A Pirate's Life for Me

Until earlier this year, I never found myself having to defend my pirate infatuation. People either shared it or humorously accepted as part of my eccentricity. In fact, it wasn't until recently that I Really started decking out my classroom in paraphernalia that spoke to my own interests. Prior to this time, I typically surrounded my students with typical teacher pedagogy stuff: motivational posters and reminders of literary and grammatical rules. Because students LOVE to look at those. And then one year, one August, I realized that I had a much better chance of getting to know my students and they me if I opened with them about the things I loved and obsessed over. Thus pirates posters appeared, along with images of Key West and Cuba. (Those are separate entries, though.) The result was positive: people liked the personalized nature of the room. It even gave some of the kids in my room who normally wouldn't have had anything to talk about something to focus on.

Then this past fall a colleague of mine a school stopped into my room at the start of the year and, glancing at my walls, asked what my "thing" was with pirates. I stammered something about their being cool and a brief rundown of the whole "relate to my students" spiel but his response multiple times was simply: "but they're criminals". Something the kids like to talk about. "But Aaron, they broke the law?"

My initial reaction to this somewhat obstinate reply was to ramrod history into the conversation. "For most of the past several centuries, the difference between a pirate and a privateer was whether or not the captain of the vessel had a special warrant from a European country's sovereign." But that would have made me...

An ass.

So I muttered some kind of agreement with the man while maintaining that I was not out to corrupt our youth. Or drink hemlock. But the conversation has not yet left my mind (obviously: I'm writing about it here months later).

So why pirates?

First, I can resolutely say that my fascination with them preceded Johnny Depp, although like most of the world I was enthralled b his performance in the first "Pirates" movie, Perhaps it comes from my youth, where yearly the historical Gasparilla invasion of the Tampa Bay area was re-enacted. Perhaps my first sixteen years of life being so close to the salt water. Perhaps a rebellious nature hidden beneath the well honed desire to please. Whatever the case, pirates came to represent for me something beyond the realm of comfortable and that entranced me,

I recognize that recent events - Somali pirates, for example - provide us a closer perspective on how vicious and unethical real pirates probably were. Even tamer pirate stories like Anne Bonny and Mary Read (famous women pirates) and their mutual consort Jack Rackham contain an element of seediness that I cannot deny. And if they were so unsavory, why idolize them?

Perhaps it is not idolization as much as curiosity. To sail on the ocean for long stretches of time: this is and has been a dream of mine for some time. But it's more than that. Because pirates operated under rules that were slightly military in origin (many pirates were ex-military British or Spaniards) and yet were more flexible than that. There's a lot of joking in the "Pirates" movies about the "code" as rules or guidelines or whatever. But the more I read (and believe me I've read a lot) I think there was a sense that things were done in a certain manner, men were treated a certain way and to violate that way or absolve yourself of such restrictions was to be something other than a pirate. It wasn't so much lawlessness as other-law.

I would be remiss if I didn't offer a final thought. While I tend to revile the second and third "Pirate" movies, there is one element I identify with. The character of Lord Beckett, head of East India Company, is a cliche of course but within the cliche I find his threat interesting. There is something to be said, historically, for the idea that piracy was not threatened unilaterally by other countries and Kings, but by business ventures. That pirates made money, both legally and illegally, and companies the forerunners to corporations found that to be a threat or, perhaps more accurately, wanted in on the action says something not only about pirates but about Western culture as a whole.