
A lot we know about pirates is not true, and a lot of what is true is not known - nkurz
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/winter/feature/lot-what-known-about-pirates-not-true-and-lot-what-true-not-known
======
apsec112
An interesting comment on studying pirates, from /r/AskHistorians:

"Pirate questions are often difficult, because pirates as a group have been so
heavily fictionalized -- and were often fictionalized even in the "golden age"
of piracy (or shortly thereafter) -- that it becomes hard to separate reality
from fiction. Indeed, there is evidence that later sailing crews, including
pirates, took on behaviors that they may have read or heard that "pirates" did
-- even if these accounts were fictional, meaning that fictional accounts of
pirate activities actually became reality due to people acting out what they'd
seen in fiction."
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60deda/how_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60deda/how_historically_accurate_is_walk_the_plank_how/)

~~~
d0mine
Pirates are not unique in that respect. All mass media is heavily
fictionalized. Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell(1807): _I will add, that the
man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads
them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind
is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the
great facts, and the details are all false._
[https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...](https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=text)

~~~
unavoidable
OT, but, Jefferson appears to have anticipated fake news and the thirst for
eyeballs.

>To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be
conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to
true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few
subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could
not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's
abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen
in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that
polluted vehicle.

~~~
beaconstudios
I think it's less that he anticipated fake news, and more that it's always
been a problem. Journalism has always been self-serving - after all, it's a
business.

~~~
graphitezepp
Certainly, I think it is borderline madness that entities such as facebook are
being called out in the current "fake news" discussion, this is far from
anything new and does not come from media centralization or the internet.

~~~
ep103
Its a level of degrees, though

~~~
graphitezepp
Volume of available information has certainly increased drastically, that is
for sure.

------
doodlebugging
My favorite read on pirates and historical events is probably the book about
an actual pirate raid on Ireland in 1631 where most of the inhabitants of a
coastal village were carried away to slavery by Barbary pirates.

[The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary
Pirates]([https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0862789559](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0862789559))

The book ends up giving the reader background on the Barbary pirates - a mix
of Turks, Dutch, Algerian, and Moroccan pirates led by a Dutch convert to
Islam (from Catholicism). It also attempts to tell the stories of as many of
the slaves as possible using historical information from people known to
suffered a similar fate.

It details some of the stories of Algiers and the Ottoman empire and how
Europeans were enslaved by the Muslims who controlled the Mediterranean at the
time and who targeted English shipping and later American shipping leading us
to dispatch Marines to the shores of Tripoli.

In the end it describes the roundabout way that one of the pirates may have
ended up on Manhattan and may be one of the founders of some of America's
oldest monied families with descendents that may include people such as Kasey
Kasem and Jon Voigt. Really a great story.

I'll have to check out some of these other books mentioned on this thread
since history is one of my favorite subjects.

------
ryandvm
By far the most interesting book I've ever read on piracy was The Invisible
Hook, by Peter Leeson. It's an analysis on the economics of piracy.

It was so profound in fact that much of it was the inspiration for our
business model:

[https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-
code-1aa1b...](https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-
code-1aa1b2e02bf6)

~~~
trevyn
I suspect this probably works well for you because you're a studio model --
you're billing for hours.

In the case where there is disagreement about what product to build, I could
see this more rapidly going sideways. Sometimes having one person with a
specific vision can be very helpful.

~~~
vinceguidry
Not the parent, but what I learned about this is that when it comes to
decisions that really matter, most people are afraid of the responsibility.
Any working system of politics has to take the few ambitious people that
remain and work out a bloodless system of resolving disputes between them.

------
Synaesthesia
My favourite read about piracy was "Pirates and Emperors" by Noam Chomsky.
Piracy was sponsored by states who plundered and raided coasts, such as Sir
Francis Drake, who was sponsored by the English government. Only it wasn't
called piracy of "we" did it, only when other countries did. Kinda similar to
today with international terrorism.

~~~
rocqua
I recall reading fiction in which there was a big difference between a
privateer and a pirate. Privateers were 'licensed' pirates, given a letter of
marque that allows them to attack enemies of the state.

The point being that, plundering french ships under an English letter of
Marque will prevent the french from calling you a pirate. Instead, you are
simply an enemy combatant.

I think this was from a Wilbur Smith novel.

~~~
24gttghh
I agree with the distinction, but I'm not sure it matters much to those being
plundered.

~~~
rocqua
Obviously, but it might explain how governments supported privateers whilst
despising pirates.

------
metaxy2
What's always surprised me is how much of the cartoony image is _real_. There
really were pirates with peg legs, hooks for hands and eye patches, pirates
that talked with lower-class English accents and kept parrots as pets. There
were swashbuckling captains feared all over the seas that held their crews of
convicts and scalawags to surprisingly strict codes of honor. As the author
says here, a lot of these things only happened in certain places and times,
but the fact that these people did really exist is pretty fun and amazing.

~~~
raverbashing
Well, accident prone work places and rudimentary medical practices lead to
those kind of prosthetic devices (and not exclusive to them)

~~~
Digit-Al
Is it really an accident if someone slashes half your leg off or bursts your
eyeball whilst you're trying to murder them? :-)

~~~
firethief
It seems like a gray area. Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance
generally covers death by homicide, although it can have an exclusion for
homicide or dismemberment that occurs in self-defense (for example, war
injuries are usually excluded). So in this particular legal sense, the
"accident" can be seen as on the part of the assailant, who did not _intend_
to be injured (regardless of their _victim 's intent_ to injure). But in
general, accident is not a very well-defined term; in this case "occupational
injury" may be more appropriate.

------
CM30
It's an interesting read, though to be fair a lot of what popular culture and
fiction says about any romanticised group is not true/heavily exaggerated.
Most of what people think they know about ninjas isn't true. Most of what
people think about the wild west isn't true. Same with everything from
medieval times to Roman soldiers to ancient egypt.

And also like mentioned in the article, much of what we think about when we
hear those words/terms is based on a subset of these groups/populations as
well.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Heck, most of what people know about any other group (romanticized or not)
isn't true. For instance, visitors to the United States often worry that
they're going to see running gun battles on the street on a daily basis.

~~~
Swizec
I mean, within a month of my moving to San Francisco somebody got shot and
killed on my street corner. And within the first two months I saw police
barricade an intersection walking around with shotguns and automatic rifles
due to a bank robbery of some sort. We were told to just walk around and in
general nobody seemed to find this event to be anything special.

I've since stopped paying attention to these things. Better that way. Feels
more peaceful.

Then again, just last week a guy got shot by police in broad daylight 3 blocks
from me because _he was actively in the process of stabbing someone_.

No running gun battles yet that I know of. It's been 2 years or so.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Here is the thing: your neighborhood is only a very, very, very small portion
of the United States. in 2014, 2% of the counties in the United States
accounted for about 51% of the murders, and 54% of the counties had _zero_
murders.

~~~
dragonwriter
> in 2014, 2% of the counties in the United States accounted for about 51% of
> the murders,

But what percent of the population did those counties represent? "Counties"
are fairly arbitrary divisions, after all. New York County, NY (better known
as the burrough of Manhattan) has a population of around 1.6 million.

Kalawao County, HI has a population of 89.

It doesn't really make sense to compare homicide counts by county.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"It doesn't really make sense to compare homicide counts by county."

It does if you're a tourist needlessly worrying about getting gunned down
while you're visiting the Grand Canyon, or a student needlessly worried that
you're going to encounter open gang warfare in a small midwestern college
town.

As it happens, the worst 1% of counties have about 19% of the population but
about 37% of the murders, so it's not just that these counties are more
heavily populated. They really are more dangerous.

Even within those counties, murders are heavily concentrated by neighborhood.

Edit: here's a map that lets you zoom down to the individual census block
level, and which shows the rate (thus controlling for population).

Note how much of the country is in the 0-50 category.

[http://nation.maps.arcgis.com/apps/OnePane/splash/index.html...](http://nation.maps.arcgis.com/apps/OnePane/splash/index.html?appid=8125e8f4244a47d986f4cd840824eef3)

~~~
whiddershins
wait is that map weighted per capita?

~~~
ghaff
It appears not. Nor does it account for the severity of the crime among the
included indexes.

ADDED:

I misread. Does seem to be a rate.

Not totally clear to me how per capita adds. On the one hand it captures the
family member or neighbor known person assault. On the other hand, it's not
terribly comforting to know that there are lots of murders somewhere but there
are lots of people so you'll probably be OK.

~~~
nostrademons
It sounded like it was weighted by population (i.e. it compares the crime
_rate_ , not the total number of crimes), but it doesn't weight by the
severity of the crime.

Colma has an index equal to or worse than most of Oakland, which only makes
sense if there's some form of population-weighting, since Colma has only 1500
or so living inhabitants (and doesn't have a particularly bad reputation for
crime, except for most "residents" being already dead when they get to Colma).

------
gadders
My favourite story about pirates is what happened when they captured Julius
Caesar:

"Not everyone, though, should take the Julius Caesar approach to kidnapping.
As a young man, reports Plutarch in his biography of the great man, he was
kidnapped off the Dodecanese islands en route to learn rhetoric under the
famous teacher, Molon of Rhodes. The Cicilian pirates (from the area of modern
Anatolia north and north-east of Cyprus) he treated high-handedly. They asked
for a ransom of 20 talents – he laughed at them for undervaluing him and
offered them 50. While he was kept captive he treated them like bodyguards
rather than prison guards, and frequently told them he would crucify them
after his ransom was paid. (Better than that, "He also wrote poems and sundry
speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he
would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians.") In due course the ransom
was paid, Caesar was set free – and, as promised, he crucified them to a man."

[https://www.theguardian.com/culture/charlottehigginsblog/200...](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/oct/27/classics-
piracy)

------
peterwwillis
"A History of American Privateers" (1899)
[https://archive.org/stream/historyofamerica017401mbp/history...](https://archive.org/stream/historyofamerica017401mbp/historyofamerica017401mbp_djvu.txt)

A few blog posts on Baltimore's history as a "nest of pirates" and stories
about privateering:
[https://maryland1812.wordpress.com/category/privateers/](https://maryland1812.wordpress.com/category/privateers/)

------
profalseidol
Black Sails a good tv series.

~~~
Xophmeister
There are a handful of good performances involved -- e.g., Stephen's Flint --
but by in large, the acting is _terrible_. Which is such a shame because the
actual story is pretty decent. If you can make it through the first season,
you'll be rewarded.

~~~
spike021
I wouldn't say the acting was horrible, though some actors/actresses weren't
great.

------
ktRolster
The headline could be shortened to "A lot we know is not true, and a lot of
what is true is not known." That's an unfortunate reality but on the other
hand, it keeps life interesting.

~~~
guiriduro
Both halves of the sentence contain wrong and rendundant statements. Since
truth is a relation of correspondence between a proposition and reality and
knowledge is justified true belief or it is not knowledge; it is both
impossible for us to know untruths if we believe them to be true (we can
believe falsehoods but we can only know truth), and likewise truths, being
essentially propositions, cannot not be known (can only be known by someone,
or there is no one proposing them therefore no truth relation subsists - ergo
no 'truth' can be wholly unknown to everyone.)

You may say instead: A lot we believe is not true, and we don't know much.

------
rnnr
A fun book I recommend is the 'Invisible Hook' by Leeson.

Excellent as a summer book, a Libertarian view on the subject with good info
on pirates even if you don't agree with the author's view.

------
trustworthy
The real history of the "golden age of piracy" is pretty fascinating.
Basically you had Spain trying to claim the entire known world and everyone
else fighting back by any means available. Provided a pirate limited himself
to Spanish shipping, he could easily become a legitimate member of (even a
hero in) one of the other Western nations.

------
cubano
I believe we are all "pirates" at heart, which is why they so easily
assimilate into society and why we usually ignore them around us as long as
they no longer overtly act in that manner.

Obviously, the magnitude of our decent in piratehood varies from person to
person, and at some level (murder being obviously a issue) we stop accepting
them post-haste.

I find a close analogy to doing drugs and drug dealers in modern society. A
lot of upstanding citizens enjoy doing drugs and actually like and feel safe
around their drug dealers, but rarely if ever does popular culture show that
side of reality.

I don't think its any coincidence that TV and movies show the murderous and
thieving side of piracy as to condition us to be appalled by them, in general.

~~~
tps5
> I don't think its any coincidence that TV and movies show the murderous and
> thieving side of piracy as to condition us to be appalled by them, in
> general.

Is this really true? There's a long history of sympathetic portrayals of drug
culture, from Trainspotting (novel and movie) to A Scanner Darkly (novel and
movie) to Jesus' Son (novel and movie) to Pineapple Express (mainstream
movie), and a whole lot more.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Trainspotting's characters may be sympathetic, but it certainly doesn't
portray drugs in a positive light. (Though of course heroin is a far cry from
weed.)

------
Judgmentality
One of my favorite books is about Captain Kidd. It's a well researched take on
his life and it argues, strongly in my opinion, that he was not a pirate and
goes into great detail how he (supposedly) led his life. It's a surprisingly
captivating read.

[https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Hunter-True-Story-
Captain/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Hunter-True-Story-
Captain/dp/0786884517)

------
VSpike
A fascinating article. There are similar parallels with the smugglers and
poachers of my area of the UK - rural Dorset. Characters like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Gulliver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Gulliver)
managed to become respectable, but at the same time are subjects of a lot of
folklore and tales.

------
pjmlp
Since a few are mentioning pirate books.

My favorite ones are the books written by Ambroise Louis Garneray, which also
served under Surcouf, before eventually becoming a painter after his life as
pirate.

However even back in his lifetime some would state he colored his memories a
bit, so that they were more interesting to read.

Of course, only he knew how much that was actually so.

------
mirimir
I highly recommend _Of Captain Mission_ by Daniel Defoe.

And _Cities of the Red Night_ by William S. Burroughs :)

~~~
oska
> I highly recommend Of Captain Mission by Daniel Defoe.

The authorship sometimes attributed to Defoe, but also to a Nathaniel Mist.
(It was published under a pseudonym). [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_History_of_the_Pyrat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_History_of_the_Pyrates)

------
bholdr
The_Buccaneers_of_America
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169961.The_Buccaneers_of...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169961.The_Buccaneers_of_America)

An insightful, nevertheless, somewhat dullfull read.

------
aaron695
I do wonder how many of these newspaper article were a realistic report -

[http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=junk+pirates&s=20](http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=junk+pirates&s=20)

------
rectang
I blame
[https://damnationkane.wordpress.com/](https://damnationkane.wordpress.com/)
the time-traveling pirate.

------
mariusmg
I thought this was about software pirates...

------
lngnmn
Just about pirates?

