They are robbers and murderers who live dirty, dangerous lives. Yet there is a glamour about pirates, especially pirates from long ago. I obviously feel that way too -- but I wonder why? 🤔
@PirateQueen Trying to think who else was a pirate in the old movies..? Think Tyrone Power might have been, but that's going back even before my time! 😄
Those who romanticise pirates may do so from knowing nothing of them beyond the half-truths and pure myths in novels and films - especially the tripe peddled by the latter.
The real ones then were, and the modern ones are, robbers with no qualms about also being murderers!
@akindheart Robin Hood was a mythical character, but his gang supposedly gave their loot to the poor. Supposedly.
Pirates have never been known to do that, though I think the 16-early 17C privateers at a time when England and Spain were at war were supposed to give at least some to the Crown. They were basically mercenaries whose main aim was to disrupt the Spaniards' flow of gold looted from the South American civilisations.
Otherwise pirates were and modern ones are, in it for themselves; but the tragedy of modern piracy off parts of the African coast is that these are mainly fishermen driven by desperation thanks very much to Spanish and French industrial-scale fishing sweeping the seas clean of the fish the residents had relied on. Some too, are victims of wars or famine.
@ArishMell Yes. The real story is just not very glamorous. I guess there is a heroic element to the impoverished fishers you mention, turning to piracy. Like the poor not waiting for Robin Hood to steal from the rich and give to them, but doing it themselves.
@PirateQueen The impoverished fishermen are the modern ones preying on merchant ships, and whilst it is possible to understand them it is why they are doing it that needs putting right.
The type the films glamorise were in a very different situation.
For both, there is absolutely nothing romantic about the reality, but some of the privateer crew-men might have thought they would make more money than they ever would as fishermen or farm-labourers back home.
They are romanticized as Robin Hood characters not only in movies but in books. [i]Frenchman's Creek[/i] by Daphne du Maurier, for instance.
In truth, they were not only thieves and murderers but rapists and by means of living on shipboard for months or years, smelly, toothless and scarred. Many of them missing appendages - hands, arms, legs - due to sword fighting.
I liked du Maurier's book ... but I don't like pirates.
They are the sea-going version of home invaders and very scary people who still exist.
it's far enough away that it can be romanticized, underscoring things like independence, virtually complete freedom, adventure, and discovering new and exotic things while ignoring things like the possibilities of starving, having all your food stores ruined, dying from an infection from a splinter, or getting scurvy and having all of your scars dissolve and reopen because you couldn't find a good vitamin c source on your months-long sea voyage.
SW-User
Works of fiction romanticized pirates and gave everyone a false narrative that they lived a life of freedom, adventure, and excitement. This served well for selling merchandise. But yeah, pirates were essentially terrorists with boats.
@ChipmunkErnie I don't think they'd want meet either version in real life!
I gather Disney made a film set in Boston, the NE American not English one, I think about the Boston Tea Party so still an English colony before Independence. The town was practically lawless, ruled by a vicious gang who would beat up or murder anyone for a fee - Disney glamourised even these!
@ChipmunkErnie I forget the title of the film but I learnt of it in a history programme, one of a series examining events that have accrued a lot of myths since. I think it was mainly about the Boston Tea Party, whose perpetrators were smugglers trying to evade a tax on the tea. The gang was a separate lot, part of the town's general lawlessness of the time.
Disney? Why have honest compassionate caring people loving each other... when we can have an audience we trained to look for fantasy to bring back repeat viewers? It's hard to spin apart culture nowadays, and might be the fall of culture... We need a male version of Sirens, after all. 🙄
Sure pirates may be thieves and murderers, but they're also sailors, navigators and soldiers, just as skilled in shipboard duties as they are in combat. It's books and films that have romanticized them as adventurers, treasure hunters, and swashbucklers.
How is eroticism different to pornography? It's all in the eye of the beholder, I guess. The acts of a pirate seem rather off putting whilst the look isn't
SW-User
For the same reason people romanticize the great depression era gangsters like John Dillinger, pretty boy Floyd and the Barrow gang
@Freeranger Can I just expound a bit though.....historical piracy has been a bit of a bent of mine. I've several books along the historical side and.....they're quite mind blowing, and I salute the authors who have researched them. As an aside, said pirates were at times, [i]employed[/i] to "do their worst.' Know yer history kiddies....as regards pirates it would amaze you if you seek the truth on them. It ain't Johnny Depp.
@Anielka Well, if we use the era of the privateers depicted by the Hollywood nonsense, only minor worries -
- long months at sea cooped up with a few dozen other men in a cramped, smelly, very uncomfortable and always damp old ship, - having almost nothing to do except keeping the ship together, - storms and shipwreck, -scurvy and other nutrition-deficiency diseases, - falling overboard and drowning, or breaking a limb or your back by an accident on board, - and if you survive intact so far, eventually being shot dead outright, or caught, tried and hanged (slow strangulation in those days)....
.. no, nothing really worth worrying about!
All right for Mr. Depp. He could just change out of the fancy clothes and go back to his comfortable home after pretending to be a pirate!
yeah basically they're hoods that travel. but the job entails some degree of organization and navigation. not to mention cool threads and parrots squak.
Oh, so now everyone is an expert on pirates. Unless you are an ‘expert’ with a degree in piratology, you can’t have an opinion, lest you be a conspiracy theorist.
