Ahoy, matey. Pirates are often depicted with a parrot on their shoulder. What’s the basis for this? Was there a specific pirate from history or literature that had a feathered friend? –Craig, Phoenix
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Piracy dates back at least to ancient Greece and continues today; its golden age began in the 1650s and peaked circa 1720, when around 2,000 pirates terrorized the Atlantic. But nearly all our notions of their behavior come from the golden age of fictional piracy, which reached its zenith in 1881 with the appearance of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Its influence on subsequent pirate lit can’t be overstated: Stevenson flat-out invented some of the genre’s most durable cliches–treasure maps marked X (see last week’s column), the black spot as token of impending doom–and his vision took hold so quickly that almost all subsequent works involving piracy are in some way derived therefrom. Long John Silver, the one-legged ship’s cook with a parrot on his shoulder, was his most fertile creation, but basically every pirate you’ve ever seen has some RLS DNA; throw in Captain Hook and crew from James Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) and that’s much of the pirate gene pool right there.
So what was real and what wasn’t?
a Skull and crossbones. This was only one of many pirate-flag insignia. Why fly a pirate flag, anyway? To terrorize victims into surrendering without a struggle. The earliest such flags were plain red or black sheets–red symbolizing blood and battle, black for death. Later captains added emblems: hearts dripping blood, fiery balls, hourglasses, cutlasses, skeletons, etc. Around 1718, Captain Richard Worley flew a black flag with a white death’s-head and crossed femurs, a symbol of death dating to medieval times. By about 1730 this design had caught on among English, French, and Spanish pirates in the West Indies and was called the “Jolly Roger” or “Old Roger.”
