Pirates
Avast ye! The National Maritime Museum devotes plenty of space to the great and good of seafaring – but this year, it’s pointing the telescope at the bad guys. This is the museum’s first major exhibition about pirates since the mid-’90s, and it’s a rollicking and sometimes surprising overview of the legends and lives of the most villainous cut-throats ever to sail the seven seas.
The show kicks off with the pirate mythos: how the Caribbean buccaneers of the eighteenth century swashbuckled their way into the popular imagination. From the original Treasure Island to the Muppet remake, from The Pirates of Penzance to Captain Pugwash, and from Captain Hook to Jack Sparrow, it’s an entertaining reminder of how pirates have infiltrated everything from video games to New Romantic fashion to kids’ toys.
From there, we’re plunged back into the golden age of piracy: the period of 40 years or so when this was a major industry. Colonial expansion meant a huge increase in the amount of valuable stuff floating across the oceans, and – inevitably – an explosion in the number of desperate men (and occasionally women) looking to loot it. We’re introduced to the rules and culture of life on board a pirate ship of the period, a bit of pirate lingo (from marooning to matelotage) and some of the famous figures of the time, many of them British, like William Kidd, Henry Morgan, Mary Read and Anne Bonny.
Pirates have infiltrated everything from video games to New Romantic fashion
Alongside the...