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Real pirates of Caribbean were no day at the movies

The real pirates were short men with bad hygiene and violent tempers. They blew up things on purpose and by accident. They burned, robbed, raped and murdered their way across this part of the world from about 1650 to 1725.

But that was then. Now, pirates are great box office. Coming into this weekend, Walt Disney Pictures' Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl had sold around $80-million in tickets.

What accounts for the enduring appeal of the pirate? What is it about this seagoing mercenary and historical footnote that makes him a mainstay of literature, sports logos, theme park attractions, and movies based on theme park attractions?

To find out, we turned to David Cordingly, former curator of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Cordingly is an authority on pirates - he advised Disney on how to dress and script the buccaneers of its current film - but he is not one of those historians who turn a blind eye to the faults of their subjects.

The true pirates of the Caribbean were "by nature rebellious and lazy," Cordingly says, "notorious for foul language and prolonged bouts of drinking . . . leading to quarrels and violence."

But two things saved this dissolute crowd from historical oblivion.

First, they weren't all drunken thugs. Some of the most famous - Sir Francis Drake, for example - became national heroes for activities apart from piracy.

Second, writers - perhaps seeing themselves as stalwart individualists adrift in the cruel sea of society - liked the image of pirates. It was only a matter of time before men such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Lord Byron and J.M. Barrie would take the whole nasty bunch and make them into romantic outlaws.

There will be a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean, it was reported last week, but in this sense the movie is already a sequel.

But never mind the escapist movies (about 70 were made), novels and poems. The truth is it was a very bad moment, indeed, when a merchant skipper spotted a pirate ship on the Caribbean horizon, quickly closing on his vessel, skull and crossbones slapping in the wind.

In the next few hours, captain and crew might die a terrible death. Women passengers could expect the worst. About the best any of them could hope for would be to be put ashore on one of the hundreds of tiny, uninhabited islands dotting the Caribbean. Here they could fend for themselves and try to keep alive their slim hopes for rescue.

"It was hit or miss whether you lived or died," says Cordingly. "It depended entirely on the mood of the captain and the mood of the crew."

Pirate captains such as Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts and Edward Low were often in very bad moods.

Roberts was a successful and savagely cruel man who operated a fleet of pirate ships. A favorite activity, says Cordingly, was to nail captives to a mast and allow the crew a bit o' target practice.

Edward Low was a former seaman, "a torturer, a sadist, really, who took out his anger on the world," says Cordingly.

At the other end of the scale were men like Drake and Henry Morgan - not really pirates, but privateers. A privateer carried a "letter of marque," an official document that authorized the attack and plunder of enemy vessels. Governments such as England routinely issued these letters, and in return got a share of the loot.

Before he helped defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, Drake was a highly successful privateer. He is credited with the largest haul a pirate or privateer ever made - a $60-million grab of a Spanish treasure ship that helped the Britsh navy rebuild its fleet.

Morgan was no lowlife, either. He was born to a good family in Wales and came to the Caribbean in 1664 as a soldier, serving British forces trying to seize Hispaniola. He soon made a reputation for successful raids on Spanish-controlled cities in the Caribbean and eventually died in Jamaica, a much-honored man.

"Drake would never have seen himself as a pirate but the Spanish certainly did," says Cordingly. "Morgan too, saw himself as defending Britain against its hereditary enemy, Spain."

And then there's the matter of who really owned the gold in the first place. The pirates' primary targets were ships en route to Spain, carrying gold and silver coin minted in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. But since much of this gold came from the Incan and Aztec populations, it seems fair to say that some pirates were thieves preying on thieves.

Whether pirate or privateer, Morgan, Drake and a few others were superior sailors and tacticians. Morgan, says Cordingly, was "a bit like Napoleon, a developer of ingenious surprise attacks."

That may be true, but there was this one time . . .

In October of 1668, Captain Morgan had just finished a fabulously successful raid on the Panamanian city of Portobello. It seemed a good idea to undertake another.

He assembled a formidable invasion force, including several French vessels from Tortuga, and the 34-gun warship HMS Oxford, which had been sent to the region to help in the defense of Jamaica. There was a meeting aboard the Oxford, and a target city was selected - Cartagena, another treasure port.

Then, with the work behind them, a party seemed in order. Soon the liquor was flowing. Cordingly notes in his book Under The Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates that it was normal in such circumstances for frisky buccaneers to playfully fire the ship's guns. Alas, this time a spark managed to find its way into the ship's gunpowder magazine, and the whole vessel disappeared in a monstrous explosion.

About 200 people died in the blast. Morgan was fished from the water, one of only ten partygoers to survive, reputation somehow intact.

In Lord Byron's 19th century epic poem The Corsair, the hero is a "proud and tyrannical pirate . . . with a pale and gloomy countenance . . . a man of loneliness and mystery."

But it was Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island that did the most to romanticize pirates. Its effect "cannot be overestimated," Cordingly writes in Under The Black Flag. "Stevenson linked pirates forever with maps, black schooners, tropical islands and one-legged seamen with parrots on their shoulders."

The good news, Cordingly says, is how much Stevenson got right.

"Long John Silver could have been a real pirate," he said. "He was a larger-than-life character, but he still was authentic. A lot of pirate captains had charisma. They needed it to control the bunch of criminals they sailed with."

And that's not all. Many pirates had only one leg, and used a peg in place of the missing one. Limbs were easily lost to cutlass or cannon fire.

Many wore eye patches as a result of injuries sustained either in battle, or in the performance of the many hazardous duties at sea.

Long John Silver hopped around on a peg leg. He had a parrot on his shoulder, too. Parrots were popular with sailors, Cordingly notes. They were colorful birds and could be taught to speak. Any distraction or entertainment was welcome during long periods at sea.

Stevenson knew his way around sailors and the sea. His father and his grandfather designed lighthouses, Cordingly says, and often little Robert Louis would take trips with them.

"He would have seen sailors at close hand. Long John Silver was a ship's cook, and Stevenson would have known that a one-legged man would probably be assigned to the galley."

Other mainstays of the image are true, too. The Jolly Roger, for example, was designed by a group of pirates who thought it would be a good idea to have a common flag. Others - walking the plank, for example - probably were just good storytelling. Why bother, after all, when you can just hack the hapless prisoner to death and throw the pieces overboard?

"It may have happened once of twice," says Cordingly, "but I think it became such a popular notion after (J.M. Barrie's) Peter Pan and Treasure Island."

Physically, the average pirate probably wasn't much to look at - no Johnny Depp, certainly.

He was young, short (probably about 5-foot-3), and of French, British, Dutch, Italian or African descent. He probably began his working life as a respectable seaman, but found himself better suited for a different kind of life. He and his fellows were a rough crowd to begin with, but were made more dangerous because they knew the law would have no mercy on them when caught.

Comparisons to Robin Hood don't work, says Cordingly. "The pirates spent the money themselves." It was difficult, dangerous, lonely work, performed in cramped, miserable conditions.

And yet, says Cordingly, these men - and a few women - were good sailors and fearsome warriors. "There was even a kind of discipline aboard a pirate vessel," he says. "People did not desert their posts; there seldom was excessive drinking when in action."