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Two lovers engage in sociologically minded discussions exploring books, movies, and whatever else fits the bill.
Ahoy Samwise!
I mean, Ahoy, Sam.
Ahoy me Hannah!
How are you doing today?
I am good.
I am just getting into
my second cup of coffee for the day,
and I will probably have another
two more.
Wow, that's so intestinally Demanding.
Yeah, I've learned to live with it.
Do you want to tell the good people what
we're going to be talking about today?
One piece. Well,
yeah,
we're probably going to have some tangents
into one piece,
but that's going to be your talking part.
Since I have fragments of it
tattooed onto my body.
Yes. I don't.
But what I do have
is notes on a field trip
that I went on this week
to the Whydah Museum on Cape Cod.
The what museum?
The Whydah museum.
What is Whydah? w-h-y-d-a-h.
The Whydah was a pirate ship
that sunk off the coast of Cape
Cod in 1715.
April 1715. Okay. It was a
slave ship
sailing from London to West Africa.
Okay.
And it was taken by Sam Bellamy,
an OG Cape Codder
and his crew and somebody,
you know, started to recover the wreckage
from this ship,
which is no easy feat because it straight
up exploded on the bottom of the ocean,
scattered everywhere, and founded this
great museum on Cape Cod.
If you're ever in Cape Cod and it’s
a rainy day, go to this museum.
It's great. It's very atmospheric.
It's very well-researched.
It's DEI propaganda that would make
the Trump administration so angry.
And it's atmospheric and creepy.
And there's a bunch of little boys
running around in pirate hats.
Very vibey, very cool.
And I was just running around this museum,
you know, a 35-year-old 11 year old.
With my glasses on
and my notebook just scribbling down notes
so that I could talk to you about it.
Cool. Yeah.
There's so much in that museum
that I'm not going to cover here, though.
There's a lot about the technology,
the weaponry, the money, the artifacts,
how they do underwater archeology
and restore the pirate ship and much more.
So don't think that after you've listened
to this podcast, you ought not to go.
Oh, and the specific people
who were on the pirate ship too,
it gets into all of that.
So definitely a very fun afternoon.
I don't want to take away from that
by describing a lot of the things
that I learned at the museum, but
I thought it would be a great jumping off
point for a conversation
about the mythologizing of pirates.
Fact versus fiction,
how pirates were mythologized
back in the Golden Age of Piracy,
and how pirates are mythologized now,
and why we think certain narratives
tend to propagate and certain
other narratives don't.
And of course, we're releasing
this episode in conjunction
with the acclaimed remaster of everyone's
favorite video game.
And of course, I'm talking
about Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag.
Oh yeah, of course.
Something that I know so much about.
Yeah, yeah.
As a disclaimer,
I do want to say that this episode
is probably going
to have no further discussion
of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag.
Oh, well, I mean, you could
I wouldn't object to it.
I don't think it's really
that preeminent of a video game.
Okay, well we will.
Well, yeah, that joke is going to land
flat for me because
what do I know
about which video games are preeminent?
There's only Mario Kart so far.
That's the only video game there is.
Mario Kart is the gateway drug to video
game.
Oh, okay. Well, stay tuned everybody.
All right.
So remember where we were last year
with climbing?
That's a good point.
That's such a good point.
Next year, Hannah will be
in the international competition for
a Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
All right.
Join me. Sam.
We're going back to the late 1600s
in modern day Massachusetts.
Sam Bellamy grew up poor on the Cape.
He perhaps worked briefly in the Navy.
The story that the museum likes to tell.
That seems like a fun story to me.
So we're going to tell it
is that he fell in love
with a wealthy woman, and in order
to win her parents approval to marry her,
he had to go seek his fortune.
So he went off to pursue piracy
because it's late 1600s.
Or actually, by the time he went off to
seek his fortune, it was the early 1700s.
It's the early 1700s.
social mobility isn't a thing.
that does not exist.
So if you want to seek your fortune,
there's a very short list of ways
that you might go about doing it.
And piracy is one of them.
Bellamy started on a ship with another guy
whose name I don't remember
because he doesn't matter.
And the other guy had a moral objection
to taking British ships.
Bellamy had no such objection.
And so they went their separate ways
amicably.
And the next crew voted Bellamy in
as its captain, because on pirate ships
positions were elected democratically,
with everyone having an equal vote
and everyone taking an equal
share of the loot
on the ships
that the pirate ship or fleet took.
Wait, so you're telling me that democracy
was not invented by the Founding Fathers,
but actually by a group of communist
pirates?
Yeah, our history books
really have been changed.
They have.
So obviously, this was very different
from the case on merchant
and naval vessels, where social mobility
was pretty much nonexistent.
Salaries were low,
and no one had any say in decision
making outside of the prescriptive
hierarchy.
Eventually, Bellamy's
crew took the Whydah.
The crew would vote on which ships to take
and where the ship wanted to go.
It wasn't that they elected the captain,
and then the captain
would make these decisions.
They elected the captain,
and then the crew would all make decisions
together, still democratically.
The Whydah was a slave ship and
it was sailing from London to West Africa.
Many slave ships during this
era took people by the dozens or hundreds.
The widow was a smaller trader
that brought in groups of men in 2 or 3.
These men were branded, they were chained,
and they were being brought
to do backbreaking work on plantations
in the Caribbean.
Bellamy's
crew on The Whydah was of about 150 men.
They were English,
Irish, indigenous American,
African, Dutch, Spanish,
Welsh, Swedish and more.
And they called themselves Robin Hood's
Men for reasons that seem pretty obvious.
The famous
phrase motley crew means racially diverse.
There were many nationalities
on pirate ships,
and so there were many languages of origin
on pirate ships.
And so people would just speak
whatever language was that of the ship
that they had taken spoke.
So on the Whydah That was English
because it was sailing from London
when they took it.
So wait. Sorry. Yes. To clarify.
So this pirate crew, led by Bellamy
on another ship took over the Whydah
and then the Whydah became part
of, like, the fleet of ships.
That's correct. Okay,
so now there's two ships.
At least I didn't keep track.
I'm so sorry,
but there's at least two ships.
There's at least two ships.
Yeah, and you can probably find out
exactly how many ships
and all the specific logistics of that
by going to the museum.
Yeah, I was much more interested
in the social dynamics
and social organization
and what life was like.
Yeah. And that's
what I'm going to be getting into.
Yeah.
Did you know that many pirates were black?
I'm interested to hear more specifics.
Certainly doesn't surprise me.
It would be interesting, though, to hear.
Like what Maybe percentage,
if we'd even know that.
Well, for example, on Blackbeard's
crew, 60% of the members were black.
That's unusually high.
They gave some other examples.
There was one that was
there was a crew of 270,
and 70 of them were black, but it was
a disproportionately high percentage.
And perhaps the reason why is that
at this time, a black seaman could
legally be abducted and sold into slavery
anytime their ship was import.
Isn't that crazy? Wait, meaning like..
You can be a freedman.
You can be a free person.
You are not enslaved.
If your ship is in port, you can be
abducted and sold into slavery legally.
Wow. So I certainly wouldn't
have any loyalty to nations with that law.
No, not at Like other pirate crews,
the crew of the Whydah
came from rough lives
and humble beginnings.
And one illustrative example of this
that the museum featured
was that of their swords.
So noblemen and military men
would use a sword called a rapier.
And these swords are lighter and easier
to manipulate, but they require training.
Pirates tended to use cutlasses.
They were shorter, thicker and wider.
You need more physical strength
and less training.
The plaque of the museum
said that these types of swords are ideal
for lobbing off limbs.
So like that seems like a good opening
to say that
although we're going to be talking about
many of the attributes of piracy
that are kind of politically radical
and that I think are cool.
They were very much doing murder.
So not moral beacons, but still, like,
you can see why they have become
examples of rebellion and democracy.
Yeah.
I feel like to draw an inspiration
from last episode.
You could almost relate them
to like, the anti-hero.
But I think that that mythologizing
of pirates as the anti-hero has become
whiter and less explicitly
anti hierarchical over time,
which I think is really telling.
So piracy
meant swearing off loyalty to any nation.
The jolly Roger was a real flag
that was flown by pirate crews,
but there were much more variations to it
than we typically imagine.
Pirates called themselves
brothers of the coast
and thought of themselves
as an alternative nation
because they had sworn off
citizenship to any nation,
they had no rights under the law
and could legally be killed with impunity.
There were various formal roles
on most pirate ships.
There was the captain in the Whydah's
case, That was Sam Bellamy.
The captain is not the way that we think
of a captain in the military.
He had no special privileges,
the only time that he held absolute
authority was in battle,
because somebody needed to make decisions.
There was not time to discuss them.
There was the navigator,
which was somebody with good literacy
who was good at reading maps.
Navigation was,
of course, very rough and primitive
compared to what we're capable of now.
And the museum went into great detail
about how it worked.
I did not write that stuff down.
Go see the museum. Or, you know,
you could Google it.
There was the botswain or the “bosun”
who directed control of the sails
and rigging, kept track of the cargo
and anchors, controlled the armory,
occasionally meted out punishment
for violations of the ship's articles.
So this was a highly respected position
on the ship.
And the botswain on the Whydah was an
Irishman named Jeremiah Burke.
There was the surgeon
who did the medical procedures
that were available at the time,
which was really a lot of amputations.
And on the Whydah
the surgeon was a Scottish
fellow named James Ferguson,
and he was a Jacobite.
Do you know about the Jacobites?
There have something to do
with Christianity or, you know, Abraham
like religion?
Yes. They believed in the divine
right of kings.
It was an indigenous led political
movement in the Scottish Highlands.
They were saying,
not that monarchy- our monarchy.
And that was a great big no no.
And so they often turned to piracy
as political refugees,
many political refugees turned to piracy.
Then there was the quartermaster.
The quartermaster was arguably the most
important role on the pirate ship.
The quartermaster is second in command
from the captain,
and this person
represented the interests of the crew.
He settled disputes
and he distributed the loot.
This was a very highly respected position,
and the Whydah's quartermaster
was an Irishman named Richard Nolan.
So lots of Irishman, which was a big deal.
You couldn't really
you couldn't really achieve
like respected status in other professions
as an Irishman at this time,
which I think is a great example of how
whiteness is not necessarily a race,
but more of who's in the group?
Who's in the in group?
I mean, I would argue that
whiteness as a concept was constructed
in order to justify the slave trade.
Oh yeah, for sure.
And has evolved
over time to that to keep black people
at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Yeah.
And there were people
what we would consider
or what we would think of as white today
in general terms, who did not share -
They were a racialized minority.
Yeah, So life on a pirate ship,
each ship had its articles,
which was a code of conduct.
And when you signed on to them,
you signed away your citizenship
and rights in other countries,
and you gained your right to vote
on the pirate ship
and to receive your share of the loot.
The signing of the articles
was very ritualistic.
It was often held at night
by candlelight, picture
like a ritualized
swearing in at a frat or a secret society.
That was the vibe.
And pirates were indeed drunk a lot.
That mythology about pirates is accurate,
and they didn't only drink rum,
they drank whatever they could get
their hands I imagine a large part of
that was also due to necessity
being out on the ocean, where you're going
to get your uncontaminated water
that stays uncontaminated.
That, and also their morale was not high
a lot of the time.
It was very unhealthy.
People got a lot of scurvy.
They got a lot of tuberculosis.
Conditions were dirty, cold and wet.
And so pirates needed to keep up morale
by any means that were available to them.
If the pirate ship took another ship
that had a musician on it,
that person tended to be forced
to sign the articles at gunpoint
because they needed as many musicians
as they could get.
I'm loving here how each role that
you reveal of the pirate community
is just describing another member
of Luffy's crew in one piece.
Oh, is it really? It is.
Oh, that's so fun.
The navigator, the musician, the doctor.
Did they say anything about cooks?
No, not that I saw. Interesting.
Okay. Yeah.
They didn't really talk about what
the pirates ate or not that I saw.
I might have missed it.
So whereas on Navy ships,
officers slept in comfy cabins
while the crew slept below
deck in much less comfortable positions.
The first thing that pirates did
when they took a ship was level top deck,
and open up the interior of the ship
into just one big room
where everybody slept together.
No one had more comfort or privacy
than anyone else.
In fact, on many pirate
nobody could use a hammock unless
there was enough hammocks for everybody.
So this is like a motley crew of vicious
murderers, but preschool snack time rules.
If you didn't bring enough for everybody,
no hammock for you.
Which I mean, I think we all know that the
most pirate among us are preschoolers.
It's like a fun example of how
it is intrinsic to human nature,
both to be competitive
and possessive and violent,
and also to have a strong sense of justice
and be rather altruistic
and collaborative and cooperative.
So the Whydah had taken enough loot
that Sam Bellamy was ready to retire.
They were sailing back to the States where
it wasn't the states yet, but, you know.
And yeah, the Whydah sunk,
as my notes here say, the Whydah
sunk in a big ass storm
off the coast of Cape Cod in April 1715.
146 people were in the wreck
and 130 of them died.
16 were taken prisoner,
six were tried and hanged.
John Julian, the surviving crew member
who was black, was sold into slavery
at the time.
Pirate
hangings and trials were a big spectacle.
People loved stories about pirates
tearful repentance and their violent ends.
It was very sensationalized.
Pirate corpses would sometimes
be hanged in gibbets, which was like
a person shaped cage out on the docks.
They would preserve
the pirate corpses in tar,
make sure that they did
not get a proper burial,
because it was widely believed at the time
that if you got a proper burial,
that you would be able
to be ferried into the afterlife,
whereas if you were not ferried
then your soul would, you know, wander
until Judgment Davey Jones.
And that's the information
that I wanted to share with you today.
And so I guess what I'm curious about
after telling you all this is,
did any of it surprise you as
it surprised me the first time
that I went to this museum? No.
I feel like a lot of this.
And part of it was you discussing
some of this with me and,
like, bits and pieces
over the past couple of weeks.
Part of it is a little bit of,
like, rabbit holes that I've dove into,
into, like, pirate culture
through various popular media.
I think an interesting topic to discuss
that you brought up out of it, though,
would be how we maybe not so much in 2026,
but certainly, prior to like the 20 tens
conceptualized pirates.
And I say we as in American culture.
Yeah, I was surprised the first time
I went to this museum
by a lot of what I found out,
and it was mainly because my
my biggest frame of reference for pirates,
prior to my first visit to the Whydah
museum was Pirates of the Caribbean.
And I remember the romanticization
of pirates in that movie.
They were certainly portrayed
as rebellious as a motley crew.
But I also remember when the Keira
Knightley character was abducted
by the pirates.
She invoked this universal pirates code
in order to appeal to the captain,
who had his own luxurious private quarters
and had authority
to draw upon about what to do with her
that the rest of his crew did not share.
And so they were sort of presented
as a dark mirror to naval ship,
less polished, more creepy, more dirty,
but ultimately mirroring that hierarchy.
And it's interesting to me
that that's the idea
about how pirates organized themselves
that persisted,
when in fact, we know that that is not
how parrots organize themselves.
Their hierarchy was very flat,
very democratic.
The setup of the actual ship
was reflective of this flat hierarchy,
and I wonder if that was how people,
during the Golden Age of Piracy
imagined that pirates
organized themselves, or whether that's
like a more modern invention,
you know? Yeah.
I'm reminded of how,
like when Christians envision
a satanic church or a satanic church
service, it's like a creepy version
of a Catholic church service
instead of its own separate thing.
Yeah.
And I also wonder to what extent
that I'm sure piracy,
as we would look to in American eyes
and point to
and say that's piracy
in other cultures has also existed,
maybe not under the same term, obviously,
or under a slightly different
conceptualization, but effectively,
like this band of rogue
multicultural thieves, thieves
living on the sea or on land.
like Robin Hood's men. Yeah.
And I think another interesting thing
that I don't think
going through and comparing everything
that you've talked
about
to like all of the details in one piece,
would be something that our listeners
would be particularly interested in.
But I do think an interesting topic
that has come up recently in the One
Piece community, and that's
kind of spilled over into more popular
mass media, is this discussion over
is One piece political?
again, I'm kind of going in assuming
that most people are probably not
super familiar with one piece,
especially the entirety of the story.
But it's an anime about pirates
and and it's huge.
It's huge and it's storytelling.
It's long in it's storytelling,
and it also captures
this more arguably realistic
portrayal of pirates.
I mean, to the degree that in Taiwan,
the one piece flag has become
a symbol of the movement for democracy.
Yeah.
I mean, it's appeared
other places as well,
like at the No King's March,
where we went to in New York, remember?
I forgot about that. Yeah.
So I think the question of
is one piece political?
I mean,
just demonstrably in terms of the evidence
available to us, the answer is yes.
Yeah.
But is the text of One piece political?
Yeah.
I think that One Piece is creator,
whether he would
call it himself a leftist or not,
certainly sympathizes
and is inspired by a lot of leftist
principles, leftist ideals.
And I think those ideals, again,
also fit in with this conception of piracy
that we've talked about today.
That is maybe not what the general public
at large would think of pirates as.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that they were, in fact,
as in mythologizing
pirates were a very masculine bunch.
It was overwhelmingly men,
although there were female pirates.
And my dad gifted me a book about them.
Maybe I'll read it
and we'll do another episode.
Yeah. Pirates part
two. 2 Pirates 2 Furious.
2 Pirates 2 feminine.
Yeah, but My impulse.
You know, when I learn about a movement
that existed in history
that was far more egalitarian
than I was led to believe and far more,
you know, rebellious and countercultural
is to romanticize it and idealize it.
And I think that that is a problematic
impulse when it comes to a lot of things,
including piracy. Right?
Because they were they were violent.
They were murderous.
It would be a mistake to look upon them
as, you know, an example of a moral ideal.
Yeah.
And it would also be a mistake
to make a moral judgment of pirates
more harshly
than that of the British Royal Navy
or other colonialist powers
during this time, or of the slave trade,
and it does inspire hope
and admiration to hear about people
organizing themselves
democratically in an egalitarian way,
with such great solidarity,
when the rest of the world was so much
none of those things.
was so very hierarchical
and marked by social division.
People are capable of coming up with
something very, very different from that.
Yeah.
And it's I think the other
interesting thing about all that is why
we have these conceptions of pirates
and other topics that don't reflect,
you know, like you
said, you find it interesting
and you begin to romanticize which, okay,
maybe that's taking it a bit too far.
But then I think part of that
original spark that you found interesting
was like, wow, this thing that I thought
was one thing was actually a lot more
aligned with my principles and values
than I would have thought.
And why is that the case?
Why have we been?
I mean, not
I'm not trying to be conspiratorial,
but like in a certain sense,
why have we been told otherwise?
Yeah, it's interesting
that we have been told otherwise
in a way that still romanticizes pirates.
Yeah.
You know,
years later, we romanticize pirates,
but we've erased everything about them.
That, to me, seems worth romanticizing.
Well, we've romanticized what I think.
And I say we
I think the American culture and media,
yes, has a romanticized
I think their freedom because.
Yes, yes, Romanticized their freedom
and their rebellion,
but erased the solidarity, the democracy,
the anti hierarchical social organization
and the multiculturalism.
Yeah.
Which I think is very telling
of our interpretation of it.
Yeah.
And it's also like to go back
to the conversation
that we were having earlier
about the anti-hero.
It's like it's a similar vibe of like,
we're going to romanticize this figure
for the esthetic of rebellion,
but erase any specificity about like,
what we imagine him
to be rebelling against.
So I'm so glad that the Whydah museum
exists.
I'm so glad that it's vibey and fun,
and that it's also like
DEI propaganda that would never be funded
by the federal government.
I'm not glad that it would never be funded
by the federal government.
I would like to get back to a time
when the government would fund wonderful
education, educational institutions
like the Whydah museum.
But, you know, I'm glad that it stands
in its principles and tells the truth,
Because the truth is so fascinating
and so complex.
Yeah.
And arguably not
what we've grown up
to understand it to be.
Yo ho ho.
So how are we going to
idealize pirates and
thus love better in our society?
What aspects of piracy
can we take into our.
We should loot and plunder
with swords and lob off people's limbs.
Well,
I mean, up until a certain point,
I was with you in
that you're not a fan of the limb
lobbing off, but you are
a fan of the looting and plundering.
Yeah, I mean, look at a movie
like I love boosters.
that was fun.
It clearly portrays
something that in the mass
media is vaillianized as corrupt,
greedy individuals trying to steal off
hardworking Americans
as something that is, in fact,
a way of life for some people
and how they make their living.
Yeah, but I think I love boosters
is a great segue, actually,
because it portrays that in the context of
I love boosters.
The Robin Hood
mentality is a starting point,
and spoilers up ahead for I Love Boosters,
but it will not shock you.
The the end point is organizing and worker
solidarity
organizing formally against the owners
of the means of production.
And I think that's the limitation
of romanticizing piracy.
I like the idea of taking slave ships
and naval ships
and disrupting those, like,
very oppressive systems.
But the end to
that was simply to take the loot.
Yeah. Which, no qualms. Get your bag.
But the end goal is not to dismantle
the oppressive system.
It is to disrupt it, perhaps,
and but mainly to profit from it.
Yeah.
And that's that's the limitation there
that Boots Riley
so beautifully takes us
far past in his stories.
I think another angle
from which to understand piracy
was just how very limited people's life
choices were in that era in history,
and understanding
why people make the choices
that they make based on, like a realistic
and holistic understanding
of what
the spheres of reality were at the time.
So how are you going
to use this conversation
and what you learned in it
to act more loving in society?
That's a good question.
I think I am going to go to the Whydah
Museum.
Yeah.
And learn more about pirates.
And I would love to learn more about some
women pirates
and to discuss that with you.
I have a Book about it on the bookshelf
right now.
Maybe we should read that for our next
book.
Maybe.
I feel like I come back to curiousity
a lot.
But, you know, getting curious about what
stories we like to tell about real people
who really existed and suffered
and hoped and and connected
with each other and tried getting curious
about what their lived realities
were and, and understanding
that ideas that seem
so very modern
and evolved to me
like flat social hierarchies
and one person, one vote,
and not recognizing the authority
of a nation that the modern world
did not invent these ideas
that people have been resisting
and organizing themselves
in very different ways
for a very long time.
Yeah, I love you.
I love you, too.
Yo ho ho. Let's eat some chili.
Yeah.
I hope it's been chili-fied. Hell, yeah.