“Now and then we had a hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” –Mark Twain, S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!
The Pirates of My Youth
by Jack Simons
As a child, I developed a passion for jewels and gold – strange, seeing I possessed none, and neither did my parents. In this I blame the lust-producing movies I saw in childhood – Africa Screams at age five – I watched Lou Costello follow a trail of giant uncut diamonds through the jungle to his apparent doom, and wished for those diamonds. Seeing Walt Disney’s Treasure Island, a year later, I writhed with desire in my theater seat as Ben Gunn displayed Old Flint’s treasure to the survivors of the expedition. All that gold! It was more than my eyes could bear.
Such foolishness has since been replaced by a more balanced mind, but in those early years when the fit was still on me, I pursued the study of piracy and read through the most common books for a young boy. Treasure Island was first – I had seen the movie. Then I discovered Rafael Sabatini: Captain Blood and more. I haunted the library for books on pirates, and finally landed on my favorite: Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.
I gazed endlessly at every illustration. I accepted every word as the truth. Now Pyle’s book is no more real than Captain Flint’s treasure, but I accepted it as a new gospel that promised high adventure, uninhibited freedom, and treasure.
If I had carefully read the title page, I would have found:
“Fiction, Fact & Fancy concerning
The Buccaneers & Marooners of
The Spanish Main: From the
Writing & Pictures of Howard
Pyle: Compiled by Merle Johnson”
‘Fiction’ and ‘Fancy’ sound like works of the imagination, but ‘Fact’ was required to provide the book credibility – that is my adult conclusion. But my dreams of being a pirate were nothing more than imagination in the first place, and so they had a root in the soul.
The human heart more deeply longs for freedom than anything else. Unfortunately, that longing is constrained by the myriad elbows of nearby neighbors – each one searching for freedom and all struggling one against another to find equal opportunity and freedom from tyranny. Somehow this struggle, for most who have lived under this sun, seems to result in modified slavery – to tribe, to king, to foreign conquerors, to the past, to the dull ravings of dialectical materialism.
A young boy: the natural slave to parents, church, school, and convention, but, heart bursting with youthful desires, would find piracy a natural haven for his needs and imagination. He would not be wrong. So it was with Mark Twain, the patron saint of young adolescence.
Twain and I had to imagine the sea without ever having seen it. He was born alongside the Mississippi River, and I lived near Lake Michigan, but both of us took the oceans of the world as our own before ever seeing heaving seas or hearing the sound of its surf. It wasn’t hard. The sea in my mind meant destination, adventure, and more than anything else – freedom.
Attack on a Galleon
Our ancestors had in one place or another been on the open water since the dawn of history; our nearer ancestors had crossed an ocean to arrive in the new world. It was only natural to imitate them in our minds. The freedom to travel unhindered to whatever destination one chose has always been one of the great romances of historical and literary piracy.
Our pirates chose the Caribbean, and so did our imaginations.
‘Freebooters’ – The word is borrowed from the Dutch and anglicized. It originally meant ‘free booty,’ but the anglicized version shifted the focus to the pirate himself – a ‘free boot’ I might say, and these boots were made for walkin’.
Pirate crews were voluntary companies of free men who signed articles of agreement guaranteeing rights and shares, and setting the terms of service. Even if a sailor signed the articles under the threat of being thrown overboard, he still entered into a free company that included an equal vote.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, I have taken the first three articles of a generic pirates’ code:
“I. Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure, unless a scarcity (not an uncommon thing among them) makes it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment.
II. Every man to be called fairly in turn, by list, on board of prizes because, (over and above their proper share) they were on these occasions allowed a shift of clothes: but if they defrauded the company to the value of a dollar in plate, jewels, or money, marooning was their punishment. If the robbery was only betwixt one another, they contented themselves with slitting the ears and nose of him that was guilty, and set him on shore, not in an uninhabited place, but somewhere, where he was sure to encounter hardships.
III. No person to game at cards or dice for money.”
I think even my mother might find reason to approve – apart from marooning, slitting noses and ears, and other excessive punishments – she hated lying, cheating, and thieving.
Notice that each freebooter had an equal vote; the crews’ shares were determined by rank.
If the code is further explored, it turns out that duties were required, conduct was governed, but this was always done with the consent (vote) of the crew.
The code also provided generous compensation for the loss of limbs or eyes. The article in part reads: “If in order to this, any man should lose a limb, or become a cripple . . . , he was to have eight hundred dollars, out of the public stock, and for lesser hurts, proportionately.”
Blind Pew, under these articles, would have received compensation for the loss of his eyes, but then, in Treasure Island, Captain Flint had stolen the treasure.
Last, pirates had the freedom to seek treasure, riches, unimaginable heaps of gold as though from Smaug’s treasure horde. A young boy imagining gold coins larger than silver dollars pouring through his fingers like so many jelly beans would feel unimaginable pleasure.
Young men in the age of piracy could bypass all the limitations of class or circumstance and, basing their careers on courage and pluck, amass a fortune – and if they spent it all, they could do it over and over.
I couldn’t become a pirate, so I joined the army. Some months later I found myself with a mask, a snorkel, and fins standing on the cliff above the mouth of the Chagres River in Panama. It gave me great pleasure to study the ruins around me – a bell tower and unroofed jagged walls of an abandoned church, the low walls of a fort.
The area had not yet been made fit for tourists, and the jungle had taken over the ruins. Below, dozens of sharks rolled in the mouth of the river waiting for whatever garbage floated down from the interior. I imagined the pirate Henry Morgan taking that very promontory in December 1670, on his way to the sack of Panama City.
I didn’t shiver at the memory, but it pleased me. Adventurous men placing their lives on the line against a fort with its cannon and numerous warriors excited my spirit. The pirates are all dead, the defenders gone, the area in ruins – the gold they sought and defended, now melted, re-minted and residing in safer vaults — probably in Switzerland.
Their adventure, though, lived in my mind, and that was enough.
Pyle’s book mapped all this adventure to my questing young imagination. He did it with color pictures I still see before my mind’s eye, and through tales of daring-do that I have never forgotten.
The pictures are included here and are magnificent. The book was a better read at age ten than now, but still worth the effort.
