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