An interesting comment on studying pirates, from /r/AskHistorians:
"Pirate questions are often difficult, because pirates as a group have been so heavily fictionalized -- and were often fictionalized even in the "golden age" of piracy (or shortly thereafter) -- that it becomes hard to separate reality from fiction. Indeed, there is evidence that later sailing crews, including pirates, took on behaviors that they may have read or heard that "pirates" did -- even if these accounts were fictional, meaning that fictional accounts of pirate activities actually became reality due to people acting out what they'd seen in fiction." https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60deda/how_h...
Pirates are not unique in that respect. All mass media is heavily fictionalized. Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell(1807): I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
Interesting because alot of modern day pirates/hackers are exactly the same. Co-opting their identities from movies like "Hackers" and "Sneakers". If you read any of the interview sections of Phrack articles these movies and their aesthetics are all referenced heavily. I think it was ironic/toungue in cheek at first but then turned into something sincere as new generations looked up to the old without context.
Well, that's something they have in common with ninjas then. :) Ninjas had lots of rumored abilities and practices ascribed to them which they didn't really have, and the ninjas of the day did nothing to counter the rumors. In fact they helped spread the rumors since it enhanced their fearsome reputation to do so.
My favorite read on pirates and historical events is probably the book about an actual pirate raid on Ireland in 1631 where most of the inhabitants of a coastal village were carried away to slavery by Barbary pirates.
The book ends up giving the reader background on the Barbary pirates - a mix of Turks, Dutch, Algerian, and Moroccan pirates led by a Dutch convert to Islam (from Catholicism). It also attempts to tell the stories of as many of the slaves as possible using historical information from people known to suffered a similar fate.
It details some of the stories of Algiers and the Ottoman empire and how Europeans were enslaved by the Muslims who controlled the Mediterranean at the time and who targeted English shipping and later American shipping leading us to dispatch Marines to the shores of Tripoli.
In the end it describes the roundabout way that one of the pirates may have ended up on Manhattan and may be one of the founders of some of America's oldest monied families with descendents that may include people such as Kasey Kasem and Jon Voigt. Really a great story.
I'll have to check out some of these other books mentioned on this thread since history is one of my favorite subjects.
I suspect this probably works well for you because you're a studio model -- you're billing for hours.
In the case where there is disagreement about what product to build, I could see this more rapidly going sideways. Sometimes having one person with a specific vision can be very helpful.
My favourite read about piracy was "Pirates and Emperors" by Noam Chomsky. Piracy was sponsored by states who plundered and raided coasts, such as Sir Francis Drake, who was sponsored by the English government. Only it wasn't called piracy of "we" did it, only when other countries did. Kinda similar to today with international terrorism.
I recall reading fiction in which there was a big difference between a privateer and a pirate. Privateers were 'licensed' pirates, given a letter of marque that allows them to attack enemies of the state.
The point being that, plundering french ships under an English letter of Marque will prevent the french from calling you a pirate. Instead, you are simply an enemy combatant.
What's always surprised me is how much of the cartoony image is real. There really were pirates with peg legs, hooks for hands and eye patches, pirates that talked with lower-class English accents and kept parrots as pets. There were swashbuckling captains feared all over the seas that held their crews of convicts and scalawags to surprisingly strict codes of honor. As the author says here, a lot of these things only happened in certain places and times, but the fact that these people did really exist is pretty fun and amazing.
It's an interesting read, though to be fair a lot of what popular culture and fiction says about any romanticised group is not true/heavily exaggerated. Most of what people think they know about ninjas isn't true. Most of what people think about the wild west isn't true. Same with everything from medieval times to Roman soldiers to ancient egypt.
And also like mentioned in the article, much of what we think about when we hear those words/terms is based on a subset of these groups/populations as well.
Heck, most of what people know about any other group (romanticized or not) isn't true. For instance, visitors to the United States often worry that they're going to see running gun battles on the street on a daily basis.
I thought I knew nothing about ninjas, since I had never actually studied ninjas, only got information from movies and manga, then I heard a historian supposedly specialized in ninjas give a talk titled "Everything you know about ninjas is wrong" or somewhat like that. 90% of what he has said met what I already knew and believed (even though I wasn't very sure of what I knew).
This is technically true, but given the particular topic, it's unreasonably dismissive. As Turing_Machine points out this can also be true of modern cultures. Unremarkably. As fiatjaf points out, this can (sometimes) be untrue of ninjas.
The interesting distinction here is the almost self-fictionalisation of pirates. Many pirates would go from port to port spreading rumours and horror-stories about themselves simply to make raiding an easier (and less violent) process; fearful captains being all the more compliant.
My favourite story about pirates is what happened when they captured Julius Caesar:
"Not everyone, though, should take the Julius Caesar approach to kidnapping. As a young man, reports Plutarch in his biography of the great man, he was kidnapped off the Dodecanese islands en route to learn rhetoric under the famous teacher, Molon of Rhodes. The Cicilian pirates (from the area of modern Anatolia north and north-east of Cyprus) he treated high-handedly. They asked for a ransom of 20 talents – he laughed at them for undervaluing him and offered them 50. While he was kept captive he treated them like bodyguards rather than prison guards, and frequently told them he would crucify them after his ransom was paid. (Better than that, "He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians.") In due course the ransom was paid, Caesar was set free – and, as promised, he crucified them to a man."
There are a handful of good performances involved -- e.g., Stephen's Flint -- but by in large, the acting is terrible. Which is such a shame because the actual story is pretty decent. If you can make it through the first season, you'll be rewarded.
Besides all the Pirating action, I'm really surprised how credible the economics and politics of the show is. I'm often embarrassed by how naively those things are treated in TV, but here it mostly makes sense on at least some level.
Aside for 1 or 2 miscasts I find the acting pretty damn great. All the 4 captains are a joy to watch.
I did stop watching for a time after a really dumb plot development at the end of Season 2, but I'm glad I picked it up again.
The headline could be shortened to "A lot we know is not true, and a lot of what is true is not known." That's an unfortunate reality but on the other hand, it keeps life interesting.
Both halves of the sentence contain wrong and rendundant statements. Since truth is a relation of correspondence between a proposition and reality and knowledge is justified true belief or it is not knowledge; it is both impossible for us to know untruths if we believe them to be true (we can believe falsehoods but we can only know truth), and likewise truths, being essentially propositions, cannot not be known (can only be known by someone, or there is no one proposing them therefore no truth relation subsists - ergo no 'truth' can be wholly unknown to everyone.)
You may say instead:
A lot we believe is not true, and we don't know much.
The real history of the "golden age of piracy" is pretty fascinating. Basically you had Spain trying to claim the entire known world and everyone else fighting back by any means available. Provided a pirate limited himself to Spanish shipping, he could easily become a legitimate member of (even a hero in) one of the other Western nations.
I believe we are all "pirates" at heart, which is why they so easily assimilate into society and why we usually ignore them around us as long as they no longer overtly act in that manner.
Obviously, the magnitude of our decent in piratehood varies from person to person, and at some level (murder being obviously a issue) we stop accepting them post-haste.
I find a close analogy to doing drugs and drug dealers in modern society. A lot of upstanding citizens enjoy doing drugs and actually like and feel safe around their drug dealers, but rarely if ever does popular culture show that side of reality.
I don't think its any coincidence that TV and movies show the murderous and thieving side of piracy as to condition us to be appalled by them, in general.
Pulp Fiction was a popular (and extremely violent) movie which depicted exactly what you're describing. John Travolta is comfortable with his heroin guy - they banter, talk about travel, and then discuss the dope in genial terms. When money changes hands, it's practically a formality between two people who are acting out a ritual, like a regular at a coffee shop.
I guess it doesn't end up too well for Travolta, but I think his dealer made it out okay. Come to think of it, that guy had a negative body count by the end of the film; he saved Uma Thurman's life.
> I find a close analogy to doing drugs and drug dealers in modern society. A lot of upstanding citizens enjoy doing drugs and actually like and feel safe around their drug dealers, but rarely if ever does popular culture show that side of reality.
There are dealers and then there are dealers. A hippy friend who can get you MD, acid or DMT (which he orders on darknet) is very different from someone who pushes crack for a living in a bad neighborhood.
> I don't think its any coincidence that TV and movies show the murderous and thieving side of piracy as to condition us to be appalled by them, in general.
Is this really true? There's a long history of sympathetic portrayals of drug culture, from Trainspotting (novel and movie) to A Scanner Darkly (novel and movie) to Jesus' Son (novel and movie) to Pineapple Express (mainstream movie), and a whole lot more.
From the little of "How i met your mother" I have seen, the show didn't take a harsh tone about their weed-smoking in college. In fact there is a light-hearted scene where Marshall tells some character's sister "Don't do drugs except weed".
But yeah i am yet to see a drug-themed kids show or cartoon.
One of my favorite books is about Captain Kidd. It's a well researched take on his life and it argues, strongly in my opinion, that he was not a pirate and goes into great detail how he (supposedly) led his life. It's a surprisingly captivating read.
A fascinating article. There are similar parallels with the smugglers and poachers of my area of the UK - rural Dorset. Characters like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Gulliver managed to become respectable, but at the same time are subjects of a lot of folklore and tales.
My favorite ones are the books written by Ambroise Louis Garneray, which also served under Surcouf, before eventually becoming a painter after his life as pirate.
However even back in his lifetime some would state he colored his memories a bit, so that they were more interesting to read.
Of course, only he knew how much that was actually so.
[+] [-] apsec112|9 years ago|reply
"Pirate questions are often difficult, because pirates as a group have been so heavily fictionalized -- and were often fictionalized even in the "golden age" of piracy (or shortly thereafter) -- that it becomes hard to separate reality from fiction. Indeed, there is evidence that later sailing crews, including pirates, took on behaviors that they may have read or heard that "pirates" did -- even if these accounts were fictional, meaning that fictional accounts of pirate activities actually became reality due to people acting out what they'd seen in fiction." https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60deda/how_h...
[+] [-] d0mine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bimjam27|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sniffnoy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doodlebugging|9 years ago|reply
[The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0862789559)
The book ends up giving the reader background on the Barbary pirates - a mix of Turks, Dutch, Algerian, and Moroccan pirates led by a Dutch convert to Islam (from Catholicism). It also attempts to tell the stories of as many of the slaves as possible using historical information from people known to suffered a similar fate.
It details some of the stories of Algiers and the Ottoman empire and how Europeans were enslaved by the Muslims who controlled the Mediterranean at the time and who targeted English shipping and later American shipping leading us to dispatch Marines to the shores of Tripoli.
In the end it describes the roundabout way that one of the pirates may have ended up on Manhattan and may be one of the founders of some of America's oldest monied families with descendents that may include people such as Kasey Kasem and Jon Voigt. Really a great story.
I'll have to check out some of these other books mentioned on this thread since history is one of my favorite subjects.
[+] [-] ryandvm|9 years ago|reply
It was so profound in fact that much of it was the inspiration for our business model:
https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1aa1b...
[+] [-] trevyn|9 years ago|reply
In the case where there is disagreement about what product to build, I could see this more rapidly going sideways. Sometimes having one person with a specific vision can be very helpful.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocqua|9 years ago|reply
The point being that, plundering french ships under an English letter of Marque will prevent the french from calling you a pirate. Instead, you are simply an enemy combatant.
I think this was from a Wilbur Smith novel.
[+] [-] metaxy2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|9 years ago|reply
And also like mentioned in the article, much of what we think about when we hear those words/terms is based on a subset of these groups/populations as well.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucideer|9 years ago|reply
The interesting distinction here is the almost self-fictionalisation of pirates. Many pirates would go from port to port spreading rumours and horror-stories about themselves simply to make raiding an easier (and less violent) process; fearful captains being all the more compliant.
[+] [-] LaMarseillaise|9 years ago|reply
Do you have some examples for these two, or maybe a link? I am interested in these subjects in particular.
[+] [-] gadders|9 years ago|reply
"Not everyone, though, should take the Julius Caesar approach to kidnapping. As a young man, reports Plutarch in his biography of the great man, he was kidnapped off the Dodecanese islands en route to learn rhetoric under the famous teacher, Molon of Rhodes. The Cicilian pirates (from the area of modern Anatolia north and north-east of Cyprus) he treated high-handedly. They asked for a ransom of 20 talents – he laughed at them for undervaluing him and offered them 50. While he was kept captive he treated them like bodyguards rather than prison guards, and frequently told them he would crucify them after his ransom was paid. (Better than that, "He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians.") In due course the ransom was paid, Caesar was set free – and, as promised, he crucified them to a man."
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/charlottehigginsblog/200...
[+] [-] teslaberry|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peterwwillis|9 years ago|reply
A few blog posts on Baltimore's history as a "nest of pirates" and stories about privateering: https://maryland1812.wordpress.com/category/privateers/
[+] [-] profalseidol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xophmeister|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
Besides all the Pirating action, I'm really surprised how credible the economics and politics of the show is. I'm often embarrassed by how naively those things are treated in TV, but here it mostly makes sense on at least some level.
Aside for 1 or 2 miscasts I find the acting pretty damn great. All the 4 captains are a joy to watch.
I did stop watching for a time after a really dumb plot development at the end of Season 2, but I'm glad I picked it up again.
[+] [-] amorphid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktRolster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guiriduro|9 years ago|reply
You may say instead: A lot we believe is not true, and we don't know much.
[+] [-] rnnr|9 years ago|reply
Excellent as a summer book, a Libertarian view on the subject with good info on pirates even if you don't agree with the author's view.
[+] [-] trustworthy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubano|9 years ago|reply
Obviously, the magnitude of our decent in piratehood varies from person to person, and at some level (murder being obviously a issue) we stop accepting them post-haste.
I find a close analogy to doing drugs and drug dealers in modern society. A lot of upstanding citizens enjoy doing drugs and actually like and feel safe around their drug dealers, but rarely if ever does popular culture show that side of reality.
I don't think its any coincidence that TV and movies show the murderous and thieving side of piracy as to condition us to be appalled by them, in general.
[+] [-] leggomylibro|9 years ago|reply
I guess it doesn't end up too well for Travolta, but I think his dealer made it out okay. Come to think of it, that guy had a negative body count by the end of the film; he saved Uma Thurman's life.
[+] [-] golergka|9 years ago|reply
There are dealers and then there are dealers. A hippy friend who can get you MD, acid or DMT (which he orders on darknet) is very different from someone who pushes crack for a living in a bad neighborhood.
[+] [-] tps5|9 years ago|reply
Is this really true? There's a long history of sympathetic portrayals of drug culture, from Trainspotting (novel and movie) to A Scanner Darkly (novel and movie) to Jesus' Son (novel and movie) to Pineapple Express (mainstream movie), and a whole lot more.
[+] [-] _nedR|9 years ago|reply
But yeah i am yet to see a drug-themed kids show or cartoon.
[+] [-] Judgmentality|9 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Hunter-True-Story-Captain/dp/0...
[+] [-] VSpike|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|9 years ago|reply
My favorite ones are the books written by Ambroise Louis Garneray, which also served under Surcouf, before eventually becoming a painter after his life as pirate.
However even back in his lifetime some would state he colored his memories a bit, so that they were more interesting to read.
Of course, only he knew how much that was actually so.
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
And Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs :)
[+] [-] oska|9 years ago|reply
The authorship sometimes attributed to Defoe, but also to a Nathaniel Mist. (It was published under a pseudonym). [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_History_of_the_Pyrat...
[+] [-] bholdr|9 years ago|reply
An insightful, nevertheless, somewhat dullfull read.
[+] [-] aaron695|9 years ago|reply
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=junk+pirates&s=20
[+] [-] rectang|9 years ago|reply