Heart of Oak

Posted By Sarah on July 29, 2010

As we continue to make progress on Heron and daydream about the future, more and more pirate themed events are presenting themselves to us. This is very cool, but it’s causing me to re-evaluate some of my long-held opinions about the boundaries between reenacting, performing fiction, and “edutainment.” Confession time: “Pyrates” have been the bane of my existence in more than one period of historical reenactment. I grit my teeth and smile every time some group of kids runs along the shore beside our vessel yelling, “Pirates! Look at the pirates!” With the exception of one or two very specifically-themed events, we don’t play pirate. Our usual portrayal is naval militia, the armed gunboats common in an era of border skirmishes and simmering war.

Despite the Hollywood caricatures of the lovable, dimwitted comic figures or the sexy, dangerous (yet not actually threatening) rogues, I’ve just never gotten into the whole pirate thing. I don’t think of Johnny Depp when I think “pirate,” I think of the International Maritime Bureau’s map of reported present-day attacks. I’ve been on watch in piracy-prone waters. I have friends who are currently working aboard ships that routinely pass through some really nasty areas, and I worry for them sometimes. When Pirates of the Caribbean came out, my non-maritime friends fought over who got to sit next to me in the theatre to watch me foam. (They were disappointed – after a certain point, my brain just went, “Oh, this is an alternate world without the slightest basis in our own reality,” and shut off. After that, I had a great time with those movies.)

But with the likelihood that I’m going to become a “professional” pirate reenactor/performer growing increasingly likely, I’m starting to look at it in a whole new light. Surprisingly, I’m getting excited about the idea. For starters, I’m getting better about maintaining that disconnect between Hollywood-pirates and present day sea-thugs. I can see the attraction of the pure-fantasy aspect – the “yarrgh me hearties” pyrates are a chance to let your hair down, play really fabulous dress-up, and play with guns. Without the responsibility of authenticity, *everybody* can be an officer dripping with lace! That leather corset, skull & crossbones necklace, and black lace skirt is totally okay if we all agree we’re playing theme-party dress-up.

What gets me is when you see the above, and they’re claiming to be based in real history. I suppose I can’t get entirely cranky about Hollywood pyrates, though – they provide a good hook (pun not intended, I promise) into actual teaching moments. Pirates are popular. Everyone knows something about pirates, and it can be a good starting point for conversations about the myths, legends, and realities of the maritime world in the age of sail.

For the record, I’m not *totally* anti-pirate, historical or otherwise. There’s been some fascinating scholarship coming out on piracy’s implications in the early modern Atlantic world. Marcus Rediker has produced some great books looking at shipboard proto-democracy, most notably in his books Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.) and The Many-Headed Hydra : Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (With Peter Linebaugh. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.) David Cordingly has done a great job separating fact from fiction with his Under the Black Flag : The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates. (New York: Random House, 1996.)  There’s a lot of really neat stuff there.

As a historian, I’m really interested in from-the-bottom-up kind of history, the stories and material culture of the working man and the common housewife. Piracy isn’t as cut-and-dried as Hollywood makes it seem. (Old joke: What does a historically accurate pirate look like? Just like a historically accurate fisherman when the fish weren’t biting.) Piracy ranged from intermittent attacks of opportunity in coastal waters to multi-year professional hunting voyages with dedicated fleets. It could be a back-door way to wage war against foreign countries. In some areas, entire communities supplemented their living by luring ships onto the rocks and ensuring there were no survivors to claim the surviving cargo. Accurately portraying pirates and other common seamen could be a useful and interesting way to tell the stories of a wide section of the non-Navy maritime world.

The other issue with getting more into historical piracy – a minor one, fortunately – is that it’s a shift backwards in time for us into a period we haven’t really researched before. We usually do events that range from the mid-18th century to the early 19th, and the commonly accepted Golden Age of piracy runs from the 1650s to the 1720s. I’ve done a fair amount of scholarship for that period, but I’ve never done any costuming for that era. Fortunately, there are resources out there already, and I plan to make good use of them.

Folks like those behind the Gentlemen of Fortune website have done a great job collecting and sorting various resources for authenticity-minded pirate reenactors. Researchers such as Kass McGann have put out articles & patterns for basic seamen’s clothing of that period. We draft most of our own patterns, but I’m considering getting one of her patterns for an early common sailor’s jacket. We’re lucky in that our usual portrayal is dirt-poor common sailors, and a lot of the basic look doesn’t change except in accessories. (Not as dirt-poor in appearance as our friends the Sea Rats, however, who have managed to take the “dragged out of the gutter and into the fo’c’s’le” look to an art form!)

I suppose one of the big questions now is where we want to go with this. I’m okay these days with playing the Hollywood yarr-pyrate, if that’s what the event sponsors want us to do. That can be fun sometimes. We’re pretty good at being entertaining. (Though really, with the boat & the cannon around, any crew is really just secondary entertainment as far as most folks are concerned, I think.) I’m really hoping we get contacted to do more serious history, though. Historical piracy is one of those fields where the truth is so much more fascinating than the pop culture fiction.

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