Why Pirates Fascinate

around lunchtime on Thursday, the 10th of July 2003 by Scott

I got The Kid into trains, and now he has returned the favor with Pirates. After reading the stories below, I am wondering why pirates from the pre-victorian era are so fascinating. After all, piracy today does not enthrall - it repulses when one hears of Chinese, Malaysian and Filipina crew being machine gunned to death over a few cargo containers filled with car parts. But the stories of the Buccaneers, and especially Blackbeard, resonate in a way that nearly no other modern-day story or legend can.

Pirates lived in a very autocratic and brutal age. As Churhchill once noted, life at the time was nasty, brutish and short. Human life held little value unless you were one of the tiny minority born into wealth and priviledge and the concept of human rights was still being thought through by British and French philosophers. The freedoms that we so take for granted today didn’t exist except in embryonic forms. Even the freedom to choose one’s profession barely existed; one simply did what one’s father did. In Japan this had been codified into law, but was the custom of most of Europe at the time.

With pirates, however, you had men (and a few exceptional women like Grania) who defied the law and custom and chose their own destiny. Pirates also followed strict codes of conduct - stricter than many employed by armies at the time, directly elected their captains and shared the booty in a relatively fair and systematic fashion. Pirates were free spirits at a time where freedom barely existed, and I think that we find that Pirates and the legends that grew up around them satisfy are own yearnings for freedom.

Long live Blackbeard and the Pirate Kings of Yore!