One thing I love about contemporary life is that people like to do social, frivolous things in order to escape the dreary realities of day-to-day living.  One of my personal favorites is the “holiday” called “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, held annually on September 19th. It’s a modern phenomenon, born on the Internet and assisted in popularity by syndicated columnist Dave Barry.  And September 19th also happens to be my birthday.  Arrr!

On this day, everyone is supposed to talk like a pirate, saying things like, “Arggh, ye wench!  Fetch me my vittles!” (to your wife), or, “Avast, ye scurvy chumbucket!  I dare ya to dispatch yet another memo across my desk!” (to your boss).  Alas, there is no pirate term for ‘memo’.  And although these statements may cause you the loss of your marriage or your job, they are so much fun to say!  Challenge your friends!  Enjoy the holiday fully!  Accessorize by wearing pirate garb to work.  Those with time on their hands (or people like me who are easily led into excuses for socialization) may host festive parties where everyone drinks vast quantities of rum, grog, and mead and shares in the celebration of all things piratey.

When we think of pirates, we think of ships festooned with smiling skull-and-crossbone flags, of wise-cracking faithful parrots, gallons of rum, hefty wooden sea chests burgeoning with jewels and gold coins, and tattooed men bearing eye patches, hooks for hands, and legs of wood.  We indulge in cute Internet role-playing games such as Puzzle Pirates. We picture the handsome Johnny Depp in his role in the Disney trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean, rakishly wooing an elusive damsel on the mainland.

These are joyous, escapist things that everyone likes.  The aforementioned hand-crafted prosthetics of a pirate suggest injuries incurred during a great, spiraling tempest while he battled the winds and seas with a great degree of manliness, or perhaps during an intense physical battle with a mysterious tough-guy.

“Say, Jim, how’d ya get that wooden leg?”

“Arrrgh.  T’was when I fought hand-to-hand with the fearsome Bluebeard on the high seas.  Carved me up with his sword, he did, and tossed me real leg overboard.  But I jumped, bloodied and scathed, into the frigid waters of the Atlantic, and pummeled with me fists the swarms of sharks who tried to ravage me whilst I swam through fifty foot waves for four hundred miles to a deserted island in order to save me own life. All while carrying a hundred pounds of gold coins, mind ye. And I didn’t drop a cent.”

Whew! Who wouldn’t be impressed?

Fictional pirates add fuel to the fire of these lighthearted images.  Smee and Hook were the bumbling pirates in Peter Pan who somehow managed to do nothing right.  If you read the original novel by J.M. Barrie, “Peter and Wendy”, there is a deep psychological facet to these pirate characters that literary scholars debate about endlessly, but in the end they got what was coming to them. In the cartoon movie, they (along with their crew) are portrayed as a collective of stereotypical yet impotent pirates who managed to elicit the young viewer’s sympathy because they aren’t really dangerous, and after all, they can be bested by the good guys.  And Long John Silver? Well, he has a chain of fish stick restaurants in the South now, doesn’t he?

However, the reality of a pirate is quite different than the romanticized version most people have.  There is a skewed sense of just exactly what an “old-school” pirate was.  History blurs.  It is important that we separate fact from fancy and understand our own perception of a pirate. Romanticized pirates were “every-guy” black sheep heroes, like Robin Hood or Jesse James.  Sure, they took stuff, but it belonged to rich folks who didn’t deserve their privileged lives.  And didn’t the aristocracy screw them over in the first place, setting them off on the path of piracy as a calling?  Didn’t they share their loot with all their friends, and secretly help widows and orphans?  Yes!  We all want to imagine ourselves having the balls to take such a daring and independent road to paydirt glory.  People will fear us.  And they will talk about us.  And they shall embellish!

In real life, Jean Lafitte was a slave trader who cheated on his wife, and a mere merchant who dealt in stolen goods out of a shop on Royal Street in New Orleans.  It is rumored that his death came at the hands of his own men.  The exploits of the notorious Blackbeard (nee Edward Teach) were largely hyperbole… his chief weapon was fear.  Fear and surprise.  Okay, that’s two weapons… surprise and fear.  And ruthless efficiency… okay three.  Amongst his weapons were…  never mind.  Sorry, that’s Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, albeit a similar collective gang of rogues.  But in reality, Mr. Teach/Blackbeard never even killed a single person.  He was also an inept seaman who ran two of his own ships aground, a drug addict who demanded ‘medicine’ as a ransom for his hostages, and a bigamist.  He was subsequently killed in a sword fight by a North Carolina lieutenant named Robert Maynard, who hung Teach’s severed head from the bowsprit of his own ship. Very terrifying indeed.

It’s great to have fun with “Talk Like a Pirate Day” (I make my high school students participate each year if it falls on a school day).  It’s also quite fun to play online games such as Puzzle Pirates, and it’s great to enjoy Depp’s portrayal of Jack Sparrow in the movies.  Those are the fantasy pirates, the ones who entertain, the ones who bring teenage girls, frustrated soccer moms, and bi-curious metro-sexuals to their knees.

But real pirates, especially modern day pirates, are hideous and they probably stink to the high heavens, too.  How many showers do you think pirates take while hiding out from the law on the high seas, crammed into a leaky vessel with fifteen other men, not able to come ashore due to the lack of proper paperwork?

A quick Googling of the word “pirates” will bring up a results list which includes an MLB baseball team, a Disney feature film, the ubiquitous Wikipedia definition entry, a video of two men who created a pseudo-holiday, and an Associated Press news story about the horrible real-life modern day pirates off the coast of Africa.  WAIT… Why on earth did the inland city of Pittsburgh name its Major League Baseball team “The Pirates” anyway?  Surely there is no huge history of seafaring lore on the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio.  No, there is not. They became the Pirates because in 1890, the Pittsburgh Alleghenies (their original name) stole, or “pirated”, second baseman Louis Bierbauer away from the Philadelphia Athletics and were subsequently renamed The Pittsburgh Pirates. A name of which to be proud, surely.

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines “piracy” as:  “… an illegal act of violence, detention, or plunder committed on the high seas for private ends…”.  Violence?  Plunder?  Hmm… Nothing about devilishly handsome adventurers with an endless supply of 180 proof Jamaican rum enjoying a few months at sea with “the boys”?

The more recent bloody demise of three modern-day pirates from Somalia (who in the end were unsuccessful at attacking an American-flagged ship, The Maersk Alabama) was a satisfying ending to an infuriating scene which played out on the televisions of the civilized world.  Three scrawny little bastards who preferred to try to intimidate working men and steal things that don’t belong to them over bettering themselves through education. Take THAT! (sound of gunfire).  Three shots from three U.S. Navy SEALS from a cubbyhole on a moving ship at a moving target… and hey, sorry, but you guys are instantly dead.  Hooray for Navy heroes everywhere.  We take back our seas, dammit, so don’t fuck with us.

REAL pirates are ALL bad guys.

But who doesn’t like to break into a chorus of that famous old sea shanty?   “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest… Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil have done for the rest… Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.”  You simply can NOT sing that song without raising your arm in a festive glass-clinking gesture while holding an imaginary bottle of rum.  But wait, what does ‘the devil’ have to do with this?  I want to know more…

Well, here are some fun facts: The name of the original song is “Dead Man’s Chest”, originally pieced from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island“. Later, it was expanded into a poem entitled “Derelict” by Young E. Allison. How many of us know any other lines?

“…The mate was fixed by the bosun’s pike
The bosun brained with a marlinspike
And cookey’s throat was marked belike
It had been gripped by fingers ten;
And there they lay, all good dead men
Like break o’day in a boozing ken

Fifteen men of the whole ship’s list
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Dead and be damned and the rest gone whist!
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
The skipper lay with his nob in gore
Where the scullion’s axe his cheek had shore
And the scullion he was stabbed four times four
And there they lay, and the soggy skies
Dripped down in up-staring eyes
In murk sunset and foul sunrise
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Ah, clarity.  While surveying the scene more closely, we see that these men are strewn about the boat in a murky drizzle while the raindrops fall into their still-open (but dead) eyeballs.  There is booze.  People have been damned.  The mate had been killed by a pike-wielding bosun.  The bosun then had his head rammed (clear through to his brains) with yet another eight-inch-long spike.  The cook had been viciously strangled in hand-to-hand combat (with both hands).  The skipper, laying in bloody gore, got hacked with an axe (in the face!).  And the guy who hacked him apparently met his own demise by being stabbed, not just once or twice, but sixteen times (if my math is accurate).  Dead and damned, all of them.

Wait. What do you mean?  Where are all the sparkly gold doubloons?  Where’s the romantic departing kiss from the dashing Captain Sparrow as he swings out from the ropes of the mainsail onto his own ship and heads out to sea?  Where are all the jocular parrots and the high-spirited shenanigans?

This is a catchy song we teach our costumed ten-year-old boys, bedecked with plastic swords and goodie sacks, to sing with their friends while out begging neighbors for candy (and threatening those same neighbors with evil tricks if they don’t hand over the loot… which does resemble piracy, but Halloween is a blog for another day).

In reality, pirates are jerks.  Modern-day pirates are a vicious scourge on society, the potential bane of good hard-working seafaring men, as were the pirates of yesteryear.  The modern day pirate is nothing more than an unemployed opportunist who can’t qualify for a job at the local Quickie Mart. They are ugly, selfish, lazy criminals who would rather steal than work for a living, and have no qualms about kidnapping, torturing, and killing whomever gets in the way of their haul.

But imaginary pirates and historically inaccurate legends of pirates are a thing to embrace. Seriously… show us the real ending to the story of that song.  Are there any survivors? Do some of these guys wake up the next morning with massive hangovers, bemoaning the mess they made?    Here’s the script:

Yo-ho-ho

ACT III:  final scene

Invasive, headache-inducing bright sunlight is rising above the horizon on a calm sea.  Pan to to the ship’s broken mainmast with flapping sail. Cue squawking lone seagull. Zoom in on disheveled twenty-something, rubbing head in obvious pain as he rises awkwardly from a restless sleep from under torn jib sail.

Disheveled twentysomething:  (holding empty gallon-sized Bacardi bottle, his face clearly showing expressions of anger and disgust)  “Oh my god, you guys… we drank all the rum!  (now points to broken hinge) And who broke the lock on the hatch?  (now shows expression of dismay) Oh, great… look at that! WHO sliced Mike’s throat with a scallop shell?  (begins to point around randomly) And who the hell are all these other dead guys?  Who invited them?”

Second disheveled twentysomething, groaning, off-camera:  “Shut up, Glen. It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

First disheveled twenty-something (first bending, then standing, now holding large pointy swordlike object):  “Okay, WHO brought the marlinspike?!  We’re not doing any 17th century ropework here! (throws object to the deck in disgust) Dammit!  You guys better help me clean up all this blood! (raises empty hands to the sky in desperation) Did we bring any OxyClean?”

Lone seagull:  “Cawrk!  Cawrk!”

Fade.

Mentions:

“Dead Man’s Chest”, or “Derelict“;  Stevenson, R.L., “Treasure Island”; 1883 and Young E. Allison

http://talklikeapirate.com

“Peter and Wendy“, Barrie, J.M.; 1911

http://www.puzzlepirates.com

MLB (c) and their subdivision affiliates, the Pittsburg Pirates (c) had nothing to do with the creation of this article.  In fact, they’d probably hate it.  Which makes me happy, as I am a life-long Boston RED SOX fan.