This Week on Myth Busters

When I hear the word “pirate”, my mind immediately conjures an image of a middle-age bearded man drunkenly hobbling around on a peg leg as a pet parrot squawks, perched atop his shoulder. This stereotype has been repeated so often in literature and media you can almost smell the stale sailor stench and hear the gravelly voice bellow, “Arr shiver me timbers”. Unlike a fictional representation like Jack Sparrow, pirates of the Golden Age spoke with the lingo professional mariners. Although a few aspects of this image are anchored in small grains of truth, the reality of pirate life greatly differs from the picture portrayed by centuries of books, plays, and eventually cinema.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, originally published in Young Folks magazine in 1881 and later in 1883 as a book, forever shaped the way the world views pirates. The protagonist pirate captain, Long John Silver, sails the seas with his pet parrot, Captain Flint. It is a myth that pirates traveled with pet parrot companions, but the tie between pirates and parrots is not completely severed. Easily contained and cared for at sea, the birds “were sometimes used …to bribe officials” or sold in European bird markets (Cordingly, David).

“The map with a cross marking the location of the buried treasure has become one of the most piratical props… yet it is entirely fictional” (Cordingly, David). Stevenson can be credited with the association between pirates and treasure maps. The map drawing which originated the book and myth is pictured to the left. However, pirates were not sailing the seas in search of buried gold but to plunder merchant ships carrying goods from the New World back to Europe. Even if the pirates were in possession of a map most of them were uneducated seamen, unable to read and not versed in cartography.

Due to the illiteracy of most pirates, there are few first-hand journals and records. Most historical piratical information is sourced from trial records or tales from captured pirates. The lack of primary source accounts and popularity of early stories like Treasure Island made way for myths to repeat over centuries and shift our perception of pirates.