Pirates Part 2 - Buccaneers, Privateers and Pirate Queens
Continuing on the deep ocean of pirate lore to cover the last half-millennia of history related to the scourges of the sea. What led to the uptick of pirate activity in the Caribbean? Why were so many pirates former privateers for the kings and queens of England? What was life like on a journey across an uncharted ocean? These questions will be answered as Levi takes you on another journey through time to learn even more about the history of the pirates life.
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Transcript
So much.
Speaker:History is wrapped up around the singular topic of piracy.
Speaker:We found that out after
Speaker:realizing a need to split this episode into two separate ones.
Speaker:Make sure I didn't have hours for one episode of this brand new show.
Speaker:Apparently that's a bad thing until you become popular.
Speaker:Who would have guessed?
Speaker:Last week, we delve into the ancient origins of
Speaker:piratical waters, looking at the ancient Egyptians, Greek Romans
Speaker:and into the early Middle Ages or the dark Ages to some and some run
Speaker:ins with some men from the north.
Speaker:We'll get ready for more tales from the high seas.
Speaker:The East Asian piracy, global exploration and the so-called golden age of piracy.
Speaker:The real meat and potatoes, if you will.
Speaker:All that more on another episode of the remedial scholar.
Speaker:Bad sanction Headmistress. Mr..
Speaker:I feel I was denied
Speaker:credit critically need to know
Speaker:in information
Speaker:belongs to CMC
Speaker:now step in your community we last last
Speaker:we left off at a very interesting place last week and if you're listening
Speaker:to this one, before you listen to that, I before listening to that,
Speaker:I recommend you go back and listen strictly based off of chronological order.
Speaker:Before we go back, first into another massive sea of stories about pirates.
Speaker:Some nautical humor for you, some quick requests. And thanks.
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Speaker:So anyway, with that being said, on to the fun stuff, back to the Pirates.
Speaker:Let's get into it.
Speaker:And we left off in the Middle Ages around the 13th century in Europe, Vikings
Speaker:were beginning to settle down.
Speaker:No more raiding really for them
Speaker:as they were living in the lands that they once raided.
Speaker:Piracy was not really over,
Speaker:but it looked a lot less like Vikings from the north and more
Speaker:just like typical 12th century vessels stealing from one another.
Speaker:What was once a section of the continent.
Speaker:Due to the Crusades, the Western European nations began to trade
Speaker:and mingle with those in the Middle East, albeit a little violently.
Speaker:They spent more trading across the sea as it was
Speaker:still the fastest way to cut across the map.
Speaker:Boats went from being single, masted and small
Speaker:to being more rotund and having to mass while still having rowing capacity.
Speaker:The battle versions often had little stands on the front
Speaker:and back that looked like castle walls at the top with the
Speaker:little grooves cut out called the four Castle and Half Castle.
Speaker:Except for being front aft.
Speaker:Being back is actually a term that still used in different ways.
Speaker:When I was in the Navy.
Speaker:They obviously use language that predates them, the modern ships.
Speaker:But there's a section of the ship called the Foxhole,
Speaker:which is an abbreviated version of for Castle.
Speaker:And I was on an aircraft carrier and this is a sections, a big room
Speaker:where there's sections of the chain for the anchor that weaves through it.
Speaker:And we would have like meetings and stuff in there.
Speaker:I'm not really used how it used to be.
Speaker:How it used to be used was a covered section for people
Speaker:to sleep basically on the ship and it evolved as ships evolved.
Speaker:It was no like the castle jets.
Speaker:Like those things wouldn't, wouldn't be part of its design for a super long time.
Speaker:But that's just how it started and that's super important.
Speaker:But I wanted to describe the types of ships as we kind of move forward
Speaker:as the size of the cruise will begin to change pretty drastically
Speaker:in the next couple hundred years.
Speaker:Now, as much history is involved in the European front of piracy, areas
Speaker:in the China Sea experienced a lot of piracy
Speaker:dating back just as far as the European counterparts should be.
Speaker:No surprise, since I stated last week that the history of stealing people's
Speaker:things with a boat is not a new concept, and many of the Asian communities sit
Speaker:very tightly on the water
Speaker:and have a rich history of balance with ocean fishing, that sort of thing.
Speaker:According to the Chinese
Speaker:sources, history of piracy can be traced as far back as the fifth century BCE.
Speaker:You know,
Speaker:the Romans had learned about power in vessel waters of the Indian Ocean,
Speaker:which is not, you know, the Super East Asia, but in the Asian continent
Speaker:document known as the tabula up went to get arena went printing
Speaker:gear in a man Latin or the pointing or map
Speaker:is a copy of a map thought to be made from the fifth century.
Speaker:CE and it describes dangers
Speaker:off the coast of India, which is fun to think about these areas as.
Speaker:You don't typically think about them intermingling in that sort of way.
Speaker:Of course, like the proud naval traditions of the Scandinavians or the Rhodes
Speaker:or Athenian people, people of eastern edges of Asia
Speaker:became quite adept with traveling and trading along the water,
Speaker:fishing as a major source of food.
Speaker:To this day in these communities.
Speaker:And and something that comes to mind almost instantly when thinking of Eastern
Speaker:Asian nations.
Speaker:In my opinion, around the 11th century, ships called Junks began
Speaker:being used by the Chinese, and the name is a little bit of a misnomer.
Speaker:They weren't junk.
Speaker:They were unassuming by having low decks that were long and thin.
Speaker:But prowess of the rigging of the sails was far more superior
Speaker:to the Western versions.
Speaker:Around the same time period, the holes were excellent for shallow waters.
Speaker:A theme I think fits with the fishing history of the region.
Speaker:Ship even had a frame of sorts.
Speaker:Instead of having walls make up the rigidity of the ship,
Speaker:junks featured these walls on the inside of the hole
Speaker:that would make up compartments along the length of the ship
Speaker:used for storage and different things like that.
Speaker:Imagine like a 70 style standing shelf with all these like different shaped
Speaker:rectangular compartments laid down and made watertight
Speaker:with a whole wall around it and then underneath.
Speaker:And that kind of gives you an idea of what what this might have looked like,
Speaker:that framework throughout the length of the ship
Speaker:actually made it more strong to resist the harsh China seawater.
Speaker:So more advances would make these ships be some of the best
Speaker:by the time like by the fifth century compared to the rigging,
Speaker:like the rigging of other ships in Europe kind of caught up by that time.
Speaker:And so, conversely, the Chinese junks, the actual like ship
Speaker:part of it caught up to the rigging and they're pretty good by that time.
Speaker:Of course, there's a lot of instances of piracy
Speaker:before the events I'm about to describe happened,
Speaker:but this is kind of when it becomes
Speaker:an issue that the emperors of these places began to take action.
Speaker:And that's why we have documented, you know, documentation about it
Speaker:in an almost directly mirrored
Speaker:event of what was happening with the Danes in Europe.
Speaker:A tribe called the church and left the frozen
Speaker:northern lands and end ships to raid Japan around 1019 C.E.
Speaker:slaughtering Japanese men and taking women for prisoners.
Speaker:The governor was killed.
Speaker:An estimated 1200
Speaker:Japanese were taken prisoner, while almost 400 were killed in the raid.
Speaker:After this, it seems that things really set off
Speaker:not directly because of it, but definitely ramped up after in the 13th century,
Speaker:Mongols were terrorizing pretty much anyone and everything
Speaker:Korea included with their need
Speaker:to defend the inland from the ravenous Mongol hordes.
Speaker:This left their coastlines, what with less than optimum defenses.
Speaker:And we all know what that means
Speaker:with hungry neighbors who knew these places would be open
Speaker:that left the Korean Peninsula open for writing in 1226 Governing bodies of Korea
Speaker:at the time sent letters to the Japanese asking why people from
Speaker:their island of Tsushima were cluttering their bays and causing mischief.
Speaker:The response of the Japanese was to execute 90 individuals, to
Speaker:essentially create the fear for others and repair diplomatic relations as well.
Speaker:Through this interaction, the term of the pirates was created.
Speaker:Waku in Korean or Wako in Japanese,
Speaker:is how pirates of any
Speaker:descent in these waters will be known until about the 17th century famine
Speaker:and war surrounding in the surrounding areas were forcing people into piracy.
Speaker:This accelerated in 1275 when the Mongols had finally taken Korea
Speaker:as a vassal state with the bolstered presence
Speaker:of Mongol warriors in the coastal waters, Japanese pirates pretty much dared
Speaker:not to raid this area, which really speaks to the presence of the Mongols.
Speaker:The Mongols even won ships from places they conquered, but were composed
Speaker:mostly of pirates because they were not familiar with the ships at all.
Speaker:Mercenary vessels now sailed against Chinese coast,
Speaker:and it was the mercenary vessels now sailed against the Japanese coast,
Speaker:and it was Japanese pirates who were skilled enough to defend their country.
Speaker:So in a weird turn of events, pirates fought against one another.
Speaker:After several failed attempts, the Mongols gave up on the attack
Speaker:on Japan, partially due to the fact
Speaker:that their ships were being wiped out in what the Japanese would call divine winds.
Speaker:The typhoon, the legend says, destroyed the Mongol fleet.
Speaker:These divine winds also known as kamikaze.
Speaker:And that's kind of where that term comes from.
Speaker:And they appeared twice and twice defeated Mongol ships.
Speaker:So either the gods were watching over the island of Japan or the Mongols sucked
Speaker:acid trip planning
Speaker:these defeats came at a cost to the Mongols and led to more defeats.
Speaker:They're even beaten back by the Chinese, by the Mid-14th century,
Speaker:Japan would be having its own government trouble and piracy was once again rampant.
Speaker:The Ming Dynasty was beginning in China, and the last thing Emperor
Speaker:Hong Lou wanted to deal with was pirates from their island neighbors.
Speaker:Another letter was sent out.
Speaker:I love how many letters were exchanged between these kingdoms
Speaker:because not only just in general, but it also gives a lot of context
Speaker:to what's happening.
Speaker:But I just love that that's how we used to keep.
Speaker:Yeah, anybody could write that, but you got to trust this one.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:In the letter, a threat was made basically saying, You're going to fix this problem
Speaker:or I will, but as Hong Wu had a coup thwarted against him
Speaker:and was dealing with roughly 30,000 people involved, which is an insane
Speaker:coup, Japan was realigning themselves to become stable once again.
Speaker:As far as the Chicago Shogunate was repairing the damage done,
Speaker:trade was once again established between the Three Kingdoms,
Speaker:and there was even a short exchange of prisoners
Speaker:when diplomats would come to visit, not to free them at all, but
Speaker:for their home country to deal with how they saw fit.
Speaker:Moving back to Europe and things
Speaker:eventually get tied together here in a little bit by the 13th
Speaker:century, different factions had different ways of dealing with pirates.
Speaker:The Hanseatic League, for instance, was created in a weird type of naval
Speaker:association where they would watch over trade routes and ports
Speaker:maintain security in the Balkan seas.
Speaker:There was also a standard
Speaker:of having armed men aboard ships to prevent or defend from pirate activity.
Speaker:Others began to take advantage of major wars like the 100 Years
Speaker:War English Channel, rife with pirates now waiting for movement
Speaker:of any kind of jump, for we even have the first real solid versions
Speaker:of some privateers the virtual brothers was a band of pirates
Speaker:who on their own caused some major damage in the trade.
Speaker:In the 14th century,
Speaker:fighting between Mecklenburg and Denmark had led to the hiring of the
Speaker:actual brothers.
Speaker:By way of Duke of Mecklenburg and his lack of a proper navy
Speaker:wishing to wage what is called a copper krieg or privateers.
Speaker:War against Queen Margaret of Denmark offering
Speaker:a letter of Marque, which we'll learn about a little more later.
Speaker:It's a legal note that essentially gives you permission
Speaker:to be a pirate on behalf of the royal request.
Speaker:These brothers would smuggle goods to besieged places, take food to others,
Speaker:and even engage in full on naval battles.
Speaker:They're especially brutal in nature, allegedly slaying most of the people
Speaker:on the vessels that they boarded, taking what they wanted.
Speaker:Pretty much they got a little too greedy and attacked Burger King in Norway in
Speaker:1393, forcing the Hanseatic League, Denmark,
Speaker:Mecklenburg and others to sign a treaty forcing them from the Baltic Sea.
Speaker:The Victor brothers had a haven in Gotland and they simply just went there.
Speaker:But a man named Conrad von Jungen of the Teutonic Knights
Speaker:invaded Gotland and slaughtered
Speaker:most of the pirates who were there jumping back slightly in 1241, Allegedly
Speaker:the first man to be executed by hanging, drawn and quartered was done to a pirate.
Speaker:There's definitely
Speaker:a writing on the wall for kingdoms like England
Speaker:and how they would deal with pirates in the future.
Speaker:But all crime was punished pretty graphically back then.
Speaker:Yet crimes continued and even still happened anyway.
Speaker:A man named William Morris was a pirate who apparently was very dangerous,
Speaker:although there's not a lot of information on him
Speaker:other than the name, title and type of death.
Speaker:King Henry, the third hated pirates and ordered the man's death by hanging,
Speaker:drawn and quartered
Speaker:is the same thing
Speaker:that they would end up doing to William Wallace of Braveheart fame.
Speaker:It consisted of the subject being dragged,
Speaker:which is the drawn part to the gallows, which could be miles at some point.
Speaker:Once there, they were hanged, but not really
Speaker:in the same way that we normally think.
Speaker:The short drop in some stop type, more like a suspended choking
Speaker:where they were dangled and strangled, I guess is the best way to do it
Speaker:or describe it until they were either completely or mostly dead.
Speaker:After that, they're either,
Speaker:you know, they're chop their head was either chopped off
Speaker:and then they cut the body or they cut off the genitals,
Speaker:disemboweled the individual and burnt them while they hanged.
Speaker:Then they would cut the body into quarters,
Speaker:which is where the quarter come from
Speaker:and sounds like some good, wholesome family entertainment.
Speaker:And people did all join up and watch.
Speaker:This thing happened back in the day.
Speaker:People say that we're violent as a society now, but holy cow, can you imagine?
Speaker:Let's get the kids wife, honey, let's go.
Speaker:Let's go.
Speaker:Watch this guy get cut up in pieces.
Speaker:All right, There's my popcorn.
Speaker:Some of the other things besides insane punishment to deter pirates
Speaker:were innovations on ships.
Speaker:A ship that dates back to the ninth century called the COG would evolve
Speaker:from different techniques that would make it more resistant
Speaker:to pirate attack, while the walls of the ships
Speaker:were pretty standard for boats at that time,
Speaker:they featured high sides that would make it harder to board
Speaker:and see fights, especially if the pirates had shorter vessels,
Speaker:the extra extra height on the walls, making it, you know, more difficult.
Speaker:They could be up to 82
Speaker:feet long and up to 26 feet wide and had a crew size of 50 for the ocean.
Speaker:Travel would lead to need for bigger ships that could handle strong waters.
Speaker:The ocean Portuguese developed a ship called the Caravel
Speaker:in around the 13th century featuring multi mass sails, the name
Speaker:potentially stemming from the Caravel method of building as opposed to
Speaker:the clinker built style where the planks and the whole lap over one another.
Speaker:Similar to how like Viking long boats have.
Speaker:If you look at pictures of the sides of them, you can see the the lap.
Speaker:The caravel is a smooth way of the whole to be built.
Speaker:The Nina and the pinto were caravel
Speaker:and they sailed across the ocean with Columbus.
Speaker:Of course, in 1492
Speaker:the other ship was a little more modern, built in the 15th century.
Speaker:Santa maria was a Carrick style model, also a Portuguese design.
Speaker:These do love ships like a lot.
Speaker:Anyway, as they began to cruise around the coasts of Africa, they needed
Speaker:bigger ships to the Carrick was their idea length of 150 feet, which is double
Speaker:that of the average caravel displacing a thousand tons, which is ten times
Speaker:as much as the caravel displacement is used to define ships
Speaker:in the weight of the water displaced by the vessel at sea.
Speaker:Think of, you know, when you sink, when you like sink some large toy
Speaker:in the bathtub, you know, when you're little anyway, and the water goes up.
Speaker:That's the those placement physics, you know, I mean, science.
Speaker:The Carrick also had a large round hole that curved upward
Speaker:to combat the high seas.
Speaker:These things are really funny looking and honestly, like
Speaker:I thought they were fake when I was looking at pictures like that.
Speaker:There's no way that's what the ships look like.
Speaker:And then you see like authentic recreations and like, I guess that's
Speaker:that is what it looked like in my brain.
Speaker:It's just all like mid 18th century ships.
Speaker:That's all the sailing ships.
Speaker:That's what they looked like.
Speaker:So anyway, the Carrick would hold up to 200 sailors,
Speaker:which is massive compared to the 30 at the Caravel.
Speaker:All these ships featured mass and were not rowed.
Speaker:The Carrick featured three and sometimes four mass
Speaker:to hold a many different variations of sails and ratings to pull them along
Speaker:the water thing that always made me curious about how ship sails
Speaker:operated because, you know, the wind's not always at your back, right?
Speaker:Well,
Speaker:I saw a video explaining how it worked and I think I can explain it through that.
Speaker:So they explained that the sails
Speaker:could push the ship forward as long as the wind doesn't.
Speaker:Wasn't at a certain degree.
Speaker:I can't remember the exact specific degrees,
Speaker:but it's directly in front of you.
Speaker:And then plus or minus, I know I want to say
Speaker:I want to say 40 on either side, but that could be wrong.
Speaker:That might be I don't know, maybe 20.
Speaker:So 40 total.
Speaker:Anyway, so the the really only thing you could do
Speaker:was a method called tacking where you would basically
Speaker:instead of going straight ahead, because that's where your destination was,
Speaker:you would go off to either direction and let the wind kind of work
Speaker:around the sail in a weird way, similar to like how an airplane wing would work
Speaker:and you would use the rudder of the ship to counteract that movement,
Speaker:and then that would kind of propel you forward.
Speaker:It's very confusing, but you know, it is what it is now.
Speaker:The advances of the ship were not just in how they were pushed forward,
Speaker:but also, you know, the gunpowder on them.
Speaker:Arrows were starting to lose their thrill with the advance
Speaker:of gunpowder leading to cannons originating in the ninth century.
Speaker:In China, gunpowder led to cannons and cannons in the field. Led
Speaker:cannons on the ships makes ship battles more exciting, but also more dangerous.
Speaker:Large blasts in the wooden hull spelling certain doom for those on board.
Speaker:This meant that the powder
Speaker:powder in the shot had to be perfect
Speaker:in the distance, perfect in the tactics and maneuvers, also perfect or death.
Speaker:Also, we took a shot to where your powder storage is here.
Speaker:You got a real bad day going
Speaker:because that's that's a michael Bay explosion if I've ever seen one.
Speaker:Anyway, this is just the life of the people on the water
Speaker:and something to consider as we enter the next phase of our story.
Speaker:Although at first combat was simple,
Speaker:it would take a while to change very drastically.
Speaker:So in the crux, the 15th and 16th centuries,
Speaker:things began to take shape in terms of how we view the world,
Speaker:the Byzantine or Byzantine Empire was mentioned in the last episode,
Speaker:began to be pressed from civil wars and outside attacks after the 12th century.
Speaker:Former Eastern Roman Empire collapsed after the fall of Constantinople
Speaker:in 1453 to the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
Speaker:The rift between Muslim nations and Christian ones
Speaker:caused the Ottoman Empire to essentially
Speaker:shut off the access to the Silk Road of the former Mongolian empire.
Speaker:What does that mean?
Speaker:Longer trips for shorter distances sailing around the Horn of Africa.
Speaker:The first to do this? That's right.
Speaker:The God damn Portuguese.
Speaker:And if you think I've been too hard on them for no reason, give it a second.
Speaker:While Columbus was sailing west to go east, Vasco
Speaker:da Gama sailed around the Horn of Africa, connecting Europe to Asia.
Speaker:Big time. Big. It's a big move.
Speaker:While Portugal worked their way around Africa,
Speaker:they left bases and forts to claim their land.
Speaker:Getting a century long head start on the transatlantic slave trade.
Speaker:That's right.
Speaker:They were exporting around 800 slaves from Africa annually, which is not that much.
Speaker:But when you realize the major market was not really there yet, that's a lot.
Speaker:I mean, any is a lot now.
Speaker:But, you know, they were mainly just taking these people back to Portugal.
Speaker:So it's a lot and it's a lot, like I said.
Speaker:But after Columbus returned from his technically failed expedition,
Speaker:he still believed the route to exist to Asia.
Speaker:Because of this, treaties
Speaker:began to be drawn and make some peace among the chaotic waters.
Speaker:The Treaty of tortoises divided the ocean and thus the world between
Speaker:Portugal and Spain, which is pretty funny because nobody in these areas knew this
Speaker:except for them.
Speaker:Columbus, as we know, went to the Americas well, really mainly just Cuba
Speaker:and the Caribbean. Several times over ten years.
Speaker:And this would really open the world up to travel
Speaker:and thus giving our topic prime real estate in the future.
Speaker:I want to stop for a second and really drive home the point about how
Speaker:insane it was to navigate uncharted waters across wide open oceans.
Speaker:Entire concept with the technology at the time is just mind blowing to me.
Speaker:They had familiarity with sailing.
Speaker:Sure, some people navigated
Speaker:the northern Atlantic before with Greenland, Iceland in the actual
Speaker:the Viking exploration that got to North America.
Speaker:But to think about where Columbus was going, the Caribbean,
Speaker:the place that gets hit by hurricanes constantly in certain months of the year.
Speaker:Like sure, storms hit the western edge of Europe, but the
Speaker:massive swells in the Atlantic were ships that were really not that big in reality.
Speaker:The Carrick style Santa maria being almost 120 feet long,
Speaker:we measure waves in the Atlantic that approached 60 feet
Speaker:and they had no way of tracking anything like that.
Speaker:Basically just going off of like, well,
Speaker:we know that there's storms in this time of year
Speaker:and we're going to kind of we're going to do that.
Speaker:They could barely see in front of them.
Speaker:You know, they had their telescopes and that's kind of it.
Speaker:An issue also being when the winds stop, I mentioned how they sailed
Speaker:with front winds. But how about no wind?
Speaker:The doldrums are a phenomenon in which there's no wind in the ship,
Speaker:just kind of sits and waits until the wind comes back.
Speaker:Could be days or longer before they're able to move.
Speaker:And if they're in a ship that was not fitted with hours,
Speaker:you know, it's a hard time.
Speaker:So with wind, they're still out months at a time, rocking back and forth,
Speaker:only using buckets for the bathroom needed salted meats and pickled goods.
Speaker:They had dried out grains.
Speaker:The worst of all these was hardtack or ship biscuits,
Speaker:the multi cooked, useless bread that can last long spans of time.
Speaker:It's kept out of the fresh air.
Speaker:They had to smash it so ground water or milk or beer
Speaker:before they could actually bite it.
Speaker:And they did drink at sea.
Speaker:And it's not because they were like, Oh, we're sailors, we got to get hammered.
Speaker:It's actually, weirdly enough, makes sense.
Speaker:They would drink beer because beer does have, you know, nutritional value.
Speaker:It does have carbs and vitamins, things like that.
Speaker:And also it's more resistant to micro bacteria
Speaker:than water would be kept in the same condition.
Speaker:So that's a little fun fact that I learned today.
Speaker:Anyway, back to our story.
Speaker:While most of the Renaissance is
Speaker:looked at as peaceful, there's still plenty of shenanigans
Speaker:going on with the routes around Africa set by the Portuguese.
Speaker:They met up to the China Sea after potentially being blown off course.
Speaker:Chinese refer to these people as southern barbarians,
Speaker:and this would connect the powers across the lands together now via oceans
Speaker:and begin to usher in a big bulk of the pirate action.
Speaker:Portuguese placed a base essentially in Malacca and tried to spread Christianity,
Speaker:as well as introducing more unsavory things into the Southeast Asian countries.
Speaker:As I mentioned before,
Speaker:the growing Ottoman Empire had a cold chokehold on the Silk Road
Speaker:and was also a place that had its own pirates, Barbary pirates
Speaker:or corsairs, as they're sometimes referred to as operated in the areas
Speaker:around the Ottoman Empire, lands that were considered
Speaker:part of the Ottoman Empire,
Speaker:but also ones that were republics on their own and chose their own rulers
Speaker:were massive in attacking the Portuguese and the Spanish.
Speaker:The northern coastline of Africa was where
Speaker:these pirates would hail places like Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli.
Speaker:The pirates seeking slaves to add to the rich Barbary slave trade,
Speaker:which I guess I had forgotten about or never learned about.
Speaker:Either way, this was far less organized than the slave trades.
Speaker:Later on, but estimates are around 1 to 1 point
Speaker:to 5 million from the 16th and 18th century.
Speaker:They're pretty indiscriminate in their choosing,
Speaker:unlike the people who took slaves around the same time and later
Speaker:equal opportunity slaves, if you will, they would seize merchant ships as well as
Speaker:attack towns along the coast, even going as far north as the Netherlands.
Speaker:These actions actually go back a few hundred years,
Speaker:but the real rampant nature of them caused people
Speaker:to look at them a little more closely.
Speaker:Some European men even left or were shunned and decided to join up
Speaker:with these Barbary pirates and put their skills to use.
Speaker:I mentioned Algiers, and they even had a pair of pirate rulers
Speaker:in the name of hatred in Barbosa and Oruc, Greece.
Speaker:The brothers rose to prominence due to their impressive naval skills
Speaker:and took and took control of Algiers.
Speaker:For the Ottomans, Barabas is the same name.
Speaker:Is that Geoffrey Rush character in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Speaker:But I don't think they were related at all.
Speaker:Now, there were attempts at legitimacy across the globe.
Speaker:For Japan and China, the colony was illegitimate.
Speaker:It scroll or messages carried by parties wishing
Speaker:to do business, signed and dated for the correct time in which to do so.
Speaker:Basically giving you a timeline in which you were allowed to legally trade
Speaker:in China to rival clans arrive at the same time to do a trade.
Speaker:But one carried outdated papers and the other one was within their range.
Speaker:The clan that had outdated
Speaker:papers bribed the Chinese officials and won the bid essentially.
Speaker:And this did not sit well with the other guys.
Speaker:He and his men killed.
Speaker:The main delegator of the Chinese burn the ship down that they were on
Speaker:and then scorched earth tactic like move through the land that they traveled
Speaker:as they went back to Ningbo and then they stole
Speaker:a bunch of ships in the process, which is pretty gnarly.
Speaker:But I get it.
Speaker:The main issue,
Speaker:the con system, was that Japan was struggling with the warring states at hand
Speaker:and having no central government power to back the colonies.
Speaker:And with that the official trade ability for Japan was kind of,
Speaker:you know, dead in the water.
Speaker:The people had a need for goods and luckily for them, pirates
Speaker:were happy to oblige, many of which held refuge and fortification fortified nations
Speaker:along the coast, bands of different ethnic groups kind of banding together.
Speaker:Portuguese pirates even joined them because there's nothing
Speaker:the Portuguese love more and cruelty on the water?
Speaker:No, I don't think so.
Speaker:But it's fun to speculate.
Speaker:By the middle of the 15th century, Magellan's mission to circumnavigate
Speaker:the globe was accomplished not by him, because he died after
Speaker:some indigenous people in the Philippines showed him
Speaker:what for his successor became the actual first one to do so.
Speaker:Juan Sebastian Okano
Speaker:This was the first circumnavigation of the globe, a feat not many have claimed.
Speaker:I mean, I have, but I am no ordinary man.
Speaker:Just kidding. But I did do it.
Speaker:I got myself a little certificate and everything.
Speaker:Anyway, we don't know the story. It's pretty gnarly.
Speaker:Magellan had five ships
Speaker:and was off the course of route around the globe
Speaker:because they all knew it was round and could end up on the other side.
Speaker:There's just no proof that it wasn't dangerous to do so.
Speaker:They thought crossing the Atlantic was dangerous,
Speaker:not because there is a cliff
Speaker:on the other side, but because there was no it was not known to be done.
Speaker:It was so hard to do, especially with the ships that they had back then.
Speaker:What they now knew was that there was land in the way of a straight shot,
Speaker:which is fine. Just go around.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Well, they also did not know how far down this land
Speaker:stretched or up or whatever, and therefore massively underprepared.
Speaker:Remember when I said it was a little crazy
Speaker:to do something so wild with a little idea of what awaited
Speaker:this is why they had five ships, 270 men, give or take a left in September of 1519
Speaker:and returned in September 1522, which is not not good.
Speaker:They also only returned with one ship
Speaker:to Victoria, which was that carrier style, similar to the Santa maria,
Speaker:and they had 18 men with them and it took them three years.
Speaker:So granted, not all of them died.
Speaker:12 got captured by the damned Portuguese and one returned a year end of the voyage.
Speaker:Upwards of 60
Speaker:were slaughtered in the Philippines with Magellan
Speaker:when he tried to spread the word of Jesus over there.
Speaker:Although it wasn't a complete loss, Magellan and the Armada tried to find
Speaker:the ship that ended up turning back after a year and in that search noticed
Speaker:how common the Pacific Ocean was and named it such Mar Pacifica.
Speaker:And so that's that's where that came from.
Speaker:LEE After that, he was like, Hey, guys, we rounded through this super cool
Speaker:strait of Magellan named after named after a cool guy, I guess
Speaker:should only be, you know, three or four days to the East Indies.
Speaker:And then it took four months for them to reach the Philippines.
Speaker:And he died, like I mentioned before, basically all that to really drive home
Speaker:the point of how treacherous and insane the journey was.
Speaker:It's no wonder why, you know, piracy was able to thrive in this time period.
Speaker:He's not the only person around this time to do so.
Speaker:A pirate, a real major one, also decided to take on this task.
Speaker:Sir Francis Drake C Francis Drake.
Speaker:He was raised by the seas.
Speaker:He's a he's a real sail boy.
Speaker:And he sailed with a man named John Hopkins.
Speaker:When in his youth we had a similar kind of persona.
Speaker:The pair had their roots in the slave trade,
Speaker:which is always a great way to start your career.
Speaker:You know, they they're both some of the more
Speaker:notable privateers of the years leading up to the golden age of piracy.
Speaker:But before turning our attention to Drake, I want to explain privateers
Speaker:a little more.
Speaker:I have mentioned them
Speaker:both in last week's episode and a little bit earlier on and this one.
Speaker:But I haven't really given like a full exploration explanation or exploration
Speaker:privateers, our commission sailors who perform actions of war
Speaker:on behalf of whoever is paying them against another nation.
Speaker:The only thing that made a privateer
Speaker:privateer and not a pirate was these commissions, similar to how legal trade
Speaker:was only allowed with those with colonies in Japan.
Speaker:As I mentioned before, many of the most famous pirates often started out
Speaker:as sailors or captains on privateer contracts or letters of marque.
Speaker:These letters essentially put the king or queen signature on whatever nation
Speaker:or whatever nation that commissioned you on the actions that you carried out.
Speaker:The argument can and has been made that to the nations being attacked,
Speaker:there's really no difference between a privateer or a pirate.
Speaker:The gains of the loot taken was also divided differently,
Speaker:with more wealth spread to the sponsors and also the issuer
Speaker:of the letter of Marque than the captains and, you know, whoever may ownership.
Speaker:And then lastly,
Speaker:you know, the crew, because of this, especially during the golden age,
Speaker:many would rather take the risk and sail on a pirate vessel than for some privateer
Speaker:that splits as the splits were a little more favorable.
Speaker:There's also similar how many would choose privateer
Speaker:over being just a typical merchant sailor due to better pay?
Speaker:So if you're looking at it as a scale, Royal Navy is probably the lowest paying
Speaker:and then merchant and then privateer and then pirate pirate being better
Speaker:shares, not necessarily better pay because you still have to
Speaker:you still have to earn your keep. Right.
Speaker:Anyway, looping back to Francis Drake is he is one of the more famous
Speaker:and pretty brutal the privateers of the 16th century,
Speaker:earning his stripes while supposedly sailing under John Hawkins,
Speaker:while the ships under his command attacked Portuguese slave ships in African towns
Speaker:and selling those taken from the attacks
Speaker:in different ports in both Europe and the Caribbean.
Speaker:The more success they had, the more that Hawkins
Speaker:gained favor of the Queen Elizabeth, the first.
Speaker:Naturally, the Portuguese were angry not just because their vessels
Speaker:were being attacked, but also due to the fact
Speaker:that they were now competing and the human selling business.
Speaker:And unfortunately for the people
Speaker:being sold, this just kind of meant a lot more of that happening.
Speaker:A competition not good anyway.
Speaker:By 1567, though, Hopkins had some failures and lost public support of the Queen
Speaker:if she wanted to keep wars from erupting against both Spain and Portugal.
Speaker:Drake joined him in 1566 on an expedition that resulted in the release
Speaker:of all 90 slaves without any money gain, which I think is okay.
Speaker:And I think the slaves probably think it's okay to this
Speaker:led Hopkins to pursue more wins and that was really mixed for the next
Speaker:few years, you know, joining forces with some local kings
Speaker:in the Sierra Leone and received a portion of the captives from their victory.
Speaker:But the thought is that he was not given, you know,
Speaker:the lion's share since he really needed their help as they
Speaker:didn't really need his help, you know, So they they could have overpowered him.
Speaker:They're like, you're going to just give up.
Speaker:You're just going to get what we give you.
Speaker:Pretty much this led directly to Hopkins and his up
Speaker:eventually being hit up with storms split up, eventually Hopkins and Drake
Speaker:being among those remaining captains who are forced
Speaker:to poor and San Juan de Zulia to Ula Ultra.
Speaker:Oh, I don't know. While here, there,
Speaker:while here.
Speaker:There's a massive battle between the Spanish,
Speaker:the privateers with English papers.
Speaker:There's a truce between the two while the English worked on their ships,
Speaker:repairing them from the damage from storms.
Speaker:But obviously things did not hold.
Speaker:Following some hostage exchanges, the Spanish began
Speaker:to arrange people on the shore, as did the English.
Speaker:But the Spanish force was secretly there to prevent any English
Speaker:trade in the new world, and the English did not know this, which makes sense.
Speaker:Thus, secretly, the Spanish had hidden troops on the shore
Speaker:and then also on a transport vessel that they wedged between the two forces.
Speaker:Suspicion arose while the English had seen forces moving around
Speaker:carrying weapons and such before the Spanish signaled for the attack.
Speaker:Spanish attackers quickly overwhelmed the English on the shore before
Speaker:taking over the cannons that they had.
Speaker:Spanish ship boarded an English one and the cannons on the shore
Speaker:began firing at the English ships.
Speaker:The once six ship band of English ships was quickly turned to to and the 13 ship
Speaker:Armada only lost one ship and the two English ships became overcrowded
Speaker:with fleeing Englishmen, Drake captaining one and Hawkins leading the other.
Speaker:Drake fled slightly
Speaker:before Hawkins, which, you know, he was kind of like, Hey, man, what?
Speaker:You abandoned me.
Speaker:And when they both returned to England,
Speaker:Hawkins was not super pumped, which makes sense.
Speaker:Things did not improve between the Spanish and the English.
Speaker:And the English really
Speaker:did not have their own navy in terms of how we typically think of.
Speaker:They relied heavily on privateers like Drake to hit Spanish and Portuguese.
Speaker:What is interesting is you can kind of look at the lists of famous privateers
Speaker:and the timeframe between the 16th and mid-17th century,
Speaker:and there's only one Spanish privateer, and he was mainly enlisted
Speaker:to fight against the Turks.
Speaker:There's probably some others.
Speaker:But, you know, on the whole, it's mostly just English
Speaker:and there's like a few Dutch ones, but like I said, mostly English.
Speaker:This kind of hearkens back to the fact that
Speaker:England did not have a major Navy until, you know, the 17th and 18th centuries.
Speaker:And not not to say that there are not any from other countries,
Speaker:but there's a strong correlation between the lack of other countries
Speaker:represented and their naval presence like Spain and Portugal.
Speaker:Other famous ones from England are Sir Walter Riley and Captain Charles Newport,
Speaker:both of which had places in American colonies named after them,
Speaker:like Raleigh, North Carolina and Newport News, Virginia, respectively.
Speaker:It's actually disputed that Newport News is named after him, but
Speaker:there's a university there called Charles Newport University in Newport News.
Speaker:So kind of feel like it's probably named after him.
Speaker:Like I can go and make that.
Speaker:Guess why the English were attacking the Spanish and Portuguese.
Speaker:Spain had conquistadors in the Americas, but also in the East, often typical
Speaker:to think about the conquistadors in the Americas ruining Aztec and Incan empires.
Speaker:But they also tore up the Philippines in the late 16th century.
Speaker:Japanese silver was all the rage, and there was especially great fortune
Speaker:in the Philippine Islands.
Speaker:And there was also a place
Speaker:where some Japanese pirates loved to hide from the greater Chinese navy.
Speaker:These pirates ended up taking over a province that was rich
Speaker:with silver called Kaguya or the Cagayan Province,
Speaker:and the Spanish, who had made a governor in the Philippines already had enough.
Speaker:He commissioned a naval
Speaker:captain named Juan Pablo to carry on to take care of these pirates.
Speaker:A wako ship was destroyed by carrion, but then there was more on the way.
Speaker:Carrion had a hand, a handful of ships and less men.
Speaker:But they had cannons, guns and better training.
Speaker:What to do, which led them to becoming victorious against the pirates.
Speaker:But the pirates,
Speaker:the China Sea, would not make it an easy life for the Western visitors.
Speaker:It should also be noted that the details of this event
Speaker:come directly from the Spanish
Speaker:as they attempt attempted to secure the more reinforcements and ships.
Speaker:And they say that they were outnumbered yet one but needed the reinforcements.
Speaker:So I don't know.
Speaker:It sounds like they were like they made it sound like they just slaughtered
Speaker:these people super easy.
Speaker:So they either were outnumbered and won or they barely won.
Speaker:And to me, it sounds like the ragtag pirates gave the pristine Spanish
Speaker:conquistadors pretty good run for their money
Speaker:and they had to write some nonsense to cover their.
Speaker:But Japan began to get their things
Speaker:sorted out by 1591 and a reunification had taken place.
Speaker:With this, the governing powers decided that they should use pirate use the pirate
Speaker:infested waters to their advantage, and they began to pay the former pirates
Speaker:for their goods instead of leaning away of it.
Speaker:Yes, there was piracy in the waters,
Speaker:but now, instead of paying money to fix it,
Speaker:they would let the pirates, whose income might be tarnished
Speaker:by the actions of others, deal with these issues as they came up.
Speaker:Some self-governing, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker:In the Mediterranean, the chaos between different European conflicts
Speaker:allowed the Barbary pirates to flourish more until each opposing country
Speaker:kind of got tired of them individually and decided to take their own actions,
Speaker:or really just urging these pirates to attack their rivals.
Speaker:For them, France would tell them to attack Spain and Britain,
Speaker:and the Dutch would tell them to attack France so on.
Speaker:It wouldn't be until the golden Age
Speaker:that these pirates would be pacified with treaties with the British
Speaker:Slavic regions had their own interesting encounters.
Speaker:A small pirate faction struggle for independence.
Speaker:The zapper reason existed in Ukrainian and Polish regions.
Speaker:This place was full of runaway slave peasants and pirates alike.
Speaker:They attack shores of the Ottoman Empire and places near Crimea,
Speaker:even allegedly raising settlements near Istanbul as colonies
Speaker:for the Spanish began to take hold.
Speaker:I mentioned St Augustine in Florida before, which was founded in 1565,
Speaker:but there are others in this created
Speaker:a network of trade and thus other nations began to focus on this area
Speaker:places like Hispaniola, Tortuga, among the Caribbean islands
Speaker:that people would begin to try and lay claim failed English colonies like Roanoke
Speaker:led to permanent ones
Speaker:like Jamestown and Jamestown, and had its own struggles, but not as bad.
Speaker:It's grown up dead, so much so that when a traveling armada
Speaker:aiming to get more settled settlers into Jamestown
Speaker:was blown off course due to storms ended up in Bermuda Triangle.
Speaker:People elected just to stay there.
Speaker:Instead of dealing with the issues that Jamestown was experiencing,
Speaker:they had droughts and some other things going on and it wasn't super great.
Speaker:The settlement on the archipelago of Bermuda
Speaker:put an English foothold in the Caribbean, which would lead to a lot of
Speaker:interesting exchanges for pirates and merchants.
Speaker:Like there's a boom for the 17th century of settlements along the east coast of
Speaker:of America and in the Caribbean as well, pretty much all over the place.
Speaker:But, you know, it is what is all this means a lot of transatlantic trade,
Speaker:which means a lot of both noble and less than noble sailors.
Speaker:In the mid 17th century, groups began to take initiative on their own.
Speaker:The Buccaneers, which is you know, we know that is a popular name now,
Speaker:but the history is kind of unique, stemming from a group of French
Speaker:that lived on Hispaniola and then later into Tortuga.
Speaker:Its people eat meat from the Yukon, which is a so sort of frame
Speaker:I think is how I saw described as like a rotisserie
Speaker:tile type thing that they used to cook in Maine, became Buccaneer
Speaker:one who used Buchanan and then Buccaneer
Speaker:because English language ruins everything.
Speaker:So these men moved to Tortuga full time and would make their mark by attacking
Speaker:Spanish ships returning to Spain with whatever their reward might be.
Speaker:This is really one of the first instances of lawless attack,
Speaker:meaning no crown and force or direct directed incidents within the Caribbean.
Speaker:The Bahamas become a home base of sorts for the Buccaneers, allowing them
Speaker:to resupply an attack a little more rapidly than others would be able to.
Speaker:The English crown began to sanction these Buccaneers and to go
Speaker:after Spain exclusively, as the Crown often did.
Speaker:England even sent special naval officers to lead these Buccaneers
Speaker:to make sure things work smoothly.
Speaker:One notable example of these was a Welsh captain by the name of Henry Morgan.
Speaker:That name sounds familiar to you.
Speaker:Then you have a drinking problem? No, just kidding.
Speaker:But that is the believe namesake of the beloved Rum Captain Morgan.
Speaker:Anyway, Henry Morgan was a privateer who made his name in the Caribbean.
Speaker:In fact,
Speaker:we really don't know a lot of his life before his joining in the Caribbean.
Speaker:But we do know he arrived and was part of some small raiding parties in the 1660s.
Speaker:After being in the Caribbean
Speaker:for a while, he became friends with the local governor,
Speaker:getting letters of Marque in attacking different Spanish ships
Speaker:around Cuba and Panama.
Speaker:By 1668, you raided towns all the way down to Venezuela,
Speaker:even destroying a Spanish squadron of ships in the process.
Speaker:Pretty impressive.
Speaker:He attacked Panama directly and did quite well.
Speaker:Spanish allegedly lost 500 men to the 15 privateers killed in the action.
Speaker:English wanted to make sure
Speaker:the Spanish weren't mad about what Captain Morgan was doing, make sense.
Speaker:So he was arrested and sent back to England.
Speaker:The current
Speaker:English law on piracy was hefty, but only the captain could be charged and
Speaker:also required him to be tried in England, which is important to note in the future.
Speaker:When he arrived in England, he was praised by everyone, even the King,
Speaker:and two years later he was even knighted and given his professional title
Speaker:back in Jamaica.
Speaker:And in a weird turn of events
Speaker:appointed to get rid of piracy in the ports, which is kind of funny,
Speaker:he wasn't so quick to do so as many of the men that he was friendly
Speaker:with would have been charged.
Speaker:Some of his old buddies and he, you know, started taking bribes to look
Speaker:the other way from the pirate activities, which is that's a that's a real one.
Speaker:As a good friend, he also took to the slave trade,
Speaker:not a good friend and plantation
Speaker:life owning three plantations by the time he died in 1688.
Speaker:Story really sets up
Speaker:fact that the long arm of the European rule was not quite long enough
Speaker:to control the Caribbean and the colonies that it would have liked, and that led
Speaker:to plenty of lawlessness in the area and even the east coast of the colonies.
Speaker:As time moved forward, Buccaneers continue to play a part in the piratical events
Speaker:until 1690s,
Speaker:until when the friction between them and the English, Spanish
Speaker:and now the French made things increasingly more risky.
Speaker:That's drove them to be either, you know,
Speaker:regular legal maritime workers or just straight up piracy.
Speaker:They're tired overhead and line.
Speaker:I guess this also marks a point where privateers begin to slip into privacy.
Speaker:Granted, it wouldn't be until after Queen Anne's War
Speaker:that the big hitters would come.
Speaker:But this is you know, crack in the proverbial armor of privateering.
Speaker:There's a lot of risk, whether it be from opposing countries
Speaker:or just in general of seafaring and warfare on the high seas.
Speaker:Yet in that fighting itself is treacherous.
Speaker:And the pay to be a sailor on a naval warship was low privateering only paid
Speaker:slightly more that the you know, true piracy really flourished
Speaker:bridge years of the late 6090s before Queen Anne's war saw Henry
Speaker:Avery go from Royal Navy sailor to slave trader to pirate.
Speaker:He became one of the biggest pirates after gaining
Speaker:the command of a ship following the mutiny aboard it in 1694.
Speaker:A quick rename of the ship from Charles, the second to fancy, and they were off.
Speaker:Avery told his men of the riches to be had in the Indian Ocean and major scores
Speaker:happening there, and the crew was ready for a new captain to lead them to glory.
Speaker:His methods of persuasion and enslavement amassed his crew and soon
Speaker:they made modifications to the ship in form of raising some unnecessary
Speaker:portions of the ship to make it lighter and faster.
Speaker:They captured different vessels in the Atlantic and even some privateer vessels.
Speaker:They rounded the Horn of Africa and made their way into the Indian Ocean
Speaker:and other areas and gained the attention of the East India Company.
Speaker:In 1695, a coalition of five other pirates joined Avery to attack
Speaker:the Grand Mughal fleet and then smuggle and make ale, not mug Ali.
Speaker:Harry Potter people out.
Speaker:That fleet included the Fatah Muhammad and 894 cannon massive ship.
Speaker:This compared to the 46 gun frigate that sent the fancy
Speaker:a few of the ships joining every proved not to be fast enough for the chase.
Speaker:The Fatah Muhammad actually did not fight much when they arrived,
Speaker:potentially due to a battle prior, but a treasure was captured
Speaker:from a reign upwards of £60,000 on the high end.
Speaker:Another ship was Insights, and Avery might have got lucky
Speaker:when that ship backfired aboard, the cannon must have exploded and blew up
Speaker:some of the powder charges and things and the crew was shook.
Speaker:The Indian crew aboard not ready.
Speaker:And that gave time for another pirate vessel to join up.
Speaker:And they all climbed board
Speaker:in some hand-to-hand combat, which allegedly took 3 hours.
Speaker:There are some accounts
Speaker:of which alleged the Indian captain running below and then arming slave women
Speaker:he had aboard before sending them up to fight the pirates, which is wild.
Speaker:Others said there's no reason why Captain Ibrahim was not victorious against them.
Speaker:While the massive ship had blades,
Speaker:muskets ready all over the place and more people.
Speaker:Despite this, the ship eventually surrendered.
Speaker:And another report says that the pirates
Speaker:subjected the survivors to some horrific actions.
Speaker:Assault and death all around.
Speaker:The romanticism of pirates has led to some of these accounts being written off.
Speaker:But their confessions of the captured men from Avery's crew that say
Speaker:to be true, estimated 90 to 130000.
Speaker:And today's British pound was said to be split among the crew.
Speaker:But the East India company was on their tail eventually
Speaker:the first worldwide manhunt was issued after them, £1,000 for his capture alone.
Speaker:And the Crown said that he was even qualified for any sweeping
Speaker:pardon of any of the pirates that was offered at the time.
Speaker:All that withstanding, Avery was never found.
Speaker:Some suggest he escaped and lived a life after selling his riches.
Speaker:Others say he was cheated from his money and died penniless.
Speaker:Either way, pretty fascinating that he just disappeared.
Speaker:In the years following outbreaks of the war and forms of the war, Spain succession
Speaker:and the various so-called French and Indian wars, privateers on the side
Speaker:of the French worked on taking vessels in the New England area of the colonies.
Speaker:English and Indigenous fought on the land against the French.
Speaker:I mentioned privateers for the French,
Speaker:but the big uptake was more privateers for the British and colonial forces.
Speaker:So this spike of more privateers had work for the war.
Speaker:But following the war's conclusion around 1713,
Speaker:there were a lot of privateers with very little work.
Speaker:Now the war, Spain and secession I mentioned, is also known as Queen
Speaker:Anne's War to the British and the colonists at the time.
Speaker:So that's why there's both.
Speaker:You use both names, I guess.
Speaker:I don't know now.
Speaker:Well, this is where a lot of the Golden Age pirates make their debut.
Speaker:I want to stop for a second and talk about the methodology of them.
Speaker:Firstly, before this point, there's a lot of Red Baron style
Speaker:class and chivalry in regards to the way pirates behave.
Speaker:I think this is more romanticism, but when you think about the way of life
Speaker:that they had, there's really no options but to live by certain rules.
Speaker:You're sailing in the open waters.
Speaker:Do you risk your life in the life of everyone
Speaker:you have a board firing cannons and getting a rest blown to hell?
Speaker:Or do you take to the sword and board the vessel and fight the good fight?
Speaker:Also, I think fight the good fight
Speaker:might be my unofficial slogan because I've said it a bunch.
Speaker:Anyway, not only that, but most of the time
Speaker:the Pirates were too smart to go against any fully armed ships, typically
Speaker:aiming at the lesser armed or unarmed merchant vessels.
Speaker:Also, the pirate code that is referred to so often, and things of fiction
Speaker:like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Speaker:The actual thing
Speaker:finding out cover different things, how the crew should keep their weapons,
Speaker:which is, you know, good in good condition, watch and work shifts,
Speaker:shipboard laws, desertion, fighting, splitting earnings, such things like that.
Speaker:One of the things that people think about, you know,
Speaker:some of these ships, they list as 300 people.
Speaker:Well, that doesn't mean 300 people on deck at one time.
Speaker:There's people sleeping so they can sail in the night,
Speaker:you know, things like that just to consider.
Speaker:There's also prices to be paid for those who are injured.
Speaker:Typically the weight of the Lin and pieces of eight.
Speaker:What is a piece of eight, you ask?
Speaker:Well, that's a Spanish dollar
Speaker:that is worth eight reales and can literally be cut up.
Speaker:Like legally they're like, yeah, go ahead, cut our money out, which is
Speaker:which is weird.
Speaker:But one of the one whole Spanish dollar was a dollar.
Speaker:But with it being silver, be worth a little more today than it was back then.
Speaker:But either way, if your arm got blown off, your right arm got blown off 600 pieces
Speaker:in eight for you, 500 for the left, 500 for the right leg and 400 for the left one
Speaker:and then 100 per eye and finger respectively.
Speaker:So these buried ship to ship.
Speaker:Captain. Captain.
Speaker:But more or less, hey, you know, that's how they went.
Speaker:You know, things had to be a little organized.
Speaker:They almost always had sailing backgrounds.
Speaker:The sailors, the ones who did not, were most likely pressed into service.
Speaker:But that's a pretty small fraction.
Speaker:And they learned quickly. They got used to the lifestyle.
Speaker:And not every crewmember was just a sword swinging warrior.
Speaker:You know, every man had specific trades.
Speaker:Typically, you know, you had to have carpenters to repair the ship.
Speaker:Bookkeepers to track the money coming in and out, tailors
Speaker:for repairing sails or, you know, outfitting the crew,
Speaker:you know, all these things to keep the ship running smoothly
Speaker:meant that the crew was typically used to, you know, these kinds of rules despite
Speaker:having the ravaging, ruthless reputations that they like people put on them.
Speaker:And then their union Jackson Country flag swapped out for Jolly Rogers, which are,
Speaker:you know, the skull and crossbones, a black flag with the skull and crossbones,
Speaker:although each pirate kind of had different versions of it.
Speaker:And they customize it to show their unique vision.
Speaker:A lot of this seems very familiar to me, having been in the Navy,
Speaker:There's a lot of rules for everything, even like the little things,
Speaker:not to mention with sailors being super superstitious.
Speaker:Ships are strictly really superstitious, so every little thing would be followed up
Speaker:pretty well because, you know, if you don't on the bag happen,
Speaker:that's not a good quote. That also speaks
Speaker:to the attitude of the pirates who would soon rage on the seas.
Speaker:The quote goes, There's nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea.
Speaker:And I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates,
Speaker:and that by author and poet James Russell Lowell.
Speaker:And I think having seen the very thing that Lowell mentions,
Speaker:this can be very true, you know, as the but also,
Speaker:you know, the hostility definitely stemmed from a combination of resistance
Speaker:as well as tactics and scorn and from their look,
Speaker:from their former lives, as well as just how things were back then, but especially,
Speaker:you know, in the golden lands, these pirates were pretty brutal.
Speaker:So with that, let's go on to the big boys, the major dudes, the bros.
Speaker:Anyway, Captain William Kidd is the first up.
Speaker:A pirate hunter turned pirate himself after a few years of sailing
Speaker:and after a few years
Speaker:of sailing for others and working his way into a sponsored ship
Speaker:called the Adventure Galley, kids ill view of traditional royalty
Speaker:was pretty obvious an incident of refusal to give salute to a Royal Navy ship
Speaker:after being, you know, indicated to do so, ended up in his crew
Speaker:smacking their backsides as their ship sailed past.
Speaker:They were essentially pulled over after that and a lot of his crew
Speaker:was pressed into service on the royal crew on the royal ship, which is yeah.
Speaker:Despite this, he hunted pirate vessels in the colonies, New York in particular.
Speaker:That was kind of where his commission was.
Speaker:But he went into the different places
Speaker:attempting to locate pirate strongholds in places like Madagascar.
Speaker:A few years into his voyage,
Speaker:he was accused of piracy due to avoiding being his crew being impressed.
Speaker:But his rationale was that his letter of Marque protected his crew from that.
Speaker:Shortly after that, he took the crew dog merchant, a medium
Speaker:sized ship, hired by Armenians, which had quite the bounty.
Speaker:He did so with the French flag, raised the cute dog having French papers,
Speaker:and thus probably were less suspicious of colors at the time he lost seamen.
Speaker:Man After encountering another pirate, Robert Clifford.
Speaker:Not through battle, but just some kind of just left
Speaker:and joined up with Clifford because I guess he was
Speaker:he sold on and I don't know, he abandoned the adventure galley as it was
Speaker:rotten at this point and returned to the Caribbean with his adventure prize.
Speaker:That's the crew dog merchant that he renamed.
Speaker:He knew he knew that he was in the crosshairs of the crown
Speaker:and thus ditched the ship in the Caribbean
Speaker:and then sailed to New York in a different way.
Speaker:The governor of New York at the time was an investor of kids and thus with that
Speaker:he wanted to have kid sent to England.
Speaker:As the laws were beginning to change in the colonies to combat piracy
Speaker:and were no longer worried about only the captain.
Speaker:But any as well.
Speaker:So this guy's kind of covering his own, but at this time and charged
Speaker:it and wanted to charge Kidd and have him sent on his own like, Hey,
Speaker:I caught him so. Don't, don't get me.
Speaker:He used a false pardon for Kidd tricked him to getting into Boston
Speaker:where he was arrested he was found guilty of murder and five counts of piracy.
Speaker:He was hanged and displayed for others
Speaker:to see four pirates to be warned, essentially.
Speaker:And he he left behind a treasure that many have tried to find.
Speaker:Even the weirdos in the Oak Island.
Speaker:Like if you've ever seen that show on the History Channel,
Speaker:they haven't found it anyway.
Speaker:Spoiler alert has not been found,
Speaker:and many of his exploits have been shrouded in legend.
Speaker:So another pirate shrouded in legend is known as Black Caesar.
Speaker:Not my name for him, but, you know, he was allegedly a African pirate,
Speaker:West African pirate, who found his way onto Blackbeard's ship.
Speaker:Only not a lot is known for certain, but he is known to be in service
Speaker:aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge, which is Blackbeard's ship.
Speaker:And generally thought to be an ex-slave, but also has a legendary status
Speaker:of being a chieftain where he hails from, though no real record of this exist.
Speaker:All that segueing into Blackbeard, who has a similar story
Speaker:vague and full of guesses, Edward teaches his suspected name.
Speaker:Although there are many variations of this and sometimes include teak or thatch
Speaker:is also very likely
Speaker:to have been a sailor or a privateer in the war of Spanish succession.
Speaker:Given the name he would later rename the ship
Speaker:Queen Anne's Revenge as the name points to the alternate name for the war.
Speaker:From the English perspective, I guess though, it could also be
Speaker:a reference to the now dead Queen Anne, who was succeeded by George,
Speaker:who is of German ancestry and also was disliked by quite a few people.
Speaker:The ship itself, a captured French slave ship called the Concorde, a frigate
Speaker:which was a more modern interpretation of the characters I'd mentioned before.
Speaker:TEACH had upgraded the ship with more guns after taking it over and added
Speaker:black flags to it.
Speaker:Often, Blackbeard's Jolly Roger is depicted as a horn skeleton
Speaker:implicating a devil or death,
Speaker:holding an hourglass in one hand and a spear in the other
Speaker:while stabbing a heart, showing that time is almost out on death comes for you.
Speaker:Unfortunately, this imagery came out many years after his time
Speaker:to the tune of 200 years, and most depictions only hold
Speaker:that it was Black flag with death's head or skulls essentially on it
Speaker:and all of that on his Jolly Roger coming from
Speaker:the people who are studying the shipwreck of this very ship right now.
Speaker:So anyway, after the war's conclusion, as I mentioned, many former sailors
Speaker:turned pirate, one of the
Speaker:anyway, after the war's conclusion, as I mentioned, many former
Speaker:sailors turned pirate and him being one of these legendary sailors,
Speaker:a lot of his exploits make it sound like he reigned
Speaker:for like 30 years in the Caribbean.
Speaker:But in reality, his brutality was only a few years long.
Speaker:In 1717, Blackbeard sailed with others.
Speaker:Benjamin Horner Gold Steve Bannon's notorious Pirates of Their Own
Speaker:and two sloops, which are,
Speaker:you know, smaller warships and overtook the Concord in the Caribbean
Speaker:after sailing from Chesapeake after a year of activity in the Bahamas
Speaker:following this, Blackbeard, followed by three sloops, got aggressive
Speaker:and blockaded the water blockade of the harbor of Charleston.
Speaker:This and many other instances would inspire the crown
Speaker:to send British dignitaries to the American colonies to see that laws
Speaker:were followed exactly as the Crown issued when it came to pirates.
Speaker:Especially, this would be a theme in which the colonies resisted the rule.
Speaker:Since the laws of the Crown were written did not really fit
Speaker:with how the way of life was in the colonies.
Speaker:You know, you're making a law for us over here,
Speaker:but you don't understand how life is over here.
Speaker:Blackbeard had begun
Speaker:to cause some major damage and was definitely being targeted by the crown
Speaker:After blockade of Charleston, the Queen Anne's revenge was spotted
Speaker:run aground alongside another ship off the coast of North Carolina.
Speaker:Some speculate that he received a pardon and this was his retirement boat.
Speaker:What gold did he have to do?
Speaker:So, you know, what was he using the money from.
Speaker:This Charleston shakedown
Speaker:is speculated that his treasure was not merely that of golden variety,
Speaker:but it came in the
Speaker:but that he came to the shore with slaves and sold them within the area of Bath,
Speaker:North Carolina.
Speaker:Witnesses claim no lives were lost when the ships were wrecked.
Speaker:So as points to possible intentional crash.
Speaker:Other evidence of this slave trade was that North
Speaker:Carolina was struggling prior to this point economically.
Speaker:But following his arrival, there was an improvement in in the economy.
Speaker:When I read this originally, I thought that this was important,
Speaker:you know, implying that his improvement on the economy was his gold like he is
Speaker:spending a lot of money, is dumping money into the local shops
Speaker:and things you know, with the gold that he earned at sea.
Speaker:But, you know, it's
Speaker:no secret that a large portion of pirates did deal with like enslaved.
Speaker:They could be bought for less from pirates than from a typical dealer,
Speaker:like an official source,
Speaker:which, you know, is silly because you're literally selling people.
Speaker:It's such an unofficial thing to do.
Speaker:Anyway, after six months of retirement,
Speaker:he yearned for the seas and thus return to piracy.
Speaker:Despite having been given a royal pardon.
Speaker:This brought some major attention to him and he was pursued
Speaker:by a Lieutenant Robert maynard of the Royal Navy.
Speaker:It was very much still concerned with Blackbeard.
Speaker:Their battle took place on Ocracoke Island with teach thinking it was a place
Speaker:that larger Royal Navy vessels
Speaker:not really be able to approach due to the shallow waters.
Speaker:And he was kind of right.
Speaker:One ship pursued him and ended up getting stuck, ran aground,
Speaker:and he shot the, you know, he shot that one out of service
Speaker:and then he found the other one to be empty on the deck thinking
Speaker:maybe they jump ship or it was a skeleton crew.
Speaker:The pirate crew boarded and only to be found
Speaker:with a surprise attack from underneath the deck.
Speaker:Massive battle happened and an English sailor hacked at Blackbeard's
Speaker:neck with a broadsword, and Blackbeard allegedly remarked something to the effect
Speaker:of well done, lads, before attempting to fire one of his six pistols
Speaker:at Lieutenant Maynard before another blow killed him.
Speaker:And Maynard also pretty sure shot him.
Speaker:The royal sailors claim to have shot him some five times and stabbed him
Speaker:20, I guess, to make sure that he was really dead.
Speaker:And I think this also speaks to both the disdain and also maybe
Speaker:the fear from these pirates, but mostly to this disdain from the crown.
Speaker:And they took his head off, you know, hacked it off,
Speaker:threw his body over the wall, over the side,
Speaker:and is legend that it swam around the ship six times.
Speaker:His head brought back to Virginia and put on a pike
Speaker:to stir fear for other pirates.
Speaker:Others include Calico Jack and Bonnie, who are quoted
Speaker:And Bonnie, At the beginning of the first episode,
Speaker:Jack Rackham had taken another Pirates vessel, Charles Vane, and his love
Speaker:interest, and Bonnie joined him as they terrorized ships in the Caribbean.
Speaker:They also had another lady on board,
Speaker:Mary Reed, who was said to have dressed like a man in battle.
Speaker:But many suspect that the crew would have been than aware that she was a female.
Speaker:The rest of the time, it's kind of hard to hide in those close quarters situation.
Speaker:I feel like operating around 17, 18 to 1720, Calico Jack
Speaker:got his name from the colorful clothes that he wore, which I find kind of funny.
Speaker:Old timey nicknames always cracked me up.
Speaker:Blackbeard He had a big Blackbeard Calico Jack.
Speaker:He dressed like a colorful cat, and Jack was pretty clever.
Speaker:Well, I'll give him that.
Speaker:Will probably totally didn't mean to do that.
Speaker:I did not mean that. That's pretty funny.
Speaker:Anyway, he was clever.
Speaker:There was an incident that I found where he was being pursued by a Spanish warship
Speaker:and Jack was in a smaller
Speaker:sloop, was definitely outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, but not out.
Speaker:Plant Hamilton fans, you get it.
Speaker:Anyway, the larger ship was pressed further from the coast due to the low tide
Speaker:and that they could not follow the ship in because, you know,
Speaker:that's just how it worked.
Speaker:The big ship couldn't go was a you know, would get ran aground, stuck, whatever.
Speaker:So they anchored out waited.
Speaker:But during the night, Jack
Speaker:and his crew rode out on the smaller boats to capture an English sloop
Speaker:that the Spanish had with them and overpowered the Spanish aboard.
Speaker:And when the sun broke over the horizon, the Spanish warship began
Speaker:its assault on an empty ship and Calico Jack sailed away with them.
Speaker:Pretty clever, if you ask me.
Speaker:Column Jack Fox instead. You know I'm saying.
Speaker:Anyway, after many misadventures, the governor of Woods Rogers declared war
Speaker:on Jack and crew declaring them pirates.
Speaker:And so hunters began to give chase.
Speaker:In 1720, after a quick battle on Halloween, Jack gave a quarter
Speaker:pirate lingo for surrender and they were captured, tried, sentenced to hang.
Speaker:And Bonnie and Mary Reed
Speaker:both claimed to be pregnant and thus were granted a stay of execution.
Speaker:And Bonnie also allegedly chastised Jack's actions
Speaker:during the battle, saying he gave up too quickly.
Speaker:She said, quote, We had fought like a man.
Speaker:You'd need not have been hanged like a dog, which is brutal but truthful,
Speaker:you know?
Speaker:Come on, Jack, get just get your stuff together.
Speaker:You the way Jack was hanged, Reed died in her cell, perhaps due to childbirth.
Speaker:But maybe anything being is how people died from all the things back then.
Speaker:But Bonnie vanished from the records.
Speaker:There's no record of death release, Escape Aliens, Nothing.
Speaker:She's got so interesting.
Speaker:We also had the likes of Black Sam Bellamy, who is said to have captured
Speaker:some 50 ships and coins worth of upwards of $100 million in modern day money.
Speaker:He was named black
Speaker:not because of cultural appropriation, as Deadpool might suggest, but simply
Speaker:because his hair was long and black and he wore black stuff sometimes.
Speaker:And instead of using wig, which was the fashion at the time,
Speaker:he was like, Nah, I'm just going to have my regular glorious hair anyway.
Speaker:Yeah, another nickname because of hair, which is, you know, hilarious.
Speaker:Sam actually became very popular due to his more gentle approach.
Speaker:It's pirating off and not using violence, if not necessary.
Speaker:And also very generous.
Speaker:Another nickname given was Prince of Pirates,
Speaker:as well as the Robin Hood of the Sea.
Speaker:First major score came in the taking of a slaving ship that had just completed
Speaker:its sail full of new cargo and from said sail captain surrendered fairly quickly
Speaker:and Jack took his new ship for his own, adding guns from his old ship,
Speaker:as well as removing the captain's quarters,
Speaker:probably to decrease the weight and increase speed.
Speaker:As a young pirate, only 28 at the time, his career was cut
Speaker:short by a storm after a few more ships that he had taken.
Speaker:The storm occurred in April of 1717.
Speaker:He was never found, but the remnants of a ship were in 1982.
Speaker:I don't think he was.
Speaker:I don't even know if they would have found him.
Speaker:I don't think he would have been alive. I don't know.
Speaker:I mentioned him,
Speaker:but the last major golden age pirate I wanted to talk about was Charles Vane.
Speaker:The story is kind of interesting.
Speaker:He ended up being one of the leader lead Pirates of Nassau, the famous Pirate Port.
Speaker:He's especially brutal, killing many and torturing others.
Speaker:Vane was even one of the few who said no
Speaker:to a royal pardon by King George, leading others to do the same thing.
Speaker:He feigned interest after being captured and was released.
Speaker:But a month later he was kind of back at it.
Speaker:A few months after that, in July of 1718, Vane was blockaded in Nassau by Woods.
Speaker:Rodgers then had a smaller ship retrofitted to be
Speaker:turned into a fire ship, and this ship only caused damage to really one.
Speaker:But the other ships kind of moved out of the way in evasive action
Speaker:and thus a big hole was made so the ship could escape, working
Speaker:at taking other ships in the Bahamas for the next few months,
Speaker:even meeting up with his old friend Blackbeard.
Speaker:And potentially trying to get him back in the game.
Speaker:One last straw man.
Speaker:We could do it before departing.
Speaker:Once again, they tried to attack a vessel, but then found out that
Speaker:it was a French royal Navy ship and he turned and ran turn tail.
Speaker:He's out of here.
Speaker:And Calico Jack use this opportunity to instigate a mutiny.
Speaker:And Vane was voted out and the people who voted for Vane
Speaker:and Vane were given a different ship, which I guess is probably the nicest way
Speaker:they could have gone.
Speaker:But I find it pretty ironic that Calico Jack instigated
Speaker:a mutiny over cowardice given how his end came.
Speaker:But, you know, just a little.
Speaker:Just a little silly.
Speaker:After taking different ships for the next few months into 17, 19,
Speaker:they was caught in a hurricane and stranded on an island, allegedly,
Speaker:according to the book, A General History of Pirates by a supposed
Speaker:captain, Charles Johnson, which is assumed to be a pseudonym,
Speaker:then was spotted by turtle hunters
Speaker:who gave him some of their haul to survive on this island
Speaker:before leaving because they were like, I don't know, this guy seems sketchy.
Speaker:We'll just give them some turtle meat, I guess.
Speaker:And and then later an English vessel came up and this guy,
Speaker:the captain of this ship, was a former pirate hunter who knew who Vane was.
Speaker:He recognized and he said, All right, man, well, this is it.
Speaker:I'll be back in a little bit.
Speaker:I'm going to go hit a port and I'm coming back.
Speaker:You know, however long that takes, if you're here when I come back, I'm taken
Speaker:yet. And so, you know, Vane was like, I got to get off this island, dude.
Speaker:So another ship, he managed to flag another ship down,
Speaker:and this ship actually took him.
Speaker:He gave them a fake name and joined the crew.
Speaker:And, you know, having been a sailor, I'm sure it was easy for him to be like,
Speaker:Yeah, I can do this grunt work if it means survival.
Speaker:Well, by pure happenstance,
Speaker:that ship ended up crossing paths with the first English Navy ship.
Speaker:That or the English ship with the pirate hunter on.
Speaker:And the two captains were friends.
Speaker:And so they pulled alongside each other and like the crews kind of hung out
Speaker:and the captain was like, Hey, come over to my ship.
Speaker:The pirate owner said, All right, cool.
Speaker:Yeah, I'll come over for dinner. And so they had dinner.
Speaker:And during that dinner he was leaving and he
Speaker:he saw Charles Vane, like, swap on a deck or something in the back.
Speaker:And he was like, Hey, man, I know that guy.
Speaker:I know that dude.
Speaker:And I'm sure that one captain who picked him up was like, Oh, oh, that's Charles.
Speaker:My bad.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Anyway, so he he got caught and he got cut through that
Speaker:and he was brought to Jamaica and then hanged.
Speaker:And then you know, his corpse was displayed for all to see,
Speaker:which is a pretty common thing to do at that time.
Speaker:Various powers now focused heavily on pirates, and they began
Speaker:to take major precautions, estimated at 3 to 5000 pirates at work
Speaker:between 1708, 17, 17 and 1718.
Speaker:But as the response changed
Speaker:and the punishments became more cruel towards pirates in their crews,
Speaker:those numbers dropped to a reported less than 200 by 1726
Speaker:increase in different navies and harsh tactics and the anti-piracy
Speaker:certainly helped alongside the Piracy Act of 1717,
Speaker:which enabled local governments to do a lot more in line with the Crown's view.
Speaker:The last nail in the Golden Age coffin being the death of Black Bart Roberts, who
Speaker:by the time of his death had taken 470 ships over the course of his adventures.
Speaker:He didn't have them in a fleet he had just, you know, captured them
Speaker:and took their money.
Speaker:He was killed when his ship was broadsided by cannon fire in 1722.
Speaker:And many see this as the end as Rob Roberts was,
Speaker:you know, one of the most successful pirates at the time.
Speaker:A different pirates still operated Barbary pirates
Speaker:still active on the north side of Africa with the 18th century
Speaker:becoming more hostile between the colonists and the English.
Speaker:The Declaration of Independence was signed.
Speaker:And then when war broke out, America lost
Speaker:the support of the British Navy against these Barbary pirates.
Speaker:But after gaining independence, America was recognized
Speaker:by these pirates as an official like you're a your country now.
Speaker:But they also extorted them for protection on the seas,
Speaker:which is, you know, whatever.
Speaker:Eventually, the price grew too heavy and thus began a Barbary Wars
Speaker:in which the U.S., Sweden and Sicily joined together to fight these pirates.
Speaker:Now, the final blow came in the 1830s when French conquered Algeria and Asia.
Speaker:The most fascinating story in piracy comes from 19th century.
Speaker:A pirate named John Guy.
Speaker:His father and brother were both also pirates.
Speaker:So as in his family, in his early or in his years, he would impress upon
Speaker:like put a 15 year old pressed into service, basically kidnaping them.
Speaker:But this kid would eventually be adopted by him a few years later.
Speaker:And Zheng ended up going to a brothel.
Speaker:And in this brothel he found a bride in the form of the Madame there.
Speaker:And some speculate that she was pretty good
Speaker:at giving him some secrets from the men visiting the establishment.
Speaker:All the same, you know, pillow talking, which was actually pretty common for
Speaker:brothels at the time.
Speaker:A lot of a lot of secrets being spilled there.
Speaker:Either way, they got married, she came in the fold, born
Speaker:she Yang Little is known about her until the marriage, after which she is
Speaker:known as Genghis Out or wife of Shanghai, which is interesting.
Speaker:I get that she just changed her whole name.
Speaker:That's. That's who you are. You are the wife, and that's it.
Speaker:They were together and decided to adopt that younger sailor
Speaker:that I mentioned before.
Speaker:But she would go on to marry that guy after Zheng his death, which is, you know,
Speaker:this family tree is a mess.
Speaker:So before that, Shanghai and Shanghai South spent nearly six years together.
Speaker:As as their fleets grew and their fortune grew, Zhang
Speaker:was eventually lost at sea, either due to a storm
Speaker:or an accident or murder.
Speaker:Or was he pushed? We don't know either way.
Speaker:Zheng You saw become Zheng She, which is the widow of Zhang,
Speaker:and before marrying that stepson Pal.
Speaker:Now she's also been known as Ching.
Speaker:She just to make things more confusing or interesting, I don't know.
Speaker:But that's what I'm going to use that name Ching Ching chief for from now on,
Speaker:because she's no longer the widow of that guy or the wife of that guy.
Speaker:So after this power grew even further and she had to act quick,
Speaker:you know, to solidify the control over the inherited power that she possessed.
Speaker:A year following her taking power, she made a name for herself
Speaker:by taking out a ship or a fleet of 35 ships.
Speaker:And soon after her stepson turned husband took out a fleet of his own,
Speaker:allegedly splitting the Chinese fleet in half.
Speaker:It's pretty aggressive.
Speaker:This this resulted in an increase activity of pirates further contributing
Speaker:to the confederation, which was now under her leadership.
Speaker:She quickly became a concern not only for the Qing dynasty,
Speaker:but also for the Portuguese and English powers in the area.
Speaker:English still kind of sore from their loss of the American colonies
Speaker:during the Revolutionary War.
Speaker:We're reluctant to forfeit the lucrative opium
Speaker:trade that they maintained in East Asia by 1809.
Speaker:Both sides united with the Chinese
Speaker:in a joint effort to overcome this sizable pirate force.
Speaker:Pirate fleet was believed to
Speaker:be composed of around 400 ships and upwards of 40,000 pirates
Speaker:on the lower end estimates and these pirates, you know, they would
Speaker:evade blockades, you know, without losing ships and destroying others.
Speaker:And a lot of different interesting situations.
Speaker:These pirate junks vary in size and design, resembled the characters
Speaker:and sloops used by the Atlantic Pirates at the same time or from years
Speaker:a little bit prior.
Speaker:There's also some speculation is now there is some speculation
Speaker:as to what inspired her eventual surrender.
Speaker:Like you had all this power. What's the deal?
Speaker:But the most prominent theory being that with all the power that she had,
Speaker:she was able to negotiate better, She had a better stance to go, okay,
Speaker:listen, it's not looking great for you, so you better just give me what I want.
Speaker:So in 1810, negotiations were started where in response to their surrender,
Speaker:Bowe, her son slash husband guy, would receive an official title
Speaker:and keep ships for his private fleet while they gave up a large portion of the
Speaker:their bulk fleet, almost 20,000 men who would essentially be commissioned
Speaker:in a service along with the 200 some ships that they surrendered.
Speaker:She was able to retire and Bowe competed against some of the former coalition
Speaker:and which defeated them and continued to improve his standing with the government.
Speaker:He died in 1822 in battle and King She passed away
Speaker:in 1844 at the age of 68, which is one of the oldest ages
Speaker:of pirates, pirate captains that I've found.
Speaker:Like, obviously, there's probably some other ones.
Speaker:But it's pretty impressive.
Speaker:You know, one of the most powerful and influential pirates
Speaker:who was able to take three powerful nations and basically
Speaker:ban them to her will and negotiate full pardon and all these things.
Speaker:And and it was a lady who was doing it, which stereotypically
Speaker:you wouldn't think of. Right.
Speaker:Our story is massive and there's so much more.
Speaker:So I would suggest look into it, you know, yourself, but choose
Speaker:even the basis for one of the pirates in the Pirates of Caribbean movies,
Speaker:which I think is cool that they included that.
Speaker:Now, after this, there's some pirates in the Gulf,
Speaker:but these were kind of quelled
Speaker:by British and American navies teaming up against them.
Speaker:But 1870s piracy in Asia kind of died down drastically to the superpower
Speaker:that had become England Navy and also America's Navy helping.
Speaker:There are some cases
Speaker:of river privacy in the United States along the Mississippi and other locations.
Speaker:There's a man named Dan Seavey, which perfect pirate name Seavey, anyway,
Speaker:became a pirate on the Great Lakes, which is kind of hilarious.
Speaker:Like, it's
Speaker:not where I would think it would happen, but it makes sense because they're big.
Speaker:He moved to Wisconsin after joining the Navy at 13,
Speaker:so he left home 13, joined the Navy, moved to Wisconsin, got married,
Speaker:and then then went to the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Failed at that move back,
Speaker:then moved to Michigan, got a ship, but he began to steal cargo
Speaker:at night from other ships on on the Great Lakes.
Speaker:He'd also sabotage different sea lights and then cause other ships to wreck
Speaker:and then steal the cargo from that.
Speaker:Well, he had ended his life, had like, he was like 80
Speaker:something when he ended up dying.
Speaker:And he was a marshal later in life, taking
Speaker:chasing after poachers, which is kind of funny
Speaker:because he was a poacher at one point himself.
Speaker:I guess.
Speaker:Who better to hunt him than a former poacher?
Speaker:You know, there's a there's big gap between then and more modern times.
Speaker:Obviously, everybody's pretty familiar with the modern stories of piracy
Speaker:off the coast of Somalia, Malacca and Asia.
Speaker:Some estimates range up to $16 billion
Speaker:loss per year to piracy, which is way more than I thought.
Speaker:Honestly, I could put a number on it if I was going to guess, but
Speaker:that is a lot.
Speaker:Whether they take a ship and ransom it or just take it, steal the cargo,
Speaker:sell it on their own, who knows?
Speaker:Then tactics often include force boarding, blockading, hostage taking,
Speaker:hiding around the banks on the coast.
Speaker:The smaller boats approach often cargo ships with little defenses.
Speaker:You know, if you seen Captain Phillips, you know, I'm talking about that movie
Speaker:being based on the real life taking of the Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates.
Speaker:One of Tom Hanks best movies, if you ask me.
Speaker:And the ending sequence where the real life
Speaker:Navy corpsman is taking him through intake and he's like a trauma patient
Speaker:at this point that like always gets me, I'm like, okay, anyway,
Speaker:other acts of piracy that can be thought to translate to
Speaker:are things like hijacking an airplane, you know, more modern
Speaker:take on piracy, which carries, you know, its own kind of thing.
Speaker:But D.B. Cooper, air pirate did.
Speaker:There's also a
Speaker:different kind of air piracy and World War one, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker:This case involves Germans using a Zeppelin
Speaker:to fly over a Norwegian ship and then propel
Speaker:and take over the Norwegian ship, which is a wild story.
Speaker:And I don't know how that hasn't been in a movie or a whole movie itself.
Speaker:But anyway, that about wraps it up not quite to equal hands,
Speaker:but I think if I left out parts the beginning of this one,
Speaker:it would not have flowed as well as I would have liked.
Speaker:Hopefully you all enjoyed it with that.
Speaker:You know, let's discuss some interesting things we learned in the
Speaker:this episode and then we'll get into the remedial remedial rant section.
Speaker:A first thought is just how awful the conditions were compared to our lives.
Speaker:Now, like in general, life is better, more comfortable.
Speaker:But on a ship, especially,
Speaker:holy cow, cramped, stinky, bad food, sometimes months at sea.
Speaker:Longest I was ever out at sea on
Speaker:deployment was like 40 days, I think, which is short of the 40 day mark.
Speaker:That a 45 day mark for a beer day in the US Navy, which kind of sucked.
Speaker:We missed it.
Speaker:The other part
Speaker:is that the stereotypical alcohol that they drank wasn't just for fun there.
Speaker:I mentioned, you know, that the beer could give them nutrition, be
Speaker:kept longer due to not being able to hold bad microorganisms.
Speaker:Yeah. Need those times. You know what I'm saying?
Speaker:Another thing I liked learning about was that the pirates really had a code
Speaker:that they live by.
Speaker:I assume it emanates from a code of conduct
Speaker:that other legitimate ship operations would have, and it was just a good way
Speaker:to keep things organized and keep people accountable for their actions.
Speaker:With that let's get into the remedial rant section.
Speaker:The first and really,
Speaker:I guess kind of only thing I'm thinking about is a lot of romanticism
Speaker:between pirates like in general and also the specific groups.
Speaker:Like you've got a lot of romanticism and Golden Age Pirates is also Vikings.
Speaker:So descriptions of both have been taken as sort of like Hobo Shi
Speaker:type style with the dreadlocks and I paint, I'm sure with how
Speaker:well mast fire crews were that there are some sort of diverse style going on.
Speaker:But a large portion of these men were once
Speaker:Royal Navy sailors and still had views of fashion at that time.
Speaker:There are, of course, some who don't.
Speaker:And there's all those lifelong sailors who are very scrappy looking and often
Speaker:tattoos indicating.
Speaker:So, you know, not every pirate looked like Jack Sparrow.
Speaker:Not every pirate looked like George Washington.
Speaker:But there's a lot of mixing going on Now.
Speaker:As for the Vikings, well you're not one.
Speaker:I'm sorry if you're listening to this, you're not a Viking.
Speaker:You know, I'm sorry that they weren't really.
Speaker:And like, if you think about it, they're just normal dudes.
Speaker:For the time they were raiding to gain money.
