Lawless Piracy & the Struggle for Power in North America

Lawless bandits, high sea adventure, and buried treasure! When we dress up as pirates on Halloween, do our humorous sayings and elaborate costumes bear any resemblance to the real pirates that once terrorized North America? In this episode of Fabric of History, Mary, Kirk, and Haley discuss piracy's rise and fall in the Mediterranean and American Colonies, Blackbeard’s fierce tactics, pirate havens, and more. Why did so many choose this rough life and why do we romanticize pirates today?

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Transcript

 Intro (00:06)
From the Bill of Rights Institute. Fabric of History weaves together US history founding principles and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what's inside.

Haley (00:21)
Lawless bandits, high sea adventure, and buried treasure! When we dress up as pirates on Halloween, do our humorous sayings and elaborate costumes bear any resemblance to the real pirates that once terrorized North America? In this episode of Fabric of History, Mary, Kirk, and I, Haley, discuss piracy's rise and fall in the Mediterranean and American Colonies, Blackbeard’s fierce tactics, pirate havens, and more. Why did so many choose this rough life and why do we romanticize pirates today?
 
Mary (01:05)
Hello, Fabric of History listeners. This is Mary Patterson, and I'm here with Haley Watson and Kirk Higgins. Hey, Haley. Hey, Kirk.
 
Haley (01:15)
Hey, Mary.
 
Kirk (01:16)
Hey, Mary. How are you doing?
 
Mary (01:18)
I'm freezing, actually, Kirk, I have been freezing since November. I went for a walk yesterday morning before work, and I think I was like a popsicle for the rest of the day. I'm just not a winter person. I don't like the cold. I would very much like to be on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, just taking it easy and getting some sun. That just sounds perfect right about now.
 
Kirk (01:45)
I was going to say it sounds pretty idyllic. All you need is, like, maybe a little buried treasure to go along with it.
 
Mary (01:52)
Yeah.
 
Mary (01:52)
So I've actually never been to the Caribbean, but I would love to go because I'm a history dork. And when I think of the Caribbean, you think of Pirates, right? Pirates of the Caribbean. And who doesn't love Pirates? Who wasn't a pirate for Halloween one year? I think there was always a pirate in my entourage for trick or treating. I don't know about you guys.
 
Haley (02:13)
I think I was a pirate.
 
Mary (02:16)
Really? Yeah. Kirk, were you ever a pirate?
 
Kirk (02:19)
I don't think I was, but I definitely had a bunch of friends who were. It's one of those images. I think that it's immediately recognizable, too.
 
Haley (02:29)
Yeah.
 
Mary (02:29)
It's a hallmark of Halloween. I think Pirates have such a hold on our imagination. And as with anything in the past, there's a really cool story to be told about piracy in North America. So I think that exploring that story, where did Pirates come from and how did they operate and why do we hold on to their story so much? That sounds like something that's worth the conversation. Piracy is one of those professions, I think, that's been around for a very, very long time. But if we're talking about Pirates in the Caribbean or Pirates in North America, where are we in time or what's a good starting point for our tale?
 
Kirk (03:17)
When we think about Pirates, we think about or at least that romanticized Halloween version of piracy. We're thinking about a very specific time period. But piracy has been a long round for a long time. And really, when we're talking about piracy, we're talking about essentially the illegal trade of goods in some fashion or another. So it may be stealing things, but for Pirates, it's particularly on the high seas, taking trade, illegally, taking over ships. But that romanticized view, I think, is really thinking about the golden age of piracy, what people call the golden age of piracy, which is 1650 to 1720, 1730s. So it's colonial North America or the colonial period in North America when European empires are expanding. And it's in that expansion that you sort of see the origins of piracy. You had a lot of conflict going on in Europe between different factions. And as that conflict sort of shifts in the 60s, 50s, you see this growth of empires. And with that growth of empires, you're seeing more trade. And with that trade, you're also seeing more ships on the high seas. And so you have sort of all of these individuals who have been involved in that trade in one way or another or maybe involved in these different wars in Europe now turning to illegal trade to try to break out of that system and make money for themselves.
 
Kirk (04:43)
This is all exacerbated by things like the system they used to have called Letters of Mark. Letters of Mark were essentially a license for legal piracy. So the King or Queen of given European nation gives you a license, Mary, and then you can go out on the high seas and raid that country's enemies, and you get to keep all the spoils of raiding it. But you have sort of the legal protection of this other nation. So it's sort of like sanctioned piracy or I guess maybe today the equivalent would be something like a mercenary of sorts. So you have these guys are already sailing around doing that. The problem is when the war ends, sometimes it's not so much fun to stop doing that. So you have sort of this system that's already in place for these guys going out and attacking these different ships. And that becomes sort of the framework on which this sort of world of Pirates gets built. I think we'll go into that a little bit, but it becomes really interesting how it is that you overcome one of the biggest problems of being a pirate, which is, well, I have a bunch of stuff now.
 
Kirk (05:48)
Where do I sell it and what do I do with it? And that's not always an easy problem to solve.
 
Haley (05:54)
I mean, they built their, quote, unquote careers in piracy. And suddenly after the war of Spanish secession, now they can't be Pirates anymore. They can't do what they've been doing for a long time. So it's also a matter of survival in a sense that's for some of them, I'm sure it was all that they knew how to do. Everyone that they knew was a pirate. They had a crew. You're on a ship somewhere in the Caribbean. What do you do next ?
 
Mary (06:20)
Kirk, you situated us in this golden age, like 1650 to 1720. So there's a lot of players in the Western hemisphere. You've got Spain, you've got France, you've got England. And they all hate each other, and they're all trying to steal each other's stuff, and they're all plundering all wealth from North and South America and sending it home. So it's like the perfect situation to go out and steal something and then all of a sudden, as you guys say, you're out of a job. Official, like a legal job. So why would you stop doing what was okay not too long ago, but suddenly is considered a crime. Then you'll be hanged, you'll be killed. And it's pretty interesting how the tables have turned on these guys. Not that I'm pro pirate anybody. I just think it's interesting to see try to put yourself in their shoes and understand the choices they made.
 
Haley (07:16)
Yeah, you can't kind of just be like, oh, actually, just kidding. I'm sorry I killed all these people and stole all this merchandise. I want to go back and join the Royal Navy and live in London. Kind of like the point of no return, in a sense.
 
Kirk (07:28)
We should mention, we're talking a lot about where it is that Pirates originated from and sort of how we're romanticizing them. But they were pretty awful. They're running around the Caribbean. They're stealing property from other individuals. They are famous. Obviously, everyone can think of what they would call the Jolly Roger, which is their flag, or the Jolly Roger was one kind, but they would have a flag, typically a black flag that had symbols of death or bones or some sort of skeleton stabbing a heart is another famous one. The idea is to engender fear on whoever it is you're coming up against, but also point to the fact that there's going to be no quarter if you resist. So they're essentially saying, we're going to kill all of you if you try to resist at all. And so brace yourselves for your impending doom. There's a lot of stories of them capturing individuals. Pirates often participated in the slave trade. There are countless examples of them just murdering, torturing, doing everything horrific. So by no means is our romanticized version of Pirates something that we should overlook, sort of the brutality and terribleness that did occur.
 
Kirk (08:41)
That's not to say all Pirates either participated in those same kinds of things. There's exceptions when that comes out, but those exceptions are exceptions for a reason. So there may be a moment when they say, this guy didn't just sink and burn this entire ship full of people and goods or what have you. But it's exceptional, I think, partly because it is outside of the norm.
 
Haley (09:01)
Charles Vane was a notoriously cruel pirate. Out of the bunch, even out of a bunch of Pirates. He was worse than most of them, but he was known for keelhauling, which involved tying someone to a rope and then dragging that person underwater from one end of the ship to another. And this usually resulted in drowning. Or you could also die from just head trauma of just being dragged along the bottom of the ship. So if you were captured by a pirate, you better be hoping that you really don't have any hope. It probably won't go well for you. It was a very vicious time.
 
Kirk (09:43)
These guys. Although there was a period when there was longer voyages taking place. It's typically called the Pirate Round where you had Pirates going overseas and raiding off the coast of Africa and particularly around to like Madagascar into the Indian Ocean. There's a very famous story of Henry Avery who captured one of the Mogul emperors, Gallions and made him very rich. His story is really interesting but that's off the coast of India. So you do have this sort of huge expanse that these guys are sailing around and raiding different trade. But the Caribbean becomes a hangout, particularly Jamaica because it's sort of situated in an area where you can go on shorter expeditions. There's a lot of trade coming from the Americas going towards Europe. A lot of those ships are sort of concentrating there because even though you have this vast ocean, there are certain areas in the ocean where ships just tend to go because it's like if you think about it like a highway, you can catch a current and it's a lot easier to get from point A to point B or you can do it in the least amount of time and doing it in the least amount of time becomes really important in the age of sail because you don't have a lot of food and water stored on your ship and that's really all you have.
 
Kirk (10:55)
So you can find these areas where this trade is more concentrated and that means that the Pirates are going to hang out there because they can raid that trade. So the Gulf Stream obviously goes up the coast of North America. That's one of the things that they were really prowling around and taking advantage of. But also because in that area of the Caribbean there's a lot of short-day sales where you can get more supplies and get more nutrients. You don't have to be out at sea for months at a time without seeing land. So it's sort of a nice area for that reason as well. And Jamaica is interesting because of the city of Port Royal. There's an earthquake in the 1690s and it basically sank the city into the sea. And this was seen sort of across the continent as like this retaliation from God saying these Pirates are committing evil in this town is just full of it's like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah kind of a story. I mean that city literally sank into the ocean and it was a horrific event but it was seen as like this moment and it's written about throughout the North American continents that kind of points to just how well known these Pirates were at the time and how well known their adventures and things were at the time as well.
 
Mary (12:09)
So the Caribbean, I mean in addition to all of these things, you have all these coming and going. It's a highway in this time period but you have the deep ports so it's very practical you can get your water and things like that. And it's also a really nice weather. Like, if you're thinking about if we're just talking about British colonies because we the United States come from part of the British Empire. Like you said before, Haley, you could just stop raiding ships and move to England. If I have the choice of living in London or living in Jamaica, even though there is a threat of this Hurricane, I'm going to stay there. Life in London, I think life throughout Europe is it poor, nasty, brutish and short at this time period. That's what Thomas Hobbes says in Leviathan 51. Everyday life is pretty hard and probably very tedious, but to be a pirate or to be on these ships and seeing these places sounds exciting. Again, pro pirate now I am the pro pirate voice in this conversation.
 
Haley (13:17)
Oh, yeah, I can see that, too. And I was reading a bit about just how bad it was back in England, and England was where a lot of these Pirates were from, but just the conditions, if you were not well off, I think a lot of the origin stories, especially since there weren't many records except for legal records, records of plunder. But Besides that, there really weren't many records of when a pirate was born or things like that, but a lot of them were traced back to originating in England. But if you weren't well off, you really had a tough time. There's a lot of homelessness, a lot of homeless children roaming around the bad parts of England. Watching executions was part of everyday life. There are a lot of diseases. And I can see, in a sense, why people gravitated towards sailing. But again, joining the Navy or a merchant ship didn't sound that great. They weren't paid well. You would be conscripted, really, any time, even if you're done with a mission and you were just kind of hanging out in a bar back in town, these groups of sailors could come and get you.
 
Haley (14:25)
It's called pressing, I believe, groups of pressers, but they would literally come and take the seamen from a bar, from a restaurant in England, back to sea. So this was the legal way to do things, the legal way to sail, so you can kind of see why being a pirate, being, quote, unquote free appealed. And they had, it seemed to have a fairer division of plunder among the crew and the captain. So it seemed to be a little bit fairer that way. I don't want to be too, I don't know, respectful of the Pirates, but, yeah, I guess I'm mainly saying that you were in the Navy or a merchant. There were problems when you came back from a voyage about getting paid, and that was a common grievance among those legal sea people. And it was probably more immediate gratification that when you plunder a large ship, you see the treasure, you take the treasure. It's yours. You don't have to wait for a government to decide to pay you back home.
 
Mary (15:26)
It's very entrepreneurial. Again, the example I'm thinking of is William Kidd, who was a famous English pirate who starts as a privateer. He is sanctioned by powerful politicians in England to go out and plunder other people's ships, and then he becomes a pirate. Suddenly he was doing the exact same thing, but now his label has changed and he ends up being executed. But it's that line between doing things the quote-unquote right way and then being a pirate. And I think that's very interesting.
 
Kirk (16:06)
Yeah. I think you're touching on some of the things that make that we begin to look to Pirates is like this romantic sort of in the older sense of that word, these romantic figures because they're living this free, more free lifestyle. They're sort of only beholden to people who are there directly giving a sense to follow. They have these opportunities to get great riches from these different expeditions. And yeah, I mean, life on pirate ships wasn't any nicer than it was in the Royal Navy, where disease was rampant. Lots of people getting scurvy, which develops from a lack of vitamins from citrus fruit. They're eating salted beef, what they called the Navy salt horse, which is just like rock-hard pieces of beef. They would get sort of stale moldy bread when they were in harbor, and then they would get biscuits when they were out. Further out, seeing these biscuits had to last for months. So they were also rock hard, and they would often have weevils in them. So you'd have actual living like little maggots and things in your food. So it's miserable. Right. And it's not like living as a pirate was better than that.
 
Kirk (17:21)
But I think there was this idea, this sort of romance of what it meant to get away from that lifestyle and to actually directly profit from the actions that you are taking. And it's interesting, too, especially in North America you had at this time. So starting in 1650. But then up and through, like the late 1690s, the growth of sort of the apparatus for maintaining what became the British Empire, but was really England at the beginning is forming. And so you have these navigation acts that are starting to create the Mercantilist system that existed sort of in North America. And so you have these colonial governors and these colonial governments who are frustrated with their inability to trade whatever they want because they're in this sort of Imperial system. And so they actually are incentivized to sort of help out these Pirates or that the Pirates are actually benefiting them in some way and acting as smugglers and everything else. So you had this sort of whole system that's set up where it starts to look like. Yeah, it's freedom versus tyranny in this sort of big way.
 
Haley (18:25)
Yeah. And kind of going back to how these colonies not yet America, but how the colonies in North America viewed the Pirates Puritan Boston was actually very welcoming to Pirates because they brought goods that were not easily accessible. Otherwise, it was referred to as the common receptacle of Pirates of all nations by John Winthrop in 1646 yet, surprisingly, Pirates supplied these colonies with coins that they weren't always able to get, that they could then pay the English with to buy goods. So in a sense, you could argue that they had to trade with the Pirates a little bit to at least get coins so they could then buy things because a lot of things just were not available in the colonies.
 
Kirk (19:20)
Yeah. So I think if we could, I'd be interested in getting into that a little bit because I think sometimes we forget we always think about the aptly named movie that came out a few years ago, parts of the Caribbean. We always think about the parts on the Caribbean, but there's a lot of stories of piracy on the shores of North America. Maybe we could talk about a couple of those stories.
 
Mary (19:49)
So the pirate that I know of, and I don't know when I first heard of him, but I think Blackbeard or Edmund Teach is one of the more well-known North American Pirates. And he is based in North Carolina. So what's his story or why is he so legendary?
 
Kirk (20:10)
Yeah, so he's legendary. He's legendary for a lot of reasons, but mainly because he does have this great nickname, Blackbeard. And eventually, his ship was sunk off the coast of North Carolina was the Queen Anne's Revenge, which is a very fun name for a ship. And he was known for really dolling himself up to get into the minds of the people that he was attacking. So he would do things like he would put slow match in his beard. And slow match was at the time, you have cannons that were lit by a fuse as opposed to just like later there would be a flintlock or something else. But they had this slow match that would be used to sort of touch the top of a cannon that would light the powder off and fire it off. And so it was a slow-burning fuse. Essentially, he would put those in his beard so it looked like he was smoking like this demon who was coming on board your ship. And so he's just notorious for that and for being very barbarous and just being sort of an overall not nice guy. And he had sailed around with a few other Pirates that are also well known.
 
Kirk (21:15)
So Benjamin Hornigold is one and Samuel Belleme is another. So he was rating up the coast. He has this sort of bounty on his head. Basically, they would sail into these ports occasionally, and they would basically get the colonial governments to pay them money to go away, which is a great protection racket, as we tend to think of it now, kind of like the Mafia used to do. So it would sail off. But finally the governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, said enough of this, offers a bribe and ends up getting attacked and killed in Ocracoke Inlet in 1718 and dies this sort of brutal death. He was shot a whole bunch of times and had like over 20 sword cuts. Anyway, it's pretty gruesome. But they ended up decapitating him and putting his head up on the bow of the ship. So when they're sailing and he could be seen as having been defeated, which is a whole other side tangent we could get into with sort of the way that they would do an execution dock in London. They used to hang people in gibbets or gibbets, I'm not sure how it's pronounced, but they basically put the bodies they would tar the bodies, and then hang them in these cages essentially as a warning to people not to commit acts of piracy.
 
Kirk (22:29)
And they would just like hang them up there for days and months at a time, which is pretty horrific.
 
Mary (22:34)
I think you see that in the movie The Pirates of the Caribbean. When they sail in, they think that they like, take I don't know if it's a Captain Jack Sparrow, the Johnny Depp character, or someone else, but they take their hat off because they're like, oh, fallen Comrade, there's something all these Pirates that have been captured and it was trying to deter other people from pursuing an act of piracy. But I think that points to the larger idea. Like this time, life is really brutal, like nasty Brutus. In short, it was very common even in the Pilgrims colony in Plymouth, to put heads on spikes to say, don't do this or this will happen to you. And that to us is like absolutely abhorrent and grotesque. But that's common. So the Pirates are brutal. But I think a lot of things about life in this time were very doggy dog and brutal.
 
Haley (23:28)
And I think it's interesting to note that Pirates serve as inspiration to other Pirates during that time. And it seems like a lot of Pirates from the golden age, quote, unquote of piracy, like Blackbeard, Samuel Bellamy, and others looked up to Henry Avery, who came a little bit before them. But he was respected, especially because he was never caught. He had a very short career of about two years and just two years. He captured roughly a dozen vessels and made off with tens of millions of dollars in booty. And he went all over. He had that big capture of the Mogul ship. But after that, he escaped to Ireland and was never seen or heard from again. And, funny note, he took someone's wife. I forget who it was. I think it was some kind of governor there. But the wife ran away with him and they were never seen again. That kind of served as inspiration for later Pirates. You know, this guy did what he had to do to lots of money from people and got away with it. And I think more than anything, served as inspiration for these later Pirates. If you see someone's head on a pike, I think that does influence you a certain way.
 
Haley (24:42)
But it's interesting that these powers, the English powers felt that they had to do this, that piracy was such a problem that they needed to deter others from becoming Pirates.
 
Kirk (24:54)
Yeah. I think seeing sort of that vast wealth that can be accumulated quickly is such a powerful thing. It reminds me another story off the coast of North America, the wreck of the Treasure Fleet in 1715, wreck at the Treasure Fleet in the Urca Delima Gallion, which was one of these where this unimaginable wealth? I think it can't be overstated how little people subsisted on and how much wealth is represented. I mean, lifetimes and lifetimes of wealth sitting in some of these trading ships. And then it goes down off the coast of Florida, and the Pirates just showed up and attacked the Spanish who were trying to recover it from the ocean and again became these just famously rich figures, not necessarily the career that you would want to go into for the long term, but you can see why stories like that were inspiring to these individuals who are wanting to go out and make money and in some cases, just continue to fight sort of against their common enemies. Anyway. So Benjamin Hornygold, who was a part of that rate on the Urca Delima Gallion, would only attack English ships or would only attack the enemies of England.
 
Kirk (26:13)
Excuse me. So he would only attack the enemies of England because that's kind of how he got his start. And so he saw himself in a certain way, obviously operating illegally. But that's that blurred line that you were talking about, Mary. Like, so one day he's doing it and he's attacking the Spanish, and that's okay. And then some document gets signed and it's not okay anymore. And so he's just supposed to stop and, man, it sounds like I'm apologizing for Benjamin Horticol. I promise I'm not. You can at least see the blurred lines there, right? You can see where it is that these guys made a choice to say, no, I'm going to keep doing this and I'm going to make a profit off of it.
 
Mary (26:51)
I think that's part of the reason why the idea of Pirates resonates still today is just the idea of the treasure, and you could stumble across treasure. I think that's part of the appeal, for sure. I have been to the Treasure Coast of Florida, which is named that because of the Urca Delima. And there are still people today, myself included, who go to Vero Beach in Florida and are looking to find a piece of this treasure. And it's really like the best time to go is after a storm because the water has been churned up and you'll see people with metal detectors. I don't have a metal detector, but that is one of my dreams in life, is to get one so I can comb the beaches of the Treasure Coast and find I don't actually want to find a coin or something. I want to find a jewel. That's really what I want to find. But people have done it. And there are museums. I think it's called Mel Fisher's Treasure Museum. We can maybe link to it or include in our show notes or this man these treasure hunters find, like die for the treasure.
 
Mary (27:59)
And he's in court with the state of Florida for a long time. But he ends up having the exclusive. He owns what he found. And it's like gold bars, massive chains with giant jewels. I mean, the stuff when you think treasure, this is real treasure. So, yeah, like you were saying, Kirk, the opportunity to become wealthy and to escape this sort of humdrum, tough, short everyday life is pretty alluring. And I think people today, we're still trying to find that, myself included, find my Spanish doubloons or something washing up on the beach.
 
Kirk (28:35)
I think that's right, Mary. I think there's something powerful about it. And you see even into the 19th and 20th century, sort of this idealized view of Pirates. Right. So you think about the early movies with Errol Flynn and the movie Captain Blood, and it's like this swashbuckling adventure, but it's really sort of escapism. Right. Or it's thinking about this idealized view of freedom and making your own choices and getting rich in the process and then living this wonderful life in the middle of the warm Caribbean. Think about the book Treasure Island by Robert Lu Stevenson, written in the 1880s. And it's the same kind of thing. It's this adventure. It's this escape. It's this journey to find yourself. But there's this romance, again, that older view of romance, like sort of this idealized view where every day on the high seas is this tranquil, sunny, warm day with a soft breeze and you're sailing around with all your best friends. And yeah, occasionally you'll occasionally steal a ship and make a bunch of money, and then that'll be it. And then you get to go back and sit on the beach and drink a bunch of rum or something.
 
Kirk (29:43)
I don't know. But you can see where that becomes this appealing sort of stylized version of what was sort of born out of economic conditions and the difficult realities that individuals were facing.
 
Haley (29:59)
So the golden age of piracy did end, if anyone hasn't noticed, we don't have Pirates running around the Caribbean and Cape Cod and North Carolina like we did. But it ended. There are many reasons why. But an interesting one that I found. Woods Rogers started out as a privateer, and he was sponsored by Bristol merchants whose ships had been lost to foreign privateers. He actually, side note, rescued someone named Alexander Selkirk, who is a Scottish Seaman whose adventures later provided the basis for Robinson Crusoe. He was stranded on a Pacific Island for about four years and learned how to live with a bunch of goats. I believe that was what he was doing. But his adventures later fueled that amazing book by Defoe. But he landed in Nassau, Bahamas, and this was a huge pirate hub. It's the headquarters of about 2000 Pirates. And he was largely responsible for kind of turning this free piracy around and setting up government. He became governor of the Bahamas there, and he basically told them, we're going to turn a blind eye to everything that you've done if you become good citizens and settle down and try to make this an honest island.
 
Haley (31:24)
So a lot of Pirates did accept this offer. No one wanted to go to jail or get executed, but some other ones just refused this. I believe Benjamin Hornigold was one of the Pirates who accepted this offer. So Hornigold actually ended up hunting down Charles Vane, another noted pirate. So not all Pirates were equal at that time. There were definitely feuds within the piracy and what they decided to do with this new policy. So that fueled this end to this mass piracy, but also just the expansion of the British Navy, fueled by just expanding to create a more stable world order in general, not being bogged down by so many wars. So they are able to create a bigger army and just really clamp down on all this crazy piracy happening in North America.
 
Kirk (32:21)
Yeah, for sure. To put on my civics educator hat for a second. You can see as these empires are better able to project their power into North America, that this opportunity for lawlessness, call it diminishes. So you begin to see sort of the growth of stronger colonial governments, the growth of the ability for these empires to mitigate against losses due to piracy. And that's reflected not only in the Caribbean but also in North America, as you see sort of stronger control in the colonies of British, for example, exerting more direct control of the colonies. Obviously, we know where that story goes in 1776, but there's a link to the Pirates there as well. The Pirates aren't exempt from feeling the growth of that Imperial projection of power.
 
Mary (33:15)
Even as the heyday of the Pirates and the black beards and all the people we've talked about goes away. I mean, piracy still continues, right? So there's still outright piracy. As long as there's something worth stealing, there's going to be piracy in some form. And private tiering will continue, which is sort of that blurred line of basically kind of doing what Pirates do but being okay. And even like in the early United States, as its own sovereign nation has to deal with Barbary Pirates. So it's not like piracy goes away at all. But Blackbeards and the Benjamin Hornigolds. We don't see characters like that as much, but we still have them for Halloween costumes. And I think they're still so much a part of our culture.
 
Haley (34:09)
For better or worse. I think when you step back from it, you can romanticize it once you get down to reading these stories of Pirates and just awfulness bloodthirsty, literally. Yeah. It's not so cute, but it's very hard to separate that big picture idea of them from what actually happened.
 
Mary (34:31)
I think using our interest in Pirates and why they and why they're so interesting to us is a good like we just did in our conversation. Kirk and Haley is to probe a little bit deeper, and that's what we're all about here at the Bill of Rights Institute is trying to tell those stories and explore them and look for nuance. So there's definitely the Pirates of the Caribbean image of what piracy is, and then there's a very, more real kind of nasty side to it as well. And I think taking together when you look at all the pieces of the puzzle is when you start to get a better picture of what it was and why it was that way and how it is part of the fabric of our history.
 
Haley (35:16)
I love that.
 
Mary (35:17)
Kirk, Haley, thank you so much for talking Pirates with me. We got through this without one arr so I think that's I got one in there, so I think we should throw it out to our listeners. So what are your were you a pirate for Halloween? What resonates with you or does it resonate with you? When we talk about piracy and the age of Blackbeard and all of these great stories that really endure. So reach out to us. You can always write to us at comments@fabricofhistory.org. You can find us on all the social media channels. If you like listening to us, please give us a review that helps us reach more people and hear more stories and tell more stories. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear what you think of us. And until next time, everybody keep asking questions.
 
Outro (36:10)
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exists in a free society. Check out our educational resources and programs on our website. Mybri.org any questions or suggestions for future episodes? We'd love to hear from you. Just email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and don't forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay connected and informed about our future episodes. Thank you for listening.