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Geoff Hunt

1948-Present, London, UK

Former President of the Royal Society of Marine Artists

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Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Men Tell No Tales

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Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Men Tell No Tales

historical-nonfiction

The Pirate Queen of the South China Sea

The Red Flag Fleet under Ching Shih’s rule went undefeated, despite attempts by Qing dynasty officials, the Portuguese navy, and the East India Company to vanquish it. After three years of notoriety on the high seas, Ching Shih finally retired in 1810 by accepting an offer of amnesty from the Chinese government. Ching Shih died in 1844, at the ripe old age of 69.At the dawn of the 1800s, a former prostitute from a floating brothel in the city of Canton was wed to Cheng I, a fearsome pirate who operated in the South China Sea in the Qing dynasty. Though the name under which we now know her, Ching Shih, simply means “Cheng’s widow,” the legacy she left behind far exceeded that of her husband’s. Following his death, she succeeded him and commanded over 1,800 pirate ships, and an estimated 80,000 men.

Her husband, Ching I, was the formidable commander of the Red Flag Fleet of pirate ships. He married a 26-year-old Ching Shih in 1801. She quickly took to the pirate life and when Ching I died six years later, Ching Shih wasn’t going to let Ching I’s adopted son, Cheung Po Tsai take over. Cheung Po Tsai, however, was more than just Ching Shih’s adopted son –- the young man had also been Ching I’s lover.

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Phrases like “shiver my timbers” and traditional pirate songs like “Fifteen Men on the Dead Man’s Chest” were made up by Robert Louis Stevenson for his novel Treasure Island, published in 1883 – over 150 years after the end of the Golden Age of Piracy. We might as well tell you right now that 90 percent of all pirate tropes come from the same book: One legged pirates, squawking parrots, drunken mutinies … all that stuff can be traced back to Treasure Island.

Yes, pirates did lose limbs in battle, mutiny on occasion and get shitfaced a lot, but Stevenson was the first to combine those elements into one package, creating the popular image of pirates.

But what about the “arr” voice? That actually comes from the West Country accent from the southwestern portion of England. In the 1950 Disney adaptation of Treasure Island, Robert Newton played a pirate from the West Country and overdid it a little with the accent, throwing “arr” into every other sentence. Two years later Newton used the same accent in Blackbeard the Pirate, and the stereotype was cast.

To put this in perspective, if Newton played a pirate from Boston, we’d all be imagining pirates shouting “wicked pissah” as they boarded enemy ships.

So what did pirates actually sound like? In reality, there never was one “pirate accent” at all, mainly because that makes no damn sense.

6 Absurd Pirate Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies)