6 Absurd Pirate Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies)

This is thanks to decades of cartoons and movies where everyone playing a pirate was legally obligated to litter their speech with "arrs" and the like while assuming the intonation of a rowdy drunken Englishman. Unless your name is Johnny Depp, that is; then you're obligated to assume the intonation of Johnny Depp in every Johnny Depp movie ever.

Granted, outside of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise there haven't been a lot of pirate movies in the past few decades, but at the same time there's been no shortage of pirate or pirate-talking characters invading other genres: Like the Pirate Captain in The Venture Bros., the other Pirate Captain in The Simpsons, Steve the Pirate in Dodgeball and Agent Scurvy Pirateson in CSI: Miami.

Obviously, we know the "pirate accent" we hear in these shows and films is exaggerated, just like they would exaggerate a French or Mexican accent, but it must be based on something real, right?

The Truth:

Phrases like "shiver my timbers" and traditional pirate songs like "Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest" were made up by Robert Louis Stevenson for his novel Treasure Island, published in 1883 -- over 150 years after the end of the Golden Age of Piracy. We might as well tell you right now that 90 percent of all pirate tropes come from the same book: One legged pirates, squawking parrots, drunken mutinies ... all that stuff can be traced back to Treasure Island.

Yes, pirates did lose limbs in battle, mutiny on occasion and get shitfaced a lot, but Stevenson was the first to combine those elements into one package, creating the popular image of pirates.

But what about the "arr" voice? That actually comes from the West Country accent from the southwestern portion of England. In the 1950 Disney adaptation of Treasure Island, Robert Newton played a pirate from the West Country and overdid it a little with the accent, throwing "arr" into every other sentence. Two years later Newton used the same accent in Blackbeard the Pirate, and the stereotype was cast.

To put this in perspective, if Newton played a pirate from Boston, we'd all be imagining pirates shouting "wicked pissah" as they boarded enemy ships.

So what did pirates actually sound like? In reality, there never was one "pirate accent" at all, mainly because that makes no damn sense. The idea of a pirate dialect assumes that all pirates spoke English and used the same slang, when in fact many pirate crews were from different countries. If pirates did have a distinct way of speaking, it was only in the sense that they needed to employ nautical terms on a daily basis. You can take solace in the fact that English-speaking pirates did use the word "avast," but the probability of it ever being combined with "mateys" is slim at best.

With all those peg legs, hook hands and eye patches, it's like these movies are trying to tell us that pirates, more so than any other group of people in history, were remarkably good at misplacing body parts. At other times they were simply born without them -- like One-Eyed Willie from The Goonies, who didn't even have an eye socket under that patch.

But what was it about pirates that made them more likely to lose an eye than, say, Vikings or something?

The Truth:

Actually, it looks like the only reason pirates wore eye patches was to keep one eye adjusted to darkness while boarding another ship. That's right: If this theory is correct, they only wore the patch before and during a raid.

Think about it: Pirates needed to be able to fight and ransack both above and below deck, and since artificial light wasn't a thing, it could get pretty dark down there. A guy could trip on a treasure chest or something. It takes the human eye several minutes to adjust to darkness -- however, this way, pirates could simply swap the eye patch and immediately be prepared to fight in the lower decks without constantly running into walls, which is something you'd probably want to avoid if you're carrying a cutlass.

Obviously we don't know for sure that this was always the case, but this explanation does make more sense than "they all happened to lose one eye" or "they thought it would look cool." True, you're sacrificing your peripheral vision, but it's better than having no vision at all. If you don't believe us, it's easy enough to try this yourself -- just cover your eye with your hand for the next half hour and then walk into a dark closet.

In fact, this method works so well that it's still used by the American military today. Nighttime survival guides recommend keeping one eye closed during bright lights to preserve night vision, and the same goes for military pilots. So all those movie pirates wearing eye patches all the time? Turns out they're just being extra careful.

... to Veggie Tales.

Or Disney's Peter Pan. Sometimes the skull is replaced with two cutlasses, like in Barbossa's flag in Pirates of the Caribbean, but other than that and how expertly or crappily it is drawn, it's always pretty much the same thing.

But this makes sense, right? The purpose of the flag was to intimidate sailors and steal their loot while they were too busy shitting their pants, so it makes sense that they should all choose something ominous like a skull on a black background.

The Truth:

Actually, if there was a pirate ship approaching and you saw a black flag waving, you were in luck: It meant the pirates were willing to give quarter. The real "Oh shit we're completely fucked" flag sported a decidedly more minimalistic "completely red" design -- in fact, historians believe that the term Jolly Roger comes from "jolie rouge," which is French for "pretty red," which in turn sounds like the name of a romantic comedy starring Emma Stone.

Also, the design of the black flag varied a lot from ship to ship: Only a few pirate captains used the skull and crossbones design, like Edward England and Christopher Condent. On the other hand, a pirate that you may have actually heard of, Blackbeard, used a bizarre flag with a skeleton holding an hourglass and stabbing a bleeding heart:

The hourglass was actually a common element in many pirate flags, since it symbolized the inevitability of death (more so than a freaking skull, apparently). Captains Walter Kennedy and Jean Dulaien also incorporated the hourglass, except in their case it was being held by a naked guy swinging a sword at a perplexed floating face:

And some of them didn't give a shit, like Thomas Tew and his magnificently lazy flag of an arm holding a cutlass:

There are a lot of designs to make fun of and not enough time, sadly, but we should also mention that most pirates stuck to all red or all black flags. Also, all these designs are only recreations of the real thing based on descriptions like this one, so there's a huge chance that they all looked completely different in reality. For example, a museum in Florida has one of the only two authentic Jolly Rogers that remain, and it looks pretty far from the detailed skull drawing that we're used to. It's almost like it was shoddily put together by some sort of uncultured ... oh wait.

The Myth:

Based on what we've learned from the singing pirates on Peter Pan, the life of a pirate was all about stealing, fighting and collecting booty, and therefore the decision to become one must have depended entirely on how much you enjoyed those things. Pirates of the Caribbean adds "ingesting massive amounts of alcohol" to the mix. Look at any pirate song and you'll see the same basic ingredients repeated over and over.

In fact, the entire twist of movies like The Princess Bride (we're assuming you've either seen it by now or don't care) depends on people taking for granted that the only way to become a pirate was by being a complete wreck of a human being -- not even Westley's own crew knows he sort of stumbled upon his "Dread Pirate Roberts" title out of necessity, not criminal tendencies, because that would kill his reputation.

After all, it's not like decent citizens just went and became pirates all the time ...

The Truth:

Wait, no, it did happen all the time. The overwhelming majority of pirates were honest sailors who ditched their jobs because the conditions were awful. Only a small minority became a pirate because they actually enjoyed being an outlaw. Being a sailor during pirate times was one of the shittiest jobs ever, and if they lived under British rule, most of them didn't so much "sign up" as "get kidnapped by the Royal Navy."

Seriously, at one point, half the British Navy consisted of men forcibly recruited by hired thugs who scoured the harbors looking for anyone with a full set of limbs. If they didn't have enough money to pay off these thugs, they were suddenly sailors. "Pressed men" were paid less than volunteers (if they were paid at all), were shackled to the ships while on port so they didn't try to make a run for it and were flailed for any minor offense in a naval handbook that they probably didn't even get a chance to read.

That's without counting all the storms, crowded quarters and tropical diseases that made life so shitty for sailors in general. As a result, 75 percent of men who were press-ganged ended up dead within two years. So when a pirate crew captured their ship and offered them an alternative to certain death and constant humiliation, a lot of them understandably replied, "Fuck yeah!" In pirate movies, there's always a huge difference between the clean-cut lawful sailors and the nasty, deformed pirates, but it turns out they were basically the same thing.

Wouldn't the older pirates basically treat the fresh meat like slaves, though? Apparently not. We've told you about Black Bart, the sailor who was captured by pirates and six weeks later became their captain -- kinda like Westley's story in The Princess Bride, except for the fact that his crew knew exactly where he came from and didn't give a shit.

The Myth:

This is like the main thing that pirates do, right? Steal treasure, put it in a chest, bury it someplace and then draw a map to remind themselves where they left it? If we are to believe RPG games, the whole world is littered with treasure chests that someone forgot about -- and according to The Goonies, the map could very well be hidden in your attic.

The Pirates of the Caribbean movies notably found more things for the pirates to do than just bury and search for treasure, but those are still important parts of the story. After all, they couldn't get away with ignoring such a central part of real-life pirating, because this was totally a real thing that people did (we sure hope the next paragraph doesn't disprove it).

The Truth:

Pirates did bury their treasure ... like three times. None of those three guys made a map, meaning that authentic pirate treasure maps have simply never existed.

Not only did treasure maps not exist -- they were never even necessary, because the buried booty was usually found right away. The first pirate that we know for sure buried a treasure was Sir Francis Drake, who in 1573 robbed a Spanish mule train loaded with gold and silver and buried some of it along the road because it was too heavy to carry in one trip (if only there had been some mules nearby). Apparently the treasure wasn't so expertly hidden, though, because by the time Drake and his men came back to retrieve it the Spanish had found and dug up most of it.

Another famous pirate, Roche Brasiliano, confessed to burying more than a hundred thousand pieces of eight near Cuba after being tortured by the Spanish Inquisition, who thanked him for the tip and killed him. Captain William Kidd is said to have buried some treasure near Long Island in 1699, but again it was found by the authorities almost right away and used as evidence against him in England. And that's about it. If there were more, no one's been able to prove it.

Maybe if those guys had been more successful, treasure-burying might have caught on among pirates, but that doesn't seem to be the case. However, there were still persistent (unfounded) rumors that some of Captain Kidd's treasure was never found, and that was enough to capture the imagination of writers and painters everywhere.

Kidd's legend inspired Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller in 1824 and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug" in 1843, among others, which incorporated the idea of a treasure map. Irving's work influenced Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and the rest was (a gross misconception of) history.

So if they never buried it, what did pirates do with all that gold that they obviously collected? Well ...

The haunted gold cavern in Pirates of the Caribbean ...

And the entire treasure island in Treasure Island (we're guessing, we've never seen it). Often the entire plot revolves around getting or keeping the gold, like in Roman Polanski's Pirates or Cutthroat Island.

But pirates did raid ships and steal their gold: That's a historical fact, and don't you dare take that away from us, Cracked. Why else would they raid ships? What could possibly be more important to pirates than riches?

The Truth:

How about soap? Or food? Or candles, sewing tools and other horribly mundane household supplies? When a ship was taken by pirates, the loot was more often that not a cargo of salted fish or supplies going to the colonies -- and they were pretty OK with that.

Pirates were big fans of gold and silver, but they were even bigger fans of not starving to death in the middle of the ocean or accidentally drowning because they didn't have the equipment to perform necessary repairs on their ships. Being outlaws, they knew they couldn't just pull into the local 7-Eleven and load up on provisions and spare parts, so they had to be judicious when it came to their loot. They also raided ships for slightly less boring stuff like gunpowder and navigational tools. For those sailing in tropical climates, however, the real treasure was actually a chest filled with medical supplies.

And if they did come across a spectacular amount of money (which did happen on occasion), they preferred to spend that shit right away in a place like Port Royal -- the pirate harbor so licentious that God pulled a Sodom and Gomorrah on it -- rather than save up to invest in some sort of 17th century 401k.

Read more of Yosomono at his headquarters at the GaijinAss Web page or follow him on Twitter @GaijinAss.

For the truth behind other historic lies, check out The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught In History Class and 6 Ridiculous History Myths (You Probably Think Are True).

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