Seafaring Gangsters

 Throughout history, pirates
have held a place in our
imagination, particularly with
the romantic notion of the
handsome outcast who
survives through intelligence,
skill and sex appeal.

Like the gangster, we imagine the pirate as someone with talent who has been led astray—someone who could have been a lawful leader if he hadn't been lured by crime. In the movies, these glamorous pirates were portrayed by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp.

We'll never really know, however, what real pirates actually looked like or the details of their personalities. The most famous include Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, William Kidd, Bartholomew Roberts, and women, too—Mary Read and Anne Bonny, among them.

Our contemporary image of pirates came out of the Golden Age of Piracy (1690 - 1730), when pirates sailed the seas and operated outside the law, taking what wasn't theirs—gold and silver, molasses, rum, spices, cloth, anchors and rope. It was the job of every pirate captain to determine what ships were worthy of pursuit.

Pirates came from a variety of backgrounds, but they were customarily sailors. Because hundreds of pirates could live together on a large ship, life at sea was a democracy. The captain was elected, however, because he had to lead a contingent of men who could easily become bored and hostile to each other, he had to be a natural leader and enforce the ship's own laws, sometimes through his own personal strength. The crew shared the spoils, with the captain and the higher-ranked crew getting extra.

Rules were clearly articulated at the beginning of each voyage by the captain, and anyone who attempted to run away, keep a key secret, steal, attack another, smoke in the hold without a cap on his pipe, carry around a lit candle without a lantern, or failed to keep his arms clean (to name a few infractions) could be marooned or whipped. A pirate could be condemned to death for sexually violating a woman against her will.

Perhaps the worst fate for a pirate was to become disabled—men were compensated for the loss of fingers, limbs and eyes. But there was little discrimination against disability if a pirate had a talent or agility deemed essential to running the ship. Although the character of Captain Hook is fictional, there were men at sea who had lost body parts and lived to tell the tale.

When on land, pirates tended to spend all of their hard-earned money on lots of drinking, gambling and whoring. If pirates were captured, they were hanged, unless they ratted on the other men. Sometimes they were hanged anyway.

Women, in disguise, sometimes served on pirate ships, but their discovery could mean death. Even the famous female pirates were cross-dressers with a talent for weaponry and fighting. Literature has stoked the reputation of women pirates, with lots of fictional tales based on the legends of real women.

Piracy, as we have come to know it, died out in the late 1720s. It lives on today in a word that is used to describe the illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted materials, mostly films.