On Sunday, as I was drawing with my three-year-old nephew,
he asked if I could draw him a boat. As I was colouring in the hull, he
instructed that I needed to add a sail and a scary flag.
He then put my drawing skills to the test by asking for the
inclusion of a pirate, which according to Joshy had to have a hat, a patch and
a parrot. As I attempted to draw out his requests in thick Crayola felt tip
pens, I asked if he could make up a story about pirates (sneakily thinking I
could get Josh to unwittingly write this blog post). I started him off with the
classic and culturally ingrained ‘Once upon a time...’
Once upon a time, there
were dinosaurs that roared loudly. Scary, roaring dinosaurs. They chased the
pirates away. The pirates ran back to their boat and sailed away from the
dinosaurs. They went to an island to find treasure, gold treasure. They had a
key. When they used the key – ‘POP!’ – because there was a Jack-in-the-box
hidden inside. Then the cavemen came and took the pirates underpants and then
took them to the dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs wore them and roared because they
were happy. The end.
Anyone who regularly reads books to children will be able to
see that Josh’s story has been greatly influenced by a specific children’s
book, Dinosaurs Love Underpants. This
book, along with others, have formed part of Josh’s current knowledge of a
world he’s still learning and trying to understand. At the minute, for him, his
favourite books (full of imagination) are just as real and valid as concrete
objects or authenticated facts.
From both what Josh asked me to draw and from the story he
told, it is clear that Josh has managed to acquire the same stereotypical
depiction of a pirate as would be held by most adults. However, where we
perhaps just accept this stereotyped view of a pirate, Josh is presently in a ‘why?’
phase – questioning everything and looking for answers. And it got me thinking:
is this view of pirates derived from reality or has it been constructed
overtime by fictional works (such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan) and subsequently reinforced
via the medium of film?
So what was based on reality and what has been made up?
Did pirates really have
pet parrots?
Exotic pets were certainly popular amongst sailors, if for
no other reason than the high price they could command in the European markets,
and parrots were especially popular, perhaps because they could be taught to
talk. Several probate inventories of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries list parrots or parrot cages amongst the possessions of seamen, but
most importantly perhaps is the description of parrots to be found in William
Dampier's journal of his circumnavigation in which he describes the parrots of
Campeachy Bay as "yellow and red, very coarsely mixed; and they would
prate [talk] very prettily…"
Did
pirates really wear eye patches ?
There is one theory that the
eye patch was worn over one eye so the pirate could move between the darkness
of below-deck to the brightness of topside without waiting for the eyes to
adjust.
Another theory: the eye patch stereotype predates
the "Golden Age of Piracy" by some 200 years. Up until the 1500s one
of the key tools of maritime navigation was the
cross staff, which required the navigator to look directly into the sun at high
noon. This led to a lot of sailor/navigators who were partially blind in one
eye. After significant sight loss, many would likely have taken to wearing an
eyepatch over the afflicted eye. By the 1500s other tools like the back staff
had been invented which eliminated the need to look directly into the sun, but
by then the sailor/eyepatch image had made its way into public consciousness.
Did pirates really say ‘Arrr’?
Most scholars
think English-speaking Golden Age pirates spoke exactly the same as English-speaking
merchant sailors of the time, since large numbers in both groups tended to be
from riverfront neighborhoods around London, he said.
Many of the phrases that most people think of
as pirate speech today can actually be traced back to the 1950s Disney movie
Treasure
Island, starring Robert
Newton as fictional pirate Long John Silver (
hear Newton as Silver).
Thank you for
reading,
Lara
