What was that life like for these sailors?
They didn’t see themselves as brigands or thieves, most of them seem to have seen themselves as social revolutionaries fighting a back door action against the ship owners and ship captains who’d made many of their lives miserable when they were serving in the Royal Navy and the merchant marines. The other element that made these pirates unusual and famous through history was their motivations were unlike those of the pirates that had come before. So from this pirate base, this pirate republic, they were able to grow large and dangerous. And the pirates showed up and occupied Nassau and the Bahamas and put guns in the fort and fortified the harbor before the English government got around to reoccupying this colony, and made themselves very difficult to move. During this long war, the enemy sacked and destroyed the English colony in the Bahamas four times, and by the time that the war ended, there was a bunch of people living in hovels in the woods and no effective government at all. This outbreak of piracy coincidentally occurred right at the end of a major colonial war, now forgotten to most of us, called the War of Spanish Succession, or in this continent often called Queen Anne’s War. Right by this archipelago of uncharted islands and reefs and sandbars – a maze that pirates and small vessels or even sailing canoes could slip into and not be pursued by warships. In the case of the Bahamas pirates in the early 1700’s, the Bahamas was an unoccupied, abandoned and destroyed English colony hidden astride the straits of Florida, which in those days, due to the prevailing wind directions and the limited ability of square-rig vessels to sail into the wind, pretty much compelled all maritime commerce leaving the Caribbean basin and the Spanish main to go through with their treasure, galleons, everything else – all had to go through the straits of Florida. They managed to bring five empires to their knees by threatening their commerce, before the counter-attack was launched, and they were able to do that because unlike many of the pirates who have come before and very much like some of our contemporary pirates, they were able to rely on the sanctuary and infrastructure of this sort of rogue-pirate state. They were unusual in two respects: one was their level of success.
I guess that’s part of what drew me to them. And they have been able to have this level of immortality and fame because they were extremely unusual pirates. And the amazing thing is that 95-98% of all of our pirate pop imagery is an ode to one small gang of pirates who operated for a very brief period at the beginning of the 18th century out of the Bahamas, who all knew each other and many of whom had overlapping careers before piracy, in the royal navy, as privateers. This is the first attempt in many decades to reconstruct the actual historical story of the great Caribbean pirates, the ones who are responsible for virtually all of our pirate pirate-pop imagery today. Tell me a little bit about your book, The Republic of Pirates, and why you wanted to write it.
With Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on the way by the end of this year, we talked with Woodard about the incredible history of these men and women, and learned more than a little bit about what we can all expect out of the upcoming Ubisoft game, based on the same historical period. Historically, a relatively small group of pirates form the basis of the entire mythology that has grown up around pirates, but the actual history of their battles and adventures is at least as fascinating as the many fictional movies, comics, and books based on the period.
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The Republic of Pirates is also currently being adapted for TV John Malkovich plays Blackbeard in the upcoming show, entitled Crossbones. His 2008 book, The Republic of Pirates, is a thorough and fascinating glimpse into the true lives of the pirates who sailed the Caribbean in the early 1700s. His insight offers plenty of hints about what to expect in the upcoming game.Ĭolin Woodard is no stranger to the world of pirates. We speak with Colin Woodard, the historian who literally wrote the book on the golden age of piracy.