Although the theme of this year’s tall ships is naval, the
Maritime Museum of the Atlantic will still be presenting its usual
pirate mascot alongside a costumed naval captain on the boardwalk this
year. Museum curator Dan Conlin says the public’s interest in pirate
culture remains as strong as it ever was, though he’s quick to point
out the Johnny Depp-meets-Blackbeard mascot isn’t an accurate
portrayal.
“Most pirates wore rags,” he says. “It’s only if a pirate was doing
unusually well that he would start to dress a little more
flamboyantly.”
There are other myths fuelled by the Pirates of the Caribbean films and popular folklore. Conlin points out that contrary to the
fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, pirates never buried treasure, nor
did they force captives to walk the plank. Pirate crews were also
surprisingly democratic, with each ship boasting a written article
dictating equal sharing and elections for officers.
And most pirates weren’t particularly bloodthirsty—Conlin says in
most cases the pirates came aboard vessels, stole the loot and left
most of the crew alive. Of course, there were exceptions, like the
famously unpredictable Captain Edward “Ned” Low, who spent a period
pillaging vessels anchored in Shelburne during the heyday of piracy in
and around Nova Scotia.
“He was a big fan of torture,” says Conlin. “He liked to cut off
body parts—ears and noses. He would cook your own nose and make you
eat it, and then rip your guts out and kill you. He was quite a nasty
character.”
The punishment for piracy at its peak in Nova Scotia was equally
grisly. Captured pirates faced a mandatory death sentence, with the
corpses of the guilty strung up on poles at places like Black Rock
Beach in Point Pleasant Park at low tide, and then the corpse was
covered in tar and placed in an iron cage nailed to a post at the
entrance of Halifax Harbour as a deterrent to other would-be offenders.
In the wake of our current sewage woes, one has to wonder how this
would have affected the tourist trade in the eighteenth century.
“At one point, you had a pirate hung up at Point Pleasant Park and
four navy mutineers hung up at McNab’s Island,” says Conlin. “Tall
ships that came in would see rotting corpses on portside and rotting
corpses on starboard side. Welcome to Halifax.” —AL
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2009.