216: Pirates of the Caribbean with Colin Woodard

00:04:18:26 – 00:04:32:01
Dan LeFebvre
The first movie in the franchise is The Curse of the Black Pearl, and it sets up one of the primary locations where a lot of the stories really throughout the entire franchise take place. Port Royal was Port Royal a real place.

00:04:32:12 – 00:04:59:17
Colin Woodard
Port Royal was a attempt shortened and rather by the port in Jamaica. It was for a long time Jamaica’s primary port and therefore in the whole English and later British, you know, Americas, that was the primary hub for their Caribbean operations. The Empire, Jamaica, that was sort of the headquarters of the British fleet, protecting their possessions in the West Indies in the the largest presence for the English and British there.

00:04:59:18 – 00:05:23:18
Colin Woodard
However, where Disney has kind of taken a flight of fancy or taken advantage of of flexible narratives in television. Port Royal had been largely destroyed by the time the pirate outbreak came out. There was a terror. It was located on the peninsula, jutting out into into the into a harbor behind what’s what was what was Kingston, which became the real port for the Jamaica.

00:05:23:26 – 00:05:49:14
Colin Woodard
And there was a terrible earthquake that essentially caused the sandy structure of the peninsula to collapse, along with, like half the town drowning many people and pretty much Port Royal never recovered from that. And that would have occurred when the pirates who make up the real golden age pirate boom, from which all of our mythology and cultural references to Pirates of the Caribbean comes from those those.

00:05:49:17 – 00:06:11:11
Colin Woodard
They would have been children at that time when port oil was destroyed. It was sort of a legendary place, not exactly of pirates, but of the Buccaneers generation who preceded them, who weren’t in general pirates in the sense that they were outlaws from the perspective of their own governments. So the real piracy outbreak took place somewhere else, not in Port Royal.

00:06:11:22 – 00:06:23:09
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Well, you mentioned the time there. I want to ask you about that, because the movie doesn’t really let us know what time period as this is taking place would have been the 1617 hundreds one word that the pirates.

00:06:23:20 – 00:06:57:27
Colin Woodard
The other pirate outbreak that that inspired all the pirates in fiction. And eventually the Pirates of the Caribbean movies took place between 1714 and 1719 in the Caribbean. And then many of the pirates who survived moved on into Africa, and especially the Indian Ocean, for sort of an epilog time period. But the great pirate outbreak was sort of the early part of the 1700s and was dubbed not at Port Royal, but around Nassau in the Bahamas, which was their pirates nest.

00:06:58:08 – 00:07:25:09
Colin Woodard
And it was sort of a key book after most of the pirates had been captured, but some of them were still alive. That was published in 1724 called The General History of the Pirates, spelled with a Y and it was that book written by an author using a pseudonym who was not Daniel Defoe, but rather somebody else was the book that really became a bestseller at the time in 1724 on both sides of the Atlantic.

00:07:25:18 – 00:07:54:03
Colin Woodard
And it set up all of the received myths and stories about the pirates, which become the grist for all of Europe. There are pirate legends and pirate pop culture. That was the book that, you know, Robert Louis Stevenson would later find when he wrote Treasure Island and kidnaped and thus ended up inspiring in a secondary sense, the early Disney films, The Black and Whites of Blackbeard and others, and then eventually the the more recent Pirates of the Caribbean series with Johnny Depp.

00:07:54:13 – 00:08:00:25
Dan LeFebvre
So it really just kind of started trailing off even further and further from that book, kind of just everybody kind of writing their own fiction and trailing. Yeah.

00:08:01:04 – 00:08:20:16
Colin Woodard
I mean, and that book was funny because it’s a combination. Some passages are exactly correct and quoted almost verbatim from what at the time would have been sort of secret or privileged government documents the author was given access to and other parts. We can prove our complete flights of fantasy made up to be exciting and and give good stories.

00:08:20:16 – 00:08:41:16
Colin Woodard
And there’s other parts where we we can’t prove it one way or another because the the source documents would be missing. But you can make pretty good guesses after you kind of follow the pattern for a while. But that book so that was 1724. Right. And that’s kind of the gives you a bookend because the moment where the mythology really kicks off is in 1724 after that big pirate outbreak.

00:08:41:16 – 00:09:04:23
Colin Woodard
And the pirates that are traced in that book start legitimately enough with the sort of, you know, the the avatar, the precursor and inspiration figure for that generation of pirates. A man named Henry Avery who committed a was the subject of a global manhunt in 1696 for depredations in the Indian Ocean and led him to come to Nassau to sell his to sell his ill gotten gains.

00:09:04:23 – 00:09:30:10
Colin Woodard
But that’s the time period, really. 1696 is the inspirational figure. And then 17, 14, 17, 19, 17, 20 and 21 outside the Caribbean was kind of the core of the era that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are trying to replicate. They, of course, are very fuzzy about exactly when it takes place. But the technology of the time and most of the references and what they’re talking about are events that would have taken place of them.

00:09:30:18 – 00:09:46:27
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay. Well, go back to that first movie. At the very beginning of it, the character of Elizabeth one invokes Parlay. She says, and I’ll quote from the movie, According to the Code of the Brethren set down by the Pirates, Morgan and Bartholomew, you have to take me to your captain. And there’s a few things to unpack there.

00:09:47:03 – 00:09:52:20
Dan LeFebvre
Was parlay a real thing? Was there a pirate code? And were Morgan and Bartholomew real people?

00:09:53:23 – 00:10:14:04
Colin Woodard
I mean, a concept of parlay, generally speaking, existed in sort of the way warfare was conducted in that era. You know, this was still in formal warfare. It was still that sort of gentlemanly time where you’d all wear proper uniforms, assemble on a field, and marched on each other to be shot sort of things. And people will come, you know, sit on the hillside and watch the battle for entertainment.

00:10:14:14 – 00:10:35:16
Colin Woodard
But on, you know, in that era, you you’d wait. You could wave a white handkerchief or flag and, you know, march out with your flags and have a parlay, have a discussion between the commanders or emissaries of the two forces to discuss usually terms of surrender or something or other. So the general concept of the flag of truce and to parlay, to talk and discuss existed.

00:10:35:22 – 00:11:01:09
Colin Woodard
But I’ve seen no evidence that the pirates themselves practiced parlay. I’ve never heard any references of that happening, nor that there was any specific pilot parlaying in their specific ethical culture and codes of behavior. The pirates did have, you know, ships, you know, contracts, ships, codes of that. Everyone would agree to their sort of articles of agreement becoming pirates.

00:11:01:16 – 00:11:31:24
Colin Woodard
The most famous one to survive was captured when the pirate Bartholomew Roberts was captured a bit later in the African theater. But it gives us an example of a full set of articles. It doesn’t mention parlay particularly, and other pirates. There’s lots of references in the real, you know, documents and such to a pirate code or the laws of the ship that seem to correspond on more or less and map to the ones that Bartholomew Roberts was using.

00:11:31:24 – 00:11:44:11
Colin Woodard
So in other words, there were these ships codes out there, but they don’t appear to you know, each ship would have had their own set of codes. They’re probably largely similar, but parlay was not a major feature.

00:11:44:14 – 00:11:52:29
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. And it sounds like maybe that’s where they even got the name Bartholomew from, even though the impression I got from the movie was that the last name? But it sounds like I mean, it still sounds pirate. Yeah.

00:11:54:09 – 00:12:17:12
Colin Woodard
So they’ve taken, you know, Sir Henry Morgan’s name and thrown it out there. Henry Morgan was a, you know, a privateer, you know, a generation or two earlier. He wasn’t really a pirate. He was a pirate from the perspective of the Spanish and the people he’s attacking. But, you know, in in he was so successful at what he was doing back then that when he got back home, you know, the sovereign, you know, made him Sir Henry Morgan and made him governor of Jamaica.

00:12:17:12 – 00:12:41:26
Colin Woodard
He wasn’t an outlaw at all. He was did terrible things, but he was not a pirate. And then, yes, Bartholomew Roberts appears to be where they borrowed the name Bartholomew, a pirate who probably was in the Caribbean theater as an ordinary pirate and sailor. And after the pirates were evicted from the Caribbean Theater circa 17, 18, 17, 19, he later emerges among the diaspora, the refugees Pirates of the Caribbean.

00:12:42:04 – 00:12:50:08
Colin Woodard
He emerges in Africa, in the Indian Ocean Theater is one of the most fearsome pirates of the Epilog period. As I think the book.

00:12:50:08 – 00:13:08:23
Dan LeFebvre
Since it is in the title of the first movie, I want to ask about The Black Pearl as a ship. And according to the movie, there are two very fast ships. The Navy ship is called the Interceptor and it said to be the fastest ship. But then there’s the black pearl that gains honor. And of course, there seems to be some supernatural boost that the Pearl has in the movie.

00:13:08:23 – 00:13:12:26
Dan LeFebvre
But for ships like we see in the movie, how fast are we talking? How fast would they go?

00:13:13:13 – 00:13:34:02
Colin Woodard
Well, they’re pretty fast for age of sail. I mean, a frigate under I mean, it depends on the conditions you’re in, right? Whether you’re sailing into the wind, the winds behind you, you know, the points of sale. How fast is the wind? Is your ship in good shape? But, you know, a top speed of a warship, like a frigate, a pretty flexible one, might be about 14 knots.

00:13:34:02 – 00:13:56:07
Colin Woodard
You’re talking, what, 15 miles an hour sort of thing. And a huge ship like a, you know, man of a ship of the line with multiple decks of cannon that weren’t exactly designed to be flexible. They were designed for those gentlemanly battles, right where you line up your ships and sail by and shoot at each other, sort of floating fortresses.

00:13:56:07 – 00:14:14:15
Colin Woodard
They might make 12 knots in exactly the right conditions. Your typical merchant vessels, you’re talking eight or nine knots or, you know, ten miles an hour sort of thing. Sounds pretty slow going when you think about it in terms of, you know, the vessels without board motors. But that’s a pretty good clip for a large ship in that era.

00:14:15:08 – 00:14:19:27
Colin Woodard
But yeah, you’re not moving it at the speed of the 21st century for sure.

00:14:20:01 – 00:14:31:06
Dan LeFebvre
Not a speedboats. Yeah. In the second movie, Dead Man’s Chest, one of the major plot points kind of centers around the East India trading company. Was that a rail company?

00:14:31:25 – 00:14:49:06
Colin Woodard
It was. I mean, the East India trading company in the movies is is cast like a you know, a vast, you know, like that the company in the aliens movies and you know all that you know the things that control everything and everyone saw neon in it that it controls imperial trade and maybe the government.

00:14:49:06 – 00:14:49:25
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah.

00:14:50:07 – 00:15:14:06
Colin Woodard
Well that’s pretty much what the East India Company was, both the English and later British East India Company and its Dutch rival, the Dutch East India Company were these vast global trading companies that acted like empires unto themselves. You know, at its height, the British East India Company had an army of like 200,000 people of its own, which was like twice the size of Britain’s actual army.

00:15:14:18 – 00:15:47:11
Colin Woodard
And they, in effect, would rise to become I mean, they they controlled their own empire, including large swaths of India. Were actually owned by the company rather than anybody else. And they were trading all over the world with fantastical profits and, of course, had enormous political power back in England. So in that sense, they’re describing the East India Company correctly as being your sort of nemesis in the film, except for the fact that it’s the East India Company and its charter granted it a monopoly of trade with the Indian Ocean Theater, the East Indies and India.

00:15:47:21 – 00:16:08:09
Colin Woodard
So they actually weren’t allowed during the era of piracy to be trading in the Americas at all in the West Indies would be what the Caribbean would have been called, then they would be prohibited from it. So they had no involvement and no influence directly over American affairs until the 1770s, like the period of the American Revolution, when they were granted a dispensation to trade tea.

00:16:08:09 – 00:16:32:04
Colin Woodard
One of the big things you were going to India for was to collect tea, which was all the rage in England, and they were allowed finally to trade with the American colonies, to trade tea specifically, but they actually had to stop in England first even to do that. So that’s why we think of the East India Company when we think of the Boston Tea Party because in fact those were East India Company vessels that they were tossing the tea off.

00:16:32:09 – 00:17:07:12
Colin Woodard
But you go back 60 years earlier to the era of the Pirates and East India Company vessels wouldn’t have been there at all. Although I understand why Disney looking around for a giant corporate Borg nemesis, might pick that name. There wasn’t an equivalent, you know, board like that operating in the Americas. The biggest, you know, the Royal Africa Company, which was trading slaves in the Triangle trade, taking enslaved people, you know, taking trade goods and manufacturers in England during the first leg of their triangle, trade to Africa to trade the slave forts, to get their human cargoes.

00:17:07:12 – 00:17:25:24
Colin Woodard
And then in this horrible middle passage, the second leg go to the Caribbean, the West Indies, to sell their cargo at slave markets and then loaded with treasure and goodies from that. The proceeds of that would sail back to England. That was the triangle trade. But even then the Royal Africa Company, well, it was making incredible amounts of money.

00:17:26:05 – 00:17:53:15
Colin Woodard
They weren’t it wasn’t like they owned the West Indies colonies. They didn’t have any direct political influence, although they were important economic factor in the slave societies of of the English West Indies. And what would become the American South Carolina’s and and, you know, Georgia and Virginia. So but Jamaica, Barbados, the the Leeward Islands colony and all those were very much tangled up in the trade with the Royal Africa Company.

00:17:54:00 – 00:18:18:20
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Well, I mean, makes sense. I mean, the impression that I get from the movie with the East Indies trading company and of course, their kind of representative is Lord Cutler. Beckett is just kind of the evil villain. Right? And I get the impression that there’s a lot of corruption. And it sounds like if there’s a company that was that huge and had that much political power and military power, it sounds like, too, that there must have been some corruption going on as well.

00:18:18:20 – 00:18:21:00
Dan LeFebvre
You just assume that that’s going to be a thing. Would that be correct?

00:18:21:18 – 00:18:47:07
Colin Woodard
Oh, yes. I mean, the East India Company, you know, the people involved were could be very corrupt and self-serving. So were the governors at the time period throughout the Americas. You know, it was when Henry Avery, this pirate from the 1690s, who’s whose exploits would inspire the great Caribbean pirate outbreak of the early 1700s. He basically was wanted all over the world because he’d messed with the East India Company.

00:18:47:12 – 00:19:16:21
Colin Woodard
He’d gone into the Indian. He had he and his crew had mutinied for good reason on their English vessel, seized control of it and sailed into the Indian Ocean and decided to try to raid the most important figure in India, the grand mogul of India’s treasure ship, as it was returning from Mecca, from the pilgrimage, you know, loaded with treasure and, you know, family members of the mogul and his wives and, you know, they raped and pillaged and stole the ship and, you know, killed lots of people.

00:19:16:28 – 00:19:37:07
Colin Woodard
And this was terrible that the grandmother of India was furious. The East India Company, you know, a lot of their people were arrested. There were threats. They would put them to death or kick the East India Company out of India at the time. So it was a huge disaster. So there’s an all points bulletin. The catch, this guy was like the first time that the East India Company and the Royal Navy and everybody were all trying to chase the same guy.

00:19:37:07 – 00:19:51:20
Colin Woodard
So where does he go? He goes around the world, sneaks away. You know, everyone’s chasing for me in the in the ocean. He went all the way around to the Caribbean, to Nassau, in the Bahamas, and just shows up and says, Oh, yeah, my name’s Henry Bridgman, and I’ve got this giant vessel that looks like an Arab treasure ship.

00:19:51:20 – 00:20:15:29
Colin Woodard
But no, it’s not really. I’ll give it to you and I’ll give you a whole mess of the treasure. And, you know, in exchange for a smallish, he basically fences his goods to the British governor in Nassau, in the Bahamas, then the English governor, and and then say, you know, his men break up and sail around him. Some of them go up to Philadelphia and one of them marries the daughter of the governor of Pennsylvania.

00:20:15:29 – 00:20:45:01
Colin Woodard
Right. So, I mean, that’s how corrupted as the most wanted person in the whole world turns out to be, you know, kind of trading his goods wink, wink, nudge, nudge with the governors themselves. So, yes, an East India company, but through and through, you know, a lot of people were self-dealing in that era. You know, the governor of Virginia in the great piracy or Alexander Spotswood, that set up a bunch of, you know, dummy companies to basically give himself a vast, you know, feudal preserve of land.

00:20:45:10 – 00:20:57:27
Colin Woodard
You know, through sort of blind trust and stuff, which was a named Spotsylvania County and still is after himself and Virginia. Now, it just kind of, you know, corruption was very, very common and the East India Company would have been no exception.

00:20:58:04 – 00:21:08:06
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Wow. Changing gears a little bit. Still in dead man’s chest. Another big concept that we see in that movie is Davy Jones Locker. Was that a real legend that people believed?

00:21:08:27 – 00:21:29:24
Colin Woodard
It was a legend that came again later in the air of the pirates? It doesn’t seem to have existed. The first references to it were in a book published, actually published by Daniel Defoe, the period author in 1726. He makes reference to legends that some sailors believe having to do with. It’s sort of like an evil spirit apparition figure.

00:21:29:24 – 00:21:48:09
Colin Woodard
He’ll be sitting in the rigging, you know, when your ship is going to go down and be, you know, a harbinger of doom. It became this sort of supernatural figure that would be the death of the sailor, usually. And Davy Jones locker was the idea that you’re going to be drowned and taken away by the sea and, you know, end up in his, you know, storage area.

00:21:48:18 – 00:22:06:27
Colin Woodard
So the idea that Davy Jones, his locker was like some quest item that would be worth a lot of money was not ever part of the legend. But there was this this figure apparently among at least English sailors, a sort of supernatural trickster like figure who was who was sort of feared as a as a boogeyman, a poetic boogeyman.

00:22:07:03 – 00:22:26:12
Colin Woodard
But, again, that, you know, seems to appear in the record shortly, you know, seven or eight years after the pirates have been operating. So could could the pirates have been from a generation to believe that? Yeah, maybe. But you don’t hear any references to it in the period documents about the pirates. It’s not something that they were like muttering about, you know, to everyone they ran into.

00:22:26:22 – 00:22:31:08
Colin Woodard
So maybe. Yes, but not as a form of like a quest object.

00:22:31:15 – 00:22:42:09
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. How about the legend of the Kraken? Because that’s something that we see tied to Davy Jones. You bring out the Kraken. Was was that tied to Davy Jones locker or anything like that or any references?

00:22:42:18 – 00:23:00:18
Colin Woodard
Not to my knowledge. I mean, this is going to be a little fuzzy for me because my expertize in research is on these particular pirates. I think the Kraken like evolved what in like Norse mythology or something like that. But the idea that there are sea monsters out there that might encircle your ship and crush it and take it away and it would never be seen again.

00:23:00:18 – 00:23:29:21
Colin Woodard
I think probably was believed by a lot of sailors. I mean, the world was still, you know, somewhat inexplicable and strange things happened out there. And, you know, people believed in the I think, the supernatural to some degree or another that forces out there that we would consider nonscientific to be having a bearing on events. So, yeah, I mean, I didn’t I’ve never encountered any references again in the actual surviving documents associated with these pirates about fear of sea monsters or Kraken and stuff.

00:23:29:21 – 00:23:52:20
Colin Woodard
But, you know, it’s of a piece that people would be fearful of those kind of things if you were creating a movie and you wanted to bring one of the mythologies or true. And bring them to life. Sure. Bring on a crack and or, you know, some serpents or whatever they would be. Definitely part of the pantheon of things that, you know, sailors who were drunk all the time, you know, being given large quantities of rum every day as they’re rationed because they couldn’t drink the water.

00:23:52:26 – 00:23:57:20
Colin Woodard
It probably saw all kinds of stuff, mermaids and who knows what, right? Yeah.

00:23:58:22 – 00:24:08:26
Dan LeFebvre
We talked about Port Royal earlier and another concept that we see in Dead Man’s Chest. And again, kind of throughout the entire franchise is from the other side, the the town or the pirate town of Tortuga. Was that a real place?

00:24:09:14 – 00:24:42:00
Colin Woodard
I mean, Tortuga is a real place and know an island location. But wasn’t the location for a pirate town? I think we just kind of borrowed that name as sounding, you know, appropriate to the region and fair enough. But there were, in fact, real pirate towns, the most famous one being, as I mentioned, the one in Nassau. I mean, essentially this the real piracy outbreak that they’re modeling their story after took place, after right after a colonial war, one of these many wars where England fought France and Spain and so on, that’s called the war of Spanish Secession ended in 1714.

00:24:42:09 – 00:25:02:24
Colin Woodard
And when it ended, as a lot of people were thrown out of work, the trade contracted, the Royal Navy contracted by two thirds, just dumped all their sailors out on the docks of wherever they were. And for surviving sailors could get a berth or get work on a merchant vessel. Because of supply and demand, they were able to slash wages to beyond starvation level.

00:25:02:24 – 00:25:24:27
Colin Woodard
So, you know, a lot of anger out there over the way ordinary people and certainly sailors were treated on ships and Royal Navy ships, sadistic captain and brutal discipline for minor infractions and feeding them, you know, spoiled food and, you know, all kinds of terrible stuff where have having cheating out of wages that was all normal. And so there were a lot of grievances.

00:25:24:27 – 00:25:50:08
Colin Woodard
And after that war ended, there were even greater grievances. This ended up being this big outbreak of piracy taking place at that time, and that during that war, the English colony in the Bahamas Islands had been sacked and destroyed multiple times by the enemy. And the key thing is these pirates who kind of ended up gathering either by mutiny on their vessels or or wanting to go into piracy, moved in first before the empire did.

00:25:50:08 – 00:26:07:27
Colin Woodard
They’re the ones who came to Nassau and shored up the fort and set up a battery in the harbor, basically created a base from which they couldn’t be evicted, an actual sort of pirate republic, if you will. So, yeah, there was this pirate town called in Nassau, in the Bahamas during that period, and there was in the Indian Ocean and Madagascar.

00:26:07:27 – 00:26:28:06
Colin Woodard
There was had been for a long time a sort of, you know, pirate beachcomber. You know, various people hiding out from the law would go to Madagascar, which hadn’t been colonized by Europeans and where the Malagasy people were in rival tribes who kind of thought each other on the island, and you could come ashore and trade with them and form alliances with one tribe against the other.

00:26:28:06 – 00:26:44:21
Colin Woodard
And so there was this whole like, you know, castaway community of pirates and others living there for decades as well. And that was another famous pirate town. So, yes, there were pirate towns. None of them were Tortuga. But yeah, that’s a possibility. Drawing inspired by history.

00:26:44:21 – 00:27:00:20
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the songs that it’s a song that opens the third movie and again, we hear throughout it that oh ho ho, you know, Pirate’s life for me. So I just have to add did pirates sing was that was a classic song the pirate sang or any reference to that.

00:27:01:01 – 00:27:05:24
Colin Woodard
Well, I mean, that particular song was created, I think in the 1960s. For one, the Disney film.

00:27:06:01 – 00:27:07:05
Dan LeFebvre
Was like an actual pirate.

00:27:08:18 – 00:27:36:26
Colin Woodard
What’s his name? George Bruns or something like that is the guy who composed like all those classic, you know, Snow White, the Seven Dwarves soundtracks, Cinderella. And he scored and created that particular song. So that one wasn’t one that the pirates sang. However, sailors saying all the time all kinds of sea chanties, you know, and songs to have the rhythm, you know, in this time period, these were, you know, sailing vessels were like the one giant piece of industrial machinery out there in the free industrial age.

00:27:37:01 – 00:27:55:06
Colin Woodard
You had to have large numbers of people coordinate their actions to make what was the most complicated machine out there work and have to work thousands of miles from home and not have a mishap. So to coordinate, you know, they would often be singing songs to keep their pace and keep the rhythm and keep going to pull this and have everybody pulling at the same time.

00:27:55:06 – 00:28:19:04
Colin Woodard
And they’re also you know, it’s incredibly boring. There’s no TV or Internet and, you know, well, what else do you do? Is there musical instruments and all that? There was a incredibly well developed singing and music of the sea. And, you know, who are the pirates? You know, 99% of them were sailors who went into piracy. So they’re all the traditions of the sailing world at the time were also the pirates traditions.

00:28:19:09 – 00:28:38:27
Colin Woodard
And that goes for peg legs and, you know, having patches over your eye and parrots on your shoulder. That’s all true of merchant sailors at the time. Incredibly dangerous plays, cargoes rolling around. That’s all in barrels. You all you know, you get in combat and injured and you know that you lost eyes and limbs and hands all the time.

00:28:39:06 – 00:28:57:01
Colin Woodard
Thus peg legs and eye patches and hooks for hands and and exotic animals were like incredibly cool thing for that long trip home and to show off when you got home, you might have a colorful parrot. You could teach them to talk, right? Birds that can talk. It’s like. It’s like the magic of the Kraken or whatever. You can bring it home on your shoulder.

00:28:57:01 – 00:29:06:20
Colin Woodard
The magic is real, right? So yeah, well, also, you know, entertain yourself as well. So yeah, all a lot of those things were true of pirates because they were true of sailors in general, including the songs.

00:29:06:25 – 00:29:13:02
Dan LeFebvre
And I’m sure the ration of rum also helped with a lot of those injuries and the songs.

00:29:13:28 – 00:29:32:05
Colin Woodard
All of that. I mean, just the amount of I can’t remember, you know, what the ration was for Royal Navy sailors. But it’s absolutely shocking just how much they were drinking because they couldn’t trust the water supplies. They’re dehydrated. They’re out there in, you know, warm clothes with no sunblock on. And, you know, yeah, it’s amazing that they were able to stand up at all.

00:29:33:23 – 00:29:58:01
Dan LeFebvre
Well, a key concept that we see in at World’s End is the Brethren courts. And that’s where in the movie we see the Pirate Lords. They’re pirates from all around the world. They come and they vote a pirate king. The impression that I got from the movie that the Pirates were kind of a form of organized crime, kind of like, you know, different mafia families where they really that organized.

00:29:58:15 – 00:30:17:16
Colin Woodard
They weren’t that organized. I mean, the movie is taking something that vaguely has parallels in reality and amping it way up out of control. So the main reason that it couldn’t get that developed is none of the pirates survived very long. It wasn’t like, you know, a pirate would have a 40 year career and then passed down his legacy to the next pirate.

00:30:17:22 – 00:30:38:03
Colin Woodard
You know, most pirates, you know, died within a year or two of going into piracy. It was an incredibly dangerous occupation. The the reason that this particular golden age gang of pirates, as I describe them, that operate out of the Bahamas, it was Blackbeard Steed Bonnet, you know, Sam Bellamy, the women pirates, Mary Reed and Bonny Calico, Jack Rackham.

00:30:38:03 – 00:30:56:21
Colin Woodard
All of these pirates were part of one gang, the Bahamas. And the reason they’re so famous is, unlike most pirates, they got a base for themselves. They had a pirate republic that they could resupply and they could repair their ships. They could have an arm. They could set up trading relationships to fence their goods with corrupt merchants who would bring them the gunpowder and the rum and everything.

00:30:56:21 – 00:31:15:09
Colin Woodard
They knew that without that infrastructure, which most pirates through history didn’t have, they’d be picked off. You know, a storm will destroy their ship or someone will pick them off or a straight animal destroy their main mass. And they can’t repair because they can’t go into a shipyard. I mean, almost none of them survived very long, which meant you couldn’t have these mafia families really poor.

00:31:15:19 – 00:31:39:12
Colin Woodard
But what’s true about it is they were sort of organized around charismatic figures in an underworld sort of way. So, you know, the pirates, what made this particular gang of pirates unusual and I think made them into anti-heroes, is they elected their captains by a show of hands. They could depose a captain any time outside of combat, by a show of hands, a popular vote.

00:31:39:17 – 00:32:01:24
Colin Woodard
They had all kinds of restrictions on the captain. They shared their loot equally, regardless of your rank. And, you know, in doing all that, that meant that the person who’s selected and becomes the pirate captain is generally a charismatic figure, popular with the crew who they trust. Right. And so they they can get rid of them. But it also means that these particular pirates have the the the men in the crew and the company behind them.

00:32:01:24 – 00:32:21:27
Colin Woodard
And when they would gather at Nassau, at their pirate base, they were different factions. Right. People were loyal to a particular captain or commodore, and there were multiple Commodores and captains ashore. And they had to work out among themselves, you know, how this place would be governed, because you did need to defend the island and organize things and stuff, and somehow they did it sort of order out of anarchy.

00:32:21:28 – 00:32:47:07
Colin Woodard
I don’t know if you any of your listeners of remember that series Deadwood, right. That takes place out there in the in the Dakota Territories. Same thing, right? It’s an outlaw community that shouldn’t be there. It has no government. But, you know, the brothel owner and the brutal, you know, Chinese, you know, pig farmer who disposes of the bodies and all these other factions are there and they create an order out of anarchy, even though nobody’s in charge.

00:32:47:07 – 00:32:56:06
Colin Woodard
Same thing with this pirate face. So, yeah, they’re kind of mafia like, but not as organized as you describe where they were. They’d be able to pass down traditions like that.

00:32:56:12 – 00:33:18:05
Dan LeFebvre
But it sounds like it that that concept had to have been very different from a lot of the pirates used to be sailors for the British Empire. More specifically, I’m sure they were, you know, from other countries as well. But just that idea of being able to vote for who your captain is, is that it sounds like it almost sets up this type of war, like you’re saying, like a republic, right?

00:33:18:05 – 00:33:21:09
Dan LeFebvre
Where like you’re voting. And that’s just had to be something that they’re not used to.

00:33:21:10 – 00:33:42:28
Colin Woodard
That’s the really amazing thing about this group of pirates and why ended up really getting hooked on writing their story. You know, separating fact from fiction was exactly that. Right. In an era, you know, we’re talking 60 years before the American Revolution and, you know, 75 before the French Revolution. You’re getting a view into what ordinary people thought of how things were going in the world.

00:33:42:28 – 00:34:01:06
Colin Woodard
And the answer was they didn’t like it at all. They knew that the ship owners and the ship captains and the judges and the governor’s wrong cahoots and were exploiting everyone. You know, this is the time when the class system was being created. This is the early modern period when the old obligations of the feudal period of the medieval days, you know, where.

00:34:01:13 – 00:34:17:18
Colin Woodard
Yes, you’re a surf and I’m your Lord. But, you know, I owe the surf certain things and protection and you and they get to tend the land and they have to give me this and that. That was all breaking down like serfs are being kicked off the land and there would be made, you know, the land is being made into giant commercial sheep farms to enrich the Lord.

00:34:17:18 – 00:34:42:04
Colin Woodard
And there were suddenly all these peasants with nowhere to go who were the surplus population. And it was a consolidation of a much more brutal system. And these pirates were experiencing that both at home before they went into piracy and on the ships, and they finally end up rising up. And what did they do? Yeah, this roughshod crude leveling democratic impulse where they will elect their captains and depose them.

00:34:42:04 – 00:35:15:20
Colin Woodard
Not only that, they you know, they they have these primitive disability benefits. Right. But they would take the treasure on a privateering vessel. And Privateering privateers were people who were allowed to be mercenaries by their government in time of war to go raid enemy shipping, kind of like, you know, maritime mercenaries. And they would be private stock companies would be set up and they would send out on privateering missions to go attack the French or whoever it was, and they’d bring back the prizes and the investors would get half of the shares who had who had raised the money, and the captain would get 14 shares and each crewman would get one on a pirate

00:35:15:20 – 00:35:31:02
Colin Woodard
vessel. There’s no investors. They get all of the money and the everyone would get a share except the captain might get a share. And a half just is kind of a bonus, but that’s it. But before they divide up the treasure, they would hand out like Bartholomew Roberts. I believe it’s his articles that spell it out. You know?

00:35:31:02 – 00:36:03:24
Colin Woodard
You know, you get £2 off the top for anyone who’s lost an eye and £3 for someone who’s lost a leg. Before we divvy up the treasure, this is the time where none of that existed anywhere in the English world. There weren’t there weren’t social benefits and there weren’t this kind of democracy. So, yeah, this is a key point, which I think is part of the reason that despite the fact these pirates were condemned by the authorities as the villains of all nations and enemies of the empire and had to be hunted down, most people at that time appear have been on the pirate side, had to believe the pirate stories that they were, in

00:36:03:24 – 00:36:27:06
Colin Woodard
fact, Robin Hood’s men settling the scores for ordinary people against against their, you know, exploitative master. And so that’s why the fact of that is why they exist as anti-heroes. These people who should we should regard as criminals had a case to be made that was believed at the time that they were really the anti-heroes whose side you ought to be on, which is kind of their reputation in pop culture now.

00:36:27:08 – 00:36:54:17
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that just I have to ask then it was there something that kind of inspired them to come up with those concepts that seemed to be so foreign for pretty much that the entire time there and then on the other side, that because we are more familiar with more democratic things today were things like, you know, with the American Revolution, as you know, specifically, perhaps were they almost inspired by pirates to be like, hey, this actually this can work.

00:36:55:20 – 00:37:13:22
Colin Woodard
Right? You know, we don’t have to. I mean, it’s a view that out in the public, the people who didn’t read and write and leave us notes on what they thought, you know, most people that there was this inspiration, that things are wrong and that people should be able to govern themselves. So something of that was out there.

00:37:13:29 – 00:37:35:27
Colin Woodard
I’m not sure that it inspired the people who kind of led the American Revolution ideas in it. You know, they’re reading they’re, you know, Locke and everybody else’s natural rights theories and the slaveholders weren’t, but some of them were. And and you know, getting their ideas through the written culture. But I think the reason it was percolating around is that this was felt in a lot of places.

00:37:35:27 – 00:38:10:21
Colin Woodard
Right. There’s a levelers movement to roughshod radical sort of democratic movement that was happening. And even in the English Civil Wars, the 1640s and later where people wanted to, you know, level out society and not have there be incredibly rich people and poor ones. So those ideas were already percolating around. Where did they come from? I don’t have the real answer, but I know that in the culture of Scandinavia and the old black Anglo-Saxon mythology and all that, there’s this notion that you’re free born people is kind of something that they would kick off.

00:38:10:29 – 00:38:30:08
Colin Woodard
And I don’t know to what extent that would have been passed around to ordinary sailors, but in the sort of deep cultural mores, there’s this idea that’s different than the like Roman Empire Latin idea. But freedom is a German ish Freiheit concept of like inborn freedom, at least for you and your gang. Maybe all those other people out there don’t deserve it.

00:38:30:08 – 00:38:56:06
Colin Woodard
But you’re if you’re Trott does. Right. But liberty is the Latin word right of the Roman Empire. Libertas, which is a liberty, is a privilege given to you to be able to be a citizen. Right. That that liberties are special privileges for a few. Right. So the democracy of ancient Greece, in ancient Rome, these are slave societies with a small number of people at the top with the liberty to practice democracy right.

00:38:56:06 – 00:39:09:01
Colin Woodard
So what I’m saying is in that zone that many of the pirates came from, in the culture, is some idea of like, you know, freeborn people, you know, sort of that may have been out there in the deep psyche somewhere. But it’s hard to know for sure.

00:39:09:17 – 00:39:27:00
Dan LeFebvre
That that’s fascinating. If we go back to the movies at the beginning of the fourth movie on Stranger Tides, There’s A Sailor that claims he found Ponce de Leon ship. And that’s something that, you know, he had died some 200 years earlier. The movie mentions that and then it sets up Captain Jack Sparrow searching for the fountain of youth.

00:39:27:06 – 00:39:30:17
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if there were pirates who actually searched for the fountain of youth?

00:39:31:02 – 00:39:52:24
Colin Woodard
I don’t think any of the pirates from that era of search for the fountain of youth or anything like that. However, it was probably part of the legend lore of the Greater Caribbean Basin that, you know, people like Ponce de Leon and many of the Spanish conquistadors, you know, we’re looking for the fountain of youth or had actually found a mountain of silver in Peru and, you know, crazy amounts of gold that they were stealing from the Aztecs.

00:39:52:24 – 00:40:21:24
Colin Woodard
It seemed impossible in the year that, you know, the things that seemed impossible from the old European experience before they found the Americas turned out to be possible. And so people believed all kinds of additional things to be possible, including a fountain of youth and other magical things. So I think probably, you know, since they’re operating the Caribbean Theater and they’re, you know, their neighbors are the Spanish and the stories of de los Casos and what was happening in the in the Spanish colonization of the of the Americas.

00:40:22:02 – 00:40:29:03
Colin Woodard
You know, those ideas were probably around there. I don’t think any them were exercising them, but probably a lot of them knew about the fountain of youth legend, at least.

00:40:29:10 – 00:40:46:24
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay. Another concept that we see in on Stranger Tides, I know we kind of talked about this a little bit before, but it’s the concept of the privateer. And one of the lines of dialog I point out specifically, I think, is Jack Sparrow is talking to Hector Barbosa and he calls him a pirate. He calls Barbosa a pirate.

00:40:46:24 – 00:40:57:25
Dan LeFebvre
And Barbosa just replies Pirate, nay. Privateer But can you clarify the difference between those? And did people bounce between being a pirate and a privateer and back and forth? And it kind of sounds like it’s you can go either one.

00:40:58:15 – 00:41:18:14
Colin Woodard
Yeah. Yeah. So a privateer is somebody as I mentioned before, who’ve been given permission by their government in time of war to attack enemy shipping. So you have these vast oceans. The government only has a few Royal Navy vessels. And how are you ever going to stop the enemy? You know, attack them, defend your colonies and raid their shipping all at once?

00:41:18:14 – 00:41:34:14
Colin Woodard
Absolutely impossible. So what do you do? You go to the private sector and they would make them deal. Hey, you have permission to go attack any French ships? You honor Spanish ships, whoever you’re at war with, and you can keep a lot of the treasure and you bring me the sovereign part of it and as a is a tax and everybody wins.

00:41:34:19 – 00:41:50:19
Colin Woodard
And it was very lucrative. So tons of people would get involved in Privateering and you’d hire capable people to be your Privateering Captain and Privateering crews. They were all in it for the money. So that had been that was a normal thing and many people were engaged in it. And if you were a really good privateer, you’d be celebrated.

00:41:50:19 – 00:42:15:18
Colin Woodard
You could get a knighthood like like Sir Henry Morgan did. Captain Kidd was a privateer initially before he upset and insulted rich and powerful people in the East India Company and got himself declared a pirate. So, I mean, privateers were entirely respectable people in within their own societies. They might appear to be pirates from the other side. Pirates, by contrast, hadn’t gotten permission to do what they were doing from anybody.

00:42:15:27 – 00:42:44:16
Colin Woodard
They were. And they were often operating in times of peace, and they were often attacking vessels from their own nations. So they were just, you know, all out criminals from the perspective of their government. And if they made it home, they wouldn’t be knighted, they’d be hanged. So that was the difference between them. However, many, many of the pirates remember I said that this outbreak had taken place in the aftermath of the colonial war, the war of Spanish secession and, in addition to all of the push factors, all the ways that sailors are being exploited.

00:42:45:02 – 00:43:04:03
Colin Woodard
Also, many of them had been privateers during that war. They had all of the skills and they were making lots of money, raiding Spanish ships. And all of a sudden the war ends and your privateering permission letters mark were taken away from you. So you’ve got your ship and you got your gun and you got your cannon, and suddenly you can’t go attack the Spanish anymore.

00:43:04:11 – 00:43:31:15
Colin Woodard
So, you know, the only way you could do it was to go be a pirate if you wanted to keep doing what you’d been doing the whole time. So many, many people who had been privateers became pirates. Usually that was a one way trip. You couldn’t once you’re a pirate, you’re in trouble with everybody. You can’t just go back to being a privateer, except this particular outbreak in Nassau that I write about in Republic of Pirates got so bad it was threatening all of the umpires, including the English umpire.

00:43:31:23 – 00:43:50:16
Colin Woodard
And so the king ends up offering a pardon. He has a divide and conquer strategy. So the pirates could take a pardon from the king and be absolved for all of their piracy up until the date of the pardon and keep their treasure and could go back to normal life. And many of them, when the next war came out, became privateers again.

00:43:50:16 – 00:43:56:15
Colin Woodard
So in the instance of these particular pirates, yeah, people were privateers, became pirates and then became privateers again.

00:43:57:04 – 00:44:03:15
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. It sounds like basically doing the exact same thing. It’s just a matter of what what they’re called and whether or not the law is after them.

00:44:04:04 – 00:44:09:14
Colin Woodard
Exactly. And whether or not you’re attacking your own country’s vessels. Those are pretty much the only differences.

00:44:09:21 – 00:44:29:20
Dan LeFebvre
Within the East India trading company then that you mentioned them having almost there, what, 200,000 you said all Jersey soldiers would their Navy, would their ships be considered privateers? Would they be along that line because they’re employed by the East India Company? Would they be something different?

00:44:30:02 – 00:45:02:20
Colin Woodard
They’re armed merchant men, so they’re merchant vessels with exclusive monopoly to their part of the world, to India and all that. And they’re arm to defend themselves against pirates or the enemy or, you know, anybody trying to mess with them. So they’d have these heavily armed vessels, but they weren’t combat vessels per se. So they wouldn’t be involved in in the defensive because the real value of them is the goods they’re transporting back to London, their value to the Empire, the value to the sovereign and everybody else is that those goods get to and fro and sell you on the ship to defend themselves.

00:45:02:20 – 00:45:06:17
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. As opposed to the privateers which are more seeking out Spanish or the enemy.

00:45:06:18 – 00:45:14:19
Colin Woodard
You overpower it’s and privateers of various nations might be trying to attack the East India ships, but their job was to repel both categories of vessels.

00:45:14:19 – 00:45:30:20
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay. One of the pirates that we meet for the first time in the movie on Stranger Tides is Blackbeard and his. He is the captain of a ship called Queen Anne’s Revenge. I think everybody knows that Blackbeard was a real pirate. But how well did the series do depicting him?

00:45:30:29 – 00:45:50:29
Colin Woodard
Well, I mean, Blackbeard was a real pirate, and Queen Anne’s Revenge was his his ultimate, you know, his greatest flagship that he had for a time and scared everybody and charged around with this large frigate size vessel that had been a slave ship with lot of the pirates, wanted to attack slave ships because they made great pirate ships.

00:45:51:09 – 00:46:08:09
Colin Woodard
They were fast. You could heavily arm them. They could carry a lot of cargo, perishable cargo, and that people died and they treated them terribly, but they had to move pretty quickly. And those are all characteristics that worked well as pirate ships. And the Queen Anne’s Revenge had been a French pirate ship. So that much was true, their depiction of Blackbeard.

00:46:08:09 – 00:46:32:24
Colin Woodard
Beyond that, it’s not really anchored much to reality. I mean, the parallels are that the reason that Blackbeard became so famous is he intentionally cultivated a terrifying appearance and reputation. He would light fuzes in his beard, so smoke would be flying off them and make him look like sort of like a devil like figure standing on the deck as he’s approaching your ship and demanding you surrender.

00:46:32:24 – 00:46:52:17
Colin Woodard
And he carried, you know, he and his men would have, you know, grenades and cutlasses and be wearing, you know, the like a Mad Max movie, all of the clothes of the rich passengers that they’d, you know, previously captured and, you know, just they just looked as scary as you might possibly imagine. That was the whole point, because Blackbeard wanted the ships to surrender without firing a shot.

00:46:53:00 – 00:47:16:21
Colin Woodard
No risk to yourself. No risk that a cannonball accidentally takes out your main mass, damages your ship. But more importantly, what did they want? They wanted the other ship, its cargo, and the source of most voluntary pirate recruits were the downtrodden sailors on the vessels they captured. You know, typically a quarter or a third of the sailors, any vessel they would capture would voluntarily want to join the pirates.

00:47:16:21 – 00:47:31:19
Colin Woodard
Right. You’re being exploited, fed, you know, not being paid your wages. Said we’ve Waverly Bread and, you know, life’s pretty miserable and these pirates capture your ship and they’re all breaking out in Madeira and seem to be having a good old time. A lot of them say, Take me with you, right? So you don’t want to hurt any of the crew either.

00:47:31:19 – 00:47:51:08
Colin Woodard
So Blackbeard had a really, really smart strategy and it paid off. I mean, he’s he was thought of as the most terrifying of all pirates for all these reasons. And everyone was surrendering without firing a shot. But if you read all of the documents of all the ships and stuff that Blackbeard captured, all the documents, by the way, almost all the testimony is from his victims.

00:47:51:08 – 00:48:09:20
Colin Woodard
Right. They’re not sympathetic to him. And yet there’s not a single instance any where they are of him killing or harming anybody prior to his final fatal battle with the Royal Navy in 1718. So it worked. So in that sense, yeah, he was he was everyone was scared of him. And that was exactly the plan. He was a very shrewd operator.

00:48:09:26 – 00:48:25:10
Dan LeFebvre
It sounds like that, too, because, you know, that fear might also help with almost his own political side. If he if everything on his own ship is democratic and he has to stay captain, he has to keep people happy, not only with the success, but also just his own image.

00:48:25:17 – 00:48:31:23
Colin Woodard
Keep everyone inspired to maintain yourself as a charismatic leader. Absolutely. All of those things. And he was very good at all of them.

00:48:31:23 – 00:48:50:09
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Wow. In the last movie, the franchise Dead Men Tell No Tales, we see a young Jack Sparrow pull off what the movie calls a bootleg turn. It’s something that looks a lot like something saw in the first movie in Black Pearl when it drops starboard anchor and they’re going full speed and the ship just turned around as a quick turn.

00:48:50:09 – 00:48:57:20
Dan LeFebvre
And the movie, they call it Club Hauling. Would it be possible to do those types of turns? You mentioned the you know, the ship speed. And I don’t know, it just seems like.

00:48:58:06 – 00:49:21:16
Colin Woodard
It would be pretty funny to watch somebody try to do it. I mean, yet the destruction it would cause your own vessel was potentially catastrophic. I mean, you throw that anchor down and if it does really catch, you’re going 40 knots in the other direction. I mean, the stresses that the cable or the rope is probably going to snap, but if it doesn’t snap, I mean, it’s going to rip out whatever it’s attached.

00:49:21:16 – 00:49:37:13
Colin Woodard
I mean, it’s going to be really bad. It’s not going to swing your vessel around quite like that. It’s inspired on our, you know, a real maneuver that’s a bit different. I’ve actually done it myself on smaller sailing vessels, but if you run aground and you’re kind of stuck or you’re becalmed, you know that a sailing vessel didn’t have any engines back then.

00:49:37:13 – 00:49:53:23
Colin Woodard
Of course, if you become, what do you do if your vessel stuck on the on a shoal or something, oftentimes you would take an anchor and you put the anchor in a, you know, rowboat. People would row out with it attached to your ship and throw it overboard, like as far from the ship as they can get in open water.

00:49:54:00 – 00:50:18:12
Colin Woodard
And then you take the capstone, the giant, you know, crack, you know, that multiple people would push to haul in the anchor and you would try to literally drag the ship off the shore from the anchor. Another maneuver is to take the anchor and run it up off of a poorly on the main mast and actually try to pull the ship over on its side a bit so that it draws less water, it takes up less water might get afloat again.

00:50:18:23 – 00:50:47:22
Colin Woodard
So some combination of those things is called caging. You could do that. And I think that’s where somebody got the idea, hey, this would look cool if we threw an anchor overboard. It spun us around. But yeah, the forces involved at certainly in an era where everything’s made out of organic fiber rope and, you know, anchored with wood, I mean, it would just tear everything apart catastrophically, but it would have been pretty cool to watch as a special effect, but it would not have burned the ship movie magic, maybe slow speed.

00:50:47:22 – 00:50:57:15
Colin Woodard
I don’t know if you’re going really slow, maybe you could assist a turn. But then how you can get the anchor up in the turn that the anchors embedded, you could have to hack it off. I mean, it just yeah, it wouldn’t make any sense.

00:50:57:15 – 00:51:00:16
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a that’s a very good point. They don’t they don’t show that in the movie.

00:51:00:16 – 00:51:06:29
Colin Woodard
It just because that’s going to throw you, right. Yeah. It’s not going to turn out well then. Yeah.

00:51:07:24 – 00:51:24:17
Dan LeFebvre
We talked earlier about the pirates search for the fountain of youth and whether or not that was the real. But in the end, dead men tell no tales. We see everybody searching for the trident of Poseidon, and that includes the British Empire. Did the British really look for legendary items to help grow their empire?

00:51:25:07 – 00:51:43:12
Colin Woodard
Yeah. Nothing in this time, not in this era. Nobody was talking about trying to find some talisman or or something like that. Certainly not the Trident they described. I mean, empires of the past in history have done that. And I think like a lot of the crazy guys running the third. Right, you know, believe that there were somehow these know special objects that would help their their armies.

00:51:43:12 – 00:52:04:19
Colin Woodard
You know, they were they believed in a lot of nutty stuff. But among them, the sort of, you know, Aryan and Norse mythology and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So it’s not beyond the imperial authorities to think that some supernatural objects in the past might help them. But I haven’t seen anything from this era of of English and early British Atlantic history that they were trying to do anything like that.

00:52:04:19 – 00:52:26:22
Colin Woodard
They were pretty concentrated on the profits made and, you know, cotton and, you know, exploiting and killing, you know, slaves to make sugar and all that kind of stuff was kind of the focus of the empire. They would have to get involved in that kind of stuff. Things were going pretty well for England’s overseas empire at the time, so they might not have felt the desire to to need to, you know, find a super natural object, a level.

00:52:26:22 – 00:52:30:15
Dan LeFebvre
Up makes sense. It’s just working the way it is when one way you don’t need.

00:52:31:02 – 00:52:36:05
Colin Woodard
More than that, you know, queen, scepter or whatever ever else we already have in our vault is working magic already. Right.

00:52:37:03 – 00:52:55:24
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. For someone listening to this who wants to learn more, you have a fantastic book called The Republic of Pirates, and I’ll make sure to include a link to that in the show notes for this episode. But before I let you go, can you maybe share one of your favorite stories from the book and where someone listening can find all your work?

00:52:56:16 – 00:53:15:22
Colin Woodard
Yeah, I mean Colin Woodard dot com CEO Ally w o air will lead you to more than you want to know about me and my books and the I think some of the most incredible stories. And there are a lot of incredible stories, but you know, Blackbeard’s back story, you know, they mentioned that there was this pardon issued by the king and eventually word gets around, right?

00:53:15:22 – 00:53:30:15
Colin Woodard
There’s no radios. Get away. You know, a ship shows up with the news and it’s like, oh, my gosh, the king’s just issue a pardon. And then people have to get in boats and, you know, go to the next island, let people know. But word was getting around that that there was this possibility to be absolved of your sins of piracy.

00:53:30:15 – 00:53:50:10
Colin Woodard
And so lots of pirates ran off to take it. And Blackbeard, when you realize that when he gets the news from a ship he’s captured, he ends up trying to make a final score. He does all these, you know, trying to track down a royally sanctioned treasure ship that’s going to be going to make the first postwar visits to new Spain’s empire to trade for gold and stuff.

00:53:50:10 – 00:54:07:27
Colin Woodard
He’s trying to track that down. He can’t, but he’s eventually plotting to get rid of all of the sailors he doesn’t trust in his flotilla of like 400 sailors and gather the 40 or 50 men around them he really cares about. So he’s he’s planning ahead and he ends up, you know, ditching most of the sailors. He destroys the Queen Anne’s revenge.

00:54:07:27 – 00:54:24:20
Colin Woodard
He gets in the small boat and he goes to the last place on earth, the weakest of all the colonies, to go take a pardon from that governor. And that was the colony of North Carolina, was then, you know, terribly poor. The Virginians made fun of the North Carolinians. That’s where the, you know, lousy, you know, good for nothing people would go.

00:54:24:20 – 00:54:47:03
Colin Woodard
And it had a very small population. It had been almost completely destroyed in the war. The local indigenous inhabitants, the capital, was this little village of like 500 people, and they came ashore there. And he basically makes a deal with the governor of North Carolina that sets himself up as this Tony Soprano like Mafia figure. Right. He’s he hey, I took my pardon and wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

00:54:47:03 – 00:55:01:26
Colin Woodard
I’m gonna go take a recreational sail out in the Atlantic and come back with a bunch of treasure I found in the sea somewhere. And I’m going to sell it to you. And it’s going to end up in, you know, the the collector of Customs barn and the under a pile of hay in the in the capital of North Carolina.

00:55:01:26 – 00:55:26:07
Colin Woodard
And all my men will have will happen to be around. And they’re well-armed. They can send off any attacks that come. And I’m going to bring in all of this treasure to this impoverished colony that will totally change your balance of payments problems. And so, yeah, that’s the most interesting thing is how well and sophisticated he was in trying to set himself up as you know, what would be better than being a pirate or being a pirate who is under the protection of an entire colonial government.

00:55:26:07 – 00:55:27:23
Colin Woodard
And so that was what he was going for.

00:55:27:24 – 00:55:29:21
Dan LeFebvre
Almost like a privateer, it sounds like.

00:55:30:09 – 00:55:47:01
Colin Woodard
Yeah, right. Super private. But fortunately you didn’t realize that the governor of much more powerful Virginia was would have not that much respect for the Lord would actually go after him invading a neighboring territories territory to track him.

00:55:47:01 – 00:55:52:21
Dan LeFebvre
I’ll make sure to include a link to your book for people to read about that story. Thank you again so much for your time, Colin!

00:55:52:21 – 00:56:01:28
Colin Woodard
Thank you. I enjoyed it.