Booty call you out

Lukewarm, mildewy water splashes over the sides of a faux wooden boat and onto my chubby cheeks. I brush the droplets away with my fingers just as the boat slams into the riverbank. On the shore, a menacing pirate, peering at the boat with his one good eye, sings: “Yo ho, yo ho / a pirate’s life for me.”

Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean ride scared the shit out of me as a kid (I had a wild imagination); but the ride also was one of my favorites.

It was fun, yet I still don’t get why the hell people are so fascinated with pirate culture.

There’s even an underground society in Sacramento of seemingly normal people obsessed with all things pirate. Men don tricorn hats and eye patches, stuffed parrots rest on shoulders and women wear busty wench outfits. The pseudo-pirates drink rum, discuss buried treasure and say things like “Shiver me timbers.”

I love themed parties, even pirate ones. Adopting a pirate persona at regular meet-ups, however, is just an excuse for women to wear revealing clothing and act like “wenches” while men hang by a rum bar in a hotel conference room calling the women “bonnie lasses.” Yes, this really happens; it will happen next weekend at the Radisson Hotel.

Johnny Depp is reason to fantasize about pirates, but, sorry to break it to you, he isn’t a real pirate. In fact, the popularized elements of pirate culture—accents, costumes, walking the plank—aren’t real, either. It’s nothing more than pirate lore made popular by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance and, of course, the Disneyfication of Caribbean pirates.

It’s not unusual for popular culture to glorify outlaws. Think of the Wild West: Hardworking cowboys rebelled against the government and lived free. Cowboys had saloon girls, like pirates have wenches. Whiskey to rum, horses to ships, the Wild West to the open sea—it’s basically the same thing. But just like the John Wayne version of cowboy life, the Depp vision of pirate culture is misinformed.

During the Golden Age of Piracy in the 16th and 17th centuries, European governments hired privateers to fight battles and raid ships in the Caribbean. They were basically government-sanctioned buccaneers who split the booty with the government. Real pirates just kept the loot for themselves.

Pirate life was not glamorous or sexy. They lived on ships infested with rats, smelled and battled scurvy. Most of the booty they looted was food, water or other supplies, and there is little evidence that pirates actually buried treasure.

Pirates remain a threat—and not just to movie-industry moguls. Pirates off the coast of Somalia regularly terrorize seafaring ships. Somehow, I doubt Sacramento’s underground pirate society would give up their faux peg legs and bottles of rum for the real pirate’s life. Maybe they should have done a bit of research.

As a kid, I feared Disney’s Animatronic pirates would come to life and attack me. Twenty years later, pop-pirate culture and its rum-drinking fools are attacking my historical sensibility.