetherlents, and
Speaker 4: there are periods of peace. And so first of all,
Speaker 4: that creates lots of opportunities for plundering, and second of all,
Speaker 4: it means that merchant ships have to be protecting themselves
Speaker 4: whenever they're going to see But that also means that
Speaker 4: they're very easy to convert to pirate ships. Right, most
Speaker 4: chips at sea would have had some kind of ammunition,
Speaker 4: So if you want to use that ship for plundering,
Speaker 4: it's quite easy to do that.
Speaker 2: In the movies, Richard, the pirates would bury their treasure
Speaker 2: and then come back and get it later.
Speaker 3: Did that really happen?
Speaker 4: This is a really interesting one because I think the
Speaker 4: sort of yes and no answer. So we have some
Speaker 4: records that the General History that I mentioned is the
Speaker 4: sort of very important book does say that one of
Speaker 4: the reasons the pirates like to operate in the Caribbean
Speaker 4: is because you've got lots of isolated islands where you
Speaker 4: can bury treasure. And I wonder if that's where Robert
Speaker 4: Luis Stevenson got the idea for Treasure Island from. But
Speaker 4: the book says they just do that so the heat
Speaker 4: dies down, and then they would go and collect it.
Speaker 4: It's not like a stash in that way. It's trying
Speaker 4: to use it to briefly, and all of the stories
Speaker 4: about really large kind of buried treasure emerge later. Right,
Speaker 4: So William Kidd claims to have stashed his treasure, but
Speaker 4: he does that when he's about to be executed, and
Speaker 4: I think it's quite clearly an attempt to get off
Speaker 4: the hook. Other pirates who are supposed to have left
Speaker 4: large stashes of treasure, those rumors don't really start to
Speaker 4: arrive until the twentieth century. So it's possible that pirates
Speaker 4: were burying their treasure, but I think it's really unlikely
Speaker 4: that you're going to find a massive cave full of
Speaker 4: treasure chests hidden away someone.
Speaker 3: What was the legal penalty for a pirate who was arrested, charged, convicted.
Speaker 4: Well, execution is a very clear.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Pirracy carries the death sentence through this entire period, but
Speaker 4: actually relatively few people are executed, partially because it's very
Speaker 4: hard to catch pirates, as we've been talking about with
Speaker 4: the police action and that are the extent of the ocean,
Speaker 4: hiding on the coastline, hiding in the bays and the
Speaker 4: inlets on the east coast of the Americas. So you
Speaker 4: have to catch them first, which happens very rarely. So
Speaker 4: most pirates that simply are never captured. Even when they're captured,
Speaker 4: sometimes they get pardoned because these are skilled sailors, they're
Speaker 4: skilled soldiers, they're people who are useful to the government. So,
Speaker 4: as I said, even Blackbeard gets to pardon before he
Speaker 4: goes back to piracy and has then killed in battle.
Speaker 4: But some pirates are pardoned and turned to government employment.
Speaker 4: And then even if you have not done that and
Speaker 4: you put them on trial, not every trial leads to
Speaker 4: a conviction, right, some of the most famous trials do
Speaker 4: and those pirates executed. William Kidd is a good example
Speaker 4: of that. But there are legal difficulties. So in theory
Speaker 4: it's very simple if you're a pirate, you get executed,
Speaker 4: but in practice it's very hard to catch and then
Speaker 4: to prove that someone is a pirate.
Speaker 5: Because as we said, there's all these legal forms of plundering.
Speaker 4: So some people, when they're put on trial, we'll say, oh,
Speaker 4: well I was doing it legally, and then sometimes they're
Speaker 4: actually acquitted. So again we have this popular image of
Speaker 4: the sort of the gallows and that of pirates, that
Speaker 4: you're hanging on the gallows of the port cities and
Speaker 4: on the River Thames, and that definitely happens, but it
Speaker 4: happens less frequently than you might imagine.
Speaker 3: What was that language for a pirate Churchard where they go?
Speaker 3: What does that mean?
Speaker 4: There are some theories that there were pirate language, but
Speaker 4: the kind of are e Shuvinmi Timbers. I think that's
Speaker 4: something that comes up. The theory I've heard is that
Speaker 4: an actor playing long John Silver in an early theater
Speaker 4: stage had a pronounced West Country Bristolian, brit Or South
Speaker 4: even ex sort of the British coastal southwest coast accent,
Speaker 4: and that's where the kind of pirate actually was so
Speaker 4: popular that everyone then saw copying that to play pirates.
Speaker 4: Many pirates came from that part of Britain, so they
Speaker 4: may well have had that accent, but it doesn't I
Speaker 4: don't think you started saying Arah when you became a pirate.
Speaker 4: Like I said, pirate is a career stage usually for sailors,
Speaker 4: people involved in the maritime world, so I think they
Speaker 4: talked like other sailors. And it's a very international world.
Speaker 4: You're English, Dutch, Spanish, French. You have some people who
Speaker 4: are escaped from slavery, so African African heritage. You have
Speaker 4: pirates in the Mediterranean from from North Africa and the
Speaker 4: Middle East. You have pirates in the Indian Ocean, plunderers
Speaker 4: who are who are from North and South India.
Speaker 5: From China.
Speaker 4: So you know, there isn't really one pirate language, just
Speaker 4: because there's not one type of pirate.
Speaker 1: Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
Speaker 1: one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
Speaker 1: com for more