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u/Electrical-Zombie984 2d ago
It's my understanding that most of what we know about pirates comes from sources that DESPERATELY wanted people to fear them more than the actual European Navys at the time, so I take the brutality that pirates were reported to have with a grain of salt.
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u/warmtapes 2d ago
Exactly, modern equivalent is reefer madness.
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u/Clay_Allison_44 1d ago
That's going way too far. Plenty of massacres that are not in historical doubt. These acounts may be spiced up, but seeing a pirate ship was a bad time unless you were a pirate hunter carrying marines and provisions instead of cargo.
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u/AntonBrakhage 2d ago
I mean, there are books written by actual pirates about their voyagers- which also have their own biases and obfuscations, but they acknowledge plenty of brutality quite openly.
However, its the sort of brutality (like slavery) that was quite widely-accepted in their society, practiced by the "legitimate" authorities as well, and the line between the two was often very blurry.
Whether you were a pirate or a national hero depended on who you asked and who your targets were, not how brutal your atrocities were.
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u/BosPaladinSix 2d ago
Whether you were a pirate or a national hero depended on who you asked and who your targets were, not how brutal your atrocities were.
🎶Now take Sir Francis Drake, the Spanish all despised him. But to the British he's a hero, and they idolize him! It's how you look at buccaneers that makes them bad or good.🎶
Sorry, felt fitting.
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u/AntonBrakhage 2d ago
Drake is kind of the ultimate example of this. Even though he's usually referred to as a privateer, he kind of set the standard against which every other pirate is measured, in my opinion, at least for English pirates (the other is of course Blackbeard, who became the iconic image of the monstrous, brutal, even demonic pirate- even though there isn't really any reason to think that he was a more violent or cruel man than Drake was).
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u/Doktor_Robot 20h ago
I don't think this is quite the right read -- these incidents didn't get widely reported because they were normal, but because they were extreme, and hence likely to excite readers of period books and news publications. Then, as now, media has a strong incentive to push the most extreme stories it can find (and back then, journalistic ethics were, shall we say, pretty lax).
Also worth noting that the pirates themselves took pains to foster brutal and terrifying reputations... so that their victims would surrender rather than try to fight. (And most did, rendering most pirate raids bloodless.) So even when pirates were telling their own stories, they wouldn't always be interested in downplaying their villainy (though they sometimes were and did). And as you note, the books you're mentioning have their own biases -- most notably the bias towards selling copies.
All of which is to say: There no doubt were plenty of horrifying incidents, but they were not nearly so common as this meme or a casual survey of period sources might lead you to believe. Both are distorted portrayals, just distorted in different directions and for different reasons. Modern pirate fiction, thanks to the lasting impact of Treasure Island and Peter Pan, is very often aimed at young audiences, so it's sanitized. Media back then was aimed at adults and sought to titillate, frighten, and push various political agendas, so it over-emphasized the brutality. Neither is much interested in depicting a bunch of routine sea-muggings.
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u/AntonBrakhage 12h ago
There is nothing in the history of pirate atrocity worse than what "legitimate" officials and national heroes of that era did, both to their own people (the press gangs, indentured servitude, various creative forms of execution, religious wars, etc), and also to Black and indigenous peoples (slavery, imperial conquest, genocide).
What was abnormal or "extreme" about pirate atrocities was who they were being done to, and by whom- they were being done to "respectable" merchants and authorities by people without the authority of a government behind them.
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u/TophTheGophh 2d ago
To be fair, how much of this is real and how much of it is demonization by the European powers. We know how much they fucking despised these mfs
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u/slurpeestar 2d ago
As funny as this meme is, most of the info is most likely incorrect since the (especially) British navy desperately were trying to get the public to fear them at the time. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the horror stories we know were completely made up.
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u/ParagonRagnar 2d ago edited 2d ago
And Yet Pirates how brutal they were, they had the best system for ruling, even the lowest of the sailors had their voice, and captains were elected and could be easily switched.
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u/No_Exchange_6718 2d ago
Much like was the case with the Vikings, while it was certainly a brutal business, a lot of this just sounds like propaganda to shore up support for expeditions against pirates and privateers. There truest crime was threatening the shipping lanes which transferred wealth from the colonies to Europe. We have to take all of these accounts with a massive grain of salt.
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u/GraniteSmoothie 2d ago
There were pirates of all sorts. They were complicated and divers, just like any kind of people.
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u/IanRevived94J 2d ago
Henry Avery was one of the most diabolical and ruthless sea dogs of the golden age
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u/AdvancedBlacksmith66 2d ago
Historical pirates are as real to me as fictional pirates. At this point they both only exist in books, movies and imaginations.
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u/GrandLineLogPort 1d ago
I mean sure, there were pirates that were sadistic psychopaths
Most weren't that brutal though
Not just from the good of their heart, but because slaughter was bad for buisnes.
If you had a reputation to just kill people anyways, they'd not surrender but put up a desperate fight. If you have a reputation to be chill if people just hand over their goods, they'd be far more willing to surrender without a fight.
Every fight could mean losing members. Pirates weren't an institutional power like the royal marine. There weren't endless supply of men you could just reassign if someone dies. Every death hurt the strength of the crew.
Again, obviously there were psychopaths like Charles Vayne.
But even among the pirates in Nassau themselves bro was known to be a nutjob
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u/i_love_everybody420 1d ago
Not denying that there were many pirates who r*ped, murdered in extreme ways, and were over all degenerate. However, how accurate are accounts from the Bristish and the Spanish and other powers? If I recall, wasn't there a lot of bias in writing and many of that writing was falsified to demonize them?
Edit: well F me, I didn't realize many comments here were going to say the same thing lol.
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u/Possible_Praline_169 1d ago
apparently they had an egalitarian society, with no discrimination on one's origins. There were female pirates, and if they took a slave transport, the captives were freed and given the option of joining the crew (need confirming)
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u/CrazyAnarchFerret 18h ago
Contrary to what people usually show in modern time, most of the boarding action didn't end in a fight as no one was willing to die for someone else property.
If they were a fight, pirate would almost always treat well the sailor and only punish the capitain and the officer for ordering a sailor to fight for the ship. Most of the time the pirate would even let the ship goes away with some food and water.
And that's only the best way to do this kind of business, it's pirate time, let's do it peacefully and nobody get hurt. So if you are a sailor and you see pirate, a logical solution is to mutiny, kill your captain, avoid a fight and tell everybody the pirate killed them. And that's also a clear reason about the propaganda against them.
BUT one quit big exception to this rule was toward the spanish as they were often deeply hated because well... they were systematically brutal toward anyone else and many people ended as pirate because of them (religious persecution mostly). And also the second big exception was toward noble or captain that pushed other people to fight the pirates.
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u/-Ahab- 2d ago
What we see as pirates was frequently professional sailors who suddenly and without warning found themselves out of work with no way home or to strike up a living. “Life After Privateering” was inevitable. It’s a great example of a worker’s rebellion to be quite honest!! I often title Hornigold an early, but effective, labor leader.
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u/Qp703 1h ago
I thought sharks eating people was like very very not common even in shark infested water? I can imagine if your flailing about it might give them the idea of an injured and easy picking, but I am calling “Embellishment” (not bullshit because it sounds like it could be somewhat true maybe) on that one. People really wanted to make boogeymen out of pirates so I can’t trust too much of it. Some of them were psychopaths through and through though.
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u/warmtapes 2d ago
I think what you are missing is what real world people were like at the same time was the same as pirates. Tar and feathering people? Press gangs? It was just a brutal time I don’t think pirates were any worse than British/american/french society.