A Pirate's Life for Me: Nature and the High Seas

In this exciting episode of Wildly Curious (formerly For the Love of Nature), co-host Laura Fawks Lapole is joined by special guest Paul Csomo, creator of the Varmintz podcast, to explore the fascinating connection between pirates and nature. They dive deep into how pirates relied on their understanding of animals, plants, weather, and ocean currents to survive on the high seas. From sea turtles as a food source to parrots and monkeys aboard pirate ships, this episode is packed with fun facts, humor, and some surprising insights into the natural world through the lens of piracy.

Perfect for history buffs, nature enthusiasts, and fans of adventurous storytelling. Tune in to discover how pirates not only battled enemies but also the elements of nature.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to For the Love of Nature, a podcast where we tell you everything you need to know about nature and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Laura, and we don't have a Katie. But we do have a very special guest with us tonight, and hopefully you guys are gonna have a lot of fun.
With us tonight is Paul. Can you say hello to the people, Paul?
Hello, people. I'm Paul.
So tonight, he and I, we're gonna talk about how pirates had to be familiar with nature in order to thrive. So before we dive into that, and hopefully there'll be lots of pirate puns. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Paul, for any listeners who haven't already listened to any of your other work?
Sure. Well, I was the host and the creator of the Varmintz Podcast, which is about animals. And that was since 2016.
And then just this past year, a few months ago, I stepped down from that because I wanted to try some other things and did not have-
That's a long time to do one podcast.
It was a long time to do one podcast. And I had several reasons for stopping doing it. But the main reason was just burnout.
Like I just got burned out of doing it. And it took a few months off to try to figure out if I wanted to do a podcast again, which of course I did. It's the worst hobby in the world, and I still love doing it.
So, you know. And then I had to figure out what did I want to do a podcast about. So now I have this project happening.
Okay, great. All right, well, let's dive right in. So Katie and I have been familiar with your previous podcast, Varmintz, as you said, and we understand that you are a fellow nature nerd like we are.
Yes. So although you've since moved on from Varmintz, and we're excited to hear about your new podcast that focuses on the golden age of piracy. What made you decide on piracy?
So back in 2016, the reason I made Varmintz was because I couldn't find a podcast about animals that was interesting to me, and that entertained me in the way that I wanted to be entertained.
Gotcha.
So I just decided to make one. Yeah. And now there's a bunch of animal podcasts out there, and they're all really, really good.
And so when I stopped making Varmintz, I was thinking of ideas, you think of ideas for podcasts, even while you're podcasting, you come up with, if you get the bug and you love podcasting, you wind up thinking of six, eight different ideas that you want to do, and you don't have time for any of them. So now I had time. And so I was thinking what do I like talking about?
What do I nerd out talking about that there isn't already 3,000 podcasts about? Yeah. And I landed on Pirates.
I was just going down the list of stuff that I really geek out about, and Pirates was one of them. I said, well, surely there's gotta be 200 pirate podcasts out there, and probably one of them is gonna sound good to me, and I just don't want to repeat that. I don't want to copy them, so.
You know, it's already, you know, I didn't want to like, I didn't want to make something and put it in, like, an already crowded sort of genre.
Right, right, you didn't want to reinvent the wheel, and it'd just be boring.
Yeah, if somebody's already doing it, and they're doing it well, there's no point in me trying to do it. And I, there are a couple of podcasts about pirates out there. They're not, they're good.
I don't want to slag off anybody's pirate podcast.
Oh man, we start this. Shots off the pout.
Well, they're good, but they're just not what I had in mind. So I was like, well, I guess I'm just gonna have to make the podcast I want to listen to about pirates.
It's gonna have to be me again.
And so here we are all over again.
No, that's awesome. Yeah, I think, I definitely think like recording a podcast, since it is so time consuming, and we all have other parts of our lives, that you have to be really passionate, or at least entertained by what you're talking about. Have you always been interested in pirates?
Yes, definitely, since I was a little kid.
And you live, is it Florida?
I live in Florida, yeah.
Okay, so like, are you near the coast?
I'm on the Gulf of Mexico. So I'm in the West Coast of Florida.
So near water and like, Oh yeah.
Yeah, I'm about 10 minutes away from the Gulf of Mexico, which is kind of nice.
Cool.
So yeah, it's definitely around water.
I have been really excited for today's episode, because I've been dying to pick your brain on how we could kind of like meld these two interests together, because I also like talking about pirates, and I by no means know a ton about them, but I like deep dive into topics throughout my whole life. Like I go through phases, and I definitely went through a pirate phase where I was like learning all about them and the different, you know, different captains and all kinds of stuff. Sure.
And I even remember, I went to go see one of the pirates of the Caribbean movies dressed up, and tried just to, I thought I was being funny. I was in high school, tried to pay with fake gold.
Oh, I like you.
I'm sure that the theater person was like, ha ha.
But anyway, so, I want us to talk about kind of how pirates and nature, there was a tie in somehow, because I don't think a lot of people think about pirates and nature ever going hand in hand.
Right, yeah.
But pirates would have had to be familiar, at least with some aspects of nature, especially because of the times. So my first question is, is it safe to say that pirates had to be familiar with nature in order to survive?
Yes, they had to be.
They not only had to be familiar with nature, but they completely relied on it for their survival. So like a pirate ship or a merchant ship or any ship out to sea, especially back then, it was a business. It was like a big floating office building with middle management, there were employees, there was an HR department, and no, there really was.
And the goal, like any business, the goal was to make as much money as possible and maybe open, you know, other offices or have other ships.
Makes sense.
So anything that would give them an advantage so that they could make more money, like pirates were just all about money. Anything that would give them that advantage was good. And in the 16th and 17th centuries, most of those resources that were going to give them an advantage were going to be natural.
That makes sense. Right, because especially, I wonder how it would change nowadays. Would they still be as reliant on nature?
Probably not, but you'd still think at some point they would have to. At least like ocean stuff.
Yeah, there's still a lot of navigation that sailors have to use now. They even, sailors now actually still rely on the stars, looking at the constellations, to kind of get an idea of where they're at. But back then, there was no technology whatsoever.
No alternatives.
Okay. Well, there's a lot of different aspects of nature, of course. And so I guess, first of all, what types of animals would pirates have interacted with and in what capacity?
For example, I'm sure some animals were a food source, others were companions, yada, yada, yada. And can you tell us a little bit about some of these different relationships?
Sure.
Sure. So the majority of relationships with animals were balls around food. So before they left court, pirates would stock up on food.
They would stock up on fresh water and rum. And a lot of the food they stocked up on was perishable. It went bad because in the sun, there was no refrigeration.
There was really no way. Yeah, it was bad. And there were rats.
So you wanted a slightly less perishable food source. So a lot of captains would bring on goats and cows and chickens because those could give you milk and eggs.
Gotcha.
Yeah. And so those are slightly less perishable. I'm calling them slightly less perishable because when the crew starts running out of food and you start running out of food to give the cows and chickens and goats, then you have to eat the cows and chickens and goats.
They're full for like their second purpose.
Exactly. There you go. Cats and dogs were kept on ships.
If they were companions, if they got along with the crew, great, but mostly they were on board to protect the food.
That makes it like pest control.
Pest control, definitely. Like you're gonna have, if you get a big wooden ship and you have goods coming off of it, you're gonna have rats. You're just gonna have rats.
So, rats are dirty, they cause disease, they bite you in the night. They're just not good to have around.
Yeah, I love rats, but I can't imagine wild rats and having to worry about them gnawing on you at night.
Yeah, yeah. So cats and dogs were good to have around to keep that population under control. And if they got along with you, then great.
That's even better. That's like a little bonus feature. But I mean, you didn't have to think with cats and dogs, as long as they were doing that, you didn't really have to feed them.
Like pets on a ship back then were not super practical because you have to keep them alive.
Right.
And you have to keep yourself alive. So if it comes down to-
There's definitely so much room for everything.
That's it. Yeah, exactly. So cats and dogs were good.
They were pretty self-sufficient and they took care of themselves.
And I guess only probably some of the larger ships would have been able to have the livestock, I'm assuming. Or how limited do you think they were with space as far as crew and livestock and goods that they're pillaging and whatnot?
Well, there were different sized ships, of course, and they each all had their own capacity. And there were actually business owners that would pool their resources and they would sort of like sponsorships to go out and collect prizes. So then they would outfit those ships with kind of whatever, you know, whatever they thought the ship would need, they would put it on that ship.
So a lot of it had to do with what the captain could afford or what the sponsors could afford or how big the ship was. I mean, I don't know for sure, there was probably a lot of ships that went out with maybe just a dog and a cat and a bunch of food that would go wrong.
Right, you just had a little bit of time.
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah, because I bet water would be a huge issue because of storage. Like, you and the livestock, yeah.
Yeah, water was a big thing because, I mean, you were talking about what kind of things would they have to know. They would have to know a little bit about food and water and that sort of hygiene. They learned pretty quickly that if your fresh water supply had green stuff floating around in it or bugs in it, it would probably get you sick.
I mean, that's pretty basic medical knowledge, but they still had to have that, you know?
Yeah, somebody had to notice it.
Absolutely.
Okay, well, I'm thinking about animals. Of course, everybody is familiar with the trope of a pirate with a parrot on their shoulder.
Right.
Do you know where that idea came from? I've actually never looked this up myself. Why parrots?
So, honestly, I don't know where it came from. And I remember back in 2017, on my old podcast, Apartments, we actually did an entire episode about parrots. And I talked about this very thing.
It was really interesting. So, I don't really know where the trope of the pirate with the parrot on his shoulder comes from. But wealthy people keeping exotic animals, that's nothing new.
Like, that's been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. And wealthy people in France were keeping parrots as pets in the 17th and 18th centuries. So, those big tropical colorful parrots had to get to France somehow, right?
Yeah.
These guys that were living in Mexico and Central America. And so, parrots and monkeys were trapped and collected and then shipped over to Europe where they were sold as exotic pets. Now, when pirates raided merchant ships, they didn't just take the gold.
They took everything on that ship that had value. Everything. They even took parts from...
If they weren't going to take the ship itself, they would take sails, they would take cans, they would take anything they could to, you know, fix up their own ship, basically.
Yeah.
So, and then that included these pets that happened to be on their ships. So, you take a ship that has exotic animals on it. They're already captured, they're already in cages, they already had food to eat.
This is assuming that you're taking the ship, too, with all the stuff on it.
Because I guess that would be definitely the easiest option if you could make sure that you could split your crew.
Yes, if you could split your crew, like, taking the ship if it wasn't already too badly damaged, that was definitely the best case. That was what you wanted to do. A new office building, right?
Right. It's like card jacking, but ship jacking?
There you go. So you have the ship. It's got exotic animals already on it.
They're already captured. They already have the food. If they're parrots, they're probably in a cage.
Their wings are clipped or they're bound up, you know, so that they don't fly away. That would be bad.
Just think they're going to hang around the ship and then they're gone.
Yeah. So, I mean, nobody has any written record of pirates carrying parrots around. There's no smoking gun, but...
Interesting.
If you have a parrot and you're not in Europe, they're not worth that much. If you're already in a tropical zone, you're going to sell a parrot to who?
That makes sense.
They're already all over the place. If they don't make it to Europe alive, then a dead parrot is not worth a whole lot. So there's nothing definitive that anybody can point to and say, look, parrots carried around parrots.
But if you have a smart, funny, colorful bird on your ship, and everybody loves it, and it's not worth anything to anybody unless it survives a trip to Europe, and it's not a boring old cat or dog that's eating rats all the time, it's plausible that pirates had parrots and monkeys.
No, that totally tracks. I can think of a million reasons. Can you imagine how bored you must sometimes get all the time?
Oh, absolutely. And a parrot would be hilarious.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
At least if it could talk, or if you could teach it to talk. I can imagine that they had, like that was like their evening entertainment was just hanging out with the parrot.
Yeah. I mean, there's so... Yeah, there's so much about pirates that we don't know.
And that's one of them. We don't know about the pole parrot thing.
Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how many people, like how many people it took for them, like, seeing, oh, that pirate has a parrot, and that one has a parrot. Was it for it to catch on, like that's a thing, like pirates have parrots, or was it something that was printed in literature or in a pamphlet, like was it an image? I wonder.
Well, I mean, that's the other thing too, is that pirates didn't hoard their gold. They didn't bury their treasure. Like there's no, the buried treasure thing is, that's Hollywood.
Weird. Like, yeah, where did that even come from?
When they got gold, when they got stuff, they flaunted it. So, when you see pirates with, you know, the puffy shirts with the frilly, you know, lacy things and the puffy sleeves and all that, and somebody will say, yeah, they didn't really wear that stuff. Well, when they captured a merchant ship, if there was clothes on that ship, and the clothes you were wearing were gross because you've been wearing it for two months and they're all sweaty and bloody and nasty.
And stiff from salt.
Stiff from salt. You know, that women's blouse is probably going to look pretty good. Like, who cares?
Yeah.
So there's a lot of stuff like that where it's like, well, we don't know for sure. But if we just use a little bit of common sense and just think about it, then you could say, well, it's at least plausible.
Yeah. Yeah. No, cool.
I've never really thought that much about where it came from. I just know that yeah, like a lot of, you know, Robert Lewis Stevenson kind of created a whole bunch of stuff. I was wondering if it was a created thing or if there was truth.
So it's no, it's good to know. And you're right. Just using a little common sense.
It makes sense. They would have them.
Yeah.
So it now comes a big question. If you were a pirate captain, what is one animal that you would absolutely need on your ship and why?
It would be a cat. At least one cat.
I was thinking the same thing.
For practical reasons and also for companionship reasons. I'm a guy who... I'm a cat guy that can't have cats.
Like I'm terribly allergic to them. I would love to have a cat, but if you get me around a cat, just fluid just pours out of every hole in my face. It's not great.
You need a hypoallergenic cat.
Yeah, I heard those don't work though. I heard those are like...
I'm sure they only work right. Like maybe better than another cat. But I'm sure if you were really allergic, you'd probably still.
I don't know though. Could you get like what? Yeah, a naked cat?
No, no, no, no, no. No. I hate that.
But not that bad.
I had a friend that had one of those hairless dogs.
Yeah.
And I could not touch it. Like they would put a t-shirt on the dog. Like to just sort of keep it warm.
And I could only touch the dog like on the t-shirt. Like I couldn't touch its bare skin. Too freaky.
I keep telling my husband, I would never buy like a Sphinx cat, like a naked one, because I'm just not into buying purebred stuff. But if somebody was giving away one, I would absolutely have a naked cat. My husband's like, no, no, disgusting.
No. They look like Gollum.
They totally do. They all look like Gollum. Like Gremlin, Gollum, something like that.
Yeah, they're terrifying.
So no naked... Well, that's good because on the high seas, the sunburn that that poor cat would get. A naked cat would be a terrible idea on a ship.
The poor thing.
Oh, that's terrible.
I'm with you. I think a cat would be the smartest thing for pest control and to just chill and hang with you. And cats can be really funny.
You can teach it all sorts of tricks. You got a lot of time on your hands.
Oh, yeah. And cats pretty much, the cats that I've known, they just kind of like entertain themselves, and they'll come to you when they want your attention. And when they're done with you, they'll go away for a while, and then they'll come back when they want your attention.
They just sort of, they're very, very self-sufficient little animals. As long as they can find food to eat, you know.
Yeah. Yeah, and probably too, as a captain, you're already trying to be in charge and make sure everybody's comfortable. And I feel like the last thing you'd want is some really needy animal that just, you know, you're like, not one more thing.
I cannot.
Exactly.
Well, what about animals that pirates might have had to watch out for? Like, I'm assuming whales and sharks could be a pretty serious threat when you're in a wooden boat surrounded by the ocean.
Yeah, and, you know, pirates were notoriously bad swimmers.
I have heard that.
Yeah, they were so superstitious, and they were so scared of what could be in the water, that they did not go in the water.
I get, but also, you'd think you'd want to know how to swim because of drowning, but I do understand the fear of, like, what could be under there.
You would think, you would think, and yet a lot of pirates just could not, couldn't swim, didn't want to have anything to do with being in the ocean. On the ocean, on top of the water, great. In the water, they didn't even go fishing.
What?
I didn't know that.
They did not go fishing. It was a waste of their time. It was a waste of their resources.
They were afraid of what they might catch. And also, you know, you'd have to catch, okay, so a small pirate ship would still need at least 10, 15, maybe 20 men on it. So you catch one fish, it's going to feed one person.
You have to sit there and catch at least 20 fish for one meal. And it's just a waste of time.
So did they, do you think they were like cast nets?
No, they didn't mess with it. The one thing they did eat, they knew of a few places that were in the Caribbean, where they actually had fisheries, and they would get fish from there, and you're going to not like this, they had fisheries for sea turtles. Because sea turtles were a lot more common.
Sea turtles, yeah, sea turtles lay eggs. They're a lot bigger, they can feed more people.
The nutrition from a sea turtle would be amazing, especially if it had eggs inside.
Yeah, so it's unthinkable now to think, eating a sea turtle is horrifying, because you know...
Right, there's not that many of them left.
There's not many of them left, but at that time there were so many of them, and that was just pirates who loved eating sea turtles.
I mean, they'd be easy to catch, but not very fast. They can't really do anything to you, not much. And then I'm sure you could probably use the shells, like, sell the shell parts and stuff, as like jewelry making stuff, I would think.
Oh yeah, absolutely. And then like whales and sharks, I think are big. You know, I grew up seeing nature documentaries about whales.
And if I ever went whale watching and I knew what to expect, and I actually saw a whale breach in front of me, I would still probably freak out.
And these guys just did not grow up with netgeo. They grew up with maybe like some pictures or some scary stories about sharks and whales. So they were naturally pretty, probably pretty afraid to to run across one of those things.
Another reason they didn't go swimming a whole lot.
Yeah. Like, yeah, if you'd never even, if you'd only ever heard about a whale, it'd be crazy to envision if you had no context until seeing it, it'd be like a biathlon, you know. So I guess pirates weren't, there weren't like whaler pirates usually.
That was more of its own profession.
That was its own profession, and that took place up closer to like the northeastern part of the United States.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Okay, let's see. Well, besides animals, I'm sure the pirates would have had to be familiar with plants for food and medicine. How do you think that pirates would have used plants to ward off something like scurvy or some other kind of ailment?
Pirates themselves didn't worry too much about that because most ships had a doctor.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah, and the doctor was very, very well protected. If there was a battle, if there was some bad weather going on, that doctor was sheltered because he was able, with his limited medical knowledge, to be able to help people somewhat. So they kind of left that to the ship's doctor.
However, the ship's doctor's bag was full of plants. And he would put together poultices and mixtures and all kinds of stuff to help these parrots with different ailments and different injuries. So I got a list of the things that a ship's doctor would be looking for for his medical bag.
Oh, cool.
Yeah. Alright, ready?
Yes.
Rosemary, mint, clover, horseradish, comfrey, sage, thyme, absinthe, blessed thistle, juniper, hollyhock, angelica, vanilla, nutmeg, ginger, mint, wormwood, cinnamon, saffron, rose petals, juniper berries, sarsaparilla root, mustard seeds, and I said ginger already.
Okay, I actually think I know what almost all of those are. That makes sense. A lot of them are edibles and like, yeah, like, common.
Yeah, it was like not common then, but Sure.
No, I know what you mean. So yeah, the ship's doctor was like.
Yeah, like an apothecary, really.
Yeah, it was an apothecary. Like, they had some standard medicine. You know how, like, back in the oldie times, if you had a toothache, they would give you cocaine, pretty much.
They had some of that stuff. But yeah, they were really reliant on these natural plants and seeds and roots and that kind of thing to make their medicines out in the sea.
Cool. And then just as a side note, so I figured that, like, the Navy and everybody would have ship doctors. What kind of ship doctors would a pirate ship attract?
The same.
Okay. Because they're just looking for the pay. How they get it doesn't...
Exactly. Or a pirate crew might approach a doctor and persuade him to join their crew and help them out.
Press gang a doctor.
Yeah, pretty much. They did that a lot.
That makes sense. That tracks more with what I was thinking. I mean, not that I wouldn't think that there'd be some guys out there who was just...
They need to survive too, so they would be employed by pirates. I was just figuring, like, bottom of the class doctor?
No, if you had a skill, if it was carpentry or fixing sails or a doctor or something like that, you could probably... You could be approached by pirates. You could be approached by a group of men that, you know...
You couldn't say no to.
That you couldn't say no to, exactly. I was trying to find the words.
You're just minding your own business, and then, yeah, all of a sudden, you go to the ocean and no one ever sees you again.
Yeah, it happened.
That'd be crazy.
You mentioned Skirby. There was a guy, one of the first pirates back in the late 16th century, and his name was Richard Hawkins. And he said, hey, oranges and lemons seem to be helping the guys with Skirby.
And nobody believed him. Fast forward about 150 years later, and there was a doctor in the Royal Navy, and he conducted clinical trials of potential cures for Skirby, which at this point had killed thousands and thousands and thousands of sailors. And he came up with the conclusion that, hey, oranges and lemons are probably good for Skirby.
And the Royal Navy ignored him for another 40 years.
Dang! And he was legit.
And he was legit. And they were finally convinced by another doctor, hey, at least just give this a try. And they added lemon juice to sailor's rations.
And everybody had either a teaspoon or a tablespoon of lemon juice every day as part of their rations. Skirby disappeared.
Richard Hawkins just rolling in his grave. I told you! And the poor other doctor, my gosh, like if they wouldn't take his word for it.
Right? Eh, we don't know though. Our doctors are carrying basically a planter.
It was probably like the head honchos on land that maybe weren't super familiar with the whole thing. Meanwhile, everybody else is like dude, just give me a lemon. I'll try.
Because isn't Skirby like you lose all your teeth?
Oh, it's it's really bad. Like your teeth getting loose is like the beginning stages of Skirby. It will absolutely kill you.
Yeah. Yeah. I just can't imagine that horrible.
Yeah. Like just feeling like your teeth feeling like they're gonna fall out. I have nightmares about that.
Yeah. No, it gets even worse than that. Like your bones get brittle.
You hallucinate. It'll kill you. It killed thousands and thousands of sailors.
Yeah. And that's so insane that they could have prevented it for so long if they would have just like given it a whirl.
And so easily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because how I mean, I'm assuming right in that part of the world, citrus would have been easily accessible.
Right. Yeah. And that the scurvy is really really hard to get because even without citrus, you're getting vitamin C in something.
Yeah.
Even in meat, there's trace amounts of it that will at least keep you on this side of scurvy. So you really had to have, like, be, you know, in a bad state of malnutrition to get scurvy.
Yeah.
And that goes back to, like, their food. You know, they had that perishable food to start off with. And then that gets eaten or goes bad.
And then what do you have except heart attack and yeah, and rum or grog.
Just, can you, man, can you imagine, like, the constant stay, I said, not so miserable, but just like constant day drinking in the heat of the sun with nothing in your stomach but hard biscuits.
Yep.
You'd be wasted all the time and just feel like garbage.
Yes, you would.
What an existence.
Yeah, it was, I mean, that's, it was a hard life.
And then by that time, once you've gotten to that point, I'm sure, like then making any good decisions about survival would be so hard. Because everybody's already like in a bad way.
Yeah, that was, a pirate's life was not, it was not pretty. It was not easy. It was not anything anybody would want for themselves.
If you really look at it, if you really look at their day-to-day life and what they had to deal with, you would never want to be a pirate. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, one more thing, in addition to plants, so nature is more than just plants and animals, as we both know. So I'm guessing that at least the captain would have had to be knowledgeable with some other stuff, like weather, ocean currents, natural navigation. Is that true?
Or were they just winging it?
Yeah, well both. So the thing about pirates, I've been saying the word pirates, we've been saying the word pirates over and over and over again. But almost all pirates were sailors, but not all sailors were pirates.
So all these guys had experience at sea. They already knew kind of what to look for with weather. There was really no weather radar or anything like that.
At the time, you know, weather stations and forecasts, those weren't the thing until like the late 1700s. They had a thermometer available to them that had been invented and a barometer.
Cool.
So if you were fortunate enough to have somebody on the crew, or if you knew how to read a barometer, you could kind of get an idea of what the weather was doing. And also you just, you had your two eyes, and you could go out on the deck and see that the weather is, you know, the sky is black out to the east.
I can at least tell that.
Yeah.
Yeah, they probably start to notice cloud cover and cloud patterns like this means that there's going to be a storm tomorrow and the old weather folklore that is actually true about, you know, birds flying close to shore or low in a storm or stuff like that.
Yeah, absolutely. And every ship had, no one ship was completely reliant on the captain for that kind of information. Because if you had a crew of 20 guys on a ship, you know, you could count on at least 10 of them, you know, half of them to have some experience on a ship and reading the weather and kind of knowing what to look for.
And yeah, like you say, watching the birds, like, you know, if the sky is black out east and birds are all flying toward you, you might want to avoid that. That kind of thing. It was a lot of trial and error, though, and the error could be really, really bad.
Because you did not want to be in a wooden ship in the middle of a hurricane. Hurricanes killed a lot. As many people as scurvy.
Oh, I bet. Especially in that part of the world, like where hurricanes happen all the time.
Right.
That wouldn't be like a freak storm. It'd be like, oh, here come the hurricanes again.
And yeah.
Yeah, no. Yeah. I think I could like survive at sea if I like push him to shove to a point.
But like the first storm that came up, it would I would be freaking out. Yeah. Because it's just water so powerful.
Oh, it is scary.
Um, okay. So more than just the captain. That's good to know.
Uh, and that makes sense because I'm sure that there was like, you know, you'd have your really experienced guys on board and then some some younger people that had just joined or and ended like, you know, some people, I'm assuming piracy wasn't something that everybody decided to do, like right from childhood. So they would just come at it from whatever walk of life they were in because of life choices or desperation.
Yeah, there was a lot of reasons people became pirates. Um, and some people actually were kind of born into it, but that was pretty rare. Um, but a lot of people, well, it's a whole other podcast episode about why people became pirates.
Yeah, I'm thinking some of them, you know, like, I would think that, like, a farmer who became a sailor would still be pretty helpful as far as, like, reading weather and things like that. But, like, I don't know, a cobbler? Like, that guy probably wouldn't know almost anything.
Yeah, that's, no, you're right. Yeah, some of the skills translated into working on a pirate ship or on any ship.
Yeah.
Yeah. But the reason people became pirates was there was a lot of different reasons, and most of them revolved around making money or just really not having any other options in life.
Yeah, makes sense.
And then there was Steve Bonnet. There was a guy called Steve Bonnet. He was a pirate.
He was basically a wealthy landowner. He ran a plantation, like a sugar plantation, and he basically had the worst midlife crisis ever. He commissioned a pirate ship to be built for him so that he could go out and be a pirate.
He hired a crew. He hired a navigator. He hired these guys to do his dirty work for him because he had no naval experience whatsoever.
He had never been out on the water.
He just read too many books. Like, this sounds fun and exciting.
He might have been the only guy that had ever said, hey, I'm going to go be a pirate because it looks fun. Yeah.
Can you imagine what the other pirates probably thought of that guy? Like, wow, slumming it with the rest of us.
That's crazy.
Yeah, that is crazy. All right. Oh, and so that very much leads me to the next question.
So learning these skills, would a lot of them have come, do you think, to the ship, knowing these background skills because of the times and a lot of people had to be more in tune with things? Or was a lot of it like on the job learning?
There was probably a lot of both. A lot of men that were privateers or pirates had experience in the Navy where they would learn a lot of the stuff before they even went on a ship.
That's cool. So they had at least had some sort of like academy or naval or maybe not academy, but like practical learning before they even got on the ocean.
Yeah. Or even if you were, you know, if you grew up your whole life working on fishing boats or merchant ships, I guess that would be an example of like on the job training where you would learn that way. You know, how to rig sails and how to look at the weather and how to navigate and that kind of stuff.
So the ones that used to be sailors, at least in the military, were they pretty well educated? Like what was the average education of a pirate? Because I think a lot of people think about pirates as being like illiterate and not knowing really anything and just thugs.
Were some of them well educated? And how did that work?
Some of them were. Some of them were very well educated. They had very high rank in the Navy.
And they became privateers. Now, a privateer is basically a state-sanctioned pirate.
Right, like the different kings and queens, right? Would like stamp them and be like, you go be a pirate, but to this other country.
Exactly that. So a lot of those guys started out like that. And they were, you know, England would say, go out and attack Spanish ships so that our boats can just do Navy warship things.
We don't have the time and the resources to go attack their shipping and their trade and their economy. So you go do it and it's okay. And then come back and give us the money.
That's such a funny way to conduct business. But I'm sure it still happens in some capacity.
It's called outsourcing.
Right, right. Sanctioned crime.
Yeah, pretty much. But then, you know, like if the war ends and you're no longer attacking, supposed to attack the Spanish, but you see a big Spanish merchant ship.
Yeah, Dan, you have to be pretty up to date on your news. Like, can you imagine if you just didn't know the war was over and you're still doing this and you're like, Oh, sorry, oopsie doopsie.
Yep. No, so that's how a lot of guys, privateers, became pirates. Yeah, a lot of them were, were, you know, military.
What am I trying to say? Officers, that's the word I'm looking for. Like officers that were trained and educated and that kind of, and a lot of them were thugs.
A lot of them were just thugs.
Yeah. What about some of the more like famous pirates that people like might recognize names of? Like, I don't know, Calico Jack, Blackbeard, like any of them well-educated, known to be well-educated?
Um, some of them, yeah, like a lot of the pirates, I have it in my outline somewhere, there was a lot of pirates became pirates because they were on a ship where nobody liked the pirate, so they would mutiny and then they would be, nobody liked the captain, so they would mutiny and then they would become the captain. Um, what was the question? I'm sorry.
No, no, it's okay. Um, it was...
Oh, the origin of some of the more famous pirates.
Yeah, or like, and as far as were they knowledge of, like, were they pretty well-educated to get to that level of rene... Like, how much background did these guys have or was it all just circumstance?
Like a lot of it was just circumstance.
Okay, okay. I'm curious. Mm-hmm.
Okay, do you think... So now that we've been kind of talking about how nature is incorporated into pretty much every... all of piracy you have to know about nature, at least, you know, what you're eating, ocean stuff, weather, all kinds of things, do you think that any pirates would have considered themselves naturalists if somebody explained what that meant?
Okay, I have good news for you. There was a pirate who was also a naturalist.
That's amazing! Tell me more.
Okay, have you ever heard the name William Dampier? I'm not sure.
Doesn't ring a bell?
Not particularly.
Okay, so William Dampier, he was from England. He was an orphan. He got a decent education.
He was with the Royal Navy for a while. When England was at war with the Dutch for a couple of years, he served in that war. And he was an apprentice to a shipmaster.
And he was out at sea either with the Navy or with the shipmaster from a very, very young age. And he was sailing all over the place. He was learning how to navigate.
He was learning everything on the job, you know, looking at the weather. He was learning about sails and rigging and everything about, you know, being on a ship and being at sea and knowing how to get from point A to point B. And so he sailed to Newfoundland.
He sailed south around Africa, up into the East Indies, which were places like the Philippines and Borneo, and places that were safe to go because they had been colonized, right?
Gotcha.
So he's doing all this sailing around. Eventually, he winds up in the Caribbean in Jamaica, and he finds himself managing a plantation because he has to have a job. He's an adult, unfortunately.
He hates it. He hates it. He starts sailing around with pirates because...
He hated adulting so much, he was like piracy.
Yep, exactly. But it's what he knew. He knew ships, and he saw these buccaneers making a lot of money.
And, you know, why not just do that instead of being a miserable manager at a plantation? So he finds himself on a ship. The captain of the ship says, hey, let's go do some pirate things in the Pacific before we go back to England.
So they go into the Pacific Ocean. That whole expedition is a complete failure. The crew was ready to mutiny.
They were actually planning on how they were going to eat the captain and the ship's officers because they were that close to cannibalism. Yeah. So they were on the verge of cannibalism.
They mutinied. They took over the ship. And it was about two miles off the shore of this mysterious land that nobody really knew anything about, but they called it New Holland.
Now all the while, everywhere that William Dampier is going, he's keeping a journal. And he's writing about all the different plants and animals and fish and birds that he's seeing. He's drawing pictures of them.
That's awesome. And he's keeping these journals. And there's a couple of things from his notes.
I'll read them, and you can guess which animals I'm talking about. So he described, a pretty little feathered creature, no bigger than a great overgrown wasp.
A hummingbird?
A hummingbird, yeah. And this one, he says, the head is small with a nose like a pig. On any danger, she lies stock still, like a land turtle, and though you toss her about, she will not move herself.
This one's tricky.
Yeah, a land turtle, like a land turtle, but with a pig face.
An armadillo.
Oh, that's, whoa, what a, that definitely would be how to describe it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so he's got all these journals. He figured out that if he took pieces of bamboo, he could roll up his journal paper, put them in the bamboo, and then seal the ends with wax, and now he had a way to keep those journals safe. And he managed to keep most of them.
So he makes his way back to England. So he sailed around the world one time.
Completely around the world.
Yes. He gets back to England. He has no money, and he has these journals.
And he has a wife back home, and so he has a place to go when he gets back home. He's broke. He has nothing but the journals.
So he writes a book called A New Voyage Around the World. And he includes all these descriptions, all these pictures, all these maps, and that kind of stuff. And the Royal Navy says, Hey cool, nice book.
Here's a rickety old warship. You know, go back to this New Holland place. We'll pay for you to go down there and just take a look around down there because we want to know what's down there and, you know, document all the plants and the animals and the birds that you find.
And we'll pay for you to do that.
So in his memoirs, did he fail to mention that he was a pirate? Or they were just like, it's fine, it's fine as long as you go. Like, you have to go.
Oh yeah, because he was still... Because he wasn't really doing anything against the Royal Navy. He was just, yeah, he wasn't attacking England or anything, so he was still pretty much like a member of the Navy.
So they're like, here's an old warship that we're not using anymore. Go to New Holland, let's see what you can find. You know, take care, peace out.
So he goes down to New Holland. Now, about 120 years later, New Holland gets a name change. And New Holland becomes Australia.
Oh, wow.
So he goes down there, he writes, he's sketching all of the plants and the animals he encountered. He's collecting specimens. He's recording everything.
And in less than a year, this rickety old warship literally falls apart. Like literally just sinks. And he lost a bunch of his journals, but he was able to save a lot of it.
And he got back to England, and he wrote a book called A Voyage to New Holland. And that was another book where he put all his memoirs, all of his pictures, all of his drawings, all of that. It was really cool.
He gets back to England, and he's in a bunch of legal trouble because he was mistreating some of his crewmen. And so the Royal Navy said...
I like that they were like, you can pillage as many ships as you want, but you have to be nice to your guys.
He wasn't a privateer. He wasn't pirating on behalf of England, but he also wasn't attacking England. He was still good with England.
But they were like, okay...
So he was attacking other countries as ships or private stuff.
Yes, that's correct. So, the Royal Navy said, well, you mistreated your lieutenant, so A, you're not allowed to captain a Royal Navy ship anymore because you're unfit for duty, and B, we're not going to pay you.
All that time for nothing.
Yeah. So, he went back to being a pirate for the rest of his life. He didn't stop writing books.
Over the course of his life, he wrote seven books. He completed three trips around the world. He was the first person to do that.
It's estimated that he put about 250,000 miles on a ship. But he had traveled about 250,000 miles. At the end of his career, he was the sailing master on a privateer ship called Duke.
And that privateer ship preyed on Spanish galleons. And in one of their expeditions, they plundered about 22 million dollars of today's money worth of money and goods and stuff.
Wow, wow, wow. And I'm assuming, too, when he went to New Holland, was this before it was a penal colony?
Yes.
Okay. So they were like, he was like scouting it out for them to like start sending people over there.
Pretty much. Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. He actually named part of it. I think he named part of it New Britain.
Okay.
Um, so yeah, he circumnavigated, he went around the globe three times. He died in debt. He was still in debt when he died.
Despite, I mean, I can feel this field does not pay well.
No, it doesn't. So it's really cool because along with these drawings and these descriptions of plants and animals that helped people like Charles Darwin.
I was just going to say, he's literally just a pirate Charles Darwin.
Yeah, and he influenced and he helped Charles Darwin with his scientific theories. He made really important contributions to navigation by collecting data on currents, weather patterns. He's one of the first people to accurately describe what hurricane is like.
He was a foodie. He loved food. He introduced new words into the English language like barbecue, chopsticks, tortilla, soy sauce.
Oh, is this right?
Just one guy?
Red fruit and cashews. He was way into food, and he published a recipe in his book, A New Voyage. He actually had a recipe.
He wrote about a fruit as big as a large lemon with skin like black bark and pretty smoothed, mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten on a plate.
Coconut.
Guacamole.
Oh, that makes sense. Oh, man. I mean, yeah, what better way to like, I mean, if you're going to travel the world looking at nature and eating food.
Oh, yeah, he did a lot of that.
And then just taking whatever money you need.
Oh, and to go back to the parrot thing, he noted that the best parrots came from near Veracruz by Mexico. Veracruz to this day remains a hotspot for the illegal parrot trade, and a lot of birds are poached out of Veracruz today.
The best parrots. That's the objective.
So there you go. William Dampier, pirate naturalist.
That was everything I was hoping. Good story. I'm so glad there is a pirate naturalist.
And now I actually don't read a ton of nonfiction, but I'd love to get my hands on some of his books.
That was the Cliff's Notes version of his life. I just barely scratched the surface. You could spend several episodes talking about what he did and where he went.
It's amazing. The actual stuff I'd like to read, because I bet it's really cool in the way it describes things. Like you were saying, the way he describes unknown species would be fascinating.
And then, do you know in his books, is it mostly naturalist stuff, or does he also talk about other things, like the things he was doing in the rest of the day, like the ships he was attacking or anything like that?
I think the books pretty much revolve around the things he was, the natural things that he was seeing. There, I mean, I don't...
There's no other, like, memoirs.
I think there might be some of that in there, but I'm not exactly sure. I haven't read these books like front to back.
I'm sure. You just said there's like seven, and I bet they're pretty dense. Because I can only imagine how much, like, to read about, like, ocean currents.
I'm gonna, like, skip some of the chat.
All right, well, before I let you go, I want listeners to be able to know how they can listen to your new show and find out more information, because I don't think Shalish think I mentioned your show. Could you tell listeners a little bit more about how they can listen and learn more about pirates?
Yeah, sure. It is the the little bit. I don't talk into a microphone very much.
The show is called Avast. A-V-A-S-T! For some reason, I like podcast names with exclamation points on the end of them.
I'm a true millennial. I actually have to take exclamation points out of emails because I put too many of them.
I do too.
I'm just always so eager, and then I have to be like, tone it down, Laura, tone it down.
I do the same thing. I'm not a millennial, and I do the same thing.
I love it.
I always think if somebody's reading this out loud, they're just going to be shouting the whole message.
But if they know me, then they know yeah, it would sound like that.
But the podcast is called Avast, and as far as I know, the only podcast called Avast, just Avast. I think there's like the antivirus software company has an Avast podcast.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that's boring. Don't listen to that.
I can't believe they have a podcast about that.
I don't know what. I should probably listen to it. Maybe it's about pirates.
We just don't know. Maybe I should start doing a podcast about antivirus software. Anyway, Avast, you can find it anywhere you get podcasts.
I only have one episode out right now, so I don't know when this episode is going to go out into the world.
But if it goes out, the end of June, the beginning of July.
Oh, so by the time this episode goes out, I might have one episode, at least one episode out there in the world about words and the way pirates talked. So go listen to the or walk the plank.
Alright. You heard the man. Well, thanks so much for listening, everybody.
And Paul, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Finally seeing the face behind your voice because I've also listened to a lot of your stuff. And talking about pirates and nature, man. I can't think of a better way to spend a Friday evening, which is when we're recording this.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Nerds in all ways, but in the best of ways. Alright. Well, listeners, tune in.
We're going to have lots more good episodes coming up. We're going to have more guest speakers. And be sure to check out Avast.
I'm sure there's going to be some great content. So thanks, everyone, and talk to you all next week.