Floating Nations Of Rebellions
Errol Flynn was my first pirate. Okay, fine. It was actually Cap'n Crunch. But Errol was my first film pirate icon. Errol was the one that was always there for me at night when I was a kid. I remember laying on the floor of my grandmother's living room in a bed made of couch pillows and afghan throws pretending to fall asleep. When I was sure my grandparents had gone to bed, I turned on the oversized and ornate, yet strangely small, screen TV cabinet to Turner Classic Movies and watched black and whites all night long. In the early days of TCM, starting in 1994, CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935) played a lot. I only know this because that's the channel I repeatedly watched it on.
Swashbuckling adventures seemed the most appropriate for my overnight stays at Grammie's. She lived in a tiny one-bedroom lakeside house. The inside of the house looked like a ship with walls, floors, and ceilings made from wide dark wooden planks. Windows floor to ceiling lined the house facing the water, and the kitchen was the size of a closet that she not so lovingly referred to as the “galley.” My grandfather had a pontoon boat that my family spent sailing many summer days drunk on rum and ham, though unfortunately not rum ham. My cousin and I spent a lot of time in the dark basement building haunted houses and fighting skeleton warriors. I didn't know it then, but it's always been a pirate’s life for me.
Writing this piece gave me a great excuse to marathon pirate movies for “research.” It isn't the first time in my life that I've connected myself to pirate related work. In college, I took multiple courses about pirates and focused specifically on Asian pirates. So, when my parents thought I was making them proud, because I said I wanted to become a doctor, you can imagine their disappointment when I specified Doctorate of Asian pirates. In my defense, the things I learned in those courses and from the books and movies I've consumed since have helped me more in life than most certificate programs I've taken. As a child, pirates are the anti-hero you can't help but be drawn to and love.
We are told they are the bad guys, but as a society we have all agreed that pirates get a pass, because they are “rowdy and cool.”
If casinos and mini putt-putt courses tell us anything, it's that kids and adults alike all fantasize about being a pirate. Maybe there’s a little bit of scallywag in all of us that doesn’t want to be beholden to the social norms.
Curiously, it is precisely because pirating briefly became a social norm that we have that fantastical pirate folklore today.
Piracy was the result of the harsh reality of global political and economic instability and not a fantasy. Piracy has existed since ancient times, and, as long as there are seas, there’s bound to be pirates. Modern day piracy still happens in smaller pockets around the world, but most of our current imagery comes from the era that historians call the “Golden Age of Piracy” which was during the 17th and 18th century. Piracy was rampant because of global political and economic instability. Pirating as an industry was booming because it was sanctioned by governments in times of war. During the peak of the Golden Age, sailors repeatedly changed titles from pirates to corsairs to privateers to buccaneers. Pirating was legal if you had the right piece of paper that gave you permission, or at least a forged facsimile of one. It became hard to tell who was on what side and when.
In the Golden Age of Piracy, it was a very real possibility to choose pirate as a career path. It didn't have a long life expectancy. The company benefits were unpredictable at best, and advancement was difficult unless someone died—or you killed someone. All in all, it seems like a hard sell, right? Yet in this time period, piracy was so rampant and a common way of life that pirate cities like Port Royal, pirate islands like Tortuga, even pirate “nations” rose up from this ocean commercialization of debauchery. Ching Shih, the famous Chinese pirate Queen, was said to command a floating pirate nation of between 80,000 to 100,000 men. A nod to her importance can be seen in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END with the character Mistress Ching, played by Takayo Fischer.
For most, piracy was not a desirable way of life, but it existed as an industry in a way that is hard to fathom in our modern-day society. To think that it could have been so successful while rooted in total lawlessness doesn't make much sense. There was a structure and sense of governance happening, but it was non-traditional to say the least. While not necessarily accurate, you get a sense that there are unwritten rules and structure in the pirate world, illustrated by tropes like “the pirate code,” the hierarchy of First Mate and Captain, and, famously, the white flag.
Even without a formal government or nation, there are still codes of conducts and identities built into the communities we surround ourselves with. When it comes to pirates, all it takes is to look at it through a different lens like historical revisionism and we'll see this entirely new narrative about people and a lifestyle that wasn't necessarily rooted in debauchery and lawlessness, as much as it was an escape from poverty, a path to multi nationalism and globalization, and most of all, a community for misfits outside the social norm.
If you haven't watched the HBO show Our Flag Means Death, I highly recommend it. For all its humor and camp, it is also a sincere, wholesome, and alternative way to view the pirate life. It makes sense that gay men might feel more comfortable with a life at sea with other men instead of being forced into the social custom of traditional heterosexual relationships. It makes sense that women might flee to the sea to escape being oppressed and powerless in their current world. It makes sense that racism, poverty, and political upheaval would drive people from various nations to the sea to escape and create their own refugee communities.
I'm not saying pirates were the good guys. History shows us violence and ruthlessness at every turn in the stories we find about the golden age of piracy. It’s important to keep in mind that a lot of these people were committing horrific acts. But that isn't the whole truth, either. There were motivations beyond just thieving and banditry. The governments at this time were playing a very chaotic and corrupt game bending law and morality to their will which in turn entangled a lot of ordinary people into this lifestyle.
The lingering legacy of the pirate has since mixed with fantasy, and the imagery and way in which people connect to golden age pirates has become more along the lines of folklore than hard history. But as I often talk about in my other regular feature “Friday Folklore” here on Neon Splatter, folklore and history are one in the same. Pirates are part of the history of mankind. I'd like to think that in our desire to be free and happy as humans that there lies a little bit of pirate inside of all of us. So thank you Errol Flynn, Kermit The Frog as Captain Smollett, and definitely you, Taika Waititi as Blackbeard (you handsome devil), for continually reigniting that flame to take risks, go on adventures, and most of all live free.
