Pirates!

Yes, the music is annoying...that's the point. This is a website hand-coded in HTML to evoke 1999, there has to be an annoying MIDI file playing. Click the link at the bottom of the page to turn it off, and click the parrot to turn it on again. It should be cycling through a selection of a few songs, and yes, they have to be MIDI or I could get some kind of threatening DMCA takedown notice.

This part of the website might eventually mention pirates of the non-marine variety, and possibly fictional ones in the future, but for now, it's a place to infodump about my current kick for reading about historical pirates. (And yes, this is the fault of Our Flag Means Death.)

I'm especially interested in female pirates. There were women (and people who we'd now recognize as non-binary or transgender) running off to sea disguised as men all the time (supposedly, according to Jane Yolen and others, although the documentation of this would necessarily be scarce and therefore reliant on oral tradition and modern speculation), but several famous pirate captains didn't bother to disguise their identities as women. The sea often offered women more freedom than Western society did, as long as they were able to defend themselves, weren't afraid to get their hands dirty, morally speaking, in order to keep a crew afloat, and didn't mind the prospect of living fast and dying young. Pirates tended toward being more meritocratic and democratic than "civilization" was--the sea wasn't a utopia of lawlessness, but results mattered more than propriety, and people who got them were more likely to be recognized as such--so women who felt constrained by the limits put on them on land often had more freedom at sea.

That said, the pirates covered in the profiles I'll be building are both male and female, and from various time periods and parts of the world. While the Golden Age pirates are well-represented on these pages, I'm trying to read up on non-Western pirates because there were some serious ballers among them that we miss out on by being Eurocentric. And I can't wait to crack into the book I bought on the history of Jewish pirates in the Atlantic during "The Age of Exploration" (ie, post-1492, when Europeans figured out there was a whole world they hadn't noticed before and began climbing over each other to steal it from all the people who already lived there).

Here's a quick rundown of the plan for this section of the website (although most of this is still being assembled):

Speaking Pirate

Consisting of working definitions of what piracy is and what parts of it I'm covering, a glossary of pirate-related terms (so you can finally find out what "pieces of eight" means!), and a breakdown of what various types of ships looked like and why that matters.

Pirate Profiles

In the style of Facebook pages (I call this section of the website "Hookbook"...because that's kinda cute, I guess, right?), I'm making profiles of each of several historical pirates I find interesting. The idea started from something like trading cards of famous pirates. Not an exhaustive assembly of scourges of the sea, just some of my favorites or ones I found interesting, and the focus is less on legends and fictional portrayals than what is known for sure about them (as much as that can be possible).

Pirate Media

This will not be a deeply-developed page (or set of pages), but stories of pirates are probably more important than actual pirates themselves, in my opinion, and so much of what we think we know about piracy comes from fiction that the two are fairly inextricable. This will be more of a listing of media that falls into different categories: movies, TV shows, novels, and music (both individual songs and playlists are the plan, right now). This might include favorite or significant fictional pirates in the future.

Sources

A bibliography that will include an element of review for some of the sources. At some point in the nebulous future, I think I want to do a meta-analysis of narratives about pirates and how both historians and the public in general treat the idea of historical pirates. Why do we think of "pirates", both as a general collective and specific individuals, the way we do, ect..