Explained (2018–…): Season 2, Episode 6 - Pirates - full transcript
In pop culture, pirates are often depicted as booty-looting rogues, but their history is far more complicated. See how they became enemies of humanity.
[ominous music playing]
[keyboard clacking]
[keyboard clacking]
[narrator] When Adolf Eichmann was found
guilty for his role in the Holocaust,
the judgment underlying
the court’s ruling was that Eichmann was,
for all intents and purposes,
a pirate.
[woman] The attorney underlined
piracy and slave tradery.
The attorney general believes
that in the case of Eichmann,
this should be the guiding principle.
[narrator] This guiding principle
that enemies of mankind
can be captured and tried by any country
regardless of nationality
was established
by international piracy law.
And that's what justified
capturing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina
and prosecuting him in Israel
for crimes committed in Europe.
[woman] The enemy of humanity
must be taken care of
so that no more harm can be done.
[narrator]
On May 31st 1962, he was hanged.
Today, we don’t really think of pirates
as enemies of humanity.
[singing]
They're campy villains,
like Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
- [singing]
- [narrator] Or kind of rock n’ roll,
like Jack Sparrow
in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Or rum-lovers
marketed by the Captain Morgan brand.
- Captain?
- [all] Captain!
[narrator] So, why are pirates
the original enemies of humanity?
And why don’t we remember them that way?
Rise up and put down the pirates
[theme song playing]
which have today made ours
a lawless world.
[man] Pirates preyed
upon America's growing commerce.
[man 2] The demon rum,
the staple food of the pirates
who once terrorized the Caribbean.
[woman] Some out-of-work fishermen
have turned to piracy,
sometimes resorting to murder.
[man 3] Their business is now very big,
around 50 million pounds this year.
The world must come together
to end the scourge of piracy.
Pirates franchises entertain hundreds
of millions of people around the world.
[man 4] No one knows, if or when
the pirates will try to strike.
[uplifting music playing]
I think a pirate is someone that sails
on the sea looking for hidden treasure.
Some of them have eye patches.
Some have peg legs. And some have swords.
Some are good guys
and some are bad guys.
A bad pirate tries to, like, take stuff.
And a good pirate
tries to, like, protect the stuff.
And they like booty
that's actually treasure.
Sometimes the men need help,
so the women pirates come in...
so they can help.
- Argh!
- Argh!
I think we're drawn to the image
of people who are operating
outside of authority.
And that really accounts, I think,
for a great deal of the persistent
romanticization of pirate life.
It's unfortunate
that it turns out not to be true.
♪ Comb their hair with catfish bones ♪
♪ And we're bound... ♪
[narrator] This is Queen Elizabeth
knighting Sir Francis Drake in 1581
for circumnavigating the globe
and bringing back treasure,
treasure he got pirating.
And that’s her again
with Sir Walter Raleigh,
another pirate she knighted.
He founded a colony he named Virginia,
after her, the virgin queen.
Its purpose? A pirate base camp.
Queen Elizabeth was
actually nicknamed the “pirate queen,”
and she venerated pirates.
She called them her “sea dogs”
for expanding her empire
and harming her rivals...
by robbing their ships.
At the time, European powers
were in constant conflict.
Their empires shifting and expanding.
And they all hired pirates
to steal and loot from their enemies.
In Europe,
when raiding took place on the seas,
one of the ways
that it was made legitimate
was through letters
of marque and reprisal.
[narrator] Pirates coveted these letters.
They meant you could rob ships
with the blessing of the state.
And there had never been
more ships on the seas.
This was the beginning
of our globalized economy,
based almost entirely on shipping,
which contributed to much of the conflict.
The European empires were fighting
for a bigger piece of global trade,
clamoring for goods
like spices from Indonesia,
cotton from India,
sugar from the Caribbean
and enslaved people from Africa.
Remnants of ships from that era
litter the ocean floor today.
And in 1996,
a particularly exciting one was discovered
off the coast of North Carolina,
and for years
reporters tracked its recovery.
Blackbeard's flagship,
the Queen Anne's Revenge,
was pulled from the bottom of the sea
off our coast today.
Queen Anne's Revenge,
it sank off the North Carolina coast.
[man] Beaufort has become known
for Blackbeard,
whose pirate ship lies wrecked
just out there.
[narrator] What these news reports
didn’t mention
was that this was originally a slave ship
named "La Concorde."
When Blackbeard captured it in 1717,
there were 455 enslaved Africans on board.
Almost all of them were sold into slavery,
while Blackbeard went on pirating.
Very few people have talked about it
as a slave ship that we have evidence of.
[narrator] You can’t understand
trade at this time
without understanding the slave trade,
because slave labor was behind
almost all of the goods produced
and shipped across the Atlantic.
I think that really helps
for people to rethink
what they know
about the transatlantic slave trade.
In many cases,
any ship can be considered a slave ship.
[narrator] But pirates
also literally traded in slaves.
[Dunnavant] Generally what would happen
is when a pirate captured a ship
with enslaved people on it,
they would take the enslaved people,
and in many cases, go to an island
where they had connections
um, and sell to some local traders there.
And then from there,
they would get sold off
into local markets and local plantations,
causing some of these pirates
to also be labeled slave traders.
Although that's not the term
people normally associate with them.
[narrator] Remember Sir Francis Drake?
Before he was a pirate and knight,
he was one of England's
first slave traders.
Pirates were ultimately interested
in making as much profit as they could.
And they were doing it
to also eventually use that profit
to gain status.
[narrator] Like one of the most famous
pirates in pop culture today.
Many people know
the more popular drink
of Captain Morgan rum,
but Captain Morgan, in many ways,
was not just a pirate,
but also a slave trader
and a plantation owner.
[narrator] Morgan made his wealth
as a hired pirate for England.
But then he was able
to sort of solidify his wealth
by establishing these plantations
on Jamaica.
He had over one hundred enslaved Africans
sort of under his ownership.
[narrator] Roughly the same number
U.S. President Thomas Jefferson had
at any given time.
He became significant and prominent
in Jamaican society,
um, and as a result of that,
ended up becoming lieutenant governor
and had very close dealings
with a lot of the aristocrats.
[narrator] In 1674, he was knighted
by King Charles II.
He's a very good example
for thinking about pirates
as these people who were not
outcasts and rogues
and determined
to stay on the edges of society.
What they wanted, in fact,
was incorporation in society
and a way to set up households as elites.
[narrator] Scotland-born William Kidd
was another pirate hired by the English,
receiving a commission in 1696.
He was given official papers,
and he was given a pass,
given a commission by England
to, um... to work on their behalf.
And the jobs that Captain Kidd was given
was as a pirate hunter.
[narrator] He voyaged from New York,
around the Cape of Good Hope,
to Madagascar
and into the Red Sea and Indian Ocean,
where pirates were robbing the ships
of the British East India Company.
But then Kidd decided he could make
more money as an actual pirate,
and he targeted what he thought
would make for a profitable raid.
The ship was actually registered
to the Mughal Empire,
so today India,
uh, a trading partner of the English,
a huge ally of the English at this time.
[narrator] Captain Kidd looted the ships,
scoring silk, cotton,
sugar, opium and iron
that today would be worth
more than 10 million U.S. dollars.
Not bad for a one-time heist.
[Chadwick] The English are getting
a lot of anger from the Mughal Empire.
They're really fed up with all
the English pirates in this region,
and they want to see something change.
They want to see concrete action
being taken against Captain Kidd.
[narrator] So the English capture him
in colonial Massachusetts...
and take him to London
to stand trial for piracy.
“...the growing Trouble, Disturbance
and Mischief of the Trading World...”
England wanted to make the point
that his crime was so serious
that any state could have done
the same thing. It’s a heinous offense,
something that was an offense
against all mankind.
[narrator] He was found guilty.
And in 1701, the judge sentenced him
to be "hanged by your Necks
until you be dead."
Which is exactly what happened.
And this is the case really
where we see a huge sea change,
because prior to then, pirates...
they hadn't been condemned in this way.
They'd kind of been allowed to thrive,
because they served a purpose
in many ways.
Hostis humani generis is Latin
for "enemies of all mankind."
And that is what
the governments of the legitimate world
in the early 18th century referred
to the Pirates of the Caribbean as.
This is an uncontested area
of international law.
No state denies the right
of any other state to pick up,
capture, prosecute any pirate
who they find on the high seas.
So Captain William Kidd
is a hugely important figure
in terms of the development
of universal jurisdiction.
[narrator] Which means that any state
can try an individual,
“without regard to where the crime
was committed,
the nationality of the alleged
or convicted perpetrator,
or the nationality of the victim..."
For centuries, this only applied
to the original enemies of mankind,
pirates...
which is why piracy law
was the precedent used
to capture, prosecute,
and execute Adolf Eichmann.
He is someone
who has committed an offense
against the entirety of mankind,
against the entire human race.
[narrator] It wasn’t just Captain Kidd
who was served a bitter end.
In the following decades,
a rash of pirates faced similar fates...
because, in 1713,
European powers briefly reached a peace,
and governments stopped hiring pirates
to raid enemy ships.
[Benton] Suddenly, a lot of mariners
found themselves in the Atlantic
without a legal way to continue raiding,
and some of them continued
to raid illegally.
[narrator] A lot of merchant sailors
at this time
decided to take up a pirate life, too,
for simple reasons.
First, the booty.
An average, able seaman
earned about twenty five pounds per year.
Pirates could in a single successful take
earn 40 times that amount.
In fact, some of them earn
even more than that.
[narrator] And then there was
the issue of workplace culture.
Merchant ships were known
as very unpleasant work environments.
Their captains had, essentially, kind of
autocratic authority over their crews,
and as you might expect,
sometimes they abused that authority.
[narrator] While pirates elected
their leaders and wrote constitutions,
with some pretty progressive
worker protections.
One ship promised
if “any Man should lose a Limb,
he was to have $800 dollars”
in compensation.
For about a decade,
illegal piracy surged.
This was the peak
of the "Golden Age of Piracy."
And governments
weren't too happy about it.
[Chadwick] Pirates really threatened
the mercantile order of European states.
Without being able to trade
with each other,
the European states, as we knew them then
and know them today,
wouldn't have been able to survive.
[narrator] So, governments cracked down
on pirates like never before,
ramping up laws
and propaganda against them.
In 1717, a British newspaper published
“A proclamation
for suppressing of pirates" by the king,
saying the military would seize any pirate
that would
“refuse or neglect to surrender.”
And all of this amped up
public intrigue around pirates.
So when the book
A General History of the Pyrates
came out in 1724,
it was an instant bestseller.
But while it advertised itself
as a history book,
a lot of it was made up.
The book tells a tale of Blackbeard,
on the eve of his death,
answering a question
about “whether his wife knew
where he had buried his money."
He answered “that nobody but himself
and the Devil knew where it was.”
But pirates
almost never buried their money.
Why would they do that?
They spent it, often in the bars
and brothels of port cities.
One hundred and sixty years later,
these stories inspired another book,
Treasure Island.
And the author,
Robert Louis Stevenson,
added his own embellishments,
like pirates singing,
“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum,”
or making people walk the plank,
and treasure maps.
Treasure Island so gripped generations
that Disney adapted it
into a movie in 1950,
advertising it as a landmark event.
[man] Walt Disney now sets a new milestone
with his first all-live action feature,
Treasure Island.
[narrator] And actor Robert Newton decided
to exaggerate a particular letter
of the alphabet...
- Argh.
- Argh.
Argh.
[narrator] More pirate movies followed,
largely inspired by the flamboyant style
of Treasure Island.
I've waited years for this.
[chanting] Hook!
[Dunnavant] There's this
Disneyfication of piracy that happens,
where they're seen
as sort of the Captain Hook
in Peter Pan where they're the mean guy,
but they're not really dealing in killing,
or harming, or harassing,
or torturing individuals.
[narrator] And the original
source material for all of this
only chronicled that so-called
"Golden Age of Piracy."
And that’s where our image of pirates
has been frozen in time,
even though pirates have existed
for as long as ships have been at sea,
like Ancient Mediterranean pirates,
Viking pirates,
Barbary pirates,
and one of the world’s
most powerful pirates,
Cheng I Sao.
She strictly enforced
her own pirate constitution.
For raping a female captive,
the penalty was death.
For 15 years,
at the turn of the 19th century,
pirates dominated the South China coast,
and Cheng I Sao commanded
the largest pirate fleet ever recorded,
more than 1,200 ships
and up to 70,000 men.
She controlled most of China’s salt trade
and destroyed government ships
that tried to stop her,
disabling the Chinese navy and threatening
the country’s ability to trade.
[Chadwick] There's no obvious bright line
that distinguishes
when you're dealing with pirates
as someone who's a petty robber,
like a small band of thieves
on the high seas,
and pirates as controlling kind of
empires, as controlling vast armies.
And it is quite difficult to actually say,
you know, where does your pirate end
and where does
your organized political community begin.
[narrator] When Cheng I Sao
decided to finally surrender,
the Chinese government
essentially treated her like a nation.
They negotiated a deal
that allowed most of her pirates
to either become military officials
or be resettled on land.
And Cheng I Sao received no punishment.
A pirate receiving that kind of treatment
would be absurd today.
The world has changed since then.
Borders are mostly fixed
and international order is held together
by laws, treaties, and trade.
Shipping is still the backbone
of our globalized economy.
Ninety percent
of internationally traded goods
are transported by sea.
The total value of those goods
is just more than 2,000 times higher
than in the time of Cheng I Sao.
And they’re no longer transported
in the hulls of wooden sailboats,
but in containers
stacked on massive cargo ships,
which are a whole lot harder to pirate.
And the most sought after booty
these days isn’t gold, silver or spices,
but oil...
If the price is high enough.
In 2013, pirates hijacked
13 oil ships in West Africa.
But when the price of oil plummeted
the following year,
they shifted to a different strategy.
Instead of targeting a ship’s cargo,
targeting a ship’s crew.
We take kidnap for ransom
quite a bit more seriously
because of the human impact.
[narrator] Just like pirates of the past,
these pirates have victims.
Only today, we can hear
those first-hand accounts directly.
Please from the bottom of your heart,
open your heart to help us.
We need your help.
[man] They thought maybe
I am from a very rich family,
and they beat. They hit...
They tie my hands from behind.
What we have experienced...
I think nobody can even imagine.
[narrator] This is what piracy
looks like now around the world.
It tends to flare up in spots
where national or international order
breaks down.
Like in Somalia,
a country that was in anarchy
when piracy surged from 2007 to 2012.
Or in Venezuela today,
where there’s been an uptick in piracy
since its economy
began collapsing in 2014.
A state has less capacity
to govern its maritime space
when it is focused on a crisis
within its borders.
Pirates don't just emerge out of nowhere.
There are certain structures in place
that, in some cases, facilitate
or, in some cases, necessitate
the idea of individuals
working outside of existing structures
to sort of proliferate illegal activity.
[narrator]
Just like pirates centuries ago,
people are driven to piracy today
for simple reasons.
An absence of viable economic alternatives
for would-be pirates
and access to vessels to attack.
[narrator] But today’s pirates
aren’t portrayed
as romanticized rogues by Hollywood.
They're desperate criminals.
Like in this Oscar-nominated film...
based on the true story of Somali pirates
taking an American ship captain hostage
in 2009.
Pirates today also no longer slip
in and out of high society.
[Chadwick] So in terms of
why are we here and pirates are there?
They are on the wrong side
of history essentially.
Politically, the civilized states
that form the world today came out on top.
[narrator] In large part
because those states
were so successful at something barbaric:
trading slaves.
Into the 1700s,
pirates just couldn’t compete
as the slave trade
became more industrial in scale,
transporting millions of Africans
to Europe's colonies in the Americas,
where their labor
generated enormous wealth,
solidifying the global dominance
of the European powers and, ultimately...
the United States.
When the U.S. finally banned
the slave trade in the early 1800s,
it passed a law saying any citizen
"engaged in the slave trade
shall be adjudged a pirate
and shall suffer death."
But only one slave trader
was ever executed by a Western state:
Nathanial Gordon,
convicted in 1862 of piracy.
[Benton] Pirates is a label
that, throughout history,
you assigned to your rivals or enemies
to suggest that what they were doing
was illegitimate,
whereas what you were doing
was entirely legitimate.
Pirates were an important part of history.
They just aren't the part of history
that we tend to think they are.
[theme music playing]
[keyboard clacking]
[keyboard clacking]
[narrator] When Adolf Eichmann was found
guilty for his role in the Holocaust,
the judgment underlying
the court’s ruling was that Eichmann was,
for all intents and purposes,
a pirate.
[woman] The attorney underlined
piracy and slave tradery.
The attorney general believes
that in the case of Eichmann,
this should be the guiding principle.
[narrator] This guiding principle
that enemies of mankind
can be captured and tried by any country
regardless of nationality
was established
by international piracy law.
And that's what justified
capturing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina
and prosecuting him in Israel
for crimes committed in Europe.
[woman] The enemy of humanity
must be taken care of
so that no more harm can be done.
[narrator]
On May 31st 1962, he was hanged.
Today, we don’t really think of pirates
as enemies of humanity.
[singing]
They're campy villains,
like Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
- [singing]
- [narrator] Or kind of rock n’ roll,
like Jack Sparrow
in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Or rum-lovers
marketed by the Captain Morgan brand.
- Captain?
- [all] Captain!
[narrator] So, why are pirates
the original enemies of humanity?
And why don’t we remember them that way?
Rise up and put down the pirates
[theme song playing]
which have today made ours
a lawless world.
[man] Pirates preyed
upon America's growing commerce.
[man 2] The demon rum,
the staple food of the pirates
who once terrorized the Caribbean.
[woman] Some out-of-work fishermen
have turned to piracy,
sometimes resorting to murder.
[man 3] Their business is now very big,
around 50 million pounds this year.
The world must come together
to end the scourge of piracy.
Pirates franchises entertain hundreds
of millions of people around the world.
[man 4] No one knows, if or when
the pirates will try to strike.
[uplifting music playing]
I think a pirate is someone that sails
on the sea looking for hidden treasure.
Some of them have eye patches.
Some have peg legs. And some have swords.
Some are good guys
and some are bad guys.
A bad pirate tries to, like, take stuff.
And a good pirate
tries to, like, protect the stuff.
And they like booty
that's actually treasure.
Sometimes the men need help,
so the women pirates come in...
so they can help.
- Argh!
- Argh!
I think we're drawn to the image
of people who are operating
outside of authority.
And that really accounts, I think,
for a great deal of the persistent
romanticization of pirate life.
It's unfortunate
that it turns out not to be true.
♪ Comb their hair with catfish bones ♪
♪ And we're bound... ♪
[narrator] This is Queen Elizabeth
knighting Sir Francis Drake in 1581
for circumnavigating the globe
and bringing back treasure,
treasure he got pirating.
And that’s her again
with Sir Walter Raleigh,
another pirate she knighted.
He founded a colony he named Virginia,
after her, the virgin queen.
Its purpose? A pirate base camp.
Queen Elizabeth was
actually nicknamed the “pirate queen,”
and she venerated pirates.
She called them her “sea dogs”
for expanding her empire
and harming her rivals...
by robbing their ships.
At the time, European powers
were in constant conflict.
Their empires shifting and expanding.
And they all hired pirates
to steal and loot from their enemies.
In Europe,
when raiding took place on the seas,
one of the ways
that it was made legitimate
was through letters
of marque and reprisal.
[narrator] Pirates coveted these letters.
They meant you could rob ships
with the blessing of the state.
And there had never been
more ships on the seas.
This was the beginning
of our globalized economy,
based almost entirely on shipping,
which contributed to much of the conflict.
The European empires were fighting
for a bigger piece of global trade,
clamoring for goods
like spices from Indonesia,
cotton from India,
sugar from the Caribbean
and enslaved people from Africa.
Remnants of ships from that era
litter the ocean floor today.
And in 1996,
a particularly exciting one was discovered
off the coast of North Carolina,
and for years
reporters tracked its recovery.
Blackbeard's flagship,
the Queen Anne's Revenge,
was pulled from the bottom of the sea
off our coast today.
Queen Anne's Revenge,
it sank off the North Carolina coast.
[man] Beaufort has become known
for Blackbeard,
whose pirate ship lies wrecked
just out there.
[narrator] What these news reports
didn’t mention
was that this was originally a slave ship
named "La Concorde."
When Blackbeard captured it in 1717,
there were 455 enslaved Africans on board.
Almost all of them were sold into slavery,
while Blackbeard went on pirating.
Very few people have talked about it
as a slave ship that we have evidence of.
[narrator] You can’t understand
trade at this time
without understanding the slave trade,
because slave labor was behind
almost all of the goods produced
and shipped across the Atlantic.
I think that really helps
for people to rethink
what they know
about the transatlantic slave trade.
In many cases,
any ship can be considered a slave ship.
[narrator] But pirates
also literally traded in slaves.
[Dunnavant] Generally what would happen
is when a pirate captured a ship
with enslaved people on it,
they would take the enslaved people,
and in many cases, go to an island
where they had connections
um, and sell to some local traders there.
And then from there,
they would get sold off
into local markets and local plantations,
causing some of these pirates
to also be labeled slave traders.
Although that's not the term
people normally associate with them.
[narrator] Remember Sir Francis Drake?
Before he was a pirate and knight,
he was one of England's
first slave traders.
Pirates were ultimately interested
in making as much profit as they could.
And they were doing it
to also eventually use that profit
to gain status.
[narrator] Like one of the most famous
pirates in pop culture today.
Many people know
the more popular drink
of Captain Morgan rum,
but Captain Morgan, in many ways,
was not just a pirate,
but also a slave trader
and a plantation owner.
[narrator] Morgan made his wealth
as a hired pirate for England.
But then he was able
to sort of solidify his wealth
by establishing these plantations
on Jamaica.
He had over one hundred enslaved Africans
sort of under his ownership.
[narrator] Roughly the same number
U.S. President Thomas Jefferson had
at any given time.
He became significant and prominent
in Jamaican society,
um, and as a result of that,
ended up becoming lieutenant governor
and had very close dealings
with a lot of the aristocrats.
[narrator] In 1674, he was knighted
by King Charles II.
He's a very good example
for thinking about pirates
as these people who were not
outcasts and rogues
and determined
to stay on the edges of society.
What they wanted, in fact,
was incorporation in society
and a way to set up households as elites.
[narrator] Scotland-born William Kidd
was another pirate hired by the English,
receiving a commission in 1696.
He was given official papers,
and he was given a pass,
given a commission by England
to, um... to work on their behalf.
And the jobs that Captain Kidd was given
was as a pirate hunter.
[narrator] He voyaged from New York,
around the Cape of Good Hope,
to Madagascar
and into the Red Sea and Indian Ocean,
where pirates were robbing the ships
of the British East India Company.
But then Kidd decided he could make
more money as an actual pirate,
and he targeted what he thought
would make for a profitable raid.
The ship was actually registered
to the Mughal Empire,
so today India,
uh, a trading partner of the English,
a huge ally of the English at this time.
[narrator] Captain Kidd looted the ships,
scoring silk, cotton,
sugar, opium and iron
that today would be worth
more than 10 million U.S. dollars.
Not bad for a one-time heist.
[Chadwick] The English are getting
a lot of anger from the Mughal Empire.
They're really fed up with all
the English pirates in this region,
and they want to see something change.
They want to see concrete action
being taken against Captain Kidd.
[narrator] So the English capture him
in colonial Massachusetts...
and take him to London
to stand trial for piracy.
“...the growing Trouble, Disturbance
and Mischief of the Trading World...”
England wanted to make the point
that his crime was so serious
that any state could have done
the same thing. It’s a heinous offense,
something that was an offense
against all mankind.
[narrator] He was found guilty.
And in 1701, the judge sentenced him
to be "hanged by your Necks
until you be dead."
Which is exactly what happened.
And this is the case really
where we see a huge sea change,
because prior to then, pirates...
they hadn't been condemned in this way.
They'd kind of been allowed to thrive,
because they served a purpose
in many ways.
Hostis humani generis is Latin
for "enemies of all mankind."
And that is what
the governments of the legitimate world
in the early 18th century referred
to the Pirates of the Caribbean as.
This is an uncontested area
of international law.
No state denies the right
of any other state to pick up,
capture, prosecute any pirate
who they find on the high seas.
So Captain William Kidd
is a hugely important figure
in terms of the development
of universal jurisdiction.
[narrator] Which means that any state
can try an individual,
“without regard to where the crime
was committed,
the nationality of the alleged
or convicted perpetrator,
or the nationality of the victim..."
For centuries, this only applied
to the original enemies of mankind,
pirates...
which is why piracy law
was the precedent used
to capture, prosecute,
and execute Adolf Eichmann.
He is someone
who has committed an offense
against the entirety of mankind,
against the entire human race.
[narrator] It wasn’t just Captain Kidd
who was served a bitter end.
In the following decades,
a rash of pirates faced similar fates...
because, in 1713,
European powers briefly reached a peace,
and governments stopped hiring pirates
to raid enemy ships.
[Benton] Suddenly, a lot of mariners
found themselves in the Atlantic
without a legal way to continue raiding,
and some of them continued
to raid illegally.
[narrator] A lot of merchant sailors
at this time
decided to take up a pirate life, too,
for simple reasons.
First, the booty.
An average, able seaman
earned about twenty five pounds per year.
Pirates could in a single successful take
earn 40 times that amount.
In fact, some of them earn
even more than that.
[narrator] And then there was
the issue of workplace culture.
Merchant ships were known
as very unpleasant work environments.
Their captains had, essentially, kind of
autocratic authority over their crews,
and as you might expect,
sometimes they abused that authority.
[narrator] While pirates elected
their leaders and wrote constitutions,
with some pretty progressive
worker protections.
One ship promised
if “any Man should lose a Limb,
he was to have $800 dollars”
in compensation.
For about a decade,
illegal piracy surged.
This was the peak
of the "Golden Age of Piracy."
And governments
weren't too happy about it.
[Chadwick] Pirates really threatened
the mercantile order of European states.
Without being able to trade
with each other,
the European states, as we knew them then
and know them today,
wouldn't have been able to survive.
[narrator] So, governments cracked down
on pirates like never before,
ramping up laws
and propaganda against them.
In 1717, a British newspaper published
“A proclamation
for suppressing of pirates" by the king,
saying the military would seize any pirate
that would
“refuse or neglect to surrender.”
And all of this amped up
public intrigue around pirates.
So when the book
A General History of the Pyrates
came out in 1724,
it was an instant bestseller.
But while it advertised itself
as a history book,
a lot of it was made up.
The book tells a tale of Blackbeard,
on the eve of his death,
answering a question
about “whether his wife knew
where he had buried his money."
He answered “that nobody but himself
and the Devil knew where it was.”
But pirates
almost never buried their money.
Why would they do that?
They spent it, often in the bars
and brothels of port cities.
One hundred and sixty years later,
these stories inspired another book,
Treasure Island.
And the author,
Robert Louis Stevenson,
added his own embellishments,
like pirates singing,
“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum,”
or making people walk the plank,
and treasure maps.
Treasure Island so gripped generations
that Disney adapted it
into a movie in 1950,
advertising it as a landmark event.
[man] Walt Disney now sets a new milestone
with his first all-live action feature,
Treasure Island.
[narrator] And actor Robert Newton decided
to exaggerate a particular letter
of the alphabet...
- Argh.
- Argh.
Argh.
[narrator] More pirate movies followed,
largely inspired by the flamboyant style
of Treasure Island.
I've waited years for this.
[chanting] Hook!
[Dunnavant] There's this
Disneyfication of piracy that happens,
where they're seen
as sort of the Captain Hook
in Peter Pan where they're the mean guy,
but they're not really dealing in killing,
or harming, or harassing,
or torturing individuals.
[narrator] And the original
source material for all of this
only chronicled that so-called
"Golden Age of Piracy."
And that’s where our image of pirates
has been frozen in time,
even though pirates have existed
for as long as ships have been at sea,
like Ancient Mediterranean pirates,
Viking pirates,
Barbary pirates,
and one of the world’s
most powerful pirates,
Cheng I Sao.
She strictly enforced
her own pirate constitution.
For raping a female captive,
the penalty was death.
For 15 years,
at the turn of the 19th century,
pirates dominated the South China coast,
and Cheng I Sao commanded
the largest pirate fleet ever recorded,
more than 1,200 ships
and up to 70,000 men.
She controlled most of China’s salt trade
and destroyed government ships
that tried to stop her,
disabling the Chinese navy and threatening
the country’s ability to trade.
[Chadwick] There's no obvious bright line
that distinguishes
when you're dealing with pirates
as someone who's a petty robber,
like a small band of thieves
on the high seas,
and pirates as controlling kind of
empires, as controlling vast armies.
And it is quite difficult to actually say,
you know, where does your pirate end
and where does
your organized political community begin.
[narrator] When Cheng I Sao
decided to finally surrender,
the Chinese government
essentially treated her like a nation.
They negotiated a deal
that allowed most of her pirates
to either become military officials
or be resettled on land.
And Cheng I Sao received no punishment.
A pirate receiving that kind of treatment
would be absurd today.
The world has changed since then.
Borders are mostly fixed
and international order is held together
by laws, treaties, and trade.
Shipping is still the backbone
of our globalized economy.
Ninety percent
of internationally traded goods
are transported by sea.
The total value of those goods
is just more than 2,000 times higher
than in the time of Cheng I Sao.
And they’re no longer transported
in the hulls of wooden sailboats,
but in containers
stacked on massive cargo ships,
which are a whole lot harder to pirate.
And the most sought after booty
these days isn’t gold, silver or spices,
but oil...
If the price is high enough.
In 2013, pirates hijacked
13 oil ships in West Africa.
But when the price of oil plummeted
the following year,
they shifted to a different strategy.
Instead of targeting a ship’s cargo,
targeting a ship’s crew.
We take kidnap for ransom
quite a bit more seriously
because of the human impact.
[narrator] Just like pirates of the past,
these pirates have victims.
Only today, we can hear
those first-hand accounts directly.
Please from the bottom of your heart,
open your heart to help us.
We need your help.
[man] They thought maybe
I am from a very rich family,
and they beat. They hit...
They tie my hands from behind.
What we have experienced...
I think nobody can even imagine.
[narrator] This is what piracy
looks like now around the world.
It tends to flare up in spots
where national or international order
breaks down.
Like in Somalia,
a country that was in anarchy
when piracy surged from 2007 to 2012.
Or in Venezuela today,
where there’s been an uptick in piracy
since its economy
began collapsing in 2014.
A state has less capacity
to govern its maritime space
when it is focused on a crisis
within its borders.
Pirates don't just emerge out of nowhere.
There are certain structures in place
that, in some cases, facilitate
or, in some cases, necessitate
the idea of individuals
working outside of existing structures
to sort of proliferate illegal activity.
[narrator]
Just like pirates centuries ago,
people are driven to piracy today
for simple reasons.
An absence of viable economic alternatives
for would-be pirates
and access to vessels to attack.
[narrator] But today’s pirates
aren’t portrayed
as romanticized rogues by Hollywood.
They're desperate criminals.
Like in this Oscar-nominated film...
based on the true story of Somali pirates
taking an American ship captain hostage
in 2009.
Pirates today also no longer slip
in and out of high society.
[Chadwick] So in terms of
why are we here and pirates are there?
They are on the wrong side
of history essentially.
Politically, the civilized states
that form the world today came out on top.
[narrator] In large part
because those states
were so successful at something barbaric:
trading slaves.
Into the 1700s,
pirates just couldn’t compete
as the slave trade
became more industrial in scale,
transporting millions of Africans
to Europe's colonies in the Americas,
where their labor
generated enormous wealth,
solidifying the global dominance
of the European powers and, ultimately...
the United States.
When the U.S. finally banned
the slave trade in the early 1800s,
it passed a law saying any citizen
"engaged in the slave trade
shall be adjudged a pirate
and shall suffer death."
But only one slave trader
was ever executed by a Western state:
Nathanial Gordon,
convicted in 1862 of piracy.
[Benton] Pirates is a label
that, throughout history,
you assigned to your rivals or enemies
to suggest that what they were doing
was illegitimate,
whereas what you were doing
was entirely legitimate.
Pirates were an important part of history.
They just aren't the part of history
that we tend to think they are.
[theme music playing]