Hollywood adores a lovable rogue. Pirates are often depicted as wise, cracking, kind hearted individuals who set out for treasure but end up writing or wrong. In the end, they usually get the girl and the treasure. In six moviegoers enjoyed The Black Pirates with Douglas Fairbank Senior as a young man who joins a pirate crew to exact revenge for killing his father, and yes, the script follows the age old
formula well. In ninety five, Pirates returned to the silver screen with Errol Flynn as Captain Blood, and of course, in two thousand three came the tremendously popular Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Storytelling has no shortage of beloved characters, from Captain Jack Sparrow to Captain Hook and Long John Silver and many in between. Pirates are profitable for publishers and Hollywood alike, along with books and film. A new
pirate emerged in the nineteen seventies. While they didn't hijack boats, they did seek a way to make money off the work of others. Woody Wise picked up his kids from school on a Friday afternoon and never returned home. Instead, they went on the run from the FBI. As it turns out, Wise had been pirating films. When the FBI agents arrived at his house, they carted away dozens of movies. He had once owned and operated his own theater, but
television had cut into his profits. Movies were what he knew, and so he looked for a way to make more money with them. Wise befriended people working in a movie studio shipping department responsible for getting films into theaters. Yes, back then, movie theaters still used reels of film. Then he waited. When a new film came out it opened in theaters nationwide. After a few weeks, theaters needed fewer
reels and NAT's when Wise saw a site hustle. He sold the extras, making about five hundred and seventy five dollars for each copy. The FBI, though caught Wise, Lucky for him, he received only a hefty fine. Today, books, movies, TV and streaming shows are frequently pira did and either sold or given away for all to see. It's estimated that pirated videos alone are viewed two hundred and thirty billion times a year, and just like it had during the age of piracy, that theft comes at a cost.
It's estimated that U S companies lose seventy one billion dollars each year to piracy worldwide. Those numbers are even higher over nineties seven billion, and that's just in the movie industry alone. It isn't a Victimus crime either. Over seventy thousand people in the music industry have lost their jobs, publishers have lost over three hundred million dollars, authors have lost significant portions of their income, and bookstores have suffered
as well. Digital piracy might get its name from the people who once hijacked ships at sea, but it's hardly romantic pirates. The word itself hints at a story and captures our attention. It doesn't matter if that story comes from some self justification for digital piracy, a swashbuckling fictional character, or the real life men and women who sailed the seas during the golden age of piracy, because if the story stars a pirate, folks have always been intrigued. I'm
Aaron Manky and welcome two pirates. Alexander was born in sixteen seventy six in a small Scottish town where everyone knew everyone. He had six brothers and his father, John Selcraig, worked as a shoemaker and a tanner in Lower Largo. By all accounts, Alexander was a wild child, constantly causing trouble in town and at home, and though he was
the youngest, he repeatedly beat up his siblings. His mother sent him away, claiming that she wanted more for her youngest child and hoped that he would find his fortune at sea. Other sources say that she may have just wanted her young troublemaker out of the house. Six years later, he returned home and went right back to his mischievous and law breaking ways. He had gotten away with most of his behavior in his youth, but this time he
would go too far. While the records don't clarify what exactly he did, authorities charged him with indecent behavior inside a church. To avoid the consequences, he skipped down and changed his last name to Selkirk. Of course, the court simply deferred the charges. Alexander found work at sea, and with his talent for navigation and mathematics, he quickly became an officer. His return to See proved timely to the War of Spanish Secession, gave Alexander options. He no longer
had to choose between merchant and navy vessels. Privateering offered better pay. He joined the expedition captain by a man named William Dampier in seventeen oh three. The Lord Admiral had given them letters of mark, granting the crew the right to attack enemy vessels. Dampier commanded the St. George and gave Captain Charles Pickering the command of his second ship, the sink Points. Alexander served as Pickering's sailing master. The job required someone with a formal education, as reading and
piloting were considered a senior officer. His role aside from reading maps, if they even had one, the sailing master also had to consider storms and the currents. While Alexander enjoyed the respect that came with his title, he didn't reciprocate it. He didn't think much of damp Here. The captain's previous work as a buccaneer put him at odds
with captaining a navy ship. In fact, a previous ship that he had commanded sank, and although Dampier had been cleared of any charges surrounding the incident, that moment followed him wherever he went. Morale was not existent, and the crew suffered from a lack of provisions. Diseases like dysentery and scurvy were prevalent, and rats had invested the ship. An outbreak of scurvy plagued the crew while they sailed just off the coast of Brazil, killing Pickering and several
other men. Thomas Straddling, Pickering's lieutenant, became the sink points new captain. In Alexander's opinion, Straddling was egotistical and lack the necessary experience. Most of the crew shared this assessment of the new captain, causing discord and talk of mutiny. A combination of events fueled Alexander's bad temper. He not only argued with Dampier, but he was also butting heads with Straddling. The crew thought their sailing master and their
new captain were both equally arrogant. Disagreements between the two usually became a battle of wills. The crew sailed to the uninhabited island called Juan Fernandez for a few days rest and hopefully to find some supplies. When Strandling ordered the men to load the ship, Alexander refused. Instead of asking his fellow sailors to overtake the captain, he suggested they refused to sail and remain on the island. Instead, he reminded them of the poor conditions, their terrible treatment,
and missed opportunities to raid ships straddling. Gave him an ultimatum, though, either the sailing master got on the ship or he stayed behind alone. Alexander refused to give in, and so he watched as his fellow crew members made several trips to transfer supplies to the sink point. He stood on the shoreline defiantly as the men loaded the last of the small boats. Marooning someone is one of the harshest punishments ever handed down. Still, he must have felt he
had nothing to fear. He hadn't committed a crime typically punishable by marooning. Surely they would come back to get him. But with the last load, the men got into the skiffs one final time. Still he refused to join them, so they waved him off and pushed away from shore. And that's when Alexander realized the gravity of his decision. He had just marooned himself. San Fernandez Island was remote, just over four hundred and eighteen miles west of Valparaiso, Chile.
Few ever passed much less stopped. He'd been convinced that his shipmates would have chosen him over straddling, He had called their bluff and lost. A few people survived the marooning, although Charles Vane and Bartholomew Roberts had both been fortunate to do so, and history would eventually tell us that in Captain Arnabus Lincoln and a small crew survived as well. Pirates had captured their ship and left them on a
small island barely three feet above sea level. They had been left a blanket, a pot, and a few provisions. Of the twelve men, all but one lived to tell the tale, but for twenty days the men were on their own. In seventeen eighteen, part of Captain William Greenway's crew mutinied for refusing to turn pirate. They left him and a handful of others marooned on an anchored sloop incapable of sailing. Being the only one who could swim, Williams went to shore and returned with food. The pirates
came back and forced him into piracy, but left the others. Eventually, the pirates were captured and a Spanish sloop returned to rescue the surviving men. For many sailors if exposure, storms, starvation, or dehydration didn't kill them, a bullet, did you see. Crews often left the maroon sailor with a pistol and a single bullet, giving them a choice to die a slow death or end their life by their own hand.
But even that posed a dilemma. They had been damned to die on an island, but death by suicide, in their eyes at least, meant damning their souls to hell. And Alexander was well aware of the survival rates of maroon sailors, but he was also aware that he hadn't been left a pistol. He had no extra clothes, or a blanket or a single provision, And yet there he stood, with his feet in the sand, watching his fellow crewmen
make their way back to the sink point. When he realized they meant to take him up on his threat, he ran into the water, shouting and waving at them to come back. At first they ignored his cries, and then they called back, reminding him that he had made his choice. His attitude and attempt to cause a mutiny had been his undoing, they reminded him, and his general disposition would no longer be their problem. He watched and called until all were boarded and the ship sailed from sight.
He fared better than most, though the island had a good supply of fresh water. Spaniards who had once used the island had also left behind a small population of goats. He found edible herbs, wild plums, cabbages, and other vegetation. Alexander learned to overcome the lack of knives and pots to eat and cook with. Over time, he managed to domesticate the goats too. He refused to fish, hating the taste without salt, and the goats became more useful than
just food too. When his pants and shirt wore thin, he used goat skin for clothing and even for the walls of his hut. He even domesticated a few feral cats, which helped with the other animal that the Spanish had left behind, rats. Regardless of the species, the animals kept him company, and Alexander often danced in his tent to pass the time, and even sang to the animals. Instead of wasting away, he thrived on the diet, which was
much better than what some sailors and peasants ate. With apple food and water, he could only wait and hope that a passing ship would find him, and one day that's what he saw off the coast. Alexander might not have known what day it was or how many months had passed since he'd seen another human being, but he cheered and breathed, I have relief. His ordeal was finally over. And then he caught sight of the flag, and fear
replaced joy. The flag was Spanish, and that meant the men on board were more likely to kill him that rescue him. He hastily disguised his camp and then shimmied up a tree. The men arrived and walked around for a while and even used the tree to relieve themselves, and then they left. Alexander was alone with the animals once more, and it would be a very long time before he ever saw another ship. In sev oh eight,
privateer Woods Rogers set out on an expedition. The British governments and merchants sponsored his voyage, and both wanted the same outcome to impede the Spanish financially and hinder their military might, and the crew looked forward to a profitable voyage since the British government had waived their usual cut from any raids, and that allowed Rogers to negotiate with Bristol merchants to supply capital for two ships and their crews.
Investors would receive a share of the plunder. Upon the cruise return, Rogers captain a ton frigate named the Duke, and gave command of the Duchess the smaller ship, to Stephen Courtney. The ships and crew set sail from Ireland in September of seventeen oh wait. Rogers developed a reputation of a tough but fair captain. When some of the men had gambled away everything they had, including their clothing, he banned gambling. The men worked hard, too, and Rogers
rewarded them well. He made sure his men had good food and decent medical care, and of course, he supplied them with plenty of alcohol. At times, disagreements would crop up between captain and crew. Once the crew even mutinied when Rogers refused to attack ships from neutral governments. That same fate had befallen Captain Kidd a few years before, but Rogers managed to regain control quickly and continued his expedition.
They raided several French vessels in seventeen o eight and seventeen o line, bringing in substantial profits, but later in seventeen o nine, lack of fruit caused a scurvy outbreak, and to prevent another mutiny, Rogers set course for a nearby island, hoping to restock. He hadn't expected to find anyone living there yet. As the landing party approached, a man with long hair and a beard wearing fur clothing anxiously hopped from one bare foot to the other and
waved at them frantically. When the men met, Alexander Selkirk told Rogers everything, how he'd come to be marooned and how he managed to stay alive. The two compared dates, determining that Alexander had been on the tiny island for roughly four years. The next boat arrived, and Alexander couldn't believe who stepped on to shore. There before him stood William Dampier. It turns out Rogers hadn't known about the former captain's court martial or his previous command of the St. George.
The truth about that came out after a lot of questions and talk after Alexander had been marooned. Disaster had struck the crew aboard the sink, point their ship had sank, leaving Straddling and the others stranded. After that, the Spanish had captured them, imprisoning them for piracy, and in the end, Alexander had survived, while his fellow crewmen had not. With this sort of blemished work record, Dampier had honestly been lucky to find a job at all, let alone as
a pilot. Rodgers was so impressed with Alexander that he invited him to join the crew on the expedition. Surprisingly, though he refused. He told Rogers that he would rather remain on the island and die there than serve on a ship with Dampier. So Rogers solved the matter by taking him aboard the Duke and keeping Dampier on the Duchess, and Alexander agreed. The arrangement delighted woods Rogers, but not nearly as much as listening in great detail about his
newfound friends story of survival. To his credit, Alexander returned to life at sea as though he had never left, and Rogers soon promoted him to second mate. They continued their journey, bringing in substantial amounts of treasure along the way, and when they returned to England, to a hero's glory. Alexander sailed with them as part of the crew, but life was never the same for him. Although the privateering had made him wealthy, Alexander said that he had never
been so happy as those years on the island. Eventually, he took to the seas again and died of yellow fever in seventy one. Woods Rodgers began to think of publishing an account of their journey, but crew member Edward cook beat him to it. Rogers wrote a more detailed version months later, and while both books mentioned Alexander, rogers
retelling fascinated readers the most. He had spent the most time in Alexander's company, after all, and he spent all of those evenings journaling what he had learned during their conversations. The War of Spanish Secession ended, leaving readers wanting more tales of the High Seas, so Rogers penned a cruising voyage around the world detailing their successful plunders and journey, along with detailed material of Alexander's marooning. Roger Is telling
easily outsold Edward Cooks. The story captivated readers around the globe and inspired a whole new genre of seafaring tales. Woods Rogers, the man who brought the Golden Age of piracy to heal, could never have foreseen that his book would inspire authors to write about pirates fact or fiction. People couldn't get enough of them. This season, we've visited
many of those stories here. We're fascinated with women like Granne O'Malley and Bonnie and Ching Shi, who all proved as fierce as their male counterparts, and legends like Blackbeard, William Kidd and Benjamin Hornegal never get old. There's Sam Bellamy, the Romantic Pirates, and of course the amusing Steed Bonnet. While Edward Lowe and Charles Vane will firmly remain the villains of the bunch, the Woods Rogers inspired one author to write about these real life pirates too. In seventy four,
Charles Rivington hawked books near St. Paul's Cathedral. We've mentioned the book, A General History of Pirates, written by Captain Charles Johnson. The book detailed events surrounding the most infamous and notorious pirates to sail the Caribbean. The first three editions of the book sold out. The two volumes set
sold in seventeen twenty six included additional pirates too. No one knew who Captain Johnson was, though while the author seemingly had a great deal of nautical knowledge, it became clear no such captain ever existed, and the author had used a pen name. Many people suspect he was actually Daniel Dafoe, who had written the widely popular Robinson Caruso in seventeen nineteen. That story, if you remember, follows the
adventures of a man shipwrecked on an island. It's assumed that Defoe took inspiration from Wood's Rogers telling of Alexander Selkirk's marooning, but defoex wasn't the only one smitten with pirates and woods Rogers book. A young Scottish author spent a rainy afternoon with his young son on one particularly dreary day, he created a treasure hunt to pass the time. By the end of the day, though the author had such a great time that he began to work on
a story. Ideas swirled in his head. Along with Woods Roger's story about fellow scott Alexander Selkirk. The author wanted a story full of adventure, gold, pirates and buried treasure. He created vivid characters, including a one legged man with a parrot on his shoulder. It was a magazine called Young Folks that published the first installment of The Sea
Cook in eighteen eighty one. Although the author suffered a few health setbacks, he kept writing, and by eighteen eighty two he had added an additional seventeen chapters to the first and it's a story that's still adapted and read today, with characters like Captain Flint Long John Silver Billy Bones,
and Jim Hawkins, and the author Robert Lewis Stevenson. And the final title of that book, Oh, you already know the answer by now, I'm sure the classic adventure now Treasure Island pirates have captivated us from the time they first sailed the seas, and although Blackbeard and Bellamy no longer hoist their flags, their spirits live on in the stories we tell, much like the Tale of the Pirate
Princess from this season's very first episode. We love them so much that we honestly don't care if they're true or not. And with that in mind, we've got one final story in the cargo Hold for you to enjoy. Stick around after this brief sponsor break and my crewmates, Alie Steed will tell you all about it. Most ships avoided the area Lucy how to dubious reputation as the most pirate infested waters on Earth. Authorities repeatedly warned ships
to steer clear. Sailing into those waters was like swimming with sharks. Yet one captain chose to ignore the warnings. His Groove twenty had been well versed in pirate attacks and he had cargo deliver. Though the crew disagreed with the decision to stay on course, the captain had final say and overrode them. They pushed onward, making good time towards their destination, and kept a watchful eye on the
horizon for other ships. In the early dawn hours that April, four armed pirates aboard a small skiff approached the cargo ship and alert was sounded, sending men scrambling from their beds. As it stood, the ship was too big to outrun the pirates. All they could do was try to stop them from boarding. Training taught them that pirates would likely shoot at the bridge. First crewmember Mike Perry ushered the others on board to a safer location. Then he used
the ship's rudder to swamp the pirates skiff. Still, the pirates closed in. Perry removed part of the ship's control from the bridge, and crewmember Matt Fisher controlled the steering gear. After sending off a few flares to signal distress, the ship went black, meaning that when the pirates boarded they wouldn't be able to control it. Perry, Fisher, and some of the other crew remained hidden and barricaded in a room.
They listened for the sound of the inevitable That came at daybreak when the pirates tossed a grappling hook aboard and they heard to catch. Not long after came the captain's chilling words, the bridge has been compromised. Then the captain fell silent. Perry and Fisher didn't have to see the pirates to know the captain and those with him had already been taken hostage. If they were still alive, the pirates would probably come for them next. Perry waited
outside the secured room, armed with only a knife. The dark compartment served as his only advantage. The pirates leader entered brandishing a gun. For a while, pirate and sailor engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse. After a few tense moments, Perry stabbed the pirate and managed to take him hostage. The room where the rest of the crew was hiding had grown stiflingly hot, and they couldn't stay inside much longer. But now they had a
hostage of their own, and negotiations began. For a while, it looked like the pirates were willing to exchange their leader for the captain, but at the last minute, the pirates forced the captain into one of the lifeboats and fled. In response to the hijacking, the U. S. Navy sent a destroyer and a frigate to the area while the pirates awaited their own backup. Once naval ships arrived, the situation became a standoff. With each advancing hour, the predicament
became dire. Another band of pirates had recently captured four other vessels not far away. They were on route with fifty four hostages they planned to use as human shields. Three days into the standoff, a frustrated pirate fired on a frigate, striking no one. Luckily, four days into the situation, snipers killed three pirates on the lifeboat and rescued the captain. Authorities took the surviving pirate to the U S and charged him with conspiracy to seize a ship by force,
conspiracy to commit hostage taking, and piracy. In the Golden Age, he would have been hanged. Instead, the court sentence stobbed dually mused to thirty three years in prison. If this story sounds familiar, it's because it happened recently. In two thousand nine off the coast of Somalia. Captain Phillips returned home safely, as did the rest of the crew aboard the m V Marris Alabama. There's no question that pirates
still exist. In twenty ten, they attacked four hundred forty five ships, taking one thousand, one hundred eighty one people hostage. From January to March of twenty eleventh, there were a hundred and nineteen pirate attacks. Eighty three off the coast of Somalia. Four Americans were killed after pirates attacked their sailboat. The attacks are fewer today than they were ten years ago,
they are becoming more violent and often fatal. Policing waters is difficult, and pirates often fly different countries flags to hide their intent, and like the Golden Age, piracy still has political roots. Reportedly authorities and governments are connected to some of these attacks. Today, pirate hotspots around the world are the northeastern coast of South America, Iraq, Bangladesh, the
Malacca Straits near Indonesia, Nigeria, and Somalia. We've come a long way since pirates roamed the high seas stalking colonial coasts for prizes, But then again, reality or fiction, they've never really left. Stick around for a few more minutes to find out what's next. From Grimm and Mild Presents. Pirates was executive produced by Aaron Manky and narrated by Aaron Manky and Alexander Steid. Writing for this season was provided by Michelle Mudo, with research by Alexander Steed and
Sam Alberty. Production assistants was provided by Josh Thane, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about this and other shows from Grimm and Mild and I Heart Radio, visit grim and Mild dot com. The scribe sat down to do his work. It was just like any other day. He was in the business of copying and pasting millennia before we had computers to do the job for us. Bent over the page, he carefully scratched out over four
hundred lines of hieroglyphs. This was a really important project. The document he was copying was already over a thousand years old, and its preservation was important. But although he was a master of his craft, he was a bit out of his depth with what he was transcribing. The source document talked about the human body from the top down and from the inside out, and this scribe was encountering glyphs he had never seen before. He scratched out his errors and made notes in the margins his writing
implement clumsily, making strokes for characters unfamiliar to him. In fact, according to later scholars, he created the earliest known asterisks in the history of bookmaking. But what did make it onto his page was really marvelous stuff, a collection of anatomical case studies and a treatise detailing scientific procedures for dealing with various injuries. And then, in the middle of his project, somewhere between the thorax and the spinal column,
he quit. No one knew why, not James Henry Breasted or any of the Egyptologists who came before him. It had landed on his desk in nineteen twenty, already estimated to be thirty years old. But James saw something important and alarming. When the scribe started writing again, he started copying something completely different. Magical incantations to fight pestilence, spells to manage women's health concerns, and tricks to make old
men young again. James and his fellow Egyptologists didn't know for sure, but they suspected that this ancient scribe was unaware of the importance of the work he had left unfinished, and James would go on to spend years pouring over it. It proved to be a singular, remarkable artifact, the earliest known evidence of human dissection as a practice, a blueprint
for ancient scientific surgery. Experts believed that the original document copied by the scribe was known as the Secret Book of the Physician and had originally circulated more than five thousand years ago. This document was important because it gave evidence of a stark departure from folk medicine and magic, replacing it with rational scientific observation. It represented a remarkable moment in time when people were finally pulling the body apart and going inside of it to seek out answers
to its deepest mysteries. Sadly, James and his contemporaries never found the source document, and because of that we might never know how the original book ended. What did the ancient Egyptians know about our inner workings? And how long ago did they know it? How much was lost only to need to be rediscovered again in a different time, in a different place. For the moment, it seems like it's lost to history, but the quest continues, and as
a story it illustrates a powerful idea. Even today, we're still hard at work adding to our body of knowledge. I'm Aaron Manky, and welcome two bedside manners.