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 greatest hits, there are post-colonial perspectives: what do contemporary Jamaicans make of their island’s piratical history? And there are some fun artefacts: an ornate compass, pipes, dice, lanterns and, of course, pieces of eight.
The final section of the show is perhaps the most surprising, taking us way beyond the Caribbean (and the eighteenth-century heyday of Blackbeard and his dastardly ilk). There’s a fascinating look at the Barbary pirates who ruled the North African coast for centuries, a thorn in the side of the European powers. In south and southeast Asia, pirates included Zheng Yi Sao: a veritable pirate queen who commanded up to 80,000 men and 1,800 ships. She eventually negotiated her retirement with the Chinese government, set up a gambling house in Macau and died peacefully at the age of 69. And then, of course, there are the modern-day pirates who still plague shipping routes, especially off the coasts of Africa and Malysia.
Despite their centuries-long track record of murder and slavery, pirates have also become heroes of a sort: icons of an alternative, anti-capitalist moral code, co-opted as symptoms of freedom by political activists like the international Pirate Party. To quote Tim Curry’s fabulously camp Long John Silver from Muppet Treasure Island: ‘It’s how you look at buccaneers that make them bad or good.’ And while ‘Pirates’ leaves you under no illusion of its subjects being nice people, the exhibition’s atmospheric lighting, Jolly Roger flags and cases of gleaming cutlasses and muskets make it hard not to leave feeling just a little bit thrilled by their bloodthirsty way of life.
