It may be just by chance, or it may be a sign of Fate, but the first image you meet when you are about to enter the “Pirates!” exhibition held (up to 13 May) at the Navy Museum is that of Sir Peter Blake, the king of the overseas skippers, killed in December last year by a group of “ratos de agua”, ragged sea killers, on the Rio Amazonas, in Brazil.

Blake’s photograph accompanies an exhibition relating to America’s Cup, but it makes you feel quite strange to find yourself facing it as if it were, in fact, the latest evidence of an age-long fascination (corsairs, buccaneers, galleons, gulfweeds, treasures and treasure islands, the cruelly enchanted world of children) shattered by the crudity of the present, made of two-penny robberies, useless murders, a feeling of physical and moral misery. According to the data made available by the Bureau Maritime International (Bmi), the organisation having its registered office in Kuala Lumpur and established twenty years ago with the purpose of fighting sea trade fraudulent practices, the year 2000 closed with 469 actions which can be defined as piracy, twice as many as reported in the early Nineties. An overwhelming majority of such cases occurred in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Philippines and Malacca, with a great number of cases relating to thefts, robberies, and violence perpetrated against ships at anchor. In only two cases the crew was temporarily kidnapped and in other six cases ransom money was paid; the total number of victims involved was 72. It is some kind of ‘do-it-yourself piracy’, in 58% of cases through hand-to-hand fight, a marine variant of what can happen ashore, in larger or smaller towns, a passive residue of stretches of sea where trade and life prevalently take place in a world made of water. We are not dealing with complex international trade, with criminal plots in grand-style, with organised and somewhat confederated bands, but with an endemic criminality which is quite insignificant in terms of percentage. Peter Blake was a victim of his braveness and recklessness, rather than of the murderous plot of the seven penniless wretches, ratos de agua, that is ‘water rats’, earth scum, who that night got on his Sea Master anchored before the town of Macapà. They did not know whom or what was on the ship, and possibly they would have left after pinching a few watches or ship instruments. He thought he could get rid of them by frightening them. There is a type of violence that feeds on fear and cowardice. Two hundred works displayed (objets d’art, paintings, books, tools), occupying three thousand square meters, a grand staircase leading into the exhibition area, a black ship head symbolising the entrance, a sailing ship, reconstructed for the purpose, acting as a partition between the halls, and a small child’s bedroom and toy room to close the exhibition with a dreamy note; “Pirates !” describes a two-hundred year period, the 17th and 18th centuries, first in the shadow of the Jolly Roger, the “pretty red”, which means without respite, and later in that of the black flag, the forbidden colour for seamen.

The show illustrates the pirate stages of the wars of religion, the “sea dogs” of Elizabethan and Protestant England against the sailing ships of the Catholic reign of Spain, by analysing the designed sites and the human typology that populated them: the actual Tortuga island and the utopian and imaginary Libertarian island; crews aged between fifteen and thirty, insufficient average culture, excellent practical culture, strict but community discipline, with an underlying egalitarian logic which did not exist in contemporary official marine; very few women; and it goes through the written history (L’historie des aventuriers by Alexandre Olivier Oexmelin, buccaneers surgeon, published in 1686, and The Life of Notorius Pyrates by Charles Johonson, alias Daniel De Foe, in 1724) and the drawn and filmed mythology (the paintings by Pyle, Wyeth and Schoonover, 19th century American illustrators, the films with Douglas Fairbanks and Erroll Flynn, Walt Disney’s Captain Hook ….). The result is childishly fictitious, among artificial treasures and reconstructed exotic sounds, real artificial limbs in wood and iron, guns, daggers, sabres, rifles, cannons, medical tools; all items which a forty-year old may already be familiar with in his imagination, but might have never actually seen before, which however convey the impression of being artificial owing to their extreme similarity to those which he had imagined when reading pirates’ adventures in his golden teenage years. With ship boarding and shipwrecks, running bowline knots and utopias, the show provides a complete picture. You will find the history of Edward Low, the most bloody English pirate of the Caribbean Seas, that of the French Nau, also known as l’Olonnais, who sacked Maracaibo and ate the heart of his enemies, and ended up eaten by the anthropophagous Indians of Honduras. You will find the exemplary adventure of Calico Jack, known with this name owing to his red trousers, companion of Ann Bonny, who ended up being hanged having been found drunk by the soldiers who were after him. “Had you fought like a man, you need not be hanged like a dog” whispered Anne as a viaticum following a dissipated and bloody life. And you will also find the emblematic adventure of William Kidd, the pirate who was hanged twice, because the first time the rope parted and Kidd ended with a splash in the river Themes. As a corpse, his body made a fine show at the entrance of the London harbour: it remained there for two years, turned into a skeleton by the seagulls’ beaks. He had been a pirate on behalf of his government, but at a certain point cold statecraft decided to turn into vice what had till then been regarded as a virtue. The remains of what had been a short-lived phenomenon (piracy, of course, has always existed, but privateering, buccaneers, the brothers of the coast, that range of events and gestures that characterise it, scarcely spans two centuries) surface now and again from the deep waters that witnessed its triumph and sinking.

Five years ago, at the entrance of the Beaufort Bay, North Carolina, a scuba diving team located the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the vessel of Edward Teach, known as Black Beard, the flagship of the greatest pirate ship which was ever witnessed in the New World in the early 18th century: there were hundreds of ships sacked between the Antilles and New England. About 15 cannons, over two thousand objects, including ship material and spoils from previous incursions, have so far been brought back to surface. Teach, who had been born in Bristol, had been a corsair on His Majesty’s service during the War of Spanish Succession and had later acted on his own. He had a frightening appearance, with his beard hanging to his belly, lit slow-burning cords stuck among his long hair, and he wore a sling across his chest with three pistols … Upon his death during a battle, his head was cut off and used as figurehead. Although embellished by the colouring of adventure and ideologically re-written from an anti-system and rebellious point of view, this proto-communism proved just as lame as the wooden leg of many of its protagonists; the pirate way of life and thinking never rose to the peak of fame. It remained a mutual aid delinquency society, restricted in its desires, brutal in its satisfactions, ephemeral in its accomplishments. What made it different from brigandage or sheer gangsterism lied in the setting in which action took place, rather than in the feelings harboured by the actors themselves. Gangs cherished the same criteria of equality despite diversity typical of ship crews, the same relations based on loyalty and friendship, the strong bond based on trust, which unites individuals sharing the same risks. The difference was represented by the sea, by the romantic and noble epos, the concept of total and absolute freedom that it conveys, a mixture of mastery and superiority, a sense of beauty that prevailed, despite the miseries and filthiness of life on board. Even today, in longing for solitude and for self-actualisation in silent contemplation, our thoughts fly to an island, to a sail, to waves breaking on a shore strewn with wrecks of a corsair spirit overcome by the intricate sea of civilisation.

Translated by Interpres