July 13, 2023 • 56 mins
The so-called Golden Age of Piracy was a time of lawless, terrifying, at-times amazing and objectively ridiculous history. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Matt explore a fascinating claim: Did some anti-authoritarian pirates really form their own government?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yo Ho Ho.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. Let's give it up
for the buccaneer, the privates here of Ridiculous History, super
producer mister Rex Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yo Ho ho and a bottle of rum or something
they loved rum they did. It's a little sugary for
my taste.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I'm not yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's true. I do like a tiaki drink though. I
really like a tiaki drink, and a lot of those
do contain rum, but it's not like required.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And it's with so many fruit juices. And there's this
presentation the Equi Mall. There's a great tiki bar that
we always try to go to when we're in La
and we can tiki tie. Yeah, we go to see
go to We go to this tiki bar whenever we
have time in town and it's a little place, but
they serve these amazing drinks and you have to be
(01:22):
really careful with those two man, because I could drink
like one and then I think it's time to eat
trash street food and go.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
To bed well, which is easy to do. In La
But also I think tiki t or Tiki Ti is
like in the pantheon of like great American tiki bars.
They invented some drink there, some form of corpse revivor
or whatever. Maybe it was. I mean again, I don't
think it was that. Robert Lamb of stuff to splow
your mind is the guy that turned us onto the
(01:50):
spot in the first place. But it's super cool if
you're ever there. It's also right by these Scientology like
studio backlot. It's like Scientology just have bought a lesser
like studio. It has the gates and everything, and it's
got all these billboards for their propaganda stuff. But we
don't want to get sued by the Church of Scientology,
so let's talk about pirates instead. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Also, also we were very respectful when we got two
or three cocktails deep and ran around and had a
boot like photo shooting for the church.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So thank you. We didn't hop the gate fully.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
We just peeked through, which is fine, which is totally fine.
I'm Ben your Nol and we're talking there we go
when most people today in the West think of historical pirates,
not modern day pirates, which are definitely a thing we
kind of think in terms of larger than life fiction.
Long John Silver's not the restaurant. I still don't know
(02:45):
anyone who goes to that restaurant. I don't know how
they're open.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I do have one near my eyes. I do not go.
It's like there's a Long John Silver and a red Lobster,
sort of the last bastions of like fast food seafood,
you know.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, yeah, oh, and then Captain D's. Don't know if
that's still around.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It's pronounced cap'n. It's like crunch. Okay, it's still around. Yeah,
maybe I'm misconsturing my captain versus captains. Yeah, Long John
Silvers and Captain D's I think famously not great, but
I think they're part of one of the or at
least Long John Silver is part of one of those
big hospitality groups that's like owns like a bunch of
(03:23):
other fast food restaurants. You will sometimes see a combination
Long John Silvers and uh whatever. Yeah exactly, So, yeah,
you're right, you're right.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
This is it's young brands, young brands who own so
much stuff. That's that's exactly what you're talking about, Noel.
They they they're the same folks who own Pizza Hut, KFC,
Taco Bell, and uh, like hundreds of other things. Then
Long John Silver's weirdly enough, you know, maybe we should
(03:55):
do store fast food origin stories in a later episode. Uh,
we're gonna get of the pirates. We're getting there with
this segue. Long John Silver's, the restaurant in the US
is named after a character, a pirate in a beautiful
novel called Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson. And when
(04:17):
we think about this, when we think about pirates in
the West, we think about things like Johnny Depp and
Pirates of the Caribbean, or that ride at Disney Pirates
of the Caribbean. And there are Pirates of the Pancreas
or Pirates of the Pancreas from It's Ricksteil project.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Don't insult the Pirates of the Pancress gets fair offended.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
That's true, that's true. He's put a lot of energy
into that one. And who are we to call someone's
creative baby ugly.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And they're real pirates.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
They're not all like whitewashed like you know, Disney pirates
are right. I'm not going to say the next line
it is not culturally acceptable.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So so, Noel, when you and I were talking about this,
when we knew it might end up being a two
parter or we're going to see how it goes. But
what do you think of when you hear the word pirate,
like historical pirates, not modern day Somali pirates.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, I mean I think of what we were sort
of joking about at the top of the show. I
think of peg legs and parrots and you know, rum
and body rhymes and and sword fights, walk the plank,
CAP's hook, all that kind of stuff. But also I
do think of like a crew, you know, like like
like a like a like a captain in charge of
(05:29):
a crew, and I guess modern day pirates like that
will perhaps hijack ships, cargo ships. I mean, it really
was a lot of that, you know, uh, basically heists
on the on the high seas.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Right, Yeah, one hundred percent nailed it. These comedic takes
on pirates in fiction, these romanticized takes, they can be
a lot of fun, but parts of those tropes don't
line up with real world pirates. Today, we're asking whether pirates,
these tremendously anti authoritarian criminals, whether they actually made a
(06:04):
government of their own. You see this reference in video games.
You see this referenced in fiction and novels and films.
To answer this question, we have to look at something
called the Golden Age of piracy. Depends on who you ask,
this is from, like the mid sixteen hundred.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah, Golden doo. It's funny you say that.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Because, like so many historical ages, the name Golden Age
of piracy doesn't become a thing until well after the
actual age has passed.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Now and most importantly, Ben, it's a combination Long John
Silver's at Taco Bell, which does exist. There's a whole
Reddit thread devoted to this wondrous thing that exists apparently
upon the face of God's green Earth. I'll try their
case ideas. I don't know. I don't know, Long John Silvers.
What you do is you go to the Long John Silvers,
get you some fish fingers, then go over to Taco
(07:00):
Bell or do you a case of dia, and then
just kind of combine them, you know, by hand.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Right, So this time, this goldeny, Yeah, this halcion era
is more complicated than we might initially assume, especially if
we're only watching Disney movies about it. Not All of
the people we call pirates originally wanted to be criminals,
and most didn't have a weird like specific r maybe
(07:25):
pirate accent. They came from all parts of Europe and
different parts of the world. They sounded like where they
grew up, and sometimes they got Sometimes a lot of
times people didn't want to be pirates. The ship mutinied
because the navies at the time really sucked, or they
ended up getting kidnapped themselves and joining up because they
(07:48):
needed a job.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Guys, is the providence of the pirate accents? Is this
sort of like it seems vaguely Irish or something or
vaguely European? But is it just does it sort of
morph due to isolation? Is that sort of the idea
that's implied with these bizarro pirate drawls.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, a lot of a lot of times it does
sound like it might be some kind of Irish. It's
it's really it's a caricature of a dialect called West
Country English, Okay, And so it comes The reason we
have this come about is because of those works of fiction.
Treasure Island comes out in nineteen thirty four, and then
(08:31):
Captain Blood starring Errol Flynn, it's strange because we see
it's kind of like how Santa Claus as we know
it was made by the Coca Cola company. The pirate
accent is a work of entertainment.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
And you bring up a really great point in this outline,
ban it's important to establish and we're talking about this
golden age of piracy, sometimes we're talking about the wrong thing.
Pirates not the same as a privateer. Oh yeah, let's
establish some terms upfront, because what allowed this profession to
(09:10):
flourish was the fact that it was technically on the
right side of the law and could be considered just
that a profession.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, it's really sketchy. It's kind of like I trying
to think of a modern analogy, dude. It's kind of
like bounty hunters, which are technically, you know, they're on
the right side of the law. They bend the law
pretty often. Not all pirates are created equal, Like you said, Nol,
there were several distinct names for groups that sailed the
High Seas, and we don't have to get into all
(09:40):
the differences and details and nuts and bolts of buccaneer
versus pirate and so on, or corsair, et cetera. But
we do need to know the difference between privateer and pirate.
Pirate is the most general term for outlaws on the
high seas, oh in order maritime crimes. It comes from
(10:02):
a Greek word, the purates, which means brigand, and it
was since like the thirteen hundreds, pirate has been a
term used for anyone who's committing crimes on the ocean,
and usually the folks you're thinking of when we think
of pirates, they're bandits on the water. They're violent, they
intimidate people, they raid ships at sea, or you know,
(10:25):
Viking style, they raid coastal settlements.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Isn't that funny too? How the word then became associated
with like bootlegging stuff, you know, like pirting music or whatever,
or like piracy in terms of like copyright infringement. I
wonder when that started to kind of come into being,
and if it was just sort of like an accident
maybe like a term that sort of took off and
got popular, or if there is some etymological crossover there.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
I bet there's also a pr spin because remember the
three of us are the generation where you would go
to the movies once upon a time and you'd see
those PSAs that were like, you wouldn't download a car,
would you stop piracy? I think it helped the powers
that be to compare people downloading stuff illegally to pirates
(11:13):
rating ships.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
But it does look as well like the term piracy
began to be used in its more current form due
to some court cases, some old court cases that began,
like in the in the eighteenth century, piracy was being
used to describe the act of infringing on one's copyright. Nice. Yeah,
the idea being theft. And we'll get to.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Why that rings true a little later in our show today.
All Right, privateers make the sexcellent point. Privateers are pirates
with a co side, I would call them. They get
these letters of mark kind of like it's similar to
the patent letters or letters of patent we talked about
snake oil. Right, So, a country's authorities in the midst
(11:57):
of the big colonial powers all try to take possession
of the land across the Atlantic. These big colonial powers
will issue commissions to privately owned vessels, and they'll say, hey,
if you see a ship from another country or someone
who doesn't work for us trying to move goods, blood
(12:18):
and treasure, then go get them, sick them and you've
got our approval to do that. They were private armies,
they were mercenary armies. Often whenever there was a war,
a lot of letters of mark went out and a
lot of privateers went to seek their fortune. But just
like our pal Jesse James, you know, when the war
(12:41):
ends and your only skill set is waging war, sometimes
you just keep doing it on the other side of
the wall.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
That's exactly right. Once maybe some of the more legitimate
prospects dried up, a lot of these folks just kind
of went and forged their own path. Good example is
sixteen ninety one, a guy named Thomas two, who was
born into a British colony in what is today Rhode Island,
took one of those charges that you mentioned, Ben, one
(13:19):
of these commissions from the Governor of Bermuda for a
privateering vessel a voyage to Africa to take over a
French fort that was located on the Gambia River. However,
instead of following instructions and attacking the French fort as instructed,
(13:39):
he and his crew decided to sail to the Indian
Ocean and plundered a ship, a Mughal ship which was
that would have been what like an Indian trading vessel,
probably loaded down with spices and all kinds of valuable
trade goods.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Yeah, a lot of stuff that you just couldn't get
in Europe.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
So this guy went rogue right away. He didn't like
wait for he didn't do the job and then be like,
you know what, I think I can do better, strike
out on my own. He just like like, screw this,
I'm doing the I'm gonna knock over this spice ship.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
I like to say knock over too. Yet he was
just like, guys, who's gonna stop us? The king isn't
here on the boat. It's us, bros. Let's hurt people.
So privateers were crimes, right, Let's do crimes. So privateers
were mercenaries. And the key difference again was just the
approval of a colonial power. Oh there's one other big difference.
(14:37):
Unlike out and out pirates, privateers are expected to share
their loot with their patron government. So you can go,
you can go rob and pillage a Spanish ship, but
you have to go back to the nearest English governor
and give them their cut. This is organized crime, oh absolutely.
And for like a colonizing force like the British government.
(14:58):
This sort of is a way of extending the naval reach,
right like, and and keeping those that maybe would seek
to overturn their supremacy at bay, right like, just because
you know, by by promising treasure and glory and all
that stuff, you essentially not having to pay these people
because they're getting paid with what they get and then
(15:19):
you're taking your cut, your tribute. But they're also like
wreaking havoc on all these foreign vessels, right yeah, exactly.
This is the this becomes a revenue stream for these
colonial powers. For instance, in fifteen sixty eight, a privateer
we may know named Francis Drake takes part in Back
(15:42):
to the Rapper, Yes, yeah, yeah, before he got into wrap,
even before Degrassi, he was a privateer and he was
in the Battle of San Juan de Ulua in modern
day Mexico, and he fought the Spanish and even though
he did get he did get whooped. When he came
back he had over forty thousand British pounds worth of
(16:06):
gold and silver. This was great news for the crown.
These people were called Elizabeth's Sea dogs for a while because,
like you said, they were kind of an off the
book's army, and they got sent around not just to
rob resources from other colonial powers, but they also got
sent around because the monarchy wanted to make money off
(16:27):
the slave trade.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yikes, this was like early days of the slave trade.
I mean, at least in terms of you know, a
global slave trade. So I mean these Sea Dogs and England,
if you can imagine, really were kind of the layers
of the groundwork for this whole, you know, despicable industry
that would inevitably take the world by storm.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
One hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Man.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
And what we're saying it was a chaotic time. The
colonial powers were functioning like large international criminals. Indicates France, Spain, England.
They're making them breaking alliances. They're all trying to grab
a piece of what they called the New World. And yeah, spoiler, No,
they didn't ask the people who already lived there for
(17:14):
their opinions.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Absolutely not. And Ben, I think it's something that we've
all seen, like in you know, whether it be certain
sorcery type shows or maybe historical dramas, the idea of
you don't steal from certain folks, right right, like if
someone is under the protection of a certain government, you know,
and then you maybe do go rogue and steal from
(17:37):
the wrong crew because of the whole criminal nature of
the enterprise, let's just call it what it is. You
could then be coming home to a real problem, having
a price on your head.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Oh absolutely, Yeah, and that happens throughout history. And Okay,
so most of the pirate fiction we mentioned earlier, it's
based on this one period of time, just like so
many Western films are based on Yeah, based on a
relatively short period of time called the Wild West. Like
(18:08):
we said, golden nature piracy refers to. You'll get some
different opinions, but like anywhere from the mid sixteen hundreds
to the seventeen thirties, pirates were rome in the ocean everywhere.
In general, there are like three distinct periods. The buccaneers
from sixteen fifty to sixteen eighty, those guys were more
(18:29):
focused in attacking settlements and ports. And then the second
age would be something called the pirate round. It's around
because if you look at a map, it's a predictable
trade route that follows maritime commerce. So whatever wherever these
ships piled with goods are going, where places like the
East India Company go, the pirates follow in their wake,
(18:53):
sometimes with the approval of other countries, other colonial powers.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Then we also have you know, in an era that
comes right after the War of Spanish Succession, which you know,
it ends up leaving a ton of Anglo American sailors
and these privateers looking for work. So they've got you know,
we talked about that skill set right like Jesse, James
and all that. They know how to sail, but they
(19:20):
don't have an army to sail for, they don't have
the co sign of a government. So they're like not
going to starve, They're going to apply their trade. Right.
So in a lot in a lot of ways, these
governments made their own monsters, didn't they you know what
I mean? They very much did. Yeah. So these folks
are now like, you know what, to the Caribbean, where
(19:40):
we will become the titular pirates of said Caribbean or
the Indian Ocean or the West African coasts. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And during each of these three periods, piracy in the
Caribbean rises when conditions are right, and it fizzles out
when those conditions change. So what made Golden age so golden?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
For piracy?
Speaker 1 (20:02):
First, you need a lot of unemployed, able bodied, young men,
people who are out of work. They're desperate to survive.
You need a clear network of shipping and commerce, right,
you need prey for predators to exist. These pirates they
need dev guns and ships and weapons. Most importantly, there
has to be little to no rule of law. I don't
(20:25):
want to give a shout out to eleanor Evans over
a history extra who informed a lot of what we
know about the difference between privateers and pirates.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, and then just to your point about the Wild West,
that lack of rule of law is always what really
set things off in some of these border towns. And
you know, some of these kind of frontier towns, you
might have yourself a sheriff, you know, but that's not
going to be merely enough in the face of like
all of the lawless nests that came with that period.
And with this we're talking about the open seas, man, Like,
(20:57):
how can you police the open seas without like just
a constantly deployed naval force. And it's just all of
these cross forces and cross interests bashing against one another.
During this time. It really was, to your point, a
perfect storm of badassery and frankly bad attitudes.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Ben frankly bad attitudes and no all agreed. Colonial empires
were expanding across the globe, and they were often fighting
any number of other people, you know, native empires who said, hey,
we've got our own thing going on, stay away other
rival European powers. So it's no surprise that they weren't
(21:38):
able to watch every maritime falling sparrow. They were unable
to combat or even find or know about every single
pirate ship interdicting valuable shipments, resource and treasure. Think about it,
there are compelling reasons for you to be a pirate.
You got no laws you have to follow from a king,
although you do have pirate code, which we'll talk about.
(22:00):
You got no overbearing nobles. You might win the lottery
and get tons of gold. You were also, if you
were a pirate, you were primarily after gold, silver and jewels.
But yeah, plunder just so, but you couldn't, uh, you
wouldn't find that often in big, big amounts. So a
lot of times pirates would take the cargo of a
(22:23):
ship whatever that resource might be, you know, cinnamon, peppercorns, beer, rum,
sure rum, and then you would you would steal that
stuff and you would take it to resell it somewhere
where you knew they weren't going to squeal on you
to the authorities. If you are working for a navy
at this time, you might have been kidnapped. You might
(22:45):
have been press ganged, right, or a term that did
in age well people would say sometimes is shanghied. Just
like what's that thing where you got people drunk to
fix the vote?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Oh? What was that called a boy cooping? Coopy? The
hanging with mister Cooper. Yeah. Yeah, so it's kind of
like coopy.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Uh, these unscrupulous recruiters would get people drunk and then
they would have those folks wake up on you know,
like a Royal Navy ship.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Haha, that was a wild saturday you were for us? Yeah, exactly.
Oh man, it's true. Yeah, and then and then you've
been You found a really great point on world hisstory
dot Org that a lot of these uh you know,
maybe workaday pirates would just gamble away their money, you know,
(23:38):
gamble away their plunder. They're ill gutten gains. But then
you had some that actually kind of created like a network,
you know that like had a much more forward thinking
mindset and invested their doubloons correctly and invested in their
own fleet of ships. And that's when you get the
pirates of lore. Like your long John Silvery. I know
(24:00):
he wasn't real, but like a black Beard, and that
guy was real. He commanded like a giant crew and
was very organized. And it wasn't just chaos, rape and
pillogry and on the high seas. It was an enterprise.
It very much was. And let's talk a little bit
about their gold.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
The most sought after loot, as we said, was precious gems,
silver and gold, because these could be sold to a
dealer in a port that was low key cool with pirates,
pirate haven. But coins were even better because there was
no authority to check whether or not this was dirty money.
(24:37):
You didn't have to down yeah you did have to
launder money. You could just show up with coins. And
at this time, you know, there are a lot of
different sorts of denominations around and yeah, you're right, No,
you could just melt them down if you want it.
But we're talking about like pieces of eight silver ducats,
silver pesos, Spanish doubloons.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
There were no like serial numbers or any kind of
way of tracking them back to the bank. That they
came from. There was no ink cartridge that would explode
when you like undid the band on them or whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
There was a guy at the back of the tavern
or brothel who would like, bite a piece of gold.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I love it. Yeah, well this already golden tooth. That's terrified.
Oh gosh, yeah, I know, it's funny. It just becomes
such a like a fun you know, cliche little trope.
But yeah, I mean, the golden age of piracy does
likely refer to the gold that was a flowing as well,
(25:33):
you know, because that stuff was really easy to move,
It could really easily be bought and sold. But also
let's not forget like that mogul shipping vessel that things
like spices, things like silk, things that were rare and
that you couldn't get everywhere. And there became why do
you think they call it the silk road Man, the
(25:55):
pirate bay. You know, like all of this stuff was
this underground black market that sprang up, you know, around
the types of stuff that these pirates were hauling in.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
One hundred percent. Yeah, most of the time, again, they
weren't finding these holy grails of plunder. They were hitting
up ships for things like tobacco, sugar, rum, brandy wine,
you know, barrels of fur and lumber, and even flour.
They would steal flower because this operation could also supply
(26:34):
the ship with much needed resources. Sometimes they would knock
over a ship that had very wealthy VIP pastors. They
would take all of those VIPs personal valuables, and they
would even you know, take the clothes off their backs
and say, I could sell this. I can make a
ton of money on this. They would steal food because
(26:54):
they needed to eat. They're also working vessel at sea.
They would take whatever's in the ship's medicine chest. I
read one really interesting story where there's like a fishing
boat that gets knocked over by a much larger pirate
ship and all they take, dude, are the hats of
the fishermen. The fishermen had other stuff, they have fish,
(27:16):
you know, they're just a little boat of middle class fishermen.
But the pirates had got super drunk the night before
and they rolled up on this boat and they said,
we are going to take your hats because we partied
too hard and we all threw our hats in the
water last night. So they would steal all kinds of
(27:37):
stuff you know, the stories of treasure get exaggerated a
little bit. They also took rope, tackle, you know, nails, sails, anchors,
all the stuff you need to run a pirate ship.
But here's the question. What do you do if you've
got a bunch of hot items and you can't go
(27:58):
to port and sell them because you're a wanted band, where.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Do you go? Well, you mentioned those those pirate hubs, right,
or those pirate havens. You know, you essentially needed what
you might call today a fence. You know, he needed
a place that would take your ill gotten booty and
essentially I mean hold on to it, you know, well
while things kind of cooled down, right and potentially then
(28:21):
move it for you. You know. But you also were
if you weren't in one of these sort of safe spaces,
you might likely have a price on your head or
be you know, unwanted posters and such. So you needed
these places that you referred to earlier ben as pirate havens.
One such, very famous one of these was a city
(28:44):
called New Providence. Oh yeah, there goes the neighborhood, right.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
This is located in the modern day Bahamas, and Spain
had claimed the island of due Providence after Crystabul Cologne
legendary pill quote quote discovered the New World. Eventually the
land changed hands and England lay claim to it. If
we go back to the late sixteen hundreds, there's a
(29:11):
guy named Henry Avery. Henry Avery is a privateer who
made a boatload get it by plundering gold and silver
and elephant tusk and gunpowder from these trade ships heading
from India to a local harbor. And he was able
to bribe the governor of New Providence of the English
(29:32):
Bahamas at the time, a guy named Nicholas Trott, who
is super important by the way in Carolina's history. He said, look,
let me give you not just some gold, not just
some silver, but this entire ship of elephant tusk and gunpowder.
And all you have to do, my bro is let
us operate safely here. Don't jam us up, Nick, just
(29:52):
don't jam us up.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
No.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
So in the sixteen ninety six, Avery successfully bribed the
governor Nicholas trot into establishing NASA in the Bahamas as
a haven where the pirates could do their business freely,
you know, like like Amsterdam in the wire, you know,
(30:14):
like a drug free zone. But this is like a
crime free zone. The governors would essentially, you know, go
through the motions doing their due diligence and an act
you know, being stewards of the law, and perhaps make
them you know, let's call them ceremonial attempts to stop
(30:37):
or to shut down piracy. But it's really no different
than you know, crime syndicates paying off the police, you know,
or anything like that. It really is just as simple
as that. If there's money to be made and people
are lacking in scruples, then these kinds of situations will
thrive on, you know.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
And overtime as a result, That's what I mean when
I say there goes the neighborhood, the place goes into decline.
The governors are increasingly authorities on paper only, the pirates
are becoming more and more powerful, and the founeralal statistic
about this. What you need to know is there's a
bunch of civilian settlers and soldiers. They have a fort,
French and Spanish ships team up and they attack Nassau
(31:19):
first in seventeen oh three, and then a few years
later they come back and do the same thing in
seventeen oh six. So a bunch of settlers and soldiers
leave at this point, they cut their losses. There's a
heavily damaged fort left, and there are no soldiers there.
There's no one to enforce the laws that existed even
as this place was on decline. If you look at
(31:42):
the statistics, by seventeen thirteen, there were over one thousand
pirates in this community and they far outnumbered the four
hundred to five hundred people who are just regular folks.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, this is what you might call a high of
scummon villainy. It's starting to fester over here, right.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, and the main city becomes home to folks like
black Beard. We mentioned earlier pirates like Jack Rackham, Benjamin Hornigold,
which is just hilarious, and Sam mak Roco was pretty cool,
too fun to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, these guys have
good names and they these guys all used this island
as a base. At some point there were six hundred
(32:24):
pirates not just living there, but sailing from Nassau who
raided shipping and shipping routes and ports from the Caribbean
all the way up to Maine. A couple of them
even started calling themselves the governors of New Providence. We've
got a great quote from a guy named Thomas Barrow.
He is quoted as saying that he is the governor
(32:47):
of Providence, we'll make it a second Madagascar, and expects
five or six hundred more men from Jamaican sloops to
join in the settling of Providence and to make war
on the French and the Spaniards. But for the English,
they don't intend to meddle with them unless they are
first attacked by them.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Okay, And this, you know, kind of worked out for
a time. They they came up with all name. I
wonder if this is where the Jolly Roger came from.
Probably now that probably wasn't something that was more a
flag you'd fly at sea. But they did come up
with a sort of you know name for their new institution,
the Republic of Pirates, because those two things go hand
(33:26):
in hand, you know, law and order and governance and piracy.
It did avoid attacking British vessels though, right, don't poke.
The bear word did get out about New Providence becoming
the safe haven for pirates looking to have a good
yoho ho and you know, kick back with some RUMs
and all that stuff. And it was also a place
(33:47):
that would essentially serve as a recruiting ground, right.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Oh yeah, this place launched some careers in the world
of piracy. It was mostly run by a group of
real hard cases who were collectively called the Flying Gang.
The Flying Gang is a team up that comes from
a heist. In seventeen fifteen, the Spanish treasure fleet sank
during a hurricane off the coast of La Florida, and
(34:12):
when a pirate named Henry Jennings learned that the ships
had sank, he devised a plan along with people like
Benjamin Hornegold who he mentioned, Samuel Bellamy who he mentioned,
and a guy named Charles Vain, and he said, look,
the Spanish are going to try to salvage this. They're
going to try to pull the gold out from these
sunken ships. We're going to be there and we're going
(34:34):
to steal the treasure from the salvagers. They eventually call
themselves the Flying Gang. And I'm trying very hard not
to write parody lyrics for the Flying Gang to the
tune of the Crying Game. But that's how you know,
that's how colonial powers were. They don't want no more
of the Flying Gang. And to your point about people
(34:55):
starting a career, Edward Teach aka Blackbeard. He gets start here,
so does Jack Rackham, whose pirate namer street name was
Catlico Jack, and a lot of other people, including some
female pirates like Mary Reid and a body.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, and in case you guys are wondering, I'm over
here on Assassin's Creed Wikipedia searching all these names because
all these people are in Assassin's Creed for black Flags.
So it's kind of good been in nostalgia for me
right now.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
That's awesome, man.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, And I you know, I wasn't the biggest fan
of the maritime aspects of Assassin's Creed, but what a
great universe they've built, and I enjoy I enjoy a
couple of the games having that museum mode where you
can just walk around and look at buildings. Oh yeah,
I think that's the one set in Italy. Anyway, here's
the idea. These guys they do their heist. The pirates
(35:45):
take their wealth and Horne Gold and is pal Thomas
Barrow establish a new community on this island, on New Providence,
and they set out to create a legitimate pirate republic.
(36:06):
And like you said, nol, honestly, a lot of these
guys could be subjects to their own episodes. You know,
what you need to know here is somewhere in a
mostly neglected part of the Caribbean that didn't have a
huge population at the time, some of the area's most
dangerous people put aside their typical rivalries for a common cause.
(36:27):
It's an avengers of maritime crime, you know, heist on
the high seas and they start attacking everyone except the
British at first.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Right, So by seventeen thirteen, the war of that war
a Spanish succession. I mean, that's hard to say Spanish successions.
That's what the war was about. I know, it's just
literally about too many h sounds. It was over, it
had wrapped up. Thankfully, they figured it out, they figured
out how to pronounce it. But many of these British
privateers didn't get the memma we'd take for granted, like
(37:00):
how many movies are spoiled by the existence of smartphones?
You known, problem, there's that thing, but even just like
in general, like in the thriller of some kind, like
how easy would it be for someone just to have
googled a thing or to have the correct directions that
didn't get lost or you know, for someone to be
able to warn them. You know, in these days it
was even worse. You know, they would take months sometimes
(37:22):
for word to reach individuals who were out in remote areas,
especially during wartime. So a lot of these privateers, they
did not get the news that the war was over.
This is the kind of thing you hear about all
the time, you know, in historical situations where perhaps an
action is taken, often a tragic action, due to not
realizing the circumstances had completely changed.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
One hundred percent. Man, I'm glad you bring that up,
because it reminds me of that Japanese soldier who didn't
know World War two had ended for decades and decades. Also,
people who were enslaved in the US who didn't learn
about emancipation for quite some time. The travel of information,
the frictionless travel of information, is probably one of the
(38:08):
biggest wins of recent humanity or the thing that is
going to spell the end of civilization maybe both maybe maybe.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
And so these you know a lot of these these
these uh, these privateers either didn't get the news or
wouldn't accept it, didn't didn't think that it was true.
So they, you know, slipped further and further into piracy,
which actually led to a lot of you know, new
blood kind of being pumped into New Providence right to
(38:39):
join that pirate republic and and causes an absolute boom
uh in in the numbers of pirates that were hanging
out there. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
And now New Providence is becoming a boom town and
it's not as unified as it was. Uh this this
place was only around, by the way, for a very
short amount of time, all over a decade. And over time,
these pirates of New Providence, they stop giving British ships
a hall pass. A lot of these guys who are
(39:09):
former privateers, like working for England, start attacking any ship
they want, British or not. At their height, they're giving
themselves titles like Commodore. They're commanding fleets of ships, and
they can go toe to toe with the Royal Navy.
Sometimes they can even outgun it, which is a huge
deal because the Royal Navy is the big dog on
(39:31):
campus at this point.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
That's right, And this starts to make me think of
again perhaps some thinking more along the lines of some fiction.
But this is when you know, you start to see
like things like in Game of Thrones, the Golden Compass
or whatever like these, like armies for hire or even
we have now today with the Wagner group, you know
over there in the Ukraine or in Russia. The idea
(39:56):
that an independent group could become so large as to
rival a an official military. And even though you know
right now they're at odds, there could come a time
where for enough money, maybe you can hire some of
these pirate crews to do your bidding. You know who knows.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, And at this point, you know, King George is
starting to get a little beefed up because it was
easy to ignore the crimes of these pirates as long
as they weren't attacking the British themselves. But the British
government was starting to get really concerned. They say, piracy
is so out of control that we're not getting British
(40:34):
settlers into these colonies, and if the land is unpopulated,
our foreign rivals may take it over. This is not
a sustainable situation. So George makes the decision. He contacts
a former privateer and makes some governor Woods Rogers, and
(40:54):
he says, Rogers, I want you to go over to
New Providence, go over to this high of a scumonbility
and tell them that I will give them a pardon.
I will give them an act of grace, a king's pardon.
This one is called a Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Right September fifth, seventeen seventeen, pirates would receive amnesty, be
forgiven of their trespasses that includes murder, just so long
as they surrendered by the next January fifth of seventeen eighteen.
So it's like a lot of blind eye kind of mentality,
isn't it. It's like, we're gonna unless you continue to
(41:34):
operate outside the law, but we need you to agree
that we're putting a clock on this because this isn't
gonna work forever for everyone, right.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, this is look, you will totally free pass you guys.
We've had fun, we've made some friends, we've plundered some ships,
we've had some laughs. But as long as you surrender
by this date by January fifth, seventeen eighteen, later they
kicked the can down the road, then it's all good.
And Woods was the right guy for this job because
(42:04):
he was a former privateer and slave trader. He spoke
the cultural language of the pirates, and he did convince
a lot of them to take a square life. A
lot of pirates accepted a pardon, but some refused to
give up the game, notably folks like Jack Rackham and
Edward Teach. The problem was these guys, to your point,
(42:28):
they were living on borrow time. Either the Royal Navy
or local authorities would get them soon enough. The party
couldn't go on forever. And we'll tell you what happened there,
But before we do, let's get to the heart of
the question for today's episode. Was New Providence really a
pirate government?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Kind of? Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
I mean they had people with specific jobs, like they
were organized crime, right, So the mafia has a hierarchy,
they got specif duties.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
They've got a code.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
What's the mafia code. It's not Omeerta, that's code of silence, right.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Oh, it's a I don't know. I just know Cosinostra.
I don't know. I always thought Omeerica kind of was
the mafia code, but maybe there's another one. Awesome.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, but they had like they had these rules and
just like the mafia, the pirates said, we need a
code of behavior that will reduce internal conflict and maximize
profits at the same time, you can find great examples
of real pirate code. We got one from a guy
named bartholomewle black bart Roberts in seventeen twenty two. He
(43:41):
and his crew made a set of laws that are
pretty they're pretty interesting. Just put a few of these
on here. They're not all of them, but one of
the ones that might surprise a lot of people is voting.
Everybody got to vote on the ship except hostages.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
And jump back in one more time with Assassin's Cree.
Bartholomew black Bart Roberts is actually the secret villain of
Assassin's Creed four spoilers.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
He is, oh a.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
Spoiler for a game that came out of one a
PS three.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Next, you're gonna tell me what happened at at Ford Theater?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Oh god, yeah no, but.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Yeah, he's uh, he is I forget what his role is.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
He's the sage.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah, so I saw that name and I had to
jump in here.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
I'm going away now. No, let's give it. Let's do
a max with the facts that seeking in the phone
and he's fallen knowledge. It's just for you right now
here with the fact.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
But yeah, yeah, there we go. People could vote. You
had actually more of a shage an individual on a
pirate ship than you did in a Royal navy.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Pretty interesting, right, I mean, yeah, there was a certain
amount of equity right in this arrangement where everyone was
someone on an equal playing field. It's very interesting. I mean,
I'm sure in practice, maybe I don't know, I've actually heard,
you know, I think that's a mus in history class.
May have done an episode on this back in the
day when I was the producer of that show. And
(45:14):
I do feel like they really took this stuff very seriously.
The idea of equality. You know, it wasn't just on paper.
It wasn't like it wasn't a do as I say,
not as I do. You know, everyone lived by this code.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
One hundred percent, man, and they were surprisingly progressive in
some ways. They also said in a lot of pirate code.
They said, don't steal from coworkers, you know what I mean,
don't hoard stuff from the crew, don't rob. If you
rob a fellow pirate, you're gonna have your nose and
your ears split, and then we'll throw you ashore on
(45:47):
like the worst island we can find. They said, no gambling.
Weirdly enough, this is oddly wholesome until you think about it.
They had a curfew. They said every night you got
at eight pm, you got to put out all the
lights and candles. They said, if any of the crew
want to sit around and drink, they have to do
it on the open deck without lights. And it's not
because they were worried about their bedtime. It's because lights
(46:10):
would help you identify a ship at sea.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the other you know, there's
another term like that cut of your jib, Right, that
was one the idea of I like the cut of
your jib refers to the cut of the sail on
a certain ship, so that you could be identified at sea.
That's how you knew you that was a friend, you know,
or a friendly Right. I always assumed the jib meant
(46:35):
like jaw or something like that, But no, not the case.
And this is the case too. The idea of those
lights being a really important identifier. Next we have this
is a very piratey one. I would argue, stay ready
to fight. It runs me that Russell crow bit on
South Park where he's fighting around the world, you know,
(46:56):
like singing songs and so and so and fought and
round the world. That's fairy. Yeah, always be ready for
a fight. Each man shall keep his piece, cutlass, and
pistols at all times, clean and ready for action.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
We don't know what it's gonna pop off, you know
what I mean. Stay frosty, stay sharp, five by five.
They also have workers comp They had an early version
of workers compensation. If you were crippled, or you lost
a limb, or you had another very serious injury in
your service with your pirate crew, you would get eight
(47:30):
hundred pieces of eight and if you were less, if
you were hurt less, egregiously, you would get a corresponding
amount of money. That's pretty cool. There are many places
and industries that don't bother doing that today, so that
might surprise some people, some of us with stereotypes about pirates.
We're not saying they're good people.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
We know that.
Speaker 1 (47:53):
Pirate code also said, hey, the captain isn't necessarily a dictator.
We on the ship can all take vote, and if
we don't like the captain or a leader, we can
vote them out. And again a lot of these guys
are coming from the tyranny of working for merchant ships
or the Royal Navy. This is super duper freedom for them.
(48:13):
So from seventeen oh six to about seventeen eighteen, these scalleywags,
I would argue, they really did form, if not a government,
a political entity because they adapted pirate code of the
sea to become sort of the by laws of their
haven in New Providence. And they were also they were
(48:35):
oddly progressive in terms of race relations for the time.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Absolutely, that's another thing that always kind of had me
a little bit flummoxed, you know, in addition to the
whole workers comp thing. I mean, they really were like
some of the early kind of labor rights activists. It's
very very interesting. Another very interesting feature of the Republic
of Pirates, to your point, that was the fact that
(49:01):
Africans were considered equal members of the crew. And it's
so interesting because we talked about how those privateers or
originally right that was a big early form of slave trade.
It would seem that what evolved and became maybe the
less lawful version of those pirateers that were operating outside
(49:22):
of the rule of law were in fact much more
humane than those operating under the rule of life.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
I mean, yeah, imagine you're attacking a ship as a
pirate crew, and you come to find that it is
not It is not just loaded with you know, like
cinnamon and pantaloons and rum, but they're also enslaved people
(49:49):
on there. You can be kind of a hero if
you're one of the folks who say, look, all the captain,
you know, all you other guys, we're gonna rob you,
blind you, you who were enslaved. You can be free,
you can join us. That's a hard thing to say
no to. And we know that several people of American,
(50:09):
Indian or of African background became pirate captains in their
own right. One of the most famous is a guy
called Black Caesar. And look, okay, so weirdly progressive pirates
were surprisingly weirdly progressive. Back to our boy, Governor Woods
Rogers arrives in Nassau. He's got the king's pardon. He's
(50:31):
pitching to people. One dude accepts, and he doesn't just accept.
Benjamin Hornigold says, okay, I'll stop being a pirate, and
Rogers says, well, you're a special case, my friend. He says, hey, ben,
if you want a new job, why don't you become
a trader and help me hunt down all your buddies,
(50:52):
and so Horni Gold like that goes from being a
pirate to a pirate hunter and he's chasing down all
of his former colleagues, anyone who doesn't take the King's pardon.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Man put his money? Where is not this? Yeah? This
is uh what do you call it?
Speaker 3 (51:09):
In case y'all were wondering, Horni Gold is very much
a villain in Assassin's Creed Black Flow.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
Oh good, I was gonna ask.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
He starts off the game. Actually he's like one of
your mentors. But no, it changes and you actually have
to hunt him down at some point.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
He's a pill. He's a pill in real life too.
But he didn't get everybody. He got around ten other
salty dogs. On the morning of December the twelfth of
seventeen eighteen. Nine of those fellas were Yeah, they were executed.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
They were killed yeap for piracy. And you wonder if
they got captured. I couldn't find the answer to this.
Maybe someone can help us. If those pirates got captured
and they recanted their crimes, could they take the king's
pardon right before they were executed?
Speaker 2 (52:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
I don't know, but like you said, no, our buddy
Benjamin Hornegold doesn't get everybody. The pirate hunters don't get
everyone in New Providence. A lot of folks get away,
Charles Vaine, Blackbeard. They go on to pursue their villainous
careers elsewhere in the Caribbean. And just like that, after
eleven very strange years, the Republic of the Pirates is gone,
(52:24):
and overall, as conditions change, the fortunes of the pirates
in general decline in the mid seventeen twenties, and they
never became as powerful as they were for that brief
time in the seventeen tens. And along the way, you know,
a lot of those guys can't live that demanding life
(52:45):
as they age. But if they were smart, buccaneers and
pirates and smugglers and privateers all had invested their gains.
And so now these guys, a lot of them were
no longer criminals. They owned plantations, they owned legit businesses,
and there seemed to be a rule of imperfect law
spreading throughout the Caribbean. And that's kind of that's kind
(53:09):
of the story, but it is.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
It's so interesting. It's like we started with all of
this pillage and violence, and I'm gonna come back to
this thing that I think we were both taken by.
The legal version of piracy is almost like is much
more of a free for all than this version, at
least of the illegal version, right, I don't know. It's fascinating,
(53:33):
and there's a lot.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
Of there's a lot of stuff we found for tangents
and trivia that we might save for a future episode.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
I think we'll call the Day now.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
Oh, one fact, we can say the eye patch wasn't
always to cover up a damaged eye, because there were
no electric lights and it could be dangerous to have
a lot of lights inside a wooden ship. Often the
eye patch was used to keep one eye in the dark,
so that when you suddenly ran below deck, you could
(54:03):
take the patch off and your eye would already be
used to low light.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Way. Yeah, that's alway. That's literally just taught me something
brand new. I assumed it was maybe for like sharpshooting,
you know, yeah, maybe, But I love this idea that
it was to help, you know, have your eye quickly
already adjusted to the dark. That's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
Or else they were all just very bad at not
hitting things with it.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Who knows, Yeah, who knows.
Speaker 1 (54:28):
We can't wait to uh, we can't wait to explore
more strange, ridiculous things with you folks. We want to
give a big, big thanks to our super producer and
assassins create consultant, mister Max Williams and Noel. I gotta
I gotta tell you, I gotta ask you too. If
(54:49):
you had been press ganged into the Royal Navy and
a pirate ship came by and robbed your ship and said, hey,
do you want.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
To join with us? What would you do? Pee pee
a little probably, and then just say whatever you say, sirs,
I'll be your stooge, I'll be your I'll be your schmi,
play nice until you can get the shore. Right. Yeah,
I'd probably be a bit of a smi figure. I
(55:21):
remember Schmi.
Speaker 1 (55:21):
That was from Pirates of the Caribbean, right, believe Peter Pan,
Peter Pan.
Speaker 2 (55:27):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (55:28):
Another another we could maybe do an episode on Peter
Pan because that is a messed up origin story as well.
Speaker 2 (55:36):
Sorry for another day though. Yeah. I think it's called
what Finding Neverland? I think that's the book about it.
It's very very sad, but yeah, man, thank you for this.
This pirate's romp Ben who, by the way, has also
served as the research executive on this particular episode. So
much cool stuff in the world of piracy and I
(55:58):
literally learned like six new things today.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
So thank you and big big thanks to Jonathan Strickland.
Oh wait he only gets one. Keep that part in
next uh, big big, big big thanks of course. Chris
Arrassio deceives jeffco Alex Williams who composed this slap and
bop and big thanks to you.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Noel looks like, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
I think maybe we stick with podcasting for now before
we stick a little pirate.
Speaker 2 (56:24):
Tammy pirate radio. Let's try that. We'll see next time. Puts.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yo Ho Ho.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. Let's give it up
for the buccaneer, the privates here of Ridiculous History, super
producer mister Rex Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yo Ho ho and a bottle of rum or something
they loved rum they did. It's a little sugary for
my taste.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I'm not yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's true. I do like a tiaki drink though. I
really like a tiaki drink, and a lot of those
do contain rum, but it's not like required.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And it's with so many fruit juices. And there's this
presentation the Equi Mall. There's a great tiki bar that
we always try to go to when we're in La
and we can tiki tie. Yeah, we go to see
go to We go to this tiki bar whenever we
have time in town and it's a little place, but
they serve these amazing drinks and you have to be
(01:22):
really careful with those two man, because I could drink
like one and then I think it's time to eat
trash street food and go.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
To bed well, which is easy to do. In La
But also I think tiki t or Tiki Ti is
like in the pantheon of like great American tiki bars.
They invented some drink there, some form of corpse revivor
or whatever. Maybe it was. I mean again, I don't
think it was that. Robert Lamb of stuff to splow
your mind is the guy that turned us onto the
(01:50):
spot in the first place. But it's super cool if
you're ever there. It's also right by these Scientology like
studio backlot. It's like Scientology just have bought a lesser
like studio. It has the gates and everything, and it's
got all these billboards for their propaganda stuff. But we
don't want to get sued by the Church of Scientology,
so let's talk about pirates instead. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Also, also we were very respectful when we got two
or three cocktails deep and ran around and had a
boot like photo shooting for the church.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So thank you. We didn't hop the gate fully.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
We just peeked through, which is fine, which is totally fine.
I'm Ben your Nol and we're talking there we go
when most people today in the West think of historical pirates,
not modern day pirates, which are definitely a thing we
kind of think in terms of larger than life fiction.
Long John Silver's not the restaurant. I still don't know
(02:45):
anyone who goes to that restaurant. I don't know how
they're open.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I do have one near my eyes. I do not go.
It's like there's a Long John Silver and a red Lobster,
sort of the last bastions of like fast food seafood,
you know.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, yeah, oh, and then Captain D's. Don't know if
that's still around.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It's pronounced cap'n. It's like crunch. Okay, it's still around. Yeah,
maybe I'm misconsturing my captain versus captains. Yeah, Long John
Silvers and Captain D's I think famously not great, but
I think they're part of one of the or at
least Long John Silver is part of one of those
big hospitality groups that's like owns like a bunch of
(03:23):
other fast food restaurants. You will sometimes see a combination
Long John Silvers and uh whatever. Yeah exactly, So, yeah,
you're right, you're right.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
This is it's young brands, young brands who own so
much stuff. That's that's exactly what you're talking about, Noel.
They they they're the same folks who own Pizza Hut, KFC,
Taco Bell, and uh, like hundreds of other things. Then
Long John Silver's weirdly enough, you know, maybe we should
(03:55):
do store fast food origin stories in a later episode. Uh,
we're gonna get of the pirates. We're getting there with
this segue. Long John Silver's, the restaurant in the US
is named after a character, a pirate in a beautiful
novel called Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson. And when
(04:17):
we think about this, when we think about pirates in
the West, we think about things like Johnny Depp and
Pirates of the Caribbean, or that ride at Disney Pirates
of the Caribbean. And there are Pirates of the Pancreas
or Pirates of the Pancreas from It's Ricksteil project.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Don't insult the Pirates of the Pancress gets fair offended.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
That's true, that's true. He's put a lot of energy
into that one. And who are we to call someone's
creative baby ugly.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And they're real pirates.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
They're not all like whitewashed like you know, Disney pirates
are right. I'm not going to say the next line
it is not culturally acceptable.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So so, Noel, when you and I were talking about this,
when we knew it might end up being a two
parter or we're going to see how it goes. But
what do you think of when you hear the word pirate,
like historical pirates, not modern day Somali pirates.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, I mean I think of what we were sort
of joking about at the top of the show. I
think of peg legs and parrots and you know, rum
and body rhymes and and sword fights, walk the plank,
CAP's hook, all that kind of stuff. But also I
do think of like a crew, you know, like like
like a like a like a captain in charge of
(05:29):
a crew, and I guess modern day pirates like that
will perhaps hijack ships, cargo ships. I mean, it really
was a lot of that, you know, uh, basically heists
on the on the high seas.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Right, Yeah, one hundred percent nailed it. These comedic takes
on pirates in fiction, these romanticized takes, they can be
a lot of fun, but parts of those tropes don't
line up with real world pirates. Today, we're asking whether pirates,
these tremendously anti authoritarian criminals, whether they actually made a
(06:04):
government of their own. You see this reference in video games.
You see this referenced in fiction and novels and films.
To answer this question, we have to look at something
called the Golden Age of piracy. Depends on who you ask,
this is from, like the mid sixteen hundred.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah, Golden doo. It's funny you say that.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Because, like so many historical ages, the name Golden Age
of piracy doesn't become a thing until well after the
actual age has passed.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Now and most importantly, Ben, it's a combination Long John
Silver's at Taco Bell, which does exist. There's a whole
Reddit thread devoted to this wondrous thing that exists apparently
upon the face of God's green Earth. I'll try their
case ideas. I don't know. I don't know, Long John Silvers.
What you do is you go to the Long John Silvers,
get you some fish fingers, then go over to Taco
(07:00):
Bell or do you a case of dia, and then
just kind of combine them, you know, by hand.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Right, So this time, this goldeny, Yeah, this halcion era
is more complicated than we might initially assume, especially if
we're only watching Disney movies about it. Not All of
the people we call pirates originally wanted to be criminals,
and most didn't have a weird like specific r maybe
(07:25):
pirate accent. They came from all parts of Europe and
different parts of the world. They sounded like where they
grew up, and sometimes they got Sometimes a lot of
times people didn't want to be pirates. The ship mutinied
because the navies at the time really sucked, or they
ended up getting kidnapped themselves and joining up because they
(07:48):
needed a job.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Guys, is the providence of the pirate accents? Is this
sort of like it seems vaguely Irish or something or
vaguely European? But is it just does it sort of
morph due to isolation? Is that sort of the idea
that's implied with these bizarro pirate drawls.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, a lot of a lot of times it does
sound like it might be some kind of Irish. It's
it's really it's a caricature of a dialect called West
Country English, Okay, And so it comes The reason we
have this come about is because of those works of fiction.
Treasure Island comes out in nineteen thirty four, and then
(08:31):
Captain Blood starring Errol Flynn, it's strange because we see
it's kind of like how Santa Claus as we know
it was made by the Coca Cola company. The pirate
accent is a work of entertainment.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
And you bring up a really great point in this outline,
ban it's important to establish and we're talking about this
golden age of piracy, sometimes we're talking about the wrong thing.
Pirates not the same as a privateer. Oh yeah, let's
establish some terms upfront, because what allowed this profession to
(09:10):
flourish was the fact that it was technically on the
right side of the law and could be considered just
that a profession.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, it's really sketchy. It's kind of like I trying
to think of a modern analogy, dude. It's kind of
like bounty hunters, which are technically, you know, they're on
the right side of the law. They bend the law
pretty often. Not all pirates are created equal, Like you said, Nol,
there were several distinct names for groups that sailed the
High Seas, and we don't have to get into all
(09:40):
the differences and details and nuts and bolts of buccaneer
versus pirate and so on, or corsair, et cetera. But
we do need to know the difference between privateer and pirate.
Pirate is the most general term for outlaws on the
high seas, oh in order maritime crimes. It comes from
(10:02):
a Greek word, the purates, which means brigand, and it
was since like the thirteen hundreds, pirate has been a
term used for anyone who's committing crimes on the ocean,
and usually the folks you're thinking of when we think
of pirates, they're bandits on the water. They're violent, they
intimidate people, they raid ships at sea, or you know,
(10:25):
Viking style, they raid coastal settlements.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Isn't that funny too? How the word then became associated
with like bootlegging stuff, you know, like pirting music or whatever,
or like piracy in terms of like copyright infringement. I
wonder when that started to kind of come into being,
and if it was just sort of like an accident
maybe like a term that sort of took off and
got popular, or if there is some etymological crossover there.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
I bet there's also a pr spin because remember the
three of us are the generation where you would go
to the movies once upon a time and you'd see
those PSAs that were like, you wouldn't download a car,
would you stop piracy? I think it helped the powers
that be to compare people downloading stuff illegally to pirates
(11:13):
rating ships.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
But it does look as well like the term piracy
began to be used in its more current form due
to some court cases, some old court cases that began,
like in the in the eighteenth century, piracy was being
used to describe the act of infringing on one's copyright. Nice. Yeah,
the idea being theft. And we'll get to.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Why that rings true a little later in our show today.
All Right, privateers make the sexcellent point. Privateers are pirates
with a co side, I would call them. They get
these letters of mark kind of like it's similar to
the patent letters or letters of patent we talked about
snake oil. Right, So, a country's authorities in the midst
(11:57):
of the big colonial powers all try to take possession
of the land across the Atlantic. These big colonial powers
will issue commissions to privately owned vessels, and they'll say, hey,
if you see a ship from another country or someone
who doesn't work for us trying to move goods, blood
(12:18):
and treasure, then go get them, sick them and you've
got our approval to do that. They were private armies,
they were mercenary armies. Often whenever there was a war,
a lot of letters of mark went out and a
lot of privateers went to seek their fortune. But just
like our pal Jesse James, you know, when the war
(12:41):
ends and your only skill set is waging war, sometimes
you just keep doing it on the other side of
the wall.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
That's exactly right. Once maybe some of the more legitimate
prospects dried up, a lot of these folks just kind
of went and forged their own path. Good example is
sixteen ninety one, a guy named Thomas two, who was
born into a British colony in what is today Rhode Island,
took one of those charges that you mentioned, Ben, one
(13:19):
of these commissions from the Governor of Bermuda for a
privateering vessel a voyage to Africa to take over a
French fort that was located on the Gambia River. However,
instead of following instructions and attacking the French fort as instructed,
(13:39):
he and his crew decided to sail to the Indian
Ocean and plundered a ship, a Mughal ship which was
that would have been what like an Indian trading vessel,
probably loaded down with spices and all kinds of valuable
trade goods.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Yeah, a lot of stuff that you just couldn't get
in Europe.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
So this guy went rogue right away. He didn't like
wait for he didn't do the job and then be like,
you know what, I think I can do better, strike
out on my own. He just like like, screw this,
I'm doing the I'm gonna knock over this spice ship.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
I like to say knock over too. Yet he was
just like, guys, who's gonna stop us? The king isn't
here on the boat. It's us, bros. Let's hurt people.
So privateers were crimes, right, Let's do crimes. So privateers
were mercenaries. And the key difference again was just the
approval of a colonial power. Oh there's one other big difference.
(14:37):
Unlike out and out pirates, privateers are expected to share
their loot with their patron government. So you can go,
you can go rob and pillage a Spanish ship, but
you have to go back to the nearest English governor
and give them their cut. This is organized crime, oh absolutely.
And for like a colonizing force like the British government.
(14:58):
This sort of is a way of extending the naval reach,
right like, and and keeping those that maybe would seek
to overturn their supremacy at bay, right like, just because
you know, by by promising treasure and glory and all
that stuff, you essentially not having to pay these people
because they're getting paid with what they get and then
(15:19):
you're taking your cut, your tribute. But they're also like
wreaking havoc on all these foreign vessels, right yeah, exactly.
This is the this becomes a revenue stream for these
colonial powers. For instance, in fifteen sixty eight, a privateer
we may know named Francis Drake takes part in Back
(15:42):
to the Rapper, Yes, yeah, yeah, before he got into wrap,
even before Degrassi, he was a privateer and he was
in the Battle of San Juan de Ulua in modern
day Mexico, and he fought the Spanish and even though
he did get he did get whooped. When he came
back he had over forty thousand British pounds worth of
(16:06):
gold and silver. This was great news for the crown.
These people were called Elizabeth's Sea dogs for a while because,
like you said, they were kind of an off the
book's army, and they got sent around not just to
rob resources from other colonial powers, but they also got
sent around because the monarchy wanted to make money off
(16:27):
the slave trade.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yikes, this was like early days of the slave trade.
I mean, at least in terms of you know, a
global slave trade. So I mean these Sea Dogs and England,
if you can imagine, really were kind of the layers
of the groundwork for this whole, you know, despicable industry
that would inevitably take the world by storm.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
One hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Man.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
And what we're saying it was a chaotic time. The
colonial powers were functioning like large international criminals. Indicates France, Spain, England.
They're making them breaking alliances. They're all trying to grab
a piece of what they called the New World. And yeah, spoiler, No,
they didn't ask the people who already lived there for
(17:14):
their opinions.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Absolutely not. And Ben, I think it's something that we've
all seen, like in you know, whether it be certain
sorcery type shows or maybe historical dramas, the idea of
you don't steal from certain folks, right right, like if
someone is under the protection of a certain government, you know,
and then you maybe do go rogue and steal from
(17:37):
the wrong crew because of the whole criminal nature of
the enterprise, let's just call it what it is. You
could then be coming home to a real problem, having
a price on your head.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Oh absolutely, Yeah, and that happens throughout history. And Okay,
so most of the pirate fiction we mentioned earlier, it's
based on this one period of time, just like so
many Western films are based on Yeah, based on a
relatively short period of time called the Wild West. Like
(18:08):
we said, golden nature piracy refers to. You'll get some
different opinions, but like anywhere from the mid sixteen hundreds
to the seventeen thirties, pirates were rome in the ocean everywhere.
In general, there are like three distinct periods. The buccaneers
from sixteen fifty to sixteen eighty, those guys were more
(18:29):
focused in attacking settlements and ports. And then the second
age would be something called the pirate round. It's around
because if you look at a map, it's a predictable
trade route that follows maritime commerce. So whatever wherever these
ships piled with goods are going, where places like the
East India Company go, the pirates follow in their wake,
(18:53):
sometimes with the approval of other countries, other colonial powers.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Then we also have you know, in an era that
comes right after the War of Spanish Succession, which you know,
it ends up leaving a ton of Anglo American sailors
and these privateers looking for work. So they've got you know,
we talked about that skill set right like Jesse, James
and all that. They know how to sail, but they
(19:20):
don't have an army to sail for, they don't have
the co sign of a government. So they're like not
going to starve, They're going to apply their trade. Right.
So in a lot in a lot of ways, these
governments made their own monsters, didn't they you know what
I mean? They very much did. Yeah. So these folks
are now like, you know what, to the Caribbean, where
(19:40):
we will become the titular pirates of said Caribbean or
the Indian Ocean or the West African coasts. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And during each of these three periods, piracy in the
Caribbean rises when conditions are right, and it fizzles out
when those conditions change. So what made Golden age so golden?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
For piracy?
Speaker 1 (20:02):
First, you need a lot of unemployed, able bodied, young men,
people who are out of work. They're desperate to survive.
You need a clear network of shipping and commerce, right,
you need prey for predators to exist. These pirates they
need dev guns and ships and weapons. Most importantly, there
has to be little to no rule of law. I don't
(20:25):
want to give a shout out to eleanor Evans over
a history extra who informed a lot of what we
know about the difference between privateers and pirates.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, and then just to your point about the Wild West,
that lack of rule of law is always what really
set things off in some of these border towns. And
you know, some of these kind of frontier towns, you
might have yourself a sheriff, you know, but that's not
going to be merely enough in the face of like
all of the lawless nests that came with that period.
And with this we're talking about the open seas, man, Like,
(20:57):
how can you police the open seas without like just
a constantly deployed naval force. And it's just all of
these cross forces and cross interests bashing against one another.
During this time. It really was, to your point, a
perfect storm of badassery and frankly bad attitudes.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Ben frankly bad attitudes and no all agreed. Colonial empires
were expanding across the globe, and they were often fighting
any number of other people, you know, native empires who said, hey,
we've got our own thing going on, stay away other
rival European powers. So it's no surprise that they weren't
(21:38):
able to watch every maritime falling sparrow. They were unable
to combat or even find or know about every single
pirate ship interdicting valuable shipments, resource and treasure. Think about it,
there are compelling reasons for you to be a pirate.
You got no laws you have to follow from a king,
although you do have pirate code, which we'll talk about.
(22:00):
You got no overbearing nobles. You might win the lottery
and get tons of gold. You were also, if you
were a pirate, you were primarily after gold, silver and jewels.
But yeah, plunder just so, but you couldn't, uh, you
wouldn't find that often in big, big amounts. So a
lot of times pirates would take the cargo of a
(22:23):
ship whatever that resource might be, you know, cinnamon, peppercorns, beer, rum,
sure rum, and then you would you would steal that
stuff and you would take it to resell it somewhere
where you knew they weren't going to squeal on you
to the authorities. If you are working for a navy
at this time, you might have been kidnapped. You might
(22:45):
have been press ganged, right, or a term that did
in age well people would say sometimes is shanghied. Just
like what's that thing where you got people drunk to
fix the vote?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Oh? What was that called a boy cooping? Coopy? The
hanging with mister Cooper. Yeah. Yeah, so it's kind of
like coopy.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Uh, these unscrupulous recruiters would get people drunk and then
they would have those folks wake up on you know,
like a Royal Navy ship.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Haha, that was a wild saturday you were for us? Yeah, exactly.
Oh man, it's true. Yeah, and then and then you've
been You found a really great point on world hisstory
dot Org that a lot of these uh you know,
maybe workaday pirates would just gamble away their money, you know,
(23:38):
gamble away their plunder. They're ill gutten gains. But then
you had some that actually kind of created like a network,
you know that like had a much more forward thinking
mindset and invested their doubloons correctly and invested in their
own fleet of ships. And that's when you get the
pirates of lore. Like your long John Silvery. I know
(24:00):
he wasn't real, but like a black Beard, and that
guy was real. He commanded like a giant crew and
was very organized. And it wasn't just chaos, rape and
pillogry and on the high seas. It was an enterprise.
It very much was. And let's talk a little bit
about their gold.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
The most sought after loot, as we said, was precious gems,
silver and gold, because these could be sold to a
dealer in a port that was low key cool with pirates,
pirate haven. But coins were even better because there was
no authority to check whether or not this was dirty money.
(24:37):
You didn't have to down yeah you did have to
launder money. You could just show up with coins. And
at this time, you know, there are a lot of
different sorts of denominations around and yeah, you're right, No,
you could just melt them down if you want it.
But we're talking about like pieces of eight silver ducats,
silver pesos, Spanish doubloons.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
There were no like serial numbers or any kind of
way of tracking them back to the bank. That they
came from. There was no ink cartridge that would explode
when you like undid the band on them or whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
There was a guy at the back of the tavern
or brothel who would like, bite a piece of gold.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
I love it. Yeah, well this already golden tooth. That's terrified.
Oh gosh, yeah, I know, it's funny. It just becomes
such a like a fun you know, cliche little trope.
But yeah, I mean, the golden age of piracy does
likely refer to the gold that was a flowing as well,
(25:33):
you know, because that stuff was really easy to move,
It could really easily be bought and sold. But also
let's not forget like that mogul shipping vessel that things
like spices, things like silk, things that were rare and
that you couldn't get everywhere. And there became why do
you think they call it the silk road Man, the
(25:55):
pirate bay. You know, like all of this stuff was
this underground black market that sprang up, you know, around
the types of stuff that these pirates were hauling in.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
One hundred percent. Yeah, most of the time, again, they
weren't finding these holy grails of plunder. They were hitting
up ships for things like tobacco, sugar, rum, brandy wine,
you know, barrels of fur and lumber, and even flour.
They would steal flower because this operation could also supply
(26:34):
the ship with much needed resources. Sometimes they would knock
over a ship that had very wealthy VIP pastors. They
would take all of those VIPs personal valuables, and they
would even you know, take the clothes off their backs
and say, I could sell this. I can make a
ton of money on this. They would steal food because
(26:54):
they needed to eat. They're also working vessel at sea.
They would take whatever's in the ship's medicine chest. I
read one really interesting story where there's like a fishing
boat that gets knocked over by a much larger pirate
ship and all they take, dude, are the hats of
the fishermen. The fishermen had other stuff, they have fish,
(27:16):
you know, they're just a little boat of middle class fishermen.
But the pirates had got super drunk the night before
and they rolled up on this boat and they said,
we are going to take your hats because we partied
too hard and we all threw our hats in the
water last night. So they would steal all kinds of
(27:37):
stuff you know, the stories of treasure get exaggerated a
little bit. They also took rope, tackle, you know, nails, sails, anchors,
all the stuff you need to run a pirate ship.
But here's the question. What do you do if you've
got a bunch of hot items and you can't go
(27:58):
to port and sell them because you're a wanted band, where.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Do you go? Well, you mentioned those those pirate hubs, right,
or those pirate havens. You know, you essentially needed what
you might call today a fence. You know, he needed
a place that would take your ill gotten booty and
essentially I mean hold on to it, you know, well
while things kind of cooled down, right and potentially then
(28:21):
move it for you. You know. But you also were
if you weren't in one of these sort of safe spaces,
you might likely have a price on your head or
be you know, unwanted posters and such. So you needed
these places that you referred to earlier ben as pirate havens.
One such, very famous one of these was a city
(28:44):
called New Providence. Oh yeah, there goes the neighborhood, right.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
This is located in the modern day Bahamas, and Spain
had claimed the island of due Providence after Crystabul Cologne
legendary pill quote quote discovered the New World. Eventually the
land changed hands and England lay claim to it. If
we go back to the late sixteen hundreds, there's a
(29:11):
guy named Henry Avery. Henry Avery is a privateer who
made a boatload get it by plundering gold and silver
and elephant tusk and gunpowder from these trade ships heading
from India to a local harbor. And he was able
to bribe the governor of New Providence of the English
(29:32):
Bahamas at the time, a guy named Nicholas Trott, who
is super important by the way in Carolina's history. He said, look,
let me give you not just some gold, not just
some silver, but this entire ship of elephant tusk and gunpowder.
And all you have to do, my bro is let
us operate safely here. Don't jam us up, Nick, just
(29:52):
don't jam us up.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
No.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
So in the sixteen ninety six, Avery successfully bribed the
governor Nicholas trot into establishing NASA in the Bahamas as
a haven where the pirates could do their business freely,
you know, like like Amsterdam in the wire, you know,
(30:14):
like a drug free zone. But this is like a
crime free zone. The governors would essentially, you know, go
through the motions doing their due diligence and an act
you know, being stewards of the law, and perhaps make
them you know, let's call them ceremonial attempts to stop
(30:37):
or to shut down piracy. But it's really no different
than you know, crime syndicates paying off the police, you know,
or anything like that. It really is just as simple
as that. If there's money to be made and people
are lacking in scruples, then these kinds of situations will
thrive on, you know.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
And overtime as a result, That's what I mean when
I say there goes the neighborhood, the place goes into decline.
The governors are increasingly authorities on paper only, the pirates
are becoming more and more powerful, and the founeralal statistic
about this. What you need to know is there's a
bunch of civilian settlers and soldiers. They have a fort,
French and Spanish ships team up and they attack Nassau
(31:19):
first in seventeen oh three, and then a few years
later they come back and do the same thing in
seventeen oh six. So a bunch of settlers and soldiers
leave at this point, they cut their losses. There's a
heavily damaged fort left, and there are no soldiers there.
There's no one to enforce the laws that existed even
as this place was on decline. If you look at
(31:42):
the statistics, by seventeen thirteen, there were over one thousand
pirates in this community and they far outnumbered the four
hundred to five hundred people who are just regular folks.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, this is what you might call a high of
scummon villainy. It's starting to fester over here, right.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, and the main city becomes home to folks like
black Beard. We mentioned earlier pirates like Jack Rackham, Benjamin Hornigold,
which is just hilarious, and Sam mak Roco was pretty cool,
too fun to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, these guys have
good names and they these guys all used this island
as a base. At some point there were six hundred
(32:24):
pirates not just living there, but sailing from Nassau who
raided shipping and shipping routes and ports from the Caribbean
all the way up to Maine. A couple of them
even started calling themselves the governors of New Providence. We've
got a great quote from a guy named Thomas Barrow.
He is quoted as saying that he is the governor
(32:47):
of Providence, we'll make it a second Madagascar, and expects
five or six hundred more men from Jamaican sloops to
join in the settling of Providence and to make war
on the French and the Spaniards. But for the English,
they don't intend to meddle with them unless they are
first attacked by them.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Okay, And this, you know, kind of worked out for
a time. They they came up with all name. I
wonder if this is where the Jolly Roger came from.
Probably now that probably wasn't something that was more a
flag you'd fly at sea. But they did come up
with a sort of you know name for their new institution,
the Republic of Pirates, because those two things go hand
(33:26):
in hand, you know, law and order and governance and piracy.
It did avoid attacking British vessels though, right, don't poke.
The bear word did get out about New Providence becoming
the safe haven for pirates looking to have a good
yoho ho and you know, kick back with some RUMs
and all that stuff. And it was also a place
(33:47):
that would essentially serve as a recruiting ground, right.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Oh yeah, this place launched some careers in the world
of piracy. It was mostly run by a group of
real hard cases who were collectively called the Flying Gang.
The Flying Gang is a team up that comes from
a heist. In seventeen fifteen, the Spanish treasure fleet sank
during a hurricane off the coast of La Florida, and
(34:12):
when a pirate named Henry Jennings learned that the ships
had sank, he devised a plan along with people like
Benjamin Hornegold who he mentioned, Samuel Bellamy who he mentioned,
and a guy named Charles Vain, and he said, look,
the Spanish are going to try to salvage this. They're
going to try to pull the gold out from these
sunken ships. We're going to be there and we're going
(34:34):
to steal the treasure from the salvagers. They eventually call
themselves the Flying Gang. And I'm trying very hard not
to write parody lyrics for the Flying Gang to the
tune of the Crying Game. But that's how you know,
that's how colonial powers were. They don't want no more
of the Flying Gang. And to your point about people
(34:55):
starting a career, Edward Teach aka Blackbeard. He gets start here,
so does Jack Rackham, whose pirate namer street name was
Catlico Jack, and a lot of other people, including some
female pirates like Mary Reid and a body.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, and in case you guys are wondering, I'm over
here on Assassin's Creed Wikipedia searching all these names because
all these people are in Assassin's Creed for black Flags.
So it's kind of good been in nostalgia for me
right now.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
That's awesome, man.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, And I you know, I wasn't the biggest fan
of the maritime aspects of Assassin's Creed, but what a
great universe they've built, and I enjoy I enjoy a
couple of the games having that museum mode where you
can just walk around and look at buildings. Oh yeah,
I think that's the one set in Italy. Anyway, here's
the idea. These guys they do their heist. The pirates
(35:45):
take their wealth and Horne Gold and is pal Thomas
Barrow establish a new community on this island, on New Providence,
and they set out to create a legitimate pirate republic.
(36:06):
And like you said, nol, honestly, a lot of these
guys could be subjects to their own episodes. You know,
what you need to know here is somewhere in a
mostly neglected part of the Caribbean that didn't have a
huge population at the time, some of the area's most
dangerous people put aside their typical rivalries for a common cause.
(36:27):
It's an avengers of maritime crime, you know, heist on
the high seas and they start attacking everyone except the
British at first.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Right, So by seventeen thirteen, the war of that war
a Spanish succession. I mean, that's hard to say Spanish successions.
That's what the war was about. I know, it's just
literally about too many h sounds. It was over, it
had wrapped up. Thankfully, they figured it out, they figured
out how to pronounce it. But many of these British
privateers didn't get the memma we'd take for granted, like
(37:00):
how many movies are spoiled by the existence of smartphones?
You known, problem, there's that thing, but even just like
in general, like in the thriller of some kind, like
how easy would it be for someone just to have
googled a thing or to have the correct directions that
didn't get lost or you know, for someone to be
able to warn them. You know, in these days it
was even worse. You know, they would take months sometimes
(37:22):
for word to reach individuals who were out in remote areas,
especially during wartime. So a lot of these privateers, they
did not get the news that the war was over.
This is the kind of thing you hear about all
the time, you know, in historical situations where perhaps an
action is taken, often a tragic action, due to not
realizing the circumstances had completely changed.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
One hundred percent. Man, I'm glad you bring that up,
because it reminds me of that Japanese soldier who didn't
know World War two had ended for decades and decades. Also,
people who were enslaved in the US who didn't learn
about emancipation for quite some time. The travel of information,
the frictionless travel of information, is probably one of the
(38:08):
biggest wins of recent humanity or the thing that is
going to spell the end of civilization maybe both maybe maybe.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
And so these you know a lot of these these
these uh, these privateers either didn't get the news or
wouldn't accept it, didn't didn't think that it was true.
So they, you know, slipped further and further into piracy,
which actually led to a lot of you know, new
blood kind of being pumped into New Providence right to
(38:39):
join that pirate republic and and causes an absolute boom
uh in in the numbers of pirates that were hanging
out there. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
And now New Providence is becoming a boom town and
it's not as unified as it was. Uh this this
place was only around, by the way, for a very
short amount of time, all over a decade. And over time,
these pirates of New Providence, they stop giving British ships
a hall pass. A lot of these guys who are
(39:09):
former privateers, like working for England, start attacking any ship
they want, British or not. At their height, they're giving
themselves titles like Commodore. They're commanding fleets of ships, and
they can go toe to toe with the Royal Navy.
Sometimes they can even outgun it, which is a huge
deal because the Royal Navy is the big dog on
(39:31):
campus at this point.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
That's right, And this starts to make me think of
again perhaps some thinking more along the lines of some fiction.
But this is when you know, you start to see
like things like in Game of Thrones, the Golden Compass
or whatever like these, like armies for hire or even
we have now today with the Wagner group, you know
over there in the Ukraine or in Russia. The idea
(39:56):
that an independent group could become so large as to
rival a an official military. And even though you know
right now they're at odds, there could come a time
where for enough money, maybe you can hire some of
these pirate crews to do your bidding. You know who knows.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, And at this point, you know, King George is
starting to get a little beefed up because it was
easy to ignore the crimes of these pirates as long
as they weren't attacking the British themselves. But the British
government was starting to get really concerned. They say, piracy
is so out of control that we're not getting British
(40:34):
settlers into these colonies, and if the land is unpopulated,
our foreign rivals may take it over. This is not
a sustainable situation. So George makes the decision. He contacts
a former privateer and makes some governor Woods Rogers, and
(40:54):
he says, Rogers, I want you to go over to
New Providence, go over to this high of a scumonbility
and tell them that I will give them a pardon.
I will give them an act of grace, a king's pardon.
This one is called a Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Right September fifth, seventeen seventeen, pirates would receive amnesty, be
forgiven of their trespasses that includes murder, just so long
as they surrendered by the next January fifth of seventeen eighteen.
So it's like a lot of blind eye kind of mentality,
isn't it. It's like, we're gonna unless you continue to
(41:34):
operate outside the law, but we need you to agree
that we're putting a clock on this because this isn't
gonna work forever for everyone, right.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, this is look, you will totally free pass you guys.
We've had fun, we've made some friends, we've plundered some ships,
we've had some laughs. But as long as you surrender
by this date by January fifth, seventeen eighteen, later they
kicked the can down the road, then it's all good.
And Woods was the right guy for this job because
(42:04):
he was a former privateer and slave trader. He spoke
the cultural language of the pirates, and he did convince
a lot of them to take a square life. A
lot of pirates accepted a pardon, but some refused to
give up the game, notably folks like Jack Rackham and
Edward Teach. The problem was these guys, to your point,
(42:28):
they were living on borrow time. Either the Royal Navy
or local authorities would get them soon enough. The party
couldn't go on forever. And we'll tell you what happened there,
But before we do, let's get to the heart of
the question for today's episode. Was New Providence really a
pirate government?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Kind of? Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
I mean they had people with specific jobs, like they
were organized crime, right, So the mafia has a hierarchy,
they got specif duties.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
They've got a code.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
What's the mafia code. It's not Omeerta, that's code of silence, right.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Oh, it's a I don't know. I just know Cosinostra.
I don't know. I always thought Omeerica kind of was
the mafia code, but maybe there's another one. Awesome.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, but they had like they had these rules and
just like the mafia, the pirates said, we need a
code of behavior that will reduce internal conflict and maximize
profits at the same time, you can find great examples
of real pirate code. We got one from a guy
named bartholomewle black bart Roberts in seventeen twenty two. He
(43:41):
and his crew made a set of laws that are
pretty they're pretty interesting. Just put a few of these
on here. They're not all of them, but one of
the ones that might surprise a lot of people is voting.
Everybody got to vote on the ship except hostages.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
And jump back in one more time with Assassin's Cree.
Bartholomew black Bart Roberts is actually the secret villain of
Assassin's Creed four spoilers.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
He is, oh a.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
Spoiler for a game that came out of one a
PS three.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Next, you're gonna tell me what happened at at Ford Theater?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Oh god, yeah no, but.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Yeah, he's uh, he is I forget what his role is.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
He's the sage.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah, so I saw that name and I had to
jump in here.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
I'm going away now. No, let's give it. Let's do
a max with the facts that seeking in the phone
and he's fallen knowledge. It's just for you right now
here with the fact.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
But yeah, yeah, there we go. People could vote. You
had actually more of a shage an individual on a
pirate ship than you did in a Royal navy.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Pretty interesting, right, I mean, yeah, there was a certain
amount of equity right in this arrangement where everyone was
someone on an equal playing field. It's very interesting. I mean,
I'm sure in practice, maybe I don't know, I've actually heard,
you know, I think that's a mus in history class.
May have done an episode on this back in the
day when I was the producer of that show. And
(45:14):
I do feel like they really took this stuff very seriously.
The idea of equality. You know, it wasn't just on paper.
It wasn't like it wasn't a do as I say,
not as I do. You know, everyone lived by this code.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
One hundred percent, man, and they were surprisingly progressive in
some ways. They also said in a lot of pirate code.
They said, don't steal from coworkers, you know what I mean,
don't hoard stuff from the crew, don't rob. If you
rob a fellow pirate, you're gonna have your nose and
your ears split, and then we'll throw you ashore on
(45:47):
like the worst island we can find. They said, no gambling.
Weirdly enough, this is oddly wholesome until you think about it.
They had a curfew. They said every night you got
at eight pm, you got to put out all the
lights and candles. They said, if any of the crew
want to sit around and drink, they have to do
it on the open deck without lights. And it's not
because they were worried about their bedtime. It's because lights
(46:10):
would help you identify a ship at sea.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the other you know, there's
another term like that cut of your jib, Right, that
was one the idea of I like the cut of
your jib refers to the cut of the sail on
a certain ship, so that you could be identified at sea.
That's how you knew you that was a friend, you know,
or a friendly Right. I always assumed the jib meant
(46:35):
like jaw or something like that, But no, not the case.
And this is the case too. The idea of those
lights being a really important identifier. Next we have this
is a very piratey one. I would argue, stay ready
to fight. It runs me that Russell crow bit on
South Park where he's fighting around the world, you know,
(46:56):
like singing songs and so and so and fought and
round the world. That's fairy. Yeah, always be ready for
a fight. Each man shall keep his piece, cutlass, and
pistols at all times, clean and ready for action.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
We don't know what it's gonna pop off, you know
what I mean. Stay frosty, stay sharp, five by five.
They also have workers comp They had an early version
of workers compensation. If you were crippled, or you lost
a limb, or you had another very serious injury in
your service with your pirate crew, you would get eight
(47:30):
hundred pieces of eight and if you were less, if
you were hurt less, egregiously, you would get a corresponding
amount of money. That's pretty cool. There are many places
and industries that don't bother doing that today, so that
might surprise some people, some of us with stereotypes about pirates.
We're not saying they're good people.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
We know that.
Speaker 1 (47:53):
Pirate code also said, hey, the captain isn't necessarily a dictator.
We on the ship can all take vote, and if
we don't like the captain or a leader, we can
vote them out. And again a lot of these guys
are coming from the tyranny of working for merchant ships
or the Royal Navy. This is super duper freedom for them.
(48:13):
So from seventeen oh six to about seventeen eighteen, these scalleywags,
I would argue, they really did form, if not a government,
a political entity because they adapted pirate code of the
sea to become sort of the by laws of their
haven in New Providence. And they were also they were
(48:35):
oddly progressive in terms of race relations for the time.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Absolutely, that's another thing that always kind of had me
a little bit flummoxed, you know, in addition to the
whole workers comp thing. I mean, they really were like
some of the early kind of labor rights activists. It's
very very interesting. Another very interesting feature of the Republic
of Pirates, to your point, that was the fact that
(49:01):
Africans were considered equal members of the crew. And it's
so interesting because we talked about how those privateers or
originally right that was a big early form of slave trade.
It would seem that what evolved and became maybe the
less lawful version of those pirateers that were operating outside
(49:22):
of the rule of law were in fact much more
humane than those operating under the rule of life.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
I mean, yeah, imagine you're attacking a ship as a
pirate crew, and you come to find that it is
not It is not just loaded with you know, like
cinnamon and pantaloons and rum, but they're also enslaved people
(49:49):
on there. You can be kind of a hero if
you're one of the folks who say, look, all the captain,
you know, all you other guys, we're gonna rob you,
blind you, you who were enslaved. You can be free,
you can join us. That's a hard thing to say
no to. And we know that several people of American,
(50:09):
Indian or of African background became pirate captains in their
own right. One of the most famous is a guy
called Black Caesar. And look, okay, so weirdly progressive pirates
were surprisingly weirdly progressive. Back to our boy, Governor Woods
Rogers arrives in Nassau. He's got the king's pardon. He's
(50:31):
pitching to people. One dude accepts, and he doesn't just accept.
Benjamin Hornigold says, okay, I'll stop being a pirate, and
Rogers says, well, you're a special case, my friend. He says, hey, ben,
if you want a new job, why don't you become
a trader and help me hunt down all your buddies,
(50:52):
and so Horni Gold like that goes from being a
pirate to a pirate hunter and he's chasing down all
of his former colleagues, anyone who doesn't take the King's pardon.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Man put his money? Where is not this? Yeah? This
is uh what do you call it?
Speaker 3 (51:09):
In case y'all were wondering, Horni Gold is very much
a villain in Assassin's Creed Black Flow.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
Oh good, I was gonna ask.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
He starts off the game. Actually he's like one of
your mentors. But no, it changes and you actually have
to hunt him down at some point.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
He's a pill. He's a pill in real life too.
But he didn't get everybody. He got around ten other
salty dogs. On the morning of December the twelfth of
seventeen eighteen. Nine of those fellas were Yeah, they were executed.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
They were killed yeap for piracy. And you wonder if
they got captured. I couldn't find the answer to this.
Maybe someone can help us. If those pirates got captured
and they recanted their crimes, could they take the king's
pardon right before they were executed?
Speaker 2 (52:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
I don't know, but like you said, no, our buddy
Benjamin Hornegold doesn't get everybody. The pirate hunters don't get
everyone in New Providence. A lot of folks get away,
Charles Vaine, Blackbeard. They go on to pursue their villainous
careers elsewhere in the Caribbean. And just like that, after
eleven very strange years, the Republic of the Pirates is gone,
(52:24):
and overall, as conditions change, the fortunes of the pirates
in general decline in the mid seventeen twenties, and they
never became as powerful as they were for that brief
time in the seventeen tens. And along the way, you know,
a lot of those guys can't live that demanding life
(52:45):
as they age. But if they were smart, buccaneers and
pirates and smugglers and privateers all had invested their gains.
And so now these guys, a lot of them were
no longer criminals. They owned plantations, they owned legit businesses,
and there seemed to be a rule of imperfect law
spreading throughout the Caribbean. And that's kind of that's kind
(53:09):
of the story, but it is.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
It's so interesting. It's like we started with all of
this pillage and violence, and I'm gonna come back to
this thing that I think we were both taken by.
The legal version of piracy is almost like is much
more of a free for all than this version, at
least of the illegal version, right, I don't know. It's fascinating,
(53:33):
and there's a lot.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
Of there's a lot of stuff we found for tangents
and trivia that we might save for a future episode.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
I think we'll call the Day now.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
Oh, one fact, we can say the eye patch wasn't
always to cover up a damaged eye, because there were
no electric lights and it could be dangerous to have
a lot of lights inside a wooden ship. Often the
eye patch was used to keep one eye in the dark,
so that when you suddenly ran below deck, you could
(54:03):
take the patch off and your eye would already be
used to low light.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Way. Yeah, that's alway. That's literally just taught me something
brand new. I assumed it was maybe for like sharpshooting,
you know, yeah, maybe, But I love this idea that
it was to help, you know, have your eye quickly
already adjusted to the dark. That's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
Or else they were all just very bad at not
hitting things with it.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Who knows, Yeah, who knows.
Speaker 1 (54:28):
We can't wait to uh, we can't wait to explore
more strange, ridiculous things with you folks. We want to
give a big, big thanks to our super producer and
assassins create consultant, mister Max Williams and Noel. I gotta
I gotta tell you, I gotta ask you too. If
(54:49):
you had been press ganged into the Royal Navy and
a pirate ship came by and robbed your ship and said, hey,
do you want.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
To join with us? What would you do? Pee pee
a little probably, and then just say whatever you say, sirs,
I'll be your stooge, I'll be your I'll be your schmi,
play nice until you can get the shore. Right. Yeah,
I'd probably be a bit of a smi figure. I
(55:21):
remember Schmi.
Speaker 1 (55:21):
That was from Pirates of the Caribbean, right, believe Peter Pan,
Peter Pan.
Speaker 2 (55:27):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (55:28):
Another another we could maybe do an episode on Peter
Pan because that is a messed up origin story as well.
Speaker 2 (55:36):
Sorry for another day though. Yeah. I think it's called
what Finding Neverland? I think that's the book about it.
It's very very sad, but yeah, man, thank you for this.
This pirate's romp Ben who, by the way, has also
served as the research executive on this particular episode. So
much cool stuff in the world of piracy and I
(55:58):
literally learned like six new things today.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
So thank you and big big thanks to Jonathan Strickland.
Oh wait he only gets one. Keep that part in
next uh, big big, big big thanks of course. Chris
Arrassio deceives jeffco Alex Williams who composed this slap and
bop and big thanks to you.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Noel looks like, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
I think maybe we stick with podcasting for now before
we stick a little pirate.
Speaker 2 (56:24):
Tammy pirate radio. Let's try that. We'll see next time. Puts.
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Noel Brown
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