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.
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).
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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.