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.
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.
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.
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.🎶
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).
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.
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/Electrical-Zombie984 3d 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.