(lively bright music) - Welcome to Hilarious Helmet History. The show where your cultural
historical misconceptions are even sillier than my helmet. This week I'm wearing the
helmet of the scurvy seas. A pirate hat. Because we're talking about pirates. The outlaw rock stars of sailing. Also, I'm speaking English
so when I say pirates you're probably picturing white European pirates. Such as this famous, crazed
international criminal. Or instead of him, Blackbeard. That other guy. Anyway you're wrong about these people. Though you do know how they
really looked, you're wrong about almost all the important stuff. And you're super wrong if you
think white European pirates, your favorite kind of pirate,
were more than a blip on the historical radar. They barely even existed. Let's start with one and two here. You are kind of right about pirates. Because almost all pirate lore
and pop culture comes from a kind-of right source. In 1724, the hit bestselling
book A General History Of The Robberies And Murders Of The
Most Notorious Pyrates defined pirates in the minds of Western audiences. It defined pirates on its own. And as the main historical
reference for Peter Pan and for Treasure Island. The 1950 movie version of
which took a joke version of a regional British accent. - Smart as paint you be. - And made it so global and so annoying it's got an official
made-up Internet holiday. All that came from this one book. And this book had a mystery
author, writing under the pen name Charles Johnson whose
real identity is a mystery to this day and Charles Johnson
listed almost zero sources. He made lots of stuff up. However, according to Under The
Black Flag, a book by actual historian David Cordingly,
some of Johnson's book is accurate. Because Johnson wrote it in pirate times. He used current newspapers as sources. And he tracked down eyewitness
accounts of a few key things, such as the crazy style of
the famed pirate Blackbeard. So because our dominant single
source for pirate stuff is kind of accurate our concept
of them is kind of accurate too. For instance, Johnson said
white European pirates dressed like guys of their time. And if you Google that era. If you google "guys in King
Charles The Second England", the guys will look pirate-y to you. Even the fancier guys
look like fancy-pirates. Also pirates often lost hands at sea. Many famous pirate captains
had Ahab style peg legs. When raiding a ship, pirates
really swung over, armed to the teeth. Even eyepatches might've been
common and in a way that's cooler than you think. Because if you have two
working eyes, an eyepatch is an old-timey night vision goggle. You wear it over one eye all
day, that eye gets used to darkness, it's born in the dark. Then at night, you flip the patch up, boom you're half of a Bane. And speaking of movies, the
navies that pirates fought against were even bigger
(beep) than The Pirates of the Caribbean movies make them out to be. The real British Navy kidnapped
people, worldwide, to force them to work as British sailors. It was a system called impressment. And that not impressive system
got three out of four of its victims killed, within
two years of capture. Compared to that global
government body-snatching, you got to root for pirates, right? 'Cause they didn't work for The Man, man. They were outside of The Man's mans. Like free mans except that
they did work for The Man. Most pirates were The Man's
entry-level employees. You see Spain's navy rode
their Christopher Columbus discovery and gold buzz into the 1600s. They dominated the Americas. The rest of Europe got jealous. So around the 1630s, France,
England, and the Netherlands hired officially licensed
pirates, called privateers, to attack Spanish ships. And kept hiring them and kept hiring them. Britain even did stuff like
conquering Jamaica, in 1655, to create more ports for
British-backed pirates-not-pirates. Europe's kings didn't agree to
cut that out until the 1690s. At which point they
downsized their privateers. And those unemployed guys
stayed in business, as the true pirates you're a fan of. Which means those British navy
guys who hate Jack Sparrow, they're mad at a phenomenon
Britain's government created. Also, the kings crushed that
phenomenon as fast as possible. By the 1720s, the major pirate
captains were retired or dead. So almost no pirates lived
as true skull and crossbones style outlaws. Even that skull and crossbones
flag is kind of made up. In his book Life Under The
Jolly Roger, historian Gabriel Kuhn says the first recorded
use of a skull and crossbones was in 1700. About 25 years before piracy's ended. Before that, the actual pirate
attack flag was bright red. The French called that color
"Jolie Rouge", and the English mangled that into the term
"Jolly Roger", because words are hard. And pirates almost never did
the romantic pirate stuff. They aimed to steal boring stuff
like food and medicine, not cool impractical gold. When they did get gold they
spent it because gold is heavy, and burying treasure is weird and stupid. Also movies claim that pirates
built tons of lawless island party towns. In actuality they built one
of those, called Port Royal. It existed for a few years
before being hit by an earthquake, then hit by a
tsunami, then hit by diseases that killed the survivors and
spilled the drinks or whatever. Even pirate raids
probably stunk, as drama. Cordingly writes that in pirate
times, the average merchant ship had a crew of 10 to 18 people. The average pirate ship had a
crew of at least 30 and up to 200 people. A pirate attack was unfair. The merchants usually just surrendered. And pop culture says pirate
crews were super co-ed, full of female first mates and captains
played by the hottest babes. And I'm so sorry, that's not
true, this is Charles Johnson's fault. He spent a lot of pages on
Mary Read and Anne Bonny, two female European pirates. But they were practically the only ones. And a lot of writers romanticize
piracy as a space that was so full of freedom, it
was full of diversity. But white European pirates
came from that culture and that era. They practically never hired
non-white people as anything, but manual labor. And pirates treated captured
slave ship cargo as cargo. Because pirates were mostly (beeps). Also, reminder, they
were mostly not outlaws. And most importantly, if you
love Jack Sparrow type outlaw badass rum pirates, I'm telling
you, that was barely a thing at all. There were more than a couple
of them, for about 35 years. Timeline-wise, Western history
has more than three times as many years of Pittsburgh
Pirates baseball teams. Many of them with much cooler outfits. Now, if you wanna talk about
pirate traditions in other parts of the world, hell
yeah, that history is epic. If you watch this YouTube
show, you know about Japan's wokou. Who were samurai pirates. If you listen to the Cracked
Podcast, you know about China's long tradition of massive pirate fleets often led by women like Ching Shih. And we could do a whole 'nother
Hilarious Helmet History about the so-called Barbary
pirates, who conquered the Mediterranean, then founded
a North African country that lasted into the 1800s and
fought two wars against the United States. Yeah. Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison both fought pirate wars. And somehow there is not
a Disney movie about that. Even though I keep sneaking
both of those Hall of Presidents president-robots onto
the pirate ride with me. Which is a crime, I'm going
to jail, this is our last episode, sorry.
This makes me sad because I really like pirates. :(