Part Two: The Golden Age of Pirates & One Great Polycule of History

In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Miriam about what's unique about the golden age of piracy and why we romanticize the wrong things, plus they discuss Mary Read, Anne Bonny and Calico Jack.

South Street Seaport Museum's Queer Chanteys, Queer Sailors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRxo-nJn8X8

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Great Polycules of History, the show
that's usually cool people who did cool stuff. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy and with me today is this week's guest,
Mariam Roacheck. Hello. He faked us out on the Polycule
last week, so I know our last episode. Is that

(00:22):
called a cliffhanger? Is that a bait and switch? Depends
on if you delivered today. We'll see. Yeah, we'll deliver today.
Sophie as our producer. Hi, Sophie, how are you? I
am wow? How are you good? Do you know the
Nick Cave song sixteen feet of Snow or something like that?
No should I This is a song where he's like,

(00:44):
I'm buried under sixteen feet of pure white snow. It's
about cocaine. But since you're currently buried under snow, are
you gonna make a joke the sixteen feet of snow
that is my backyard? Yeah? Exactly. You two are buried
under cocaine, much like Nick Cave. I was gonna say,
my dog fucking loves it. But that makes that sounds

(01:06):
that sounds bad, especially with that Cocaine Bear movie that's
coming out. What there's a movie called Cocaine Bear that's
it's actually just straight up called that. Yeah, and it's
based on a true star. Oh, it's about someone smuggling
or is it about bear that gets into some cocaine?
So like a bale of cocaine fell off of an airplane,

(01:30):
I guess yeah, and it ended up in the woods,
And what really happened is some a bear got into it,
and I think die die? Yeah, because sorry, cocaine isn't
good for bears, um only people. Yeah, I don't basically
don't do drugs. I don't know why I'm pretending like, okay,
yeah I was, But then the movie is like, what

(01:51):
if instead of dying, the bear became a cocaine fueled
bear monster? Just yeah, which is like, well that would
have been more interesting in I love living in this world.
That makes no sense anymore. I can't wait till the
first Ai movie. Okay anyway, Ah, that's what definitely what

(02:11):
we're talking about today. So if that first DAI movie
came out and we watched it without paying, what would
that make us pirates like today's Wow, and by heroes,
I mean thank you. You wouldn't download a galleon. No,

(02:35):
if movie pirates were serial killers to the same degree
as Colden Age Pirates. I don't know the world will
be different. That would be the movie. Instead of Cocaine Bear,
it would be movie pirates acting like regular pirates. You
download a movie and then all of a sudden, you

(02:56):
fucking okay anyway you download the movie by showing up
outside of her brothers and being like, give me that
Batman movie, or I will burn down all of your shit. Yeah,
I already killed three of your kids. Ian as our
audio engineer. Our theme music was written forced by young
woman where we last left our serial killers, our heroes,

(03:18):
the Golden Age had just kicked off, and the pirates
are building themselves a counterculture. Let's talk about that culture
and how they worked. They are specifically and consciously Okay, actually,
once again everyone's making this up. But there is like
some shit like that people sort of know when people
are able to kind of like best case. I mean,

(03:39):
historians aren't like like pop history writers like me suck
and like aren't trustworthy, but historians like try to figure
things out. What about that time everybody decided that Daniel
Dafoe wrote I keep wanting to say, well, Limb Dafoe,
by the way, different guy decided that Daniel Dafoe wrote
all the Pirates stories. Yeah it's a good point, Okay,

(04:01):
so but theoretically best I'm able to parse together this
seemingly near consensus. Actually I would be like the consensus
of all the different writers, but they all just completely
disagree with each other. They all lived in blood, and
then they're like, no, they were like kind of mostly
nice and only occasionally killed people. Like it's just fucking
I don't fucking know, Okay, So they specifically and consciously

(04:23):
we're looking to invert or subvert everything they knew about
the cultures they were from that much, I do believe
every ship seemed to develop its own social norms, because
I mean, these are the fuckers who put the chaotic
and chaotic neutral or evil. They had a chaotic culture.
When pirates voted, which they did all the time, the
losers of an important vote would leave the ship, so
that the pirate crew stayed in consensus with itself. But

(04:46):
most of the time the losers were like born no
bad blood, so they would just be like given one
of the ships in the fleet, because like, if you
steal ships for a living, you got a lot of ships,
and so good at it. Yeah, okay, fair enough, and
if you're not, you're dead. So most of the pirates
you meet are either untested or good. Well, I've stolen

(05:07):
a ship one time and I'm still alive, so you're
a fucking good pirate. The losers are born no bad blood,
and they often go and start a new venture and
so this like and therefore they like bring a ton
of the culture with them, so their culture spreads really
organically chaotically. It's a sort of a hydra or an amiba.
It gets called a hydra, but I think an amibas
some more accurate. And the first thing pirate crew will do, yeah,

(05:32):
exactly a new pirate crew will do is that whenever
they whether they start by mutiny or splitting off from
an existing fleet, which also sometimes happens if they take
a prize, and they're just like all right, even though
they don't have a vote, They're like, fuck it, a
bunch of us are going to go start over there.
They elect a captain, they drop their articles, the pirate constitution,

(05:53):
which is like the list of rules. It also just
talks about like how money is going to get split. Usually,
like the captain gets about twice as much as everyone else,
but only twice as much. And the quartermaster gets like
point one point five and the ship's cook gets one
point two five and shit, and it talks about what's
communal and what isn't, and then they all write down
the rules and then they get really fucking drunk and
they start shooting cannons off, which sounds fun. Not recommendable,

(06:20):
but fun. Yeah, get drunk, play with cannons. Yeah, but
don't stand downside. I know, I wonder whether there's like
like the black powder pistol. I mean, now you probably
still shouldn't suck around with them when you're drunk, but
it's like, no, definitely don't, but it does seem like
harder to anyway. Yes, yes, the gun where you have

(06:42):
to pour the gun power into it from like a
random bottle while you're drunk, is definitely safer. One for me,
one for the gun, the one for me, one for
the gun. So they create this culture, and it is
a specific counterculture. There's like a couple thousands of pirates

(07:04):
and they fucking know each other. Like I one an
article I read, I think it was being pretty accurate.
It was like, well, there's a click of pirate captains,
and that's where the cult, you know, that's what it is,
because it's just like twenty to eighty of them, you know,
captain like fleets and ships or whatever. At any given time,
most pirates drop their Christian names and take on new names.

(07:25):
On shore, they wear crazy elaborate rich people clothes because
they can, because they stole those clothes from crazy elaborate
rich people. From Steven Snelder's book The Devil's Anarchy. At
a time when seamen generally wore blue jackets, checkered shirts,
long canvas trousers, or baggy breeches, red red waistcoasts where

(07:46):
red waist could you try and say it? Red waistcoats,
and scarves around their necks, pirates added all kinds of
plundered silks, velvets, and brocades to their outfits. They probably
didn't do this like on deck all the time. They
probably did sometimes no one really knows, but people are
kind of like they probably were a little more practical
while they're like climbing around rigging and ship you've climbed

(08:09):
around rigging, I have. And contemporary tall ships don't use
quite as much tar on everything as they did back then.
But you get a little bit of pine tar on
some of your clothes, you're gonna not want to do
that again if you like those clothes. So I had
like a cool stolen brocade silk coat, I would probably

(08:31):
not wear it while climbing around in the rigging. Okay,
that's good to know. You're ruining my dreams. I mean,
you can do it. You just have to make sure
you steal some more cool coats. Yeah, that's true. You
probably have your like, well, this is the really expensive
one that was going to go to the English King
that I wear when I'm in the rigging and it's
all fucked up. And this is the other one that

(08:52):
was going to go to this English King that I
wear on shore. It's all a way to taunt society.
It's also probably because they like think it rules. They
wore heavy gold jewelry and basically just costume levels of clothing.
They mostly wore them around town. There's no specific history
of them actually wearing earrings. And then actually I were

(09:14):
kind of curious if you know more about this. What
I've been able to read is that it pre dates
They predate the Western sailor tattoo culture by a fair amount,
but they might have had tattoos anyway, based on the
idea that European traditional tattooing hadn't actually completely gone out
of gone away at this point. And then of course
they're heavily influenced by the indigenous people of the Caribbean.

(09:37):
What I what I have read, and that this could
be wrong, but what I've read suggests that tattooing was
pretty widespread among sailors at that time. But we have
more record of pirate tattoos because if you were wanted,
all of your tattoos got written down. It makes sense, okay.
And if you were not, if you were just some guy,

(09:58):
nobody was like making note of your tattoo twos because
who gives a shit. But if you are somebody who,
like the government, would quite like to kill, they are
going to have a detailed description of you, which, if
you are tattooed, would include your tattoos, because it's all
they have, like photographs of you. No, okay, so I'm
actually yeah. I read one article that was like Western

(10:20):
sailor tattoo culture comes in later in the eighteenth century,
like the middle or the end of the eighteenth century.
But the fact that because the most trustworthy history we
have on the pirates is the criminal records, the court
records and all that shit. And so they're naming the tattoos,
I'm probably like, I know, we also have an extensive
list of every tattoo that the bounty mutineers had. Yeah,

(10:43):
because like they were in trouble, so somebody took the
cho you know when, took the time to like write
down all their tattoos. I think the book I read
was wrong or or I'm wrong. Now my money is
on you being right. I appreciate that, like just talking it.
I don't know, Yeah, I mean I just read it
like a million different random ass books that all disagree

(11:04):
with each other and come up with what makes the
most sense. That's how I write these, especially this episode.
Just read a million books that disagree with each other
and then agree with the ones that agree with me.
That's that's that's how you do history. Yeah. While the
Royal English Navy was at this point early eighteenth century
on an anti buggery campaign, there is no evidence that

(11:28):
any single set of Pirate articles banned browing down with
the bros. So you know, and of course, you know,
as we talked about last time, you can't look back
and say like they were gay because the wrong way
of looking at it. Pirates were notorious for fucking ladies.
They were also notorious for raping captives, and they also

(11:49):
almost certainly fucked each other a lot. Whatever doesn't make
them straight, doesn't make them gay, make them pirates. Yeah,
and there does seem to be like, I don't know,
there seems to be evidence that the pirates were fine
with whatever your preference was. Heterosexually hadn't been invented yet anyway,
So and it seems to be telling that like throughout
the time, most most buccaneers and pirates, if they retire,

(12:13):
which the smart ones do, the ones who lived to
be old do. Um, they don't go back to Europe.
They join non European cultures because European culture sucks and
because well a lot of them are like, um, I mean,
you know, all of the buccaneers and privateers and shit

(12:36):
are also included within this like overall, not like retiring
back to ye olde England. But yeah, mostly they retire
at the bottom of the ocean or the end of
a rope. They are very accepting of disability, which makes
sense because they fight people with swords for a living.

(12:56):
Many pirates did in fact have peg legs. The articles
make it clear. The articles, like their constitutions, um make
it clear that people who are disabled in the course
of their you know, job, would be compensated and would
be allowed to stay with the pirates or leave as
they wanted. Yeah. I remember seeing articles that list like

(13:16):
what amount of money you will get for the destruction
of any given limit, Like at the end it includes
like ears. Yeah, it real. It goes very very specific there. Yeah,
it's like the longest part of it, Like the constitution
would be like and this is what's going to happen,
and then it's like here's the long footnote, the list
of Yeah, totally. I saw it referred to as the

(13:40):
first Western social security system, and it wasn't a society
of one against all. And I think this is the
biggest thing that Hollywood pirates are kind of wrong about maybe,
is that within the ranks of pirates there's a sort
of collectivism and anti authoritarianism and an incredible amount of
generosity not universally right, And you absolutely have like captains

(14:01):
who will like shoot one of their fucking crew members
and just are like what I'm captain often. That same
Beard famously once shot his first mate in the knee
during a game of cards and then said, well, if
I don't shoot someone every once in a while, my
crew will forget who I am. Yeah, which is like
not a overly collectivist approach to hang out with your buddies.

(14:26):
Didn't you get voted out? I can't. I don't know.
He got beheaded, that's right. Um, yeah, that's like a
version of voted out. No, I'd like, yeah when I
whenever I read about not all of them, but like
I read about pirate captains who will be like particularly authoritarian,
and then the crew will like mutiny instead of like
most pirate crews just vote, you know, but if you're

(14:48):
an authoritarian one, then they mutiny and then like kill you.
I don't know if that's Blackbeard was not beheaded by
his now yeah yeah, yeah, but um, I didn't really.
I think he had kind of gone all the way
sort of back around sound an authoritarian where it became like, wow,
we really actually shouldn't mess with this guy. Yeah, Okay,
that's probably effective too, which you know, yeah but anyway, no, yeah, um,

(15:14):
hard on his luck. Pirate could be given a whole
fucking ship. You could be like hanging out in a
pirate port and be like, oh, it was like it sucks.
Don't want to be a pirate, but I don't have
a ship anymore. I'm like having a rough time. People
might be like like, they'll they'll give you the ship
off their back. Eh, and uh, now that's something we
should bring back to tall ship culture. Give people the
ship off your back. Just giving people ships, yeah, totally.

(15:36):
I mean, like, if you see a person down in
the port who looks bummed out, just be like half ship, yeah,
and then the person's like thanks, and then the cops
come running. You're like, I mean that wasn't mine, but
you can have it. I'll cut the rope that attaches
it to the shore or whatever. It's yeah, fast up, um.
And you're on a tall ship and they have speedboats,

(15:57):
you're in trouble. They stood up for each other against
their collective enemies aka the entire world. A port that
would hang some pirates might get cannonaded and burned to
the ground by avenging pirates from a completely different crew.
Most stayed sort of Christian, some were Zealots, Protestant mostly,

(16:19):
some were kind of this like weirddest thing that they
have going on that I didn't really learn as much
about as I kind of wanted to. And then others
were like blasphemous as hell and basically Satanists just like
an intentional inversion of Christian values, or at least we're
presenting that as part of our like we're scary demons
from hell. Fuck you give us your stuff. And they
changed the nature of the like the idea of home

(16:41):
to basically be wherever they were, which fucking rules, and
it specifically disrupted a lot of nationalist ideas. Not all
crews were all mixed different nationalities, but a lot of
them were, and they would speak different mixed languages full
of cuss words. They really did cuss a lot, apparently. Yeah,
that is like something that you see people writing about
in history, is like how these people swear a lot.

(17:03):
But then if you actually like look at what the
people how the people were swearing, it looks very tame
by today's standards. It's like ninety percent blasphemy. So it's
like all these people are like shocked, and then it's like, yeah,
somebody said, god damn, You're like, yeah, it's disappointing, I know,
and then like basically called them like dunder heads or something,
you know, like their sense of hierarchy and authority did

(17:27):
not line up with Western civilizations. Sometimes they are understood
as protodemocrats and their captains are generally electable and recallable.
Obviously not always as we talked about, but I read
and it's convincing that it's better understood anthropologically, something more
kin to the way that tons of culture has handled
authority before the development of the state, and specifically the
carib people, and the ways that anthropologically that makes this

(17:50):
comparison electable and recallable. Their power rested on merit. The
power was controlled by the community to various degrees. Their
primary task is to keep between the people on the
ship and or be involved in like war fighting stuff.
The captain takes the largest share of the treasure, but
they don't end up enriched by this. They specifically are
expected to be the most generous people and if you

(18:12):
want to learn like all about this shit, read David
Graber's stuff. And the only time their authority is considered
absolute and unquestionable like overall, is in combat, and most
of the time the captain didn't even get the captain's
quarters because they weren't better than everyone else. And the
captain's quarters, I think sometimes we're like literally cut off
the ship. But I don't know. That didn't quite make
sense to me. Don't do that, Yeah, like as somebody

(18:34):
who likes ships, don't do that. I think they mostly
just use them for other stuff. And there were exceptions
to a lot of this. Definitely don't Sorry I call
bullshit on that. I don't. I don't believe that the
cutting the thing off the ship, yeah, you know that
one like structural integrity to worry about. Yeah, but I
could see just like turning the what would have been
the captain's quarters into like a general party central and like, yeah,

(18:57):
letting people sleep elsewhere. I think it was a symbolic
language that did not necessarily carry across the centuries that
particular piece. And so they're not like a president or
even necessarily exactly like a captain of a ship in
a Western sense, although they're a way closer to that
and often are that, but a lot more like the
role of chief as is described in a lot of

(19:17):
stateless societies, and as likely as an a coincidence, they
literally got the word buccaneer from the ship that they
learned from the carib people about how to smoke meat
and hang out in hammock and use a dugout canoe.
And then one thing that history seems to claim back
then but is not true, is that they would be
like and also the Caribs were cannibals. But I believe

(19:41):
that that is not the case. It is not true,
I think, I mean, I don't know. There might have
been some guy somewhere doing something, but my understanding is
that what would happen is like Europeans would show up,
you know, heavy quotes, exploring the Caribbean, and they would
go to any given island and be like, hey, what's up.

(20:03):
We've heard that you guys eat each other over here,
and the people would be like, oh, yeah, no, that's
the next island over. Yeah, they do that over there.
And they would also say the same thing about like hey,
where's their gold. They would be like, oh, yeah, it's
over there, it's on that next island over, Which is
how like Columbus ended up like bumbling around from island

(20:24):
to island like because everybody would just be like, oh, yeah,
all the stuff you're talking about it's definitely over there,
and they would head off to the other island where
they would be told, oh, yeah, the gold and cannibals,
it's definitely the next island over. Yeah, And so they
would never run into either of those things because that
wasn't really a thing. No, that makes sense, And I

(20:46):
mean it's like, I you know, I read a history
book that was like, and the pirates got their cannibalism
from the Carab people. But the Carab people, I don't
believe we're cannibals, and so there's a lot of I
guess it's the way of being Like, doesn't mean the
pirates didn't get their cannibalism from the fictional idea of
the carib people that was in circulation. Oh that's a

(21:07):
really good point. Yeah, totally. So they create this egalitarian
murder society and it only extends the bros, white bros
almost exclusively. Although time for history argument time there were
noted black pirates who were free and equal on their
ships and were like notorious for never giving up during

(21:30):
fights because capture might mean return to slavery. There's an
argument about overall to what degree African sailors on pirate
ships were in one of three different categories, seen as
equals or you know, pirates right, or whether they're essentially
there is like kind of like hired servants in a
way that indigenous people often works will get to that,

(21:51):
or as slaves, and my guesses was a mix of three,
and it was different on different ships because there seemed
to be sources sighting dire actually all of these positions
in different places, different times. Edward England was an irishman
who was one of the only pirates who actually Classic
Jolly Roger a terrible name for an Irish guy. He

(22:11):
changed his name to England. Why I don't know, because
he was like one of the most egalitarian pirates, one
of the only English Irish pirate captains. He changed his
name to England has probably hated enemy like four times over.
I don't know. Maybe he was like everyone's picking a

(22:33):
really like scary name, right, like John Death over there,
I need a fucking scary name the British. It's like
one of those scariest people I know. Yeah, he was
actually one of the only people who flew the classic
Jolly Roger as we know it today. And I just

(22:54):
think it's cool that one of that that particular flag,
that version of the Jolly Roger, the scollm Bone, was
flown by one of the more directly anti racist as
compared to the incredibly racist pirates which were more common. Absolutely, Yeah,
Indigenous people, particularly the Mosquito people, were on board. Apparently

(23:16):
most ships separate. They weren't. They were basically hired to
be there. I don't know whether it was equal shares.
I straight up don't know, but most ships would have
folks there who basically were there as like scouts and
then as turtlers, and they would catch turtles and feed
the crew. We're just going to pretend that they caught

(23:36):
turtles and would feed the crew, and those are two
separate things. Yeah, totally, they would catch turtles, hang out
with the turtles because the pirates were sort of boorish company,
and then feed fish. Well, turtles, as we know, eat pizza,
so they probably just the turtles would share their pizza

(23:57):
with the pirates. That's probably how it went. That is
actually how all pirates fed themselves traditionally, and is totally
not put in here by the Turtle Lobby, who is
our primary sponsor, but it does make a lot of
sense that you that they would want to have like
people on board who just like knew where the fuck
they were, because this is also like before you know,

(24:19):
any kind of a lot of like modern navigational equipment
or even like good maps. So if you were sailing somewhere,
especially somewhere like near land, it would be really good
to have somebody around who actually like knows the waters
you're in and can like tell you where not to sail. Yeah,
although I do want because I think that's almost certainly

(24:40):
true for a lot of it while they're in the Caribbean.
But these are like all they're going all over the
fucking world. Us they were just called guys. Yeah, yeah,
it's so hard to fucking know how they all related.
But but um, but turtles. Did you know that turtles are?
I don't know any turtle facts, U, but there are

(25:00):
primary sponsors. So listen to these ads about turtles and
we are back. So Honestly, the pirates in general just
kind of like messed up boundaries about what it meant
to be free or unfree, and even like the individual pirate,
even the white French pirate guy, like you know, there's

(25:24):
like all of these things about they lived so free,
they all had voting rights or whatever, right, but like,
especially by the end, most of the pirates by the
end are getting their start because pirates attack their ship
and are like, you're pirates. Now, this is like how
America spreads freedom. Yeah, there's a lot of comparisons. There's
no one who's such a big part of us myth,

(25:45):
you know, and so like I think it was like, look,
we're taking this ship and we're not going to kill you,
but you can't go anywhere until we're in the middle
of the ocean, you know. And so a lot of
people who like come like some people like sign up
right away and or like sign me the fuck up.
Fuck yeah, fuck these people, and then other people are

(26:05):
like I don't want to and basically like who hang
out as prisoners until they get to shore or like
I'm sure it goes different every fucking time, you know.
And I think and I actually don't know as much
about this, but you probably know more about it. It's
kind of like how sailors were in general at that point, right,
you have it all these like what's the name for
the assholes to go around the docks and find drunk
people and make them be press gangs? Press gangs. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(26:29):
I mean you, I mean that would be only like
you were only going to end up on a navy
ship that way. But like, yeah, people were definitely working
on ships that they did not wish to be working on. Yeah. Yeah.
Freedom is not a binary thing, and between slavery and freedom,

(26:50):
you know, even within like different types of enslavement, there's
a millions of different things. And I don't know whatever
pirates real omplicated about all this shit. They did, however,
work as little as possible, which rules Pirate ships were
crammed overflowing with people. Often five times as many people

(27:11):
would be on pirate ships as the equivalent sized merchant ship,
because when you fight people with swords for a living,
it's nicer when there's more people on your side than
the other side, which meant less ship work for everyone.
It wasn't a big if you've got time to lean it,
you've got time to clean culture overall, and they get money,
they'd hit the shore, they'd hang out in party till

(27:31):
the money was gone. They'd spend it on booze and
gambling and hiring sex workers. Then they go get money again,
very drink and be merry for tomorrow we die, which
apparently the life of a regular sailor around this time
is like roughly as dangerous as the life of a pirate. Yeah,
because there's all these pirates out there. Okay, fair, No,

(27:51):
I mean being a sailor it was incredibly dangerous. Yeah,
so you might as well not do it for government
or whatever as they put it, but you might as
well do it in a context where you will get
a lot of money instead of very little money. And yeah,
to to go get ship faced whenever you feel like it. Yeah,
And I will argue that the smartest pirates are the

(28:13):
ones who did not get on the boats and lived
on shore and sold them things like booze and sex,
because apparently the average pirate lasted about two years on
sea before dying or retiring. Makes sense. Yeah, But also
if you retire after two years, you have picked a
great career. That's also a really good point. And as

(28:39):
I said before, you know, there's like this thing that
broke Spanish rule in America and like change the face
of everything or whatever. It's like four thousand person subculture
at its like fucking peak. And I think that there's
a really good Margaret Mead quote about pirates. Never doubt
that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

(29:03):
I yes, the great topebag quote. Yeah, and that's exactly
what she was talking about. Yeah, exactly. So I'm gonna
talk about one of my favorites. There's this guy named
Sam Bellamy, Samuel Bellamy or Black Sam. None of these
guys are black, literally in England, I think at the time,

(29:24):
being called black ment you had black hair. It's the best.
I think that's I think that's right. Yeah, he got
into piracy because he was trying to support his pregnant girlfriend,
who later winds up known as the Witch of well Fleet. Okay,
that's very cool. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Goes like I love that. Oh yeah, no, this guy rules,

(29:45):
and he's like, I mean, I also love that he's
like going off to do piracy to support his pregnant girlfriend. Like, yeah,
that's a that's the honorable thing to do, right there. Well,
first he tries to go be a treasure hunter, um,
to like go find a shipwrecker whatever, and it just
doesn't pay. And so he's like, all right, I'm signing
it up as a pirate and I got to eliminate

(30:06):
the middleman when it comes to plundering shipwrecks. Yeah, and
just like you know, rob bosses instead of being robbed
by bosses, seemed like a better strategy. Absolutely, So he
joins up with this guy Hornigold and who black Beard
is serving under it this time when Hornigold he's too
much of a patriot to attack British ships, so the

(30:27):
crew is like, sucks, and the crew agrees, so they
vote him out and they vote in Black Sam, who
black Beard actually serves under for a little while, I believe,
and the asshole Hornigold later he gets accepts the King's
pardon and then he becomes a pirate hunter. Fortunately he
wrecked himself on some coral and did a dying Black

(30:50):
Sam's flag. I do know a story that I have
read about Hornigold, and I don't know if this is true,
but I like it. I don't know any stories besides
these for Gold, so it was very horny for gold.
But there's a story that his ship once chased down
some like random merchant ship, which like immediately was like okay, okay,

(31:12):
we surrender, Like these guys are very dangerous and then
a very apologetic Hornigold steps on board and is like, listen,
we're not really going to rob you that much. I
just I need all your hats because my crew got
drunk last night and they threw all the hats overboard,
and so just like, please give me all your hats
and I will leave and we will say no more
about it. And I have no idea if this is true,

(31:38):
but I love it very much. I mean, there's definitely
like it seems like it wasn't like, oh, there's pirates.
They will absolutely attack us. I think it would be
like sometimes they like hang out with you and party
and sometimes they murder you, and sometimes they do one
and then the other, you know, like yeah, sometimes they
just need your hats. Yeah. So Hornigold the hat pirate

(31:59):
turn pirate hunter. He racks himself, he dies. Black Sam
is the captain. I don't know the overlap of time here,
but you know, Black Sam gets elected in as Hornigle's
voted out. And his flag is the classic Jolly Roger
the skull and bones. That's two for two for the
cooler pirates using this flag that I'm aware of so far.
He saw himself as a Robin Hood quite consciously. His

(32:22):
crew was not the only crew that called themselves Robin
Hood's married men. He carried four dueling pistols in his sash.
He never wore a powdered wig, which is what a
lot of the pirate captains were doing at that time. Instead,
he grew his black hair long and tied it back
back with a black satin bow. He was famous for
being merciful to those he captured. At one point, they

(32:43):
capture this ship and he's like, all right, we're just
gonna take stuff and we'll let the captain keep his ship.
And his crew is like, now we're going to burn
the fucking ship. And he's like, all right, well, I mean,
you know, I'm not the authoritarian leader here, so I
guess we're burning in it. And at that point, this point,
Black Sam gives the ballerus speech in pirate history that

(33:04):
is probably made up, but it might be within his
character or maybe yet a fucking chronicler, I don't know,
or maybe like sometimes the line between fiction and fact
is a little hazy, and it doesn't super matter if
he really said it, because we know that people believed
he said it. Yep, yeah, Okay, here's the quote, though

(33:29):
you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those
who submit to be governed by laws which rich men
have made for their own security. For the cowardly whelps
have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get
by knavery. But damn ye altogether, damn them for a
pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for
a parcel of henhearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do,

(33:53):
when there is only this difference. They rob the poor
under the cover of law forsooth, and we plunder the
rich under the tection of our own courage. But there
is no arguing that such sniveling puppies who allow superiors
to kick them around around deck at pleasure henhearted numbskulls. Yeah,
that fucking rules. Yeah, it's such. It's I love the

(34:19):
balance of like sneaking puppy, henhearted numbskulls, and they rob
the poor under the cover of law, and we plunder
the rich under the protection of our own courage. Yeah.
There's like some absolutely amazing lines in there, and then
some yes stuff that sounds like what a grandmother says

(34:40):
to avoid swearing. I know, but this is the grandma
that has just captured your ship and is about to
set it on fire with you on it. Yeah, because
I'm a sneaking puppy. Yeah. And so he was incredibly successful.
Him and his crew did really well. So he turned
around and headed back home to New England to the

(35:03):
aforementioned pregnant girlfriend, presumably at this point now a mother,
the Witch of Wealth Fleet. But in seventeen seventeen, just
as he's about to make it home, his ship was
caught in a storm and sank. Many of the men drowned,
many were captured and hanged, but Black Sam's body was
never found. This isn't this isn't like, this is actual
this part um. Black Sam's body was never found. There

(35:26):
was a body that people assumed for hundreds of years
was him, but they DNA tested him again it against
this his descendants, and it wasn't him. I Like, So
what you're saying is he could still be out there
with his witch that Yeah, I'm going with that vision exactly.
He's just like in the woods witch like thriving. I know,

(35:50):
that's that's that's cool. I'm down. I know. The sad
part is The reason she's called the Witch of wealth
Leet is because she was pregnant and wasn't married. They
chased her out of town into the world. Actually, you
don't actually have to be a witch to be pregnant
and not married. You don't need to know any magic atvolved. Really,
you can get pregnant entirely naturally. I've tried and it's
not working. I mean, being a witch wouldn't hurt in

(36:17):
some situations. Wait, Margaret, you're not a witch. No, I said,
I'm trying to get pregnant and it's not I thought
I thought you were sick markets not a witch. And
I was like, wait a time. You might need to
witch harder in this particular situation. But there are witches involved.
In mind. This is enough me talking about sex, all right,

(36:37):
So as I literally blush, let's talk about pirates and
slavery again. Oh we were just giggling. I know the
pirates they fucked up the slave trade, but not in
a good way. In a lateral way. They entirely disrupt

(37:02):
the slave trade. Everyone involved in the slave trade is
fucked over by the pirates, including the African people. Sometimes
they treat the African people the way they treat the
European people that they capture or they forced summon to
be in pirates, they kill others, they set some free,
but also other times they treat African people as cargo.
To quote Gabriel kun. The threat that Golden Age pirates

(37:25):
posed the slave trade, however, did not come from the
pirate's struggle for equal rights or an early abolitionist conviction,
but from interrupting its routes, stealing its quote cargo, and
making its ventures more costly. In fact, it was not
even a threat that affected the slave trade per se.
It only affected the government sponsored and protected slave trade,
trying to protect its monopoly. And further, he says, Gabriel

(37:47):
Kuhn says, whenever their exact role, the buccaneers and pirates
were overwhelmingly of European origin, and along with their and
along with their fellow European settlers, took possession of lands
and resources that they stole from other people. A history
of genocide still haunts the Caribbean, and so does the
buccaneers and pirates part in it. And so I think
that's just like a that's like worth fucking knowing, you know. Yeah,

(38:12):
I think part of The reason that I have gotten
like burned out on talking about pirates in the past
is that a lot of people who are less interested
in nuanced than you have like tried to come at
me with this very idealized vision of like leftist pirates
who were attacking slave ships for the purposes of freeing captives.

(38:33):
And like, yeah, like you said, that happens sometimes also
other things happened, And like the idea that pirates were
the sort of unified abolitionist force is just like wildly
a historical and like and sort of you know, that's
an that's not a a neutral myth to perpetuate, totally totally,

(39:02):
It just and like, and the abolitionist pirate who's quoted
and muddies at all is Captain Mission, who's entirely fictional. Yeah,
that guy is not real. He is not real. That's
cool that he was an abolitionist, but he didn't exist, ye,
which is not a point in his favor. No, Um,
there's some cool people who didn't exist. Yeah overall Robin Hood, Yeah, totally. Uh.

(39:31):
But let's talk about the end of the era. We
will get to the Polychuel. I really were just holding
it out till the end piracy takes a little break,
a little a little nap at the turn of the
eighteenth century, because there's speaking of taking a little break.
Oh oh, did piracy need to hear from its sponsors?

(39:54):
I believe piracy need to dear from its sponsors. And
I'm really hoping it's the gold or gambling. What I
actually hope it's gold because I think gambling and the
sports gambling is it? Well, okay, the idea of sitting
around with your friends and gambling because it's fun and
no one's specifically there to take a cut. Whatever. I

(40:14):
don't give a shit. It's like a bad idea. It's
a problem for some people. Other people have fun with it.
The idea of a fucking group that just basically like
takes money from people who need the concept of a
big reward because their life is hard. It's not my
favorite thing. Here's some ads, hopefully not randomly for gambling.
Oh sorry, go ahead. Oh do you want to hear

(40:36):
a gambling story from one of the ships that I
worked on? Yes, I was working on a ship and
we were like hitting a patch of like really bad
weather and we didn't have to be anywhere for a while,
so we were just kind of waiting it out. But
we were waiting it out, you know, in the water,
like we were not at a port. So we were

(40:57):
bored out of our minds. And this was like at
the time when like poker was on television a lot,
and that was like a very big new thing. So
we were all like, we're gonna play poker. We're gonna
we're gonna play some cards. So we like found some cars.
We had to like cobble together three decks to get
like the actual proper fifty two cards that are supposed

(41:18):
to be in there, which makes gambling with poker there
are three different decks anyway, you know. Then we like
found objects to use as chips, and then we like
all sat down around a table. There were like four
of us, and we're like, all right, yeah, so it's
gonna be aces wild Texas. Hold them. Like we just
started saying all these poker words and we shuffled the

(41:41):
deck and then like we all looked around and waited,
and finally somebody said, anybody here know how to play poker?
Y'all bad pirates? We played good fish hell yeah, okay,
take it back, all right, here's some ads and we

(42:02):
are back much like piracy is back from its little
nap that it takes at the turn of the eighteenth century,
because there's this big fuck off war called the War
of Spanish Secession from seventeen o one to seventeen fourteen,
and a whole bunch of pirates are like, yeah, the
whole war against all nations thing like freedom, independence forever
or whatever, Like give me the fucking letter of Mark.
I want my like king's permission again. Yeah, you would

(42:26):
at least like to take one country off the list
of countries trying to kill you. Yeah, that's true. I
remember I'm playing risk or whatever. Yeah. So for a
little while they're like, you know, soldiers and privateers and shit.
But then seventeen fourteen peace breaks out and suddenly they're
all outlaws again, and this time there's even more of
them because a bunch of them were soldiers and now

(42:49):
they're not well. And a thing that happens every time
like peace breaks out in that era is that not
just people who had been privateers, but people who had
been regular as sailors in the navy suddenly don't have
a job too, and like they have a single marketable
skill and he is doing violence on ships yeah, totally,

(43:10):
which is very marketable at the time. It's the right
time and place to be good at sword and gun
and ship. Yeah, are you good at violence? Do you
not get motion sickness? Here you go? Yeah, not particularly
interested in living a long time. Well, so they're all

(43:31):
outlaws again, and this time there's more of them. They're
scouring the whole ass ocean looking for people to rob
their rating off the west coast of Africa. They've got
a little shitty spot as colonial as fuck on Madagascar,
part of the whole thing. We were talking about this
off Mike a little bit earlier about how like people are, like, oh,
they had this pirate utopia on Madagascar that was also
a lie from Captain Mission. Absolutely did not have that. Yeah,

(43:54):
they had a colony on Madagascar where they kept enslaved
people until I think the native people basically just fucking
killed them all and drove them all off, which rules. Yeah,
that's great. Actually the actual cool people like um. But
they're at war with every nation on Earth, and much

(44:16):
like every other time, going to war against all nations
on Earth usually goes badly. The state wanted them gone
ideally dead. There are pardons offered executions are offered. Expediated
justice is offered. Aka, we catch you, We're gonna fucking
hang you there. We don't need to send you back
to England to do it, or France or whatever. They

(44:37):
send an infiltrators to join pirate cruise to snitch them out.
It's oh no, yeah, wait that is. It is baffling
to me that we don't have movies about that. Yeah,
the information I have about that is one of the
man I can't remember as Mary Reader and Bonnie right

(44:57):
now at the top of my head. One of them
dated so Joman for a while. They have sellouts who
get caught and snitch. It's like the destruction of every
social movement I've ever covered. There's a divide and conquer
pardons for some, bullets for others well, and rope and
cannons and all kinds of stuff. By seventeen twenty two,

(45:17):
the most powerful pirates are dead or retired. And this
is the year that Captain black Bart Bartholomy Roberts is killed.
He's considered the most successful pirate of all time. Let's
really quickly talk about him, because he's fucking weird. He was, yeah,
the one who hated fun. Yeah. I almost called him
to kill Joy in the script, and then I was like,

(45:39):
I will not do that to my good family name,
even though that is the definition. Okay. So he died
at forty after four years of piracy, having captured more
than four hundred ships, which is some fucking impressive math.
That's one hundred ships a year. Yep. Before he was
a pirate, he was a Welsh slaver. They don't refer

(46:00):
to him as a slaver there, like he was a quartermaster.
He was a second mate on a slave ship. The
word for that job as slaver. Like how like how
Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman farmer or whenever? Yeah, totally. Yeah.
So he was a Welsh slaver whose ship was taken
by pirates. So he becomes a pirate and soon gets
elected captain. He's a quote about like, well I better

(46:21):
be a if I'm going to be a pirate, that
I must be a captain because he's a fucking aristocratic
suck or whatever. It wasn't a sky, I know, And
I don't think he even was an aristocrat because he
was just like a fucking but whatever. Fuck him. He
kept the captain's quarters. He made people serve him tea
because he didn't drink, but he also made people serve him.
He was a zealous Protestant, so no gambling was allowed

(46:42):
on the ship. He made a rule that it was
a death penalty to bring a woman on board disguised
as a man. We'll talk more about that later. Yeah,
my eyebrows just did like eight things. Uh huh, But
that would be a great ship to have, no idea
how to play poker on. He hated the Irish because
they were papists. Papists, I think it's papists, But like,

(47:06):
what do I know? You're the Catholic here, I know,
but what do I know about it? I'd like hold
up during the pandemic in a cabin in the forest
and suddenly cared about the religion of my ancestors. Um,
I don't fucking know anything about it, just learning about
it now, and it's all from books. So sometimes he

(47:27):
captured slave ships and set the captives free and they
joined his crew. About a quarter of his crew as
African at the time. It was capture and death as
eighty five, I believe black pirates on board. Another time, well,
that is a lot of people so eighty five was
a quarter of the people on the ship. Oh yeah, No,
pirate ships were rolling around with like four hundred fucking
people on a galleon. It was literally five times what

(47:50):
was necessary what a merchant or I think even what
a lot more than five times? Yes, no, they would
like that's like fifty times they rolled fucking deep. Another time,
he captured a slave ship and he set it on
fire with all of the human cargo on board because
he did not care. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, um would

(48:13):
not have approved. Okay, and um, anyway, he's dead, he
dies in battle. He's thrown overboard fully dressed, which was
his like thing that he always insisted that he immediately
be thrown overboard fully dressed, leading to the suspicion that
he immediately raises a suspicion in my mind. Yeah, he
also never grew a beard, mum, and he had the

(48:36):
whole thing about like better not let any women come on,
Like I don't know, mmm, I like, for a little while,
I used to always be like, whoa the most successful
pirate is probably secretly a woman, And I'm like, this
guy sucks fuck him. Yeah, that's what I was thinking,
Like yeah, yeah, no. His death marks the end of

(48:58):
the end of the Platinum era of piracy. I think
we agreed on the Pieces of eight, right, the Pieces
of eight era of piracy, especially because it was eight
years long. Well done. For four more years the pirates
are They're not fighting for plunder, They're fighting for survival.
They get more and more ruthless, They lash out like

(49:20):
a dying beast. Their ranks are no longer filled with
former privateers, but increasingly it's captured merchants who are forced
into it. You get the most, the most murdery, tortury,
bad pirates. Basically, I do have one question about the
This is a question I've always had about this, and
you may you may have some insight into it, the
whole idea of people being forced to be pirates when

(49:43):
their ship is captured. It occurs to me that, on
the one hand, if you are a pirate ship, you
probably don't want people around who hate you and are
not committed to, you know, not stabbing you in the back, right,
And if you are a pirate who is arrested for piracy,
it makes a lot of sense to say, oh, I

(50:03):
was forced into piracy. Yeah, my bad. So I'm curious
if we have any reason to think that that is
like largely true or not true, because like I can
I can see why that might enter the you know,
why why people might say that, more than I can
see why people might actually do that. No, that actually

(50:24):
makes a lot of sense. You get a lot of
like pirates who take the king's pardon and then go
back to piracy. You also get a lot of pirates
who like get put on trial and are like, oh, no,
I swear that guy who's gonna kill me if I
didn't do it. I was just a captured sailor And
they're like, oh okay, and then they let them go,

(50:44):
and then they're like sick and they steal the next
boat out of town. So yeah, no, I I don't know.
Someone knows a little bit more about what indentured piracy
looks like. M But that's a really good point. Edward
Lowe is a particular terror who tortured people and beheaded

(51:06):
people and shit. But in seventeen twenty three or twenty
four he was probably mutinied by his crew for being
a piece of shit, and he was left adrift, picked
up and hanged. By seventeen twenty six, there's only about
two hundred or so pirates left, and by seventeen thirty
the last Golden Age pirate, a French Olivier Lebouse. I

(51:28):
don't know. He was hanged on the beach. His tombstone
is still visited by admirers almost every night to this day.
And what about women, What about those women pirates? You
promised me a polycuel That's like, okay, that is what
I was thinking. Yeah, if I were an actual historian
instead of a read pop history books and craft together

(51:50):
the most accurate narrative I can, girl, i'd research more
about the women who worked on the shore and see
if there's a story about women and power there. But
I don't know that story. The story I know is
about the two women who were known to be pirates
during this time, Mary Reid and Bonnie. The fact that
both of them were on the same boat at the
same time really implies that it's quite possible there were

(52:11):
a lot more women on a lot of other boats besides.
And also they were on this like part of this
tiny fucking crew. I think it was like fifteen people
on the fucking Someone knows the number, and I don't
because I didn't write it in the scriptum, you look
like you're about to No, I mean, I just I
let's let's talk about these two first. But then I
would love to talk more about people assigned female at

(52:36):
birth ending up on ships. Yeah, representing various different genders. Okay,
well I'll give you a cue. That was a thing. Yeah, okay,
because it's like the fact that they're on the boat
at the same time that said. Okay. The counter argument
is that a lot of pirates get murdered by the state,

(52:58):
and being murdered by the state is a fair effective
means to determine what your body looks like. But we
also know that that fun hating black bart specifically made
a rule no bringing women disguised as men. There weren't
a lot of rules on pirate ships. That is an
oddly specific rule to include. It's like a I don't know,

(53:19):
no sneaking up behind me and clapping really loud, but
while I'm while I'm loading my gun, like it's like,
clearly that happened, and so yeah, that is a I
am you have given a talk about this very subject,
and I am curious. Yeah, I did a I was
on a panel on queer sailors while back for a

(53:43):
museum here in New York City. We can include the
link to that talk in the show notes. I think
we have that technology, but it wasn't specifically about pirates,
but I think we can assume that, like some of
the things that were true of sailors true of pirates,
and one of the things that was like true of

(54:04):
sailors and ships in the in the age of sail
is that there were a lot more afab people on
board than people typically think. And like part of that
was any time a ship was in port, there were
women coming aboard. Sometimes they were sex workers, sometimes they
were girlfriends or wives or family. Usually they would leave

(54:29):
when the ship left port, but not always. Often they
were supposed to leave but wouldn't. And there's like definitely
records of that being like an issue of that being
sort of an accepted like thing that people turned to
blind eye too, because there was a lot of domestic
labor that they, like captains were kind of okay with

(54:53):
having somebody around to do someone's going to wash the
blood pants exactly. But there was a also a this
is sort of a half baked idea that I've come
up with your your previous guest, Hugh Ryan probably would
like have a lot to say about this half baked

(55:13):
idea that I have, But basically my ideas, you know,
insofar as sex and gender are social constructs that have
and continue to evolve over time and in different cultures.
In the like seventeenth eighteenth nineteenth century, in the you know,

(55:34):
European countries that were participating in in this like age
of sail that we're talking about, there was a gender
called sailor where somebody who was a sailor had a
particular like form of accepted gender and sexual expression that

(55:54):
overlapped with, but was not analogous to the gender of
like man and boy, and could often and was a
was a form of gender identity that was like much
more fluid in terms of sexuality, where Like, if you
were a you know, man on land, it might be
very expected that you would, for example, not have sex

(56:16):
with other men, and that expectation didn't necessarily carry over
to sailors, yeah, who were much more likely to be
openly having sex with other men. But it also included
people who were assigned female at birth, and the fact
that they were taking on the role of sailor could
like help them to get away with that in a

(56:41):
way they would not have been able to get away
with it on land. And part of how we know
that this happened is we have like specific records of
people that were Usually what would happen is somebody would
like get a really dire injury, and they would often
be somebody who had a reputation for being like this
really tough guy who like, oh, yeah, did you hear
he like got shot in the leg that one time,

(57:01):
and he like treated it himself, wouldn't let the doctor
nare in, you know, and then at some point he
would be really sick or really injured and a doctor
would examine him and be like, oh, and when this happened,
it often happened in the navy, So they would find
somebody in the you know, in the British Navy who
had been serving for years and had a really great

(57:23):
reputation and then like, oh, whoops, turns out turns out
this person was assigned female at birth. What they would
have said at the time was this was a woman
disguised as a man, and then they would be like, well,
this person can't be in the navy anymore. But also
they kind of rule so we like definitely have a
few records of the captain basically saying like, well, shit,

(57:45):
here's a pension out of my own pocket. You did great,
it's been great having you here. We're going to put
you ashore now. And then the person would go ashore
and he would like, I'm gonna say he becaus like Frankly,
historians are very open about needing very little little evidence
to assume that somebody is SIS, So I'm going to
accept very little evidence. Um, actually, it feels like a

(58:08):
lot of evidence to assume somebody has trans as a
man exactly. Yeah, I think we'll take that as a sign.
But he would like go back to land and write
a book about like the time I ran away to
See and people would love it and they'd be like, oh,
that was so cool, Like tell us again about the
time you ran away to see. And part of the

(58:30):
narrative was almost always well, I ran away to see
to chase my boyfriend, who is real. He goes to
another school, he's from Canada, And that part of the
story never holds up because they're always like, oh, I
joined the Navy to find my boyfriend, and it's like, oh,
the Navy, the one that has thousands of ships and

(58:52):
you have no control over which one you'll be assigned to. Yeah,
you know, you would have much better like finding him
if you just like hung around on land in the
last place he saw you. Yeah right. And also the
other thing casting suspicion on the I went following my
boyfriend thing is that like often these people had like
a strong reputation for being womanizers and patronizing sex workers. Yeah,

(59:15):
one of them that we have a really good record of,
which means the sex workers are good to keeping a secret,
Oh yeah, for sure. Or also sometimes these people married
and their wives had no idea either, because like sexual
marriage is an awkward thing sometimes, yeah, exactly. But one

(59:36):
one of them that we have a really good record of,
he was injured at sea and then like retired on
land and got a job in a shipyard, like working
with a bunch of other people who are like probably
mostly sailors who had gotten injured and retired on land.
And at a certain point, if I'm remembering right, it
was because like somebody that he had dated or who
had wanted to date him was mad at him, circulated

(59:58):
a rumor that he was a woman, and he gets
confronted by like the guys at the shipyard and they're like,
is this true? And he according to his account, this
is like what he wrote down. He like, He's like, well,
this is it, and he confesses everything to them and
tells them his whole story and they go, yeah, I
knew you couldn't be a woman. I told all the

(01:00:19):
guys he wouldn't be such a ladies man if he
were secretly a woman. Will tell them all you're a
real dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, and just like goes
back to work. Yeah. So there really did seem to
be something at the time where the way that people
were men at sea allowed for more fluidity in terms

(01:00:41):
of both sexual expression and in terms of like what
you're assigned sex at birth might or might not have been.
I think that makes a lot of sense. I want
to posit the possibility that pirate culture, and it's like
part of its conscious inversion of Western civilization, which it
it did a lot of different things with might have

(01:01:03):
had to women dressed as men but not passing and
not be expected to pass. And I'll make that case
with Mary Ren and Bonnie in a second. Yeah. Well,
and and this goes to part part of what I
think drove the gender of sailor to be different from

(01:01:25):
the gender of man. Again, this is just like a
thing I made up, and I don't know if anybody
would anybody who knows things about gender theory and history
would agree with me. But like, is that often sailors
were really young, So like you might not have a beard, right,
and people might not give a shit, right, because that's
not part of what they're like thinking is when they're

(01:01:47):
looking at you and deciding, like, is that a real sailor?
Because is that somebody who belongs here? I wonder whether, um,
the average age of a Golden Age pirate is twenty seven,
off the top of my head, which I'm guessing is
older than the average age of the average navy sailor
in the same era. There would be older sailors on ships,

(01:02:09):
but there would also be like ridiculously young people on ships. Yeah, right,
so like people who were like children by any standards, right, yeah,
but they would be participating fully in a lot of
like the stuff that was happening on the ship. So like,
if you're like looking around at a crew thinking like, well,
is there anybody here who doesn't belong A face without

(01:02:32):
a beard on it is not going to stand out. No,
but that's not the Oh let me let me tell
you about this story and Bonnie Mary that you've heard
a million times, but let me let me get your
take up. But I feel like you're going to tell
it better more than almost anything else in the Book
of Pirates. Their lives are likely embellished earlier editions wink wink,

(01:02:53):
nudge nudge that they were fucking each other later editions
or like, yeah, they're totally fucking The first edition had
engravings of them in men's clothing. Later editions had them
vests and coast coats open to their bellies like somewhere
between like tits out and just lots of cleavage, both
pieces of art rule. Don't get me wrong. The author

(01:03:14):
goes at great length to be like, oh, and the
story about these two totally not made up. I know
this one. It sounds crazy, but it's totally true. Why
do I know more than anyone else was able to
get from court records about these two people Because I'm
good at my job and ask the right questions and
so definitely didn't just make it up. Yeah, this author

(01:03:36):
anonymous author doth protest too much or ah, wait, what
if I can't remember which one survives the story? What
if she wrote the book about pirates. I assume that
both their backstories are made up. There's an emphasis in
both stories about them being from broken homes, about having
their parents dressed them up as boys in order to
get around infidelity, claims, shit like that. That was another

(01:03:59):
excuse that people often cooked up in there, like why
I had to run away to see as a man? Yeah, like,
oh well I was my mom dressed me as a
boy because of reasons. Yeah, anyway, I've been dressed as
a boy ever since. Yeah, definitely not a man, you know, Yeah,
definitely not just like an eighteenth century trans dude. Yeah,

(01:04:19):
but there's there's arguments about how they presented on board,
and everyone is really certain of their arguments. Some folks
claim they passed as men, others claim that they lived
openly as women, and others as um And this is
this is actually what I believe based I could be wrong,
but based on other history, like Isabel Everhart see the
episode on her and just centuries later a different culture,

(01:04:41):
but she's like presenting as a man and not passing,
and no one thinks she's passing and no one cares
because she's presenting as a man and they're accepting her
as a man. I believe as possible they were accepted
as men despite not fooling anyone. One survivor of their
attacks verifies this last theory from my point of view
by basically being like, yeah, they were addressed as men,
but they had like huge tits. You could totally tell

(01:05:02):
they were women. And that wasn't from the Book of Lies.
That was a survivor's account of an attack. Yeah, and
so like, because the other stuff will be a little
bit like a lot of the history is like they
totally went into battle with their tits out to scare dudes,

(01:05:25):
which nothing scarier than tits. I know, I mean to
some people, but I you know, whatever, if they did,
more fucking power to them. But there's definitely a story
that I've read about one of them that like she
would fight men and then just as she killed them,
she would flash her tits at them so that they
would know they were killed by a woman. Yeah. Have

(01:05:48):
you thought for a second about fight logistics? Yeah, like, like,
gotta be really precise with your killing this dude to
be like, oh, he's definitely killed enough that he's not
going to stab me while I'm unlacing my shirt. But
he's definitely not killed enough that he's gonna see these
boobs later. Come on, this didn't happen. No, But the

(01:06:08):
fact that I don't know, it just sounds like they
didn't bind, Like yeah, which they could have. I mean,
maybe they did and it wasn't enough, or I you know,
I don't know, but like or maybe that victim later
was like making some shit up. I don't know, but like,
so that's my guess at least about how they lived.

(01:06:31):
So Mary Reid, or she was known more often Mark Reid,
was born in England. You can't fault anyone for that,
specifically if they declare war against all of the world,
including England. Eventually born in about sixteen eighty five, Supposedly,
she starts cross dressing super young because her mother had
married a sailor and born him a son and did
the thing that sailors did at the time, which is die.

(01:06:51):
So she started sucking someone else and then she got
pregnant had a daughter, but she still wanted the money
from the mom. Wait, she got pregnant and she wasn't married.
She oh, which probably Um, she still want a child
support from the dead husband's mom, so she like lies
and claims that this is her son. The reason that
this doesn't necessarily hold up to me is like, why

(01:07:12):
would because I assume Mary Reid went by Mark read
because it's almost the same fucking name, right, um, and
that is like a classic transfer cross dressing thing to do.
But why would she have a boy's name as a
kid that was her brother? Like unless her mother, Yeah,
wouldn't she have been going by the name of whether
she was pretending to be Yeah? Also was the brother dead? Yea,

(01:07:34):
Oh okay, sorry, you probably said that. I don't know
if I did, so. She she's probably starts again. This
is the according to the myth version. Once she's a pirate,
we feel like we know a little bit more about
what actually happened. But her backstory whatever. Um. She started
working as a footboy, which is a coach attendant more

(01:07:54):
or less. Um. At thirteen, she joins the army that
joins the navy. Right, yeah, yeah, I could I see
what you're saying about. You know, what a surprise, they're
not all beardy. She starts fucking this other soldier, they
get hitched, They use a bunch of money. When she's
like supposedly, she's like, I've been a girl this whole time,

(01:08:14):
and everyone's like, oh ha ha, that's so great. Here's
a bunch of money. And so they go and they
open This is what actually would happen, because people were
just like, I mean, it's so cool. You just wanted
to kill some French guys, Like okay, what a could
fault you? And so she starts pretending she's a girl
when she opens the inn. And then her husband died.
No one says, how at least that I've found And

(01:08:38):
since we're making shit up whole cloth, I say she
poisoned him and then went back to being Mark Reid
and joined the crew of a merchant ship and then
thank fuck, it was captured by pirates and she joins
up right away. She pirates for a while, she has
her fun, then she takes the king's pardon, and this
is in seventeen eighteen or seventeen nineteen, and she becomes

(01:08:58):
a privateer for a minute, but she doesn't really like
taking orders, so they mutiny and become pirates again. In
seventeen twenty, she joins the crew of Calico Jack Will
get to him a second, and Bonnie, he had a
very good flag. Tell me about it in a moment
when we get to him. Sure, and Bonnie, she's like

(01:09:19):
ten or fifteen years younger than Mark Reid. And the
thing about poor people as no one really records their birth.
She might have been born in sixteen ninety seven. She's Irish.
She's probably born to the serving This we actually heard
backstories a little bit more verifiable because her dad's rich.
She's born to the serving woman of a lawyer who
wasn't supposed to be fucking the aforementioned serving woman, but

(01:09:42):
her dad claimed her because he didn't like his wife.
So they moved to London. Then they move and supposedly
start dressing Anne as a boy named Andy. Maybe that happened,
and then they moved to the Carolinas, which is now
the US South or Carolina rather. When she's eighteen or nineteen,
she falls in love with a bad boy, a small

(01:10:02):
time pirate named James Bonnie. And this guy is gold digging.
He wants the lawyer dad money. Wait wait chives BONDI
or oh my god. I was like I was like,
I was like, wait a second, that's too good. Let's
just go with James Bondy. Okay, yeah, all right, So

(01:10:23):
James bond do you just say he was gold digging though, yeah,
he's gold digging. I know he's oh shit. Okay. So
because her her lawyer turned plantation owner now in the
Carolina's huh oh, he wants that dad money. But too bad,
she gets disinherited because she's dating a pirate. It is possible,

(01:10:46):
you'll get that. Yeah, it is possible. I don't believe it,
but we'll go with it. She sets fired or dad's
plantation and revenge. It's also possible she stabbed a girl
when she was thirteen. It's also possible that's made up
so her failed gold digger James Bondy. They moved to Nassau,
which is a pirate town. Soon enough, the piece of
shit husband starts snitching on pirates to the new governor.

(01:11:09):
This is the aforementioned Infiltrator into the Pirates. Anne isn't
happy about this, does not approve of marrying a pirate.
Only'd find out does she stab him in the back metaphorically? Okay,
by fucking this way, cooler, non snitchy pirate Calico Jack

(01:11:29):
Calico He's trying to be kind of upstanding here. He
goes to the husband and is like, look, I'll give
you money if you just divorce my girlfriend, and James
Bondi is like, no, I can't do that. So she's like,
all right, well fuck you, and so she just skips. You.
Haven't done a voice for anybody in this story, but

(01:11:51):
Dan's Bondi's shitty first husband gets a voice yea, and
so she joins. She runs away with her way cooler
pirate boyfriend and becomes a pirate herself, divorces her husband,
and Mary's calico Calico Jack. We don't know his backstory
because he wasn't a woman. Included in the Eat, Prey,

(01:12:11):
Love of Pirates. In order to sell copies, no one
bothered to make up a backstory for him. He was
probably born in sixteen eighty two in England. He was
quartermaster to a guy named a pirate named Charles Vane.
Quartermaster isn't just the person who looks after the supplies.
It's sort of the sergeant who goes between the crew
and the captain. One day, Charles Vane is like, hey,
we're going to run from this big ship instead of

(01:12:32):
taking it Calico Jack is like, we shouldn't run that,
you're a coward. So it was put to a vote
about whether or not Captain Vane was a coward, and
the crew decided that Captain Vane was a coward. All
these pirates of released sick last names anyway, especially Nathaniel missed,
who isn't a pirate, but we've decided it now he
should have been yeah, really, you know what he did.

(01:12:54):
He missed his call? Oh god, dear, okay, okay, now,
so all right, and that's why. And that was the
last time Miriam was invited on this podcast. So the
dissenters are given one of the ships so vain and
like the like fifteen people are so out of the

(01:13:15):
like hundred people on the ship, fuck off him. One
of the other ships in the fleet. Calico Jack becomes captain.
He then takes the King's pardon in seventeen nineteen. But
then he meets Anne Bonnie and he's like, damn girl,
you want to go be pirates and she's like, fun, yeah,
I do, And so they go have to go be pirates,
and now all three are on board together. And the
story and the Eat Prey Love version is that Mary

(01:13:38):
Kalico's wife, is like, you know, this new guy is
hot and goes to Anne and is like, what's up.
You want to bone I'm secretly a lady and Anne
is like, alas, I cannot for I too, am secretly
a woman. And then they some way for us to
have sex. You know, they gaze longingly at a Parasoian
scissors and they become historically close friends. I call bullshit

(01:13:59):
on that, as does basically every historian who's read it.
I think they become a power trio, although Mary is
possibly fucking another guy on the crew, but I don't think.
I mean everyone in the crew's fucking other people on
the crew. They're pirates, yeah, and on pirate ships people
fuck each other like many polycules. It was not to last.

(01:14:22):
While they were being gay and doing crime in a
very literal way, the crime part got them in trouble.
Like literally, this only lasts a couple of months. This
is like the great thing, and like like I was
all set to have this episode be like and this
is where I finally doing more research about Mary and Bonnie,
and then I'm like, there's no information about them. It's
all lies. And they were together for like three months. Yeah. No,

(01:14:45):
they had like one weird summer vacation, like yeah, totally
not have a career. No, I mean they did separately
before all three of them got together. But yeah, yeah,
can I tell you about Calico Jack's plass. Oh it
is the fucking pirate classic. It is a skull over
two crossed cutlasses. Sick fuck. Yeah, yeah, no, it's he

(01:15:09):
nailed it. Like he was a shitty pirates as you're
about to get into. He was not good at his job,
but he fucking ruled it flag design. I mean like
he just wanted to dress nice, get drunk and fuck
a bunch of people, and who amongst us being a
pop star hadn't been invented yet. He's like to be
a pirate. Yeah, he went down in history for fucking

(01:15:31):
some famous ladies. So they only last for a couple
of months. It gets referred to as terrorizing fishers on
the Jamaican shore before a pirate hunter gets them. That's
such like low grade piracy. If you're terrifying fishers, like,
come on, I think they're terrified like the Navy or something.
I know. But the thing is is it refers to

(01:15:52):
as terrorizing fishers I'm sure they robbed a fuck town
of fishers, but they also get caught because they're drunk
with some fishers. Yeah, the Turtlers specifically. Actually, the version
of the story I've always heard is that Anne, Bonnie,
and Mary Read were the almost people on board. Yeah, okay,
so they're clearly terrorizing some fishers and chilling with other
fishers because most likely, either the night before they get caught,

(01:16:15):
the crew stays up late drinking and partying with some Turtlers,
or it's literally the day that they are caught they're
drunk with some Turtlers. Either way, possibly Halloween Day seventeen twenty,
the crew is either drunk or hungover, except for Mary
Read and Bonnie and some other guy. They're attacked. All

(01:16:36):
the men except the anonymous guy for the Wind are
hiding below decks, and again this is the legend depart
but whatever, its fucking This is the part where I'm like,
I'm into the legend at this point. Yeah, no, I Bellie,
don't care if this part is true. It's part of
the story. Mary Ann and the anonymously got anonymous guy
defend the ship. Mary Reid is fucking furious, so she

(01:16:57):
starts firing shots into the hold, killing one of the
cowards and wounding another. They lose because there's literally three
of them, and every one of them is too busy
shooting at the guys who won't fight. Yeah, I'm not
mad about that, which I can understand. You know, Congress
in the face of battle has been a capital offense
in almost every army that's existed. It's also just very annoying. Yeah,

(01:17:25):
everyone's captured. They're all put on trial. The two women
plead their bellies aka, you can't kill us, we're pregnant.
The men are sentenced to death. Supposedly, Anne gets permission
to go to her husband's sell somehow or another, and
her last words to her husband fucking rule. Yes they do. Yeah,
had you fought like a man, you need not be

(01:17:46):
been hanged like a dog. That's the part where I'm like,
I don't know if that's true, but that's metal as hell. Yeah. Yeah.
Mary Reid died of a fever in jail, probably before
she had her kid, because there's no record of the
kid being buried. And Bonnie she disappears from the historical record.

(01:18:07):
Maybe she was released, maybe she escaped, probably not, but
you know, I'd like to imagine she's probably hanging out
with the Witch of well Fleet. There's a death record
in seventeen thirty three of an Ann Bonnie in Jamaica.
It's spelled a little differently, but who fucking knows. This
spelling hadn't been invented yet either. Yeah, that's probably her.
Other legends say that she moved to South Carolina and
lived till seventeen eighty two. I hope she lived long.

(01:18:30):
Who fucking knows. That's the pirates, that's what I got.
I also, I don't know that we have any reason
to think they were actually pregnant. I remember they got inspected.
I think, yeah, is there a I mean, I don't know,
fucking gynological science of the early eighteenth century. I think

(01:18:54):
it would. I mean, it depends, like how pregnant a
person is, whether that could be diagnosed by, you know,
presumably like some local midwife, yeah, groping their belly. But um,
I sort of suspect they just were like, but we
were ladies on a pirate ship, of course we're pregnant.
And everyone was like, that's probably true. Yeah, more power

(01:19:16):
to them if that's the case, you know, because one
thing we do not have a record of is either
of them giving birth? Like yeah, it's a good yeah,
all right, No, you've convinced me they're fucking liar. En.
They deserve to die in jail because they lied. That's
the only thing they did wrong, not the just yeah,

(01:19:39):
terrorizing fishers, that is. I hadn't heard that phrase before.
And that's that's kind of a bummer. That's not the like,
that's not the glamorous pirate life you want to imagine
for the No, the queer poly pirates of everybody's fantasies. No. Uh,
it turns out people who do crime for a living
usually suck. But so what does everyone else? I mean,

(01:20:02):
if you think of it as like not that they
were doing crime for a living, but that they were
participating in the capitalist extraction of wealth from colonized places
but illegally, it's like not that surprising that they sucked. Yeah,
well that's been another moral complexity unique on behind the

(01:20:26):
cool people or what's this podcast called cool people who
were bastards? I think it's called cool people who were bastards. Honestly,
that sums up that sums up pirates because they were
definitely cool. Yeah, like the esthetic flawless. The stuff they
did very badass, very dangerous. Like. They were definitely not cowards.

(01:20:49):
They were definitely like people with some like very very
cool skills and very cool like ability to just like
plunge into battle and all that shit. But they were
also bastard. Yeah, so I think that works here. At
the end of all things, you guiding the plug like

(01:21:10):
you're reading that the talk if you want to hear
more stuff about um sailor gender and also here's some
gay sea shanties. Um, you can follow up with that
link that will be in the show notes. Yeah. I

(01:21:31):
have another podcast. It's called Live Like the World Is Dying.
You can listen to it wherever. Wherever you're listening to
this fucking podcast, um, unless you're listening to it on
a website that only has this on it. I don't
think that exists, So you can go listen to it.
It's about how to live like the world is dying.
I go for very literal titling, much like eighteenth century

(01:21:55):
people who write books. Sophiaio, your next podcast title better
be like fifty words long and include a semicolon, Sophie.
Will that work? Sure? Yes, I got permission. A true
and accurate history of the anarchists who in so doing. Wherefore,

(01:22:20):
all right, bye everyone, see you next week. Bye. Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
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