Part One: The Golden Age of Pirates & One Great Polycule of History

Margaret talks with Miriam about what's unique about the golden age of piracy and why we romanticize the wrong things, plus they discuss Mary Read, Anne Bonny and Calico Jack.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Great Polycules of History, your podcast
that's usually called cool pepolted cool stuff, but this week
I'm calling Great Polycules of History. I'm your host, Margaret Keljoy,
and with me today is Miriam Rochack, one of my
favorite guests of all time. Miriam, I'm good. I'm excited
to hear what sounds like some messy history. Yeay, I'm

(00:24):
kind of I'm mislit whatever. I'm just gonna go with it. Okay,
you haven't. You still haven't told me what we're recording
about it? Neither has s Okay, now you're lying. Now
I'm now our audi. Do you want to start over?
I tried very hard to not tell Miriam what this
episode was about. Anyway, I'll just so, Miriam. Is it

(00:47):
fun that every time I introduce you, I do so
by saying Miriam and the rest of her crew once
stole a tall ship and sailed off without their bosses
permission because they weren't getting paid. Oh yeah, it's that's
slightly inaccurate. We didn't sail off without the boss's permission.
We just started operating the boat on our own terms
and getting paid in cash for it without involving the

(01:08):
owners of the boat. But yeah, okay, okay, So Miriam
wants to stole a tall ship, sailed it to a
different continent and interrupted the transatlantic slave trade. That sounds
years ago. So and our producers Sophie, Hi, Sophie, how

(01:28):
are you? First of all, when you don't want me
to tell Miriam something? You say, hey, don't tell Miriam
something because I'm gonna blab to my friend right away.
And I'm terrible at lying solid of Miriam. Okay here,
I'm remember a light of Beriam. So the reason that
this was so hard for me to keep the secret

(01:48):
is that Miriam is one of my main friends that
I like send signal messages to throughout the week as
I do research, like tittering about this or that great
lesbian and history are, who are whatever? Like the stuff
that I don't even necessarily include in the podcast. I
just get really excited about. I did enjoy being there
live for your disappointment in last week's Last Week's Hero

(02:11):
when you discovered that he was in fact terrible to
his wife. Yeah, didn't anyway, So it was particularly hard.
It was a struggle to not so what did we learn?
What we're talking about it. From this experience, Magpie, don't
trust people. If you need me to lie to somebody,

(02:34):
tell me to lie. I wouldn't tell you to lie.
I just would have told you to note on your
behalf if you asked me too, I appreciate it. If
the if the cops come, Okay, so all right. What
I have learned is to always assume that people want
to talk to me about what you're about to tell us.
We're going to talk about. Yeah, okay, So Ian as

(02:55):
our audio engineer, and our music was written for us
by one woman, high Ian Miriam. Have you ever heard
about pirates pi rits. It looks like it's pronounced oh yeah,
yeah no, Um. It took me a while. I looked
up a bunch of videos, but how to pronounce it?
It's actually pirate. I like when they spell it with

(03:18):
a y. That is actually the main source that. Yeah.
Today we're going to talk about the golden age of piracy,
which is means that this is another moral complexity week.
They mostly weren't good people, no, not not particularly. They're

(03:38):
um even the best of them could probably appear on
different shows on this network, Like I gotta warn you,
Um you know, as you know, I had a tall
ship period of my career. During that time, the Pirates
of the Caribbean movies, like the first one was out,

(03:58):
they were more of them were coming out. The I'm
on a Boat song came out. During this time. It
was it was time to be I have heard of
pop culture from approximately fifteen years ago. Ow cool, I
know what you put in the box. Anyway, The truth
is I burned out hard on pirates, but that was

(04:20):
about a decade ago, so I'm probably ready to give
pirates another try. Yeah you know, I did used to
have to dress as a pirate at work, I'm sorry,
and then interact with the public. Festival, I attended a
pirate festival and do you know what band headlined that

(04:40):
pirate festival. It was Blue Oyster Cult. And I have
no idea why, but it fucking ruled. I think somebody,
I think somebody who was booking like thought that they
were a seafood themed band or something, but they absolutely
had lined a pirate festival. It fucking ruled. I think
it's because boomers like pirates and boomers like Blue Oyster

(05:02):
Cult could be I mean also like I also like
Blue Oyster Cult. Yeah, and I could feelings about pirates
songs by them, Well, mixed feelings is what we're going
to talk about today. Today we are going to deconstruct
the myth of the Golden Age pirates. We're going to

(05:23):
take a part of the idea that they were good,
noble rebels because they weren't. We're going to talk about
how these days they're romanticized for all the wrong reasons.
But we're also going to talk about what's undeniably interesting
about them and why they hold onto our cultural attention
so much. And most importantly, we're gonna talk about the
stuff that simple, well, that's not the most important. We're

(05:45):
also gonna talk about the stff that they symbolize in
certain contexts. Most importantly, we're going to talk about literally
the only two Golden Age pirate women we know about,
a Bonnie and Mary Reid, who are maybe in a
polycuel with a snappy dresser. Oh, they absolutely were. That
is that. I will take no argument on that, but

(06:05):
I'm really excited to gossip about it with you. Great.
I'm sure that this podcast will talk about the non
Golden Age pirates in the future, too, many of whom
were like substantially more interesting for a ton of reasons. Obviously,
if for anyone who's interested in lady pirates, check out
our fairly recent episodes where we talk about Grace O'Malley,
the Irish pirate Queen. So, the Golden Age of piracy

(06:29):
lasted from about sixteen ninety to seventeen twenty five, which
is about thirty five years, which is not an incredibly
long period of time. The extra Golden Age the age
in which all of the pirates that we talk about
were active, which I'm going to call the platinum age,
because that's the only thing I'd come up with in
D and D that's worth more than gold. I guess
it could be the like diamond, I don't know, whatever,

(06:52):
I think we can call it the Pieces of eight Age. Okay,
the Pieces of eight Age is seventeen fourteen to seven
twenty two, which is only eight years. All of this
fucking culture is about something that lasted eight years, which
seems ridiculous until you remember that's twice as long as

(07:12):
the Confederacy. I really like that you are currently using
Confederacy as like a unit of short periods of time. Yeah,
the Confederacy lasted one person going to college. Ye a,
the time, yeah, longer than I went to college, but
the normal the normal college length. And you know when

(07:35):
you meet somebody who's like still incredibly stuck on those
four years of their life and they suck, Oh my god,
uh huh yep, I'm not gonna draw any conclusions. Yeah no, yeah,
they're literally just so. The pirates were like master's degree. Wait, no,
that's only two more years PhD, fast, fast PhD. They

(07:58):
quick doctors. I wouldn't trust them to do much surgery.
But there's two problems with pirate history. The first problem
is that everyone has really strong opinions about pirates and
wants to claim them and sort of put them into
this or that camp, so all the books are biased
to shit or wants to reject them. But everyone feels

(08:21):
really strongly about pirates and therefore lies. The other problem
is that everyone who talks about pirates is lying because
we don't know shit about them, you know how, like
most of what we know about the Norse gods, or
about half of what you know about the Norse gods
comes from this. Like Christian Icelandic writer who had been
in a Christian country for hundreds of years, I like
you that you say that as though I naturally would

(08:44):
know the provenance of nor Smiths. But I do know
that most of what we know about Pirates came from
a book that was probably written by the guy who
wrote Robinson Crusoe, and that he made it the fuck up. Well,
it actually probably wasn't written by him. We're going to
get to that. Oh really, okay, I'm learning already, okay,
but it was written by explain this stuff to me.

(09:04):
I am, I am, I am. Hey, I once went
on a tall ship. You were sailing it. Yeah, So, okay,
half of what we know about the Norse gods comes
from this Icelandic Christian named Snorri, who is legitimately a historian.
And I don't think he like totally lied, but it's
why I think it's why all the like Norse Smiths
sound like Christian Smith's retold you know anyway, Okay, as

(09:30):
we mentioned, the other problem is that a professional novelist
who wrote pop history wrote half of what we know
about pirates. And you should never trust a novelist who
tries to tell you history. That's that's my statement right
out the gate. Okay. So there is this British guy.
I go to lead with that as the reason not
to trust him. But his pen name is Captain Charles Johnson.

(09:54):
He was almost certainly not a captain, but throw on
that title and you'll sell more books. In sevent twenty
four he comes out with a bestseller with a sick title,
A general history of the robberies and murders of the
most notorious Pirates. Those were the fucking days when you're like,
title alone had to like, would have taken up an

(10:14):
entire tweet. Yeah, totally, Like if you need a fucking
semicolon in your title, there isn't one in this, but
you can imagine it, you know. And very importantly, this
is pirates with a why God? Yes, yeah, And this
is a companion of basically all the Pirates that people
talk about now. And this was written with a incredible
amount of artistic license. It sells like crazy. It's the

(10:38):
Eat Pray Love of the seventeen twenties. It starts this
wave of people publishing They're like great highwaymen, great prostitutes,
like like all these other books that didn't do as well,
although I would happily read either of those other books.

(10:59):
So Eat Pray Love is doing really well in the
seventeen twenties. Within two years it's on its fourth edition.
So he's like, hey, why not add more stuff, including,
at this point, entirely making things up whole cloth. And
we know this because he made up an entire pirate
whole cloth named Captain Mission, who's sort of a Republican

(11:21):
anti pirate who flies a white flag with the word
liberty on it, who's a dedicated abolitionist, and is clearly
just a representation of the author's political opinions. At least
that's it's kind of fun, though, I know, I mean
it insert a character who, yeah, espouses all your ideals. Wait,
can we go back for a second, though, Why do
I think that it was okay great in nineteen thirty two.

(11:47):
It is like two hundred years later. There's this guy
who's like, you know what this writing is like Daniel Dafoe.
I think Daniel Dafoe wrote it, And he did a
lot of research. He like presented a lot of evidence
that the writing was very much like Niel Dafoe's in
some ways and then completely unlike it in other ways.
And this convinced like all the libraries to start cataloging
it under Daniel Dafoe, and it was like, but the

(12:10):
thing is is, at this point it was like trendy
to claim books were written by Daniel Dafoe. People he
wrote a ton, right, he properly like a couple, like
a couple decades after his death, like the sixteen nineties.
He's been dead for like sixty years. They're like, we
know of one hundred and one books this motherfucker wrote,
which is a lot of fucking books. Off the top

(12:30):
of my head, Michael Morecock is the only guy I
know it was written more than that. I'm sure there's more,
but that's who I know writing more one hundred books,
a lot of fucking books. By nineteen seventy, people were
attributing five hundred and seventy books to Daniel Dafoe just
because they were like, well, this guy was around, he

(12:51):
was prolific, he wrote everything. Basically, all anonymous texts from
the early eighteenth century got attributed to Daniel Dafoe at
some point because Okay, I think I literally have a
copy of that book him as the author. Fuck yeah, Okay,
So so basically, like this guy writes like Daniel Dafoe

(13:12):
seems to have practically meant while this guy writes like
an early eighteenth century Englishman, right, Okay, so anyway, Also,
I didn't do a ton of research about Daniel Dafoe,
but he did add the duh to his name to
sound more proper. He was originally Daniel Foe, which is

(13:32):
a more hard name. He did an extra syllable in
that name, you know, competing with all the long titles.
I know, but he didn't even put his name on
half the books, or maybe put other people's names for
no reason. Yeah, totally, It's more likely that it was
written by this this media guy, um like a guy
who ran a press and then did a lot of

(13:54):
journalism and shit, but very like biased journalism that not
necessarily a bad way. It was all, well, it's all
journalism now too. But this guy named Nathaniel Missed who
had a sick fucking name that is such a cool name.
That would be a great pirate name. It would be
a great pirate name. And he was like a sailor
and Indian ocean and shit. I didn't write this part

(14:15):
into the script, so I'm riffing it. But from what
I remember from Bratt reading him, and he ran a
printing shop, that did a bunch of political journalism, so
much to the point that he spent a couple of
years in jail and eventually had to flee to France
and ship because he was one of those guys who
wanted the other Kings to be in charge instead of
the other Kings, the fucking Brits. There is a chance
that he hired Dafoe because he occasionally hired Dafoe to

(14:38):
write anonymously for his press, But I think it's the
whole thing was like crafted to be a media bestseller
and was written probably by the guy who ran the press.
He might have gotten some help from some people. I
don't know Dafoema had something to do with it, It's
not impossible, but whatever. The important thing here's the Book

(14:59):
of Lies, or it's a book of best guesses mixed
with outright lies, and it is the source for almost
everything that we know about pirates. There's court records, and
there's occasional eyewitness accounts of memoirs from people who are
captured by pirates, but most of the mythology of pirates
stems from this book, which is why rather than having

(15:20):
this episode. Besides, when we get to the polyculem. Most
of this episode is not going to be like, here's
a story about individual pirates. It's going to be talking
about the golden age of piracy and what it means
for the world, which is going to be fun. I
didn't make that sound fun. It's gonna be fun, motherfuckers,

(15:40):
I believe you. Yeah, yeah, say things loudly, people will
all right. It all starts with this piece of shit
named Columbus. I hate that guy. I know, well, he's
kind of famous. He's so famous. There's a city in
Ohio named after him, which is weird when you think
about it. Yeah, yeah, they were going to rename that.

(16:05):
I feel like it's probably pretty low on the list
of priorities, but a bigger promise to deal with, right yea, Ohio? Yeah,
fair enough, although I'm probably as close to that horrible
train crashes as um Columbus is. But Christopher Columbus was

(16:26):
this Italian guy who wasn't Italian because Italy didn't fucking exist,
didn't speak Italian because Italian didn't fucking exist, And he
sailed under the flag of Spain, except he didn't because
Spain didn't fucking exist. Nothing that they tell you about
any of the ship is fucking true. Like, but people

(16:46):
didn't think the Earth was flat then either. Yeah, that's
the one that really bothers me. Yeah that yeah, so,
I mean okay, Spain in practical sense had existed very recently,
a couple decades, I think at this point, because the
two kingdoms Castile and Aragon had like gotten hitched or

(17:07):
their monarchs had. In fourteen ninety two, Columbus sailed under
the flag of Castile, the same year that Spain became
more officially Spain and immediately kicked out all the Jews
and Muslims. Good job, Spain. Fuck you. We're not going
to talk about Columbus much. He has no redeeming qualities.
He's a dick, and he's now in the bad place.

(17:27):
I recently rewatched The Good Place. It's pretty good, so good.
That's show is fucking great. You know, Columbus shows up
on an island called Hispaniola, it's not what it was
called before that. When he gets there, yeah, uh, Spain
is like hell yeah, our Italian guy called DIBs. So
this place is ours to the whole Caribbean, and this

(17:50):
last for one hundred and thirty years. They don't respect Europe.
The Spain doesn't respect European peace treaties here. If you
show up, Spain is gonna fucking stomp you. They have
this line there is no peace beyond the line, or
it is their motto, with the line being the line
on the map, where they were like, sorry, we called
DIBs on all the It's it's cool when you have

(18:12):
a motto that requires a diagram to explain it. There
is no peace beyond the line. What are you talking about? Like, oh, sorry, yeah, totally,
And then they pull out a globe because it would
have been a globe, and then they m yeah, yeah.
Then they're like, see we made this line. Yeah, oh
finally I understand that sucks. Yeah, And so the European

(18:33):
powers they were like, but we want to go rob
enslave and colonize, but we can't because we can't set
up colonies. So what we're gonna do is rob the
shit out of the Spanish that I take no issue
with this, No, I actually honestly don't have a major
problem with this as a basic concept. Their motive is
not pure, but whatever, so they invent. But if colonizers

(18:57):
are going to rob other colonizers, that's sort of like
all right, yeah, yeah, So they do a bunch of
ocean robbery, which unfortunately there's no word for except privateering,
because they had the king's permission of this or that
king or queen or whatever, so it's technically privateering. You
could argue about whether it counts as piracy. For the

(19:20):
most part. For the show, we're going to for this episode,
we're going to distinguish because I think this actually gets
to what's really interesting about the Golden Age piracy, which
we are not at is the difference between privateering, which
is robbing people in the name of a king, and
then pirating, which is robbing people in the name of
yourself and your friends. So in fifteen twenty, the French

(19:42):
are like, all right, we're gonna go rob Spanish boats,
and they're the first ones to get in on it.
Within ten years, French privateers are sailing all the way
to the Caribbean. At first, they're just robbing the Spanish
as they come home, which just seems simpler, definitely easier. Yeah,
but it's probably easier for the Spanish to like respond
with more guns. The annoying thing about robbing people is

(20:05):
that like sometimes the people have guns also so they
start going to the current Caribbean and robbing people there
and it's a really easy job. It's really easy life.
Everyone's really happy about the not the Spanish. So in
fifteen fifty the English get involved and they call their
guys the Sea Dogs. Shit, that is cool. I know,

(20:26):
I know, it's really annoying, and that's cool, but it
is another guy with a fucking sick name. Francis Drake
is the most famous of the Sea Dogs who because
I liked taliing episodes together, but he's not an important
part of this episode. He was involved in repelling the
Spanish armada that caused Spanish sailors to land on Ireland

(20:47):
as castaways, and then the Irish either killed them or
secreted them to safety. And that's all on the Grace
O'Malley episodes you can listen to if you want to
learn more about piracy in the English aisles. They probably
don't like being called the Englis shelves on the west
coast of that okay, around sixteen hundred. The Dutch, a

(21:09):
little bit late, are like, oh, robbing Spanish ships in
the Caribbean is easy and good, so they start doing
it and they are enough to break Spanish power and
you get your first non Spanish colonies in the area.
Again completely lateral move, like I don't care more colonizers. Great,

(21:31):
But around this time you get something actually interesting. You
get the buccaneers and what's now Haiti on Hispaniola. And
I really like these early buccaneers, at least everything I've
found about them, have you, I don't know when they're
like land googles. Yeah. The version that I have been

(21:53):
taught in my in my own uh tall ship days
is that there was a community people who are basically
hanging out in what is now Haiti, and they were
smoking meat to preserve it and sailing and selling it
to other people who were sailing around so that they
would have like preserved meat that they could you know,
take with them across the ocean. And they were like

(22:15):
just chilling and doing that, and buccaneer came from like
the local word for smoking meat, yep um. And then
at some point Spain was like, hey, fuck you and wait, no, yeah,
you're just getting ahead of the script. I'll excuse me
for knowing things about pirates. Yeah, okay, I kind of
set myself up for this is literally I don't know

(22:39):
what and who were the Buccaneers and why? Well, I'm
glad you asked Land displain it to me the first
bucket of years. They're not pirates. Land displain it to
mean is the best thing I've heard in a really

(23:00):
looked all right. Well, while everyone's having fun with this,
no one else you could have fun with is gambling.
I feel like that's the ad that ends up in
all the fucking podcasts lately. Oh yeah, that sounds about right.
There's it is. I just keep getting the gold one,
which would actually be appropriate for a pirate episode. Oh
my gosh, you're right. You're so right, and we are back.

(23:30):
And I can't believe you said that about behind the Bastards.
You know, I just say it like it is. Rob
I thought you and Robert were friends. Oh he thinks that. Hey, hey,
carry on, Okay, so the first Buccaneers. I feel bad.

(23:52):
I have to defend him. He's my partner, He's the best.
Any I really like Robert having said anything, I know it.
I was like, I was like, nope, that's it. Wasn't joke.
This is the whole thing about this podcast is that
we're all too earnest to take the bits too far
because we're like, no, wait, don't do crime unless you

(24:13):
really want to, or like whatever. The bit is so buccaneers, right,
not pirates at first. They don't live on the ocean,
they don't steal shit. They've got a lot of what
becomes the pirate culture. They're this like culture of rough
and tumble folks who gets called like half civilized or
half savage or whatever. A lot their outlaw frontiersmen who

(24:35):
travel with no fixed home um in what's now called Haiti,
and they build little sheds to hang their hammocks at
night when they need to. There's this quote, I found
men who could never live in the bosom of ordered society,
men who live for the moment, swaggerers, love of lovers
of glory. Men sometimes cruel, often generous, but cowards never

(24:58):
un Yeah, Like, I feel like that gets to some
of the core of what's that kind of interesting about
some of the stuff I'm gon be talking about. They're hunters.
They live off the wild boar and the wild cattle.
As far as I can tell, there's definitely cattle, and
I believe that they are wild from abandoned Spanish settlements
basically that have now gone wild. I do like how

(25:19):
anybody who was like not living in England, regularly attending
church and like you know, saying God Save the King
a lot was was considered like half civilized in all
of these writings, Like that probably just meant that these
guys like drank sometimes and didn't always wear shoes. I mean,

(25:43):
I don't know. It could mean they were they were
doing crazier shit. It's hard to tell with these guys
because like a lot of this, Yeah, there's all this
like exaggerated stuff about you know, yeah, they didn't go
to church, so they're clearly wild animals or whatever. But
like there's a lot of story raise about them, like
continuing to wear the pants that they do the slaughtering

(26:05):
and all the time, so they're just like walking around
in blood pants. Oh these are crust punks. Yeah, No,
they're crust punks. And they travel with no fixed home
and they just lay their hammock where they want every night,
and they only gather to like they like gather where
the cattle are and ship the wild cattle. Like I
actually feel like these folks were a step more a

(26:29):
step culturally away from Western civilization. And yeah, that's that'll
raise some eyebrows. Yeah, but at the same time a
lot of whenever it's like and they were all sturdy
and filthy and stinky. That's like a classic like Western
civilizations shouvinism thing to like make up as a lie

(26:51):
about people. Also, so it's like share the blood pants
thing I think is true, but I only like sixty
seventy per think is true. But like, also, maybe they
only had one pair of pants because I bet there
wasn't a thriving textile industry at that time. Yeah, you know,
like clothes are expensive back then, you had to hand

(27:12):
make everything. Maybe check your pants privilege, I know European writers.
I mean also, they probably could have watched them. But
it is a bunch of unmarried men except for the
way in which they're married. But I'm gonna get to
that in a second. Is it gay? You can't the
audience can't see the eyes I'm making Margaret's Margaret's eyebrows
just went on a journey. It's one of my favorite

(27:34):
podcasting things. This podcasts. Who's to forget that podcasting is
just audio? And then then you're like, shit, this would
be a great cue. I know. So this culture is
what the word buccaneer means for the first half of
the seventeenth century. And as you as you point out,
buccaneer comes from the name for as best as I

(27:54):
can tell, the small meat smoking shocks that they built
to dry out the meat, a style that they learned
from the carib people who are there. And the word
is an Arowack word, which is a language family. Then
case you had some weird belief, not you, I wouldn't
assume you have this, but audience a weird belief that
indigenous people of the Americas didn't get around. This language
family has speakers scattered throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America,

(28:16):
including like deep as fuck in the Amazon Rainforest, including
in Akra and what's now Brazil, which is where the
last episode took place. And I just again like weird connections.
So you got these narrod wells. Most of them are French,
there's some English, Dutch, and really lots of people arguing

(28:37):
about this part. Indigenous and African folks who are living
as buccaneers. Most started away started off as runaway bondsmen
like people skipping out an indentured servitude, runaway slaves. Potentially
that's like people like to argue about whether or not
account as a maroon society. Mutineers, deserters, ship direct people,

(28:57):
sex workers, political exiles, just radicals basically just like all
the cool people. Yeah, that's a fucking party as well. Yes, yeah,
And like a lot of it is like it was
all men except for all of these women who were
sex working, and you're like, are you just discluding them?
Is this like a no true scotsman thing or you're like,
you know, it was all men, Like well, why there's

(29:19):
all these women around but they don't account. You could
sum up a lot of history with it was all
men except for all the women. Yeah. Yeah, and it
was mostly men because of some stuff that will get
to at least there was a lot of men only sections.
There's a lot a lot of people arguing about whether
constituted marine society. The buccaneers later are notoriously also slavers,

(29:42):
and I believe that many of these people probably also
like owned people and claimed own people, But that doesn't
actually preclude runaway slaves from having participated in I think
it would preclude it from counting as a true maroon society.
But anyway, everyone wants to prove that they're all like
either super cool woke rebels or that they're all like
slaving murderers. Um, so somewhere in the middle. I don't

(30:06):
know both extremes at the same time. Yeah, it's weird.
I don't feel the need to like figure out whether
they were good or bad. No, that's not that's not
a thing I feel the need to do to like
people who died three hundred years ago. Well, I appreciate it. Yeah,
Like it's I don't know, it's a very weird impulse. Yeah.

(30:27):
So if you're living in a way that you don't
like on Haiti or at anywhere in the Caribbean, at
this point, the awareness that these people exist gives you
a kind of out. There's a place you can go.
You can go be a buccaneer and live in a
live on the coast in a hut and eat your
fill and call no man master. And they had a
codified system of bromance called the Materilio littage system, which

(30:50):
I do not know how to pronounce, in which two
bros would get married, live together, share their possessions and income,
name each other each other's air, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. Soay, no, definitely not. There's all these historians
are like, no, we can prove that they're heterosexual men.
And I am certain this was not always a sexual relationship.

(31:13):
I am certain it was very often a sexual relationship.
I mean, heterosexual marriage. It's not always a sexual relationship either,
Oh fucking right, okay, And like the main argument that
they were not homosexuals was historians being like, nah, because
they fucked ladies sometimes and sometimes they shared ladies to

(31:34):
fuck as if gay as this like immutable straighter than
you and your buddy having sex with the same person
at the same time, now I know. And it's just
like and I think this is like one of the
clearest examples of something that the historian Hugh who's come,
who's been on the podcast before, talks about about how,

(31:55):
you know, homosexuality and heterosexuality like didn't even get now
I'm putting words in his mouth. I'm just going to
go on my own, Rent, weren't even invented until the
end of the nineteenth century. Is like concepts, right, right,
And so there's these acts that people do, and some
people prefer certain acts and not other acts, right, But
a lot of people are like, yeah, I prefer that
one act, but I'll do this other act. And we

(32:16):
all know that's true, and you can look at any like,
I mean, prison is the main example right now of
like where you know the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality
don't apply between men having sex or whatever, and it's
certain contexts, and you know, it's this is shit that's
been going on for fucking ever, but here they actually
get fucking married. Well, and you know, like you were saying,

(32:38):
there's there's different kinds of acts. Some of them are
legal and some of them are illegal, and you are
describing a context in which there is no rule of law, right,
So people who are into the acts that are not
legal in places where there is rule of law probably
going to be doing a lot more of those acts. Yeah, yeah, totally.
The powers that be are really upset about out this,

(33:01):
so they like write all of these things. I know
they're like, could you please send more lady sex workers.
We're trying to stop the men from falling in love
with each other. And I think the buccaneers during this
period are the people that I'm like, no, but these
people rule, I want to hang out with them. They've
I mean, they've really got a good thing going on.

(33:22):
They're like, wait, so all we need to do is
keep fucking each other and you will just send more
boatloads of sex workers to party with. Like that's what
you're telling me? Oh, win win all around. Yeah, all right,
let's we're gonna go get married. No homo though, Like, yeah,
this is just and I don't think they were like

(33:43):
no homo, you know, don't. I think historians are trying
to stick a no homo out to some homos, just
like what they'll do, which some of them might have
been if they were alive now heterosexual, I don't fucking care,
you know. Yeah. So the Spanish they're like, we don't
like all these people living free, so they decide to

(34:03):
fuck around. The finding out part comes later, and so
they start murdering the ship out of all the wild
boars and cows, trying to starve out the mostly peaceful outlaws.
So the buccaneers and the cows get caught in the crossfire,
which just seems unfair. It really is. I really hate
the idea of like, I mean, this is a really
common on throat history. It's like, I want to fuck
with those people. So I'm gonna kill all the animals,

(34:25):
like fuck you, I have a war, like an honest person,
I don't know, don't quote met. So the buccaneers, they're
like they're already kind of fighty right, and they're like
these like rough and tumble frontiersman and so they're like, well,

(34:49):
we don't like being told what to do, so let's
go steal shit now because we can't hunt, so let's
just go rob people now. Buy boat and by sixteen
fifty buccaneer I means someone who steals ships from boats
by means of another boat. This isn't yet grand pirate
fleets at the beginning. It's like folks and canoe is
rolling up on big boats but showing up a swords

(35:11):
and pistols, being like, you know, you don't give me
your shit. That'll work a lot of the time. It
works well for the most of the time. Yeah, most
people don't want to deal with that. Yeah, I don't
want to deal with that. You put a collist in
my face. You can have my purse. Yeah, that's a
honest exchange of yeah, I got nothing. Okay. This is

(35:36):
the aforementioned finding out for the Spanish because like this
actually likes it. This is why the United States of
America se is like English. But the privateering culture that
comes out of the Buccaneers breaks Spain, like breaks their
hold on the New World. Whoa, So they really should

(35:58):
have just left those cows the fuck alone. Yeah, you
kill a cow, you lose a continent. Like I don't
make the rules. I mean, you shouldn't have the continent
in the first place. Fuck you. But like so, the
Buccaneers they take the island of Tortuga right off the coast,
and they build a pirate island or a privateering island
at this point, and this is way worse for the

(36:19):
Spanish than having cross punks who hunt wild boor and
are historically close friends. And they call themselves the Brethren
of the Coast at this point, which is also a
sick name. They drop articles, Yeah, they drop articles. A
constitution of sorts, a fairly democratic one. We're gonna talk
more about, like pirate democracy in a little bit. Everything

(36:41):
is cool and fine, I mean, within a certain context
is cool and fine. The buccaneers have an island. They're
doing their thing. They're robbing from the rich and giving
to themselves. The only reason they're not the rich themselves
is because they spend it as soon as they get it. Really,
they are robbing the rich and then giving it to
the sex workers and bartenders. That seems good. They who
actually seem like the real smartest pirates in all of it.

(37:02):
That's my takeaway from everything I've read. Okay, so yeah, no,
set up a like I mean, this is like what
people did during the gold Rush, right, Like, yeah, you're
going to be doing much better if instead of going
out and trying to like get money the dangerous but
possibly lucrative way, you just like set up a bar
nearby the people who are getting all the money, Yeah,

(37:22):
which is even more effective because the pirates are actually
not doing it to get rich. They're doing it to
like continue their lives of hedonism and fun like buy
and large, and so they will like drop fucking six
months wages in a night on like someone they think
is cute. You know, they weren't living that beech bum

(37:44):
lifestyle because they wanted to get rich. Yeah, so they
do go privateer at this point rather than pirates, and
so they're they're like, you know, they're pirates, but they
have a note from King Dad who says it's okay,
that they're pirates as long as they only attack the Spanish,
and that's basically what all of them do. I always
privateering was like each country kind of all against all
the other countries, and there's like some of that, but

(38:05):
by and large it's France, England and the Dutch versus
the Spanish basically, okay, and I mean the Spanish privateers
of course are not on that page. So the part
that people don't like talking about this is that they're
also slavers. At this point, most of them are European

(38:26):
and this whole brethren thing. It's like kind of the
core of what philosophically is like interesting and fails about
pirates is that they have this like they come up
with all these ideals of liberty and stuff, but they
apply to a certain in group and they don't apply
it outside of that. And that's going to be a
god that sucks. You know. That sounds like the thing
that the people who wrote the Constitution, I know, I know,

(38:49):
it's the different and it's like the pirates of the
chaotic evil and the founding fathers of the cat lawful evil. Yeah,
just like, oh, we have this really cool set of
ideas about how you know all people and then people
stress next to people but they don't know how to
phrase it any other way. The asterisk at the bottom
is like people, and then there's an astras ask risk. Yeah, yeah,

(39:13):
it's a winky face. It's just yeah, it's just a
picture of a white man working. Yeah, totally. It's the
only spot color on the like Cepia document that they
like use white. Um. So yeah, they keep slaves and
they develop all this wild democracy shit and honor among

(39:34):
thieves and solidarity, and their moral world only extends to
certain people, to European men. Um, there's places and for
different individuals that will talk about it extends beyond that.
And it's actually funny. The next paragraph I have says
compared to funding fathers or whatever, but well we already
did that. Sorry, no, no, no, no, this is really good. Um.

(39:56):
Much like the Founding Fathers, they're also zealously protest didn't
at this point, Wow, you're gonna finally talk about some
Protestants on this podcast. Yeah, I never talk about religion.
They're happy to attack the Spanish because the Spanish or Catholic,
and they also really went around and killed all the

(40:17):
like Catholic priests and monks and all that shit. But
here's where it gets complicated. In other stories that I
tell on this show, people go around and kill all
the Catholics because the Catholics are like stopping slavery. In
this case, the Buccaneers are killing the Catholics because the
Catholics are shitty to the indigenous people the islands, and
the Buccaneers they don't quite extend their moral world to

(40:37):
the indigenous people, right, They're not like in the in group,
but there's a lot of overlap and solidarity and like
a lot of their rating tactics. I think this doesn't
end up in the scripts, and I'm just gonna use
what I remember, so don't directly quote me. A lot
of their like rating tactics and stuff come from I
think the carib people in that area, like the literally

(41:00):
like put a fuck ton of people in a canoe
and you can do anything you want, and so like,
and the buccaneer culture of course it gets its name
from a caraboard and like like it's just this, like
I don't know, it's interesting, yeah, I mean, and they
had been living definitely living alongside of indigenous communities back
in Haiti. Yeah, other buccaneers were Catholic, mostly French crews,

(41:23):
and they had their own priests and they kind of
like stayed clear of the Protestants. I don't know how
I've gotten so far in life and spent so much
time on tall ships without anyone ever telling me they
were pirate priests. I'm gonna need you to tell me
more about that right now. Okay. I only know a
little bit more about the pirate priests because so there's
two different things. There's the buccaneer priests and they, as

(41:45):
far as I can tell, it's like the same way
that you have a chaplain in your military. You know,
you end up with a chaplain on this like because
the privateers, in a weird way, they are an extension
of the state, and so this is mostly inference. I
only found a couple of cents is about the pirate priests,
and then later I know a bunch of pirates, including
Protestants in the proper Golden age, who um would like

(42:08):
try to get priests to come on board. Fucking um
Black Bart Bartholomy Roberts. He's like the biggest Protestant asshole
of all the fucking He doesn't like like drinking, and
no one's allowed to gamble, and like all kinds of ship.
Oh so now we have straight Edge in addition to
crust punk. Yeah. Yeah, so he's the straight edge one.

(42:28):
And he like really likes Protestant priests. I don't know
if they're called priests though, I think they are asking
the wrong person. Yeah, I don't know, all right, and
so I'm an expert. But he kept trying to be like, hey,
come on, join my book, join my ship, joined my
like merry crew, and all the priests are like, no,

(42:48):
you're pirates. That's bad. Um. It's like but we don't drink. Yeah,
and like all of his crew are like, we actually ship. Yeah,
totally yeah. And he's like one of the most murderous
of the fucking anyway. So it's sixteen fifty five. The
English take Jamaica and they were sent by the veteran
villain of the pod Oliver Cromwell, the guy who genocided

(43:10):
Ireland and deserves to only be remembered for that. You
can hear about him in the Diggers and Leveler's episode.
I just really like when I alt I say that.
Every fucking time I say that, Okay, now you've got
a real like I mean, I was going to call
it the cool people extended Universe, but then I realized
that it's actually our universe. History. Yeah, it's just history.
But that's what I like about history is it is

(43:30):
it's the it's the extended universe. It's the like the
way it all ties together. It's the grandest story ever told,
and we're fucking characters in it. And so instead it
is presented as this like weird, boring thing, and I'm like,
that's nonsense. There's all of these different factions fighting. Like
That's part of why I like all the like religious
shit is because I mean the same way if I'm
talking about the nineteenth or twentieth century, I'm going to
talk abou which communies were killing, which anarchists were killing,

(43:52):
which capitalists were you know, like the ideological battle lines
are really interesting, and in Renal Sons era, those battle
lines are religious. So in eighteen sixteen fifty five, the
English take Jamaica and a bunch of the English buccaneers

(44:13):
they leave Tortuga and they go over to join Jamaica,
and so you kind of like lose a lot of
the multiculturalism at this point, but you also get twice
as many buccaneers strongholds, which are basically pirate islands, just
all with the permission of the kings. It's like not
quite as cool. But the romance system fades away, and
what fills it instead as products and services? Oh no,

(44:35):
I know that's the worst exchange. It's okay. They can
just press skip forward fifteen years and they'll they'll get
out of that right away. Here's some ads. So the
bromance system is fading away in the sixteen seventies, everything's
going downhill as soon as they get letters from the king.

(44:56):
It's just like everything's fucking getting boring. But don't worry.
Having a letter of mark is really like it's like
being signed to a major record label, right, It's like
your fucking sellout. I think it's okay to be signed
a record Yeah no, I'm not. I mean, you know
I'm not. Yeah no, I'm just trying to make a comparison. Actually,

(45:17):
maybe that means the privateering. Like, I don't know, what
would I think if I lived in Tortuga in the
sixteen eighty I think it was really cute when all
the boys were married to each other, I missed that. Yeah,
those are the days. I know, near the end of
the seventeenth century, sixteen ninety or so, the government stopped

(45:38):
endorsing privateering basically because it's too big of a nuisance
they did there. It's there's a lot of fucking around
finding out in this the buccaneers did. They're good, the privateers.
They broke the Spanish monopoly in the area. So therefore,
you know, you start getting settlements and all of this stuff,
right and now though they don't want a siety full

(46:00):
of crazy, drunk agro guys. They want an orderly slave
society of plantations. So the pirates, the buccaneer, the privateers,
whatever they gotta go, which is to say, at this
point earlier, the state needed the nomadic war machine. You

(46:21):
ever heard of the nomadic war machine, Miriam, Well, I
know of a band. There's a really good band, Nomadic
War Machine. Yeah. Yeah, because I can't talk about pirates,
about talking about the nomadic war machine as a philosophical concept,
which is why you're like, why did I listen to
this another episode about Mary Reading and Bonnie and they're
not talking about them, and said, because this is a
different shit than you get on any other fucking podcast

(46:42):
talking about them. Yeah, that's why you can listen to
anybody be like and Bonnie and Mary read they were
girls but they were pirates. Who Yeah, and then like
credulously read that book that talks about their upbringing. That's
mazed just about titillation and lies. It don't get me wrong.
It's amazing how all of the like period woodcuts of
the time that show them are like, and they fought

(47:04):
with their boobs out as one does. I know, well, okay,
actually the first edition, I know that there's a yeah,
I know the yeah yeah yeah, okay, well but the
audience doesn't the first edition ahead of ourselves. All right, fine,
all right, you know, if you want to hear about
their kids us, you're gonna have to wait first. You
get a philosophy lesson is what you get when I

(47:26):
just finished watching The Good Place. The Nomadic war Machine
is a philosophical construct theorized by Delusing Quatari who or
two French guys. They're anti authoritarian Marxists, and an interesting
thing about them, nobody has ever managed to explain a
single one of their concepts to me successfully. Okay, so
go for it. Well, the way that I learned this

(47:47):
concept was reading about pirates a long time ago, and
it's the only context that would have helped me understand it.
There's a book called Life under the Black Flag by
Gabriel Coon, which is one of the major sort for today,
and it talks about essentially the philosophical ramifications of the
Golden Age of piracy. And it's how I anything I

(48:08):
understand about, like Nietzsche and like Dionysianism and the Nomadic
War Machine. All that shit is because I read this
book as a like young crustpunk with blood pants. I
didn't have blood pants. I had patched pants. They were
covered in like dumpster juice instead of I'm really not
making it better. Okay. So I like this concept enough
that I named a band. My dark pop band is

(48:29):
called Nomadic War Machine. The idea is that the state
wants everything to be orderly and controlled, and it wants
sort of non conflict by creating like stratified society. So
within this concept, which is not true right, but as
a concept, you know, war, chaos and war are things
that exist outside the state, but the state requires those things,

(48:53):
so it basically hires it. It kind of it recuperates
the raw chaotic energy of the non state force, which
is called the war machine. And so that's like the
rough fucking idea. And so you can see this is
what happened the Caribbean is you have the buccaneers there
this like non state chaotic force that is really useful

(49:16):
to the state, and then as soon as they are
no longer useful to the state, they've broken the Spanish control,
they're discarded. The nomadic concept part of it is a
way to like fight against the recuperation or Okay, I'm
getting this part wrong because I also don't understand to
losing Gutari. But I think that's what's cool about it,
is it you use it as a starting point to
make up your own bullshit. I strongly suspect nobody understands

(49:39):
to lose it. Yeah, and that's why nobody has ever
successfully explained it to me. It's not I'm not the
dumb one. It's everything. Yeah, totally no. And so in
this case, the nomadic part isn't necessarily actual wandering around,
but sort of a chaotic embrace of non stateness. But
actual wandering around is really good for this, and so

(50:01):
the pirates actually wander around quite a bit and are
essentially this nomadic war machine. That's what happens with the pirates.
Privateerian licenses get harder and harder to come by. First
the Spanish killed all their pigs, and now the Dutch,
French and English take away their license to rob. But
they didn't go to go away, So what's left for

(50:22):
them to do but be pirates. Seems like it kind
of backed them into a corner. I know, really brought
that on yourself, buddy. Turns out you don't need anyone's
permission to stick a gun in someone's face and say
give me all your money. This is a new realization
they suddenly all had by about sixteen nineties. I mean,

(50:46):
if you're a privateer, you're just a pirate according to
everybody except one country. Yeah, so you're really just like
subtracting one country from like the list you're you're just
adding one country to the list of people who are
mad at you. Yeah. But the differences ero and one
as a big one, Like it took humans a long
time to figure out, you know, the concept of zero,

(51:06):
Like it's a very different thing than one. So theings
get called like proper pirates or whatever. I don't know.
The English legal dictum from the eighteenth century was quote,
a pirate is in a perpetual war with every individual
in every state, Christian or Infidel. Pirates properly have no country,
but by the nature of their guilt separate themselves and

(51:28):
renounce on this matter the benefit of all lawful societies.
They're doing that thing where they say a thing that
they think is bad, but they make it sound cool
as fat. And that's why you have to You had
to go to pirate themed bullshit in the twenty first
century is because ye, but I got to see blue
Oyster call, so it worked out. Yeah, four hundred years earlier,

(51:51):
the English tried to make something sound bad and made
it sound real cool. They are presented as a means
of all mankind and villains of all nation, villains of
all nations. And this is what's interesting about them, not
their actual actions, which is mostly murder, rape, torturing, cruelty.
They're remembered by the left is nice, happy gay thieves

(52:13):
who are chaotic good and presaged Western democracy. But realistically
they're overall somewhere between chaotic neutral and chaotic evil. But
they went to war against a lawful evil system and
so the chaotic part is what's interesting. Not pretendially, I
think you could make an argument for true neutral no,
not a derailist. I'm fully on the page of believing

(52:36):
that they are a representation of chaos. Okay, yeah, no,
I don't know. I mean, I just think there's like
this element of like perpetual pure self interest where it's like, well,
so you know there isn't that's what's interesting, Okay, go on.
It will get to this more later. But they were

(52:56):
really fraternal amongst each other and like essentially communistic in
many many regards within their own culture. Not communistic isn't
really the right word, because there's still like individual all right,
we'll get to it. So one of the things that
makes them different from every other era of pirates and

(53:18):
like because I was always like, as soon as I
found out the golden Age of piracy was like eight years,
I was like, I feel like I got ripped off.
I was like, everyone talks about these motherfuckers, But there
was literally about four thousand of them total, Like at
any given time, there was like at the most peak,
at any given moment, there'd be like two twenty five
hundred of them on the ocean. I've hung out with

(53:39):
more people than that on a regular basis. I've been
to protest with way more people than that. Right, there's
probably more telship sailors. Now, Yeah, then there were pirates
in the Golden Era, Like, so what makes them so different?
And so for a while I was like mad, because
it's like, there's pirates fucking everywhere all throughout history. Why
won't people shut the funk about these pirates? And a

(53:59):
lot of it is like bullshit Western gays stuff, but
not all of it. And so I want to talk
about what makes the Golden Age pirates sort of different?
It seems as though, and this is the premise of
various you know pieces I've read. This is not like
I'm so smart and I know everything, right, Most pirates
in history have been part of a community, as sort

(54:20):
of almost like a rude coast guard, right. They've been
like part of a bandit culture that is attached to
a community. The Somali pirates, for example, got their modern
start as literally like a lot of them call themselves
as a gentleman who worked the ocean, which actually sounds
like the brethren of the coast to me. Yeah, that
sounds exactly like some Golden Age of piracy ship, I know,
and they attacked all the international fishing vessels that showed

(54:43):
up to fucking their waters after the government stopped, you know,
being able to enforce laws within the coastal waters. I'm
not trying to make a statement about the ethics of
the current development of the Somali pirates, right, but Golden
age pirates weren't part of a specific broader community than that.
There's like, there are pirates ports, but it's a really
different thing. Robert see Ritchie's way of distinguishing between these

(55:04):
two types of piracy is, and I quote, one can
be desfined as organized marauding, the other as anarchistic marauding.
Many men were involved in both, yet a distinction can
be made. Organized pirates remained attached to a port as
their base of operation. Anarchistic marauding involved leaving behind the
base of operation and wandering for months, even years at
a time. And I think that's how we end up

(55:27):
with this, is this romanticization, is that they did something
kind of different. So the core argument of Gabriel Coon's book,
the one I learned about the Pneumatic war machine from,
is really interesting. The argument is that pirates are worth
thinking or cool, but not for the reasons that radicals claim.
It's like this exploding head diagram, you know, my favorite
meme in the world. There's like pirates are cool because

(55:49):
they live free fuck the law at the bottom, right,
and then there's like, I mean they were murders and
slavers on top of that, and then you go up
to like, no, they were radically democratic and developed alternative
societies outside the law and broke free from society's conceptions
of race, gender, sex, and nationality, and that's like above that,
and then above that you're like mostly no, not really,
they were mostly just murderous thieves. But then above it

(56:11):
all is pirates are cool because he fucked the law,
and it's a shame that they didn't apply their concepts
of liberty outside just themselves in their bros. All right,
that's my I'm listening. Yeah, okay, Well, then the golden
Age of piracy actually starts in the Indian Ocean. I
don't know if you knew this, Mirriams. You know, the

(56:31):
ocean is really big and connects all of the world. Yeah, yeah,
it's bigger than most things. Yeah. Actually, yeah, congrats serious,
always take Margaret serious the Golden Thanks. Thanks, It's terrible

(56:53):
that I'll get you in trouble one day. Um. The
Golden Age pirates went everywhere that trade went, routes went,
and so even though their bases were often in the Caribbean,
they were fucking everywhere. Two English privateer captains Henry every
and Thomas two, they wind up going to the Indian
Ocean and robbing whoever they want, including Brits, even though
they were British Supposedly. In sixteen ninety two, Thomas two

(57:16):
told his crew quote that it was better to risk
your life for plunder than for government. I mean that
is going to be hard to argue with. No, I'm
just I'm with him. Yeah, And they all captains and
crew alike, and we'll talk about the how they split
money more equitably than other systems. They all get richest
ship for this. On its second trip, Thomas two dies.

(57:39):
He gets shot in the belly because robbing people's a
really bad idea overall and kind of dangerous. You don't
pick the career pirate because you're hoping to like rv
around the country after retirement looking at birds in Yellowstone.
I definitely associate that I don't remember like whose phrase
this was, but a short life and a merry one

(57:59):
is like one that pops up a lot in like
writings about the about pirates of that era. Yeah, that
makes a lot of fucking sense. That is like probably
a writer wrote it and not a pirate, but you know,
I mean, you know, and it's like even when I'm
like Thomas two said, and I'm like, I don't fucking
know Thomas who said that, Like, was it like his
ship's fucking chronicler who wrote it down? Like, yeah, I

(58:21):
knew we weren't gonna like get super far without a
reference to our flag means death. But the one of
the best things on that show is the fact that
he has like a guy following him around writing down
cool stuff that he says. I know, I know. This
is what I thought about when I said, yeah, a

(58:42):
lot of pirates get their start by mutiny, and I
haven't read about it, being like, um, it's not that
they're like usually like, oh, we don't like following the law,
let's be pirates instead their mutiny like we aren't getting paid,
we aren't being fed, Like one of the pirates that
I read about, like at their start because that mutiny,
because the captain was like, no, I don't have any food,

(59:03):
but you can, like drink some rum. I don't care,
and the pirates like, no, we want food, and so
they like fucking killed the captain and became parrots. You know,
if you, if you are ever in such a situation
as this captain was saying to your you know, dissatisfied underlings,
no you can't have any food, drink hard liquor on
an empty stomach, and make a level headed decision here.

(59:25):
That might not be your best call. It's it's the
let them eat cake. But if cake was like a
thing that makes people angry historically let me eat let
them eat violence juice. Yeah, totally. So they don't view
the project as a way to get rich overall, but

(59:46):
more as a way to live free. And also specifically
a lot of them are very directly motivated by revenge
against the system, specifically against the merchant captains who worked
sailors to death for work for fucking nothing. Pirates pretty
often would capture ship and then just ask the crew
of the ship like, hey, was this guy good to you?
And if the crews like, nah, this guy sucked, they

(01:00:06):
just fucking kill the captain. And if the captain they
were like, yeah, he was all right, they might like
not kill the captain. You know, it's a very good
incentive to be a less shitty boss exactly. That is
actually one of the things I don't think has talked
about is like the existence of this thing happening probably
got a lot of fucking merchant captains to get their

(01:00:28):
ship together. You know. Specifically, the way that they killed
some of these merchant captains was to or at least
one of them, wrap a rope around the captain's face
and tighten it until his eyes popped out. Cool people
are every episode I read at least two new torture
methods that they've never occurred to me. I rarely include them,

(01:00:50):
but I don't know. Because this one's about bosses, I
felt like including it. I mean, and I think it's
probably good to remember that, like a lot of the
stuff the people were going to be talking about are
we're doing is like really just actually terrible. Yeah, And
there's a lot of argument about exactly how murdery and

(01:01:11):
rape and tortury the pirates were. There's absolutely a decent
amount of all three. There's like proof of all three,
it's possible that they were intentionally spreading gossip about how
horrible and mean and evil and terrible they were, so
that to anyone who resisted, so that when they roll
up on you, people are like, no, I don't want
to resist, then we'll all get like tortured, right, Absolutely,

(01:01:33):
you don't want the rumor about you to be like, oh, yeah,
he's a chill guy. I hear, you can negotiate with him,
you know, but that's said. I actually think that they're
like um later pirates kind of there's a they have
this downward arc. Later get even more like violent, right,
And I think they kind of like, you have to

(01:01:54):
be both good cop and bad cup. You have to
be able to be like, look, I don't want to
torture the shit out of you. You could just give up,
you know, you have to be known for some level
of mercy two people who go along with you in
order to get away with being a robber. Like if
every mugger shot the person that they stole from, people

(01:02:15):
wouldn't give up their wallets to the person with a gun.
They'd fight, you know. Yeah, I wonder if also there
was like kind of a self fulfilling thing of like
if you hype yourselves up as sadistic, violent assholes, one
hundred years later people who are like, well, I'm a sadistic,
violent asshole. I wonder if there's a way to monetize

(01:02:37):
that might be more likely to go into the career
that you have created. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And different
crews were absolutely known for different levels of all of
this shit, And so it's it's possible that pirates lived
in this like what can only be described as a
horror movie world. Like it's possible that it was this

(01:02:59):
fucking nightmare air, this like sadistic, strange horror thing with
and some of them were absolutely bloodthirsty. One guy was
literally bloodthirsty. He was famous for hacking someone up with
the cutlass and then licking the blood off of the cutlasts.
A lot of them were cannibals, or at least presented
themselves as cannibals through like grotesque acts in order to

(01:03:19):
scare the shit out of everyone. But it's possible, and
I think probable that overall they were exerting a lot
less violence than the system that they were fighting against.
And I don't know they're pirates they're not a peaceful bunch.
By sixteen ninety seven, do you have an I means
sorry just I mean, oh no, when when you're talking
about like all of these ships that they're attacking and robbing,

(01:03:41):
these are ships carrying the wealth created by colonialists, like projects,
like colonial projects, and all of these countries where it's
slave labor right being exploited to extract resources from other
people's countries. Like there is a whole mess of violence

(01:04:03):
happening before the pirates get their hands on this money. Yeah, no, exactly,
and like and not just in a like these are
the crazy violent ones in the state is like calmly violent,
Like the state is also like torturing the shit out
of everyone's like sadistic as fuck. Like this is not
a fucking pretty time, none of which makes me want

(01:04:24):
to hang out with seventeenth century pirates anymore then I
previously did. I'm just sort of saying, like, yeah, in
the context is one of extreme violence, Yeah, totally. By
sixteen ninety seven, you have an explosion of piracy. By
seventeen hundred, pirates have a symbol for themselves, the fucking
Jolly Roger, which is a black flag with various allegories

(01:04:47):
for death on it, a skull and bones, hourglasses, bleeding hearts.
When they were privateers, they all wanted to be upstanding
and not seen as pirates like that was like they
were always like, yeah, we're not pirates. This is a
big change. Now they're fucking proud, which leads to my
argument that the first Pride flag was black and had
a skeleton holding a spear and an hourglass. That's all

(01:05:09):
I'm saying. Sometimes those flags could get absurdly intricate too.
There was one I don't remember whose this was. I
used to definitely know this, but there's like a skeleton
or maybe it's a guy but like holding a spear
that is dripping blood, and he's standing over two skulls
and the skulls are labeled like it's the country that

(01:05:32):
they are, and it's like, yeah, my guy, you do
not want to be a pirate. You want to draw
political cartoons like yeah, And that guy changed. I think
it was Black Bart, who's not black, to be clear,
None of the Goldench pirate captains or black some other
crew are. We'll talk about that more, but yeah, no,
that guy changes fucking flag like every fucking week too,

(01:05:53):
like because he's he's basically fucking Ben Garrison. I can't
think of and Garson's way, I'm now maybe now I'm
worried I got the name wrongs that that conservative weird
like weird cartoonist who makes all of these like incredibly
intricate political cartoons. Everything is labeled like the Downfall of
the West or AOC you know. Yeah, No, and me

(01:06:17):
not knowing the name of anything or anyone is not
a symbol of it being obscure or wrong. It's a
symbol of the if it's not literally written in front
of me. I don't know anyone's names, gotcha, but I
think it was Bartholomi Robert who had that flag. But
I remember reading about it being like this guy's a
little much. And that's where we're gonna leave it today.

(01:06:37):
When we come back on Wednesday, we'll talk about pirates
and that polycuele I'm like dangling in front of people,
much like the seventeen twenty sixth edition of You were like, oh,
when we get to Annibondi and Mary Read, we'll talk
about how they did or did not have their boobs
out all the time, Like we're gonna to tune in
in episode two. Yeah, the podcast that makes fun of

(01:06:59):
how other people use things for titillating purposes and therefore
basically plays into the same system that it's fighting against.
I see what you're doing. See what you're doing, Margaret. Thanks,
But but Miriam, what are you doing with your life
or plugs or things that you want to tell people about.
I'm gonna plug moderate amounts of vitamin C. Okay, you

(01:07:22):
don't need to go you know, overboard. Uh, you don't
need to keel all yourself with vitamin C. Well, like,
don't get scurvy, you know, eat an apple? All right,
Sophie guiding the plug. No, not today. I'm gonna plug
because I never plug my bands for some reason in

(01:07:44):
this podcast. I have a band called Nomadic war Machine.
Nomadic Warmachine dot bandcamp dot com has a bunch of albums.
It's dark beep boops that go beep boop boop. And
then I have a metal band called Feminasgal that does
not go whoop. Although you'll pretty quickly be able to
tell that I'm a person who writes the drums for both.

(01:08:07):
And that's what I have to plug. I'll talk to
everyone on Wednesday when we're going to talk about pirate tits.
Cool Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us
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(01:08:30):
get your podcasts.