The real pirates of the Caribbean
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Warrior women: Engraving of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read holding swords, circa 1730.
Hide Caption
5 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
North America: A map of North America dating from 1708.
Hide Caption
6 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Pirates' lairs: A map of the Caribbean depicting some of the pirates' bases and locations of significant historical events.
Hide Caption
7 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
The
Capture of the Pirate, Blackbeard, 1718 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.
Depicting the fierce duel between Teach and Lieutenant Robert Maynard of
the British Royal Navy.
Hide Caption
1 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Captain Henry Avery: One
of the most famous pirates of all time, Captain Henry Avery is depicted
here with the Indian emperor's ship from which he was said to have
taken a bounty worth more than $200 million in today's money.
Hide Caption
2 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Blackbeard: A
woodcutting of the most notorious and infamous pirate of the golden age
of piracy, Edward Teach, more commonly referred to as Blackbeard. Taken
from "A General History of the Pyrates" (1724).
Hide Caption
3 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Blazing beard:
In this woodcarving you can see the lighted fuses Blackbeard would keep
in and around his beard so that during battle a demonic halo of sparks,
fire and smoke would surround him.
Hide Caption
4 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Warrior women: Engraving of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read holding swords, circa 1730.
Hide Caption
5 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
North America: A map of North America dating from 1708.
Hide Caption
6 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Pirates' lairs: A map of the Caribbean depicting some of the pirates' bases and locations of significant historical events.
Hide Caption
7 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
The
Capture of the Pirate, Blackbeard, 1718 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.
Depicting the fierce duel between Teach and Lieutenant Robert Maynard of
the British Royal Navy.
Hide Caption
1 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Captain Henry Avery: One
of the most famous pirates of all time, Captain Henry Avery is depicted
here with the Indian emperor's ship from which he was said to have
taken a bounty worth more than $200 million in today's money.
Hide Caption
2 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Blackbeard: A
woodcutting of the most notorious and infamous pirate of the golden age
of piracy, Edward Teach, more commonly referred to as Blackbeard. Taken
from "A General History of the Pyrates" (1724).
Hide Caption
3 of 7
Photos: The real pirates of the Caribbean
Blazing beard:
In this woodcarving you can see the lighted fuses Blackbeard would keep
in and around his beard so that during battle a demonic halo of sparks,
fire and smoke would surround him.
Hide Caption
4 of 7
(CNN)Pirates
have been a part of popular culture ever since they first appeared on
the high seas with aspirations for fortune, fame and glory.
Stories about the exploits of pirates fascinated the people of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Even 300 years later, the tales of Long John Silver, Captain Hook and Jack Sparrow are as popular now as they've ever been.
But are these depictions of pirates based on reality?
Was there really an X on the map, buried treasure, a black flag with a skull and crossbones flapping in the wind?
Did duels to the death really take place between naval authorities and these wild men of the seas?
It turns out yes.
But the real stories are more amazing that anything seen on the big screen.
'I am a man of fortune, and must seek my fortune'
Captain Henry Avery: One of the most famous pirates of all time.
If one man can be said to have inspired the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, it's Captain Henry Avery.
In
his book, "The Republic of Pirates," Colin Woodard writes that Avery's
"adventures inspired plays and novels, historians and newspaper writers,
and, ultimately the Golden Age pirates themselves."
"He
was a really important inspiration and symbol to the subsequent
generation who became the Golden Age pirates," Woodard tells CNN. "Part
of the reason is that Henry Avery became a pop culture phenomenon when
these other pirates would have been children and teenagers."
By the time they were young men, Avery was a legend.
A
sailor aboard a merchant vessel, Avery, like many other sailors, was
getting increasingly disillusioned with the way the system worked.
"Sailors
were so badly treated in many of these merchant vessels by the captains
and owners," Woodard says. "They were given lousy rations, cheated out
of their pay at the end of journeys, often fed spoiled food and placed
on vessels that intentionally didn't have enough provisions on board."
Enough
was enough. In 1694 Avery rounded up others to the cause of freedom,
riches and glory and seized a ship under the cover of darkness while its
captain, Charles Gibson, was sleeping in his quarters.
Avery
placed Gibson in a rowboat before sailing away, reportedly telling him:
"I am a man of fortune, and must seek my fortune."
Rumor and myth
Avery
and his crew sailed for the Indian Ocean, using Madagascar as their
base of operations. Soon they came across and took a ship belonging to
an Indian emperor.
Accounts
vary on what happened aboard the ship but they all agree on one thing
-- Avery made off with staggering haul of money, jewels, gold, silver
and ivory, worth more than $200 million today.
Avery had his fortune and each member of his crew received the equivalent of 20 years of wages aboard a merchant vessel.
With
his ship laden with treasure and naval forces all over the world
scrambling to track him down, Avery sailed for the Bahamas where he
bribed the governor of Nassau with ivory and weapons into allowing him
to ditch his ship and take a smaller vessel, bound for Europe.
Landing in Ireland, he bid his crew farewell. Then he and his plunder disappeared into history, never to be heard from again.
Rumor and myth surrounds Avery's fate.
One
report claimed Avery died a beggar, cheated out of his fortune. Another
had him returning to Madagascar as king of the pirates, ruling over a
piratical empire with a squadron of ships commanded from a fortified
palace.
"Avery
is one of the very few who turned full pirate and got away with it,"
Matt Albers of the Pirate History Podcast says. "He just disappeared
into the winds of history.
"It
might be that he died as a penniless beggar on the streets of London or
he may have died with a fabulous kingdom out in the jungle somewhere.
"No one is entirely sure what happened to him. But we do know that he was never taken by the authorities."
Getting
away with it was a 17th-century thing. For the men he inspired in the
early 18th century there would be few, if any, happy endings.
"The
thing about those famous pirates is that all of them got caught,"
Albers says. "At some point they had a run in with the authorities that
didn't go well for them."
The golden age of piracy
A map of the Caribbean depicting some of the pirates' bases and the location of significant events.
David
Wilson, an academic specializing in historical piracy, says authorities
tried to push stories of piratical downfall as a deterrent.
"Really
they're trying to publicize that piracy ends in death," he says. "The
message is these men meet their doom through piracy to try to discourage
any future pirates."
And there were plenty to choose from.
"Black
Sam'" Bellamy, for example, was a rising star in the pirate world,
calling himself "the Robin Hood of the Seas." In 1715, at the age of 26,
as captain of his own ship, the Whydah, he was the most feared man up
and down the Americas.
Having amassed a small fortune and a reputation for being unbeatable, he was sailing for Cape Cod in 1717 when disaster struck.
"Cape Cod had a weather system that would drive ships against the brutal cliffs of sand and shoals," Woodard explains.
The
Whydah was caught in a storm and ran aground with shocking force and
sank with its treasure still on board. Some 160 men perished and
Bellamy's body was never recovered.
Newspapers of the day claimed God had punished him for becoming a pirate.
Another famous story is that of Calico Jack Rackham, named for the flamboyant Calico clothing he liked to wear.
As a pirate, Rackham was pretty unsuccessful. He was captured quite easily in 1720 and hanged.
His
flag fared better. It's the one we all associate as the pirate flag,
the skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger. Made famous by Robert Louis
Stevenson's "Treasure Island."
"They
all had different flags and black flags with all these different
symbols on," Wilson says. "They all had symbols of death in some way or
other just to enact fear in ships.
"If
you could throw that flag up and the ship gives in without a fight
you're doing much better than if you had to then engage with them."
The female pirates
Engraving of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read holding swords.
Rackham
is also famous for the company he was keeping when he was arrested:
Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the only known female pirates of the era.
"There
was Ching Shih in China but she wasn't so much a pirate as a pirate
queen who ran a pirate empire," Albers says. "The same with Grace
O'Malley in Ireland, less an actual pirate and more someone who ran the
pirates' base."
Rackham's female crewmates helped cement his own myth and legend, Wilson adds.
"A
lot is made out of the female pirates, there were some but they were an
anomaly, as were any women on sailing ships at that time," says Charles
Ewen, professor of anthropology at East Carolina University.
"Usually
they were just passengers, but there were female sailors from time to
time. But for the most part they were a disruptive influence."
Read
and Bonny were to be tried on charges of piracy and surely hanged. But,
knowing that expectant mothers were exempt from the gallows, both women
seduced guards while being held captive and fell pregnant.
"Their histories are fairly short and I think that the reason they're so popular is because of their trial," Albers explains.
Their
arrest and the subsequent escape from the noose was big news in the
London press at the time, but no one got more coverage than the
notorious Edward Teach, the most fearsome of all the Golden Age Pirates.
A man more commonly referred to as Blackbeard.
Image of terror
In
this woodcarving you can see the lighted fuses Blackbeard would keep in
and around his beard so that during battle a demonic halo of sparks,
fire and smoke would surround him.
"The
interesting thing about Blackbeard is, if you were doing a ledger of
who got the most treasure and was the most successful in monetary terms
or plunder terms Blackbeard wouldn't make your top 10 list at all,"
Woodard says.
"But he is by far the most famous real pirate who ever lived, and the reason is that he cultivated this image of terror."
Blackbeard
ruled the seas through fear. He let his beard grow wild and long, wore
clothes stolen from aristocrats and cultivated an image of a wild man in
gentlemen's fittings.
"You
had all these pirates with bandoliers and grenades and axes wearing a
gentleman's wig or a woman's silk dress or scarves and all this finery."
Woodard says. "His fellow pirates would be dressed up like a 'Mad Max'
movie."
During
battle, Blackbeard would also put lighted fuses in and around his
beard, giving him a demonic halo of sparks, fire and smoke.
"It would be utterly terrifying to people on another vessel. And that was the whole point," Woodard says.
Blackbeard also had serious firepower.
"Blackbeard
put 40 cannon on his ship, the Queen's Anne Revenge, and that was so he
could sail up, run up the black flag, which apparently they really did,
and then scare the folks into saying, 'Ok I give up, don't kill us,'"
Ewen says. "You wanted to have a scary reputation."
Duel to the death
Blackbeard's
scare tactics were so successful that there's no documented account of
him killing or hurting anybody. Everybody just simply gave up.
Until his final fatal battle with Britain's Royal Navy in 1718.
"It
was the gallant young Lieutenant Robert Maynard who was leading the
detachment of sailors charged with finding Blackbeard," Woodard
explains.
"This
is precisely where Robert Louis Stevenson and later the Disney movies
and pop culture -- this is exactly the famous scene from where all this
was constructed.
"Blackbeard's
battle was the model for your cliche shipboard fight between the
dashing young officer and the rogue pirate," Woodard continues.
Blackbeard
and his men boarded Maynard's ship. Cutlass in one hand, pistol in the
other, Blackbeard engaged the lieutenant in a duel to the death.
Maynard
shot Blackbeard, but the pirate carried on fighting furiously with his
cutlass, Maynard's own sword breaking as he tried to stave him off.
As
Blackbeard was about to deliver the final blow, one of Maynard's men
delivered the pirate a "terrible wound in the neck and throat."
Maynard
then shot Blackbeard again in the stomach and though he cocked his
pistol ready to return fire, he fell down dead before he could.
Maynard
decapitated Blackbeard and hung his head from the front of his ship. He
sailed up the east coast of America, causing shockwaves as news spread
that the notorious Edward Teach had perished in battle.
"There
was only one newspaper in what is now the United States, the Boston
Newsletter and they covered it exhaustively, as did the London papers at
the time. It was the big media phenomenon of the early 18th century,"
Maynard says.
The Blackbeard mystery
Yet there remains a mystery with Blackbeard -- the whereabouts of his journal.
The
journal was recovered by Maynard and used as evidence to try
Blackbeard's captured crew on charges of piracy. But after the trial,
the journal, along with court documents, vanished from history.
"People have been looking for it for years," David Moore, a nautical archaeologist says.
Under
protocols of the time, there should have been a copy of the documents
in the place of trial and another sent back to the Admiralty in London.
"For whatever reason that copy was never sent or it disappeared or it got lost in the filing system," Moore says.
"Certainly
if it had been misfiled somebody would have stumbled across it by now.
It would have been too fascinating a document even though they were
probably looking for something else.
"To me that's odd," Moore says.
Recovering the documents would likely be one of the most significant finds in pirate archaeology.
Who knows, perhaps there's even a map inside with an X that marks the spot.
But those who took it died a long time ago -- and dead men tell no tales.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น