Consider the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean series (what are we up to now, movie #5? #8? #12? Who the hell can keep track?). But it's been going on for a long while. Treasure Island, for example, written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1881, has seen several movie adaptations, of which this one is objectively the best:
The movie is brilliant from beginning to end, and if you can listen to the song "Cabin Fever" without guffawing, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.
In other iterations, the approaches vary from the comic (Our Flag Means Death) to the deadly serious (Blackbeard, Captain Blood), and I learned from Wikipedia that there have also been a few pornographic pirate movies, which I would prefer not to think about. Even Lost in Space, never content to be left out, gave piracy their best shot with Cap'n Alonzo P. Tucker the Space Pirate, complete with (I shit you not) an electronic parrot:
In addition to the parrot, Tucker is identifiable as a pirate because he says "Arrrrh" and "Avast ye swabs" and "Ahoy matey" a lot.
So many legends have grown up around piracy that it's often hard to sort fact from fiction. Sometimes it's easier to tell than others, though. Disney, for example, seems to need a refresher on what the word "pirate" actually means:
As a biologist, though, I'm more puzzled by how the hell that parrot can fly, given that its head is bigger than the rest of its body put together.
The whole topic of pirates comes up because of a strange historical footnote I just recently learned about. It has to do with a guy named James Misson, the ship La Victoire, and the country of Madagascar.
Misson, so the story goes, was Provençal, born somewhere in the southeast of France in around 1660 or so. He started out as some sort of diplomat, and had been dispatched to Rome, but was "disgusted by the decadence of the Papal Court," and soured on the entire idea of autocratic government (very much in vogue at the time). He fell under the influence of a "lewd priest" (which were also apparently common) named Caraccioli, who (along with Misson) signed on to the crew roster for a warship called La Victoire. Why the crew needed a "lewd priest," I have no clue, but then, I have no idea what a bo's'un does, either, so maybe it's just one of those nautical things I never learned about.
In any case, Caraccioli had definite ideas about lots of things, and started having long discussions with Misson and the rest of the crew. According to the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, Caraccioli "fell upon Government, and shew'd, that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired... that the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusillanimous Subjection on the other."
Which I certainly can't find fault with. Considering that at the moment, the top one percent of people, wealth-wise, own more than the rest of the world put together, I'd say we haven't progressed all that far in that regard. Maybe we need more Notorious Pyrates to rough the place up, I dunno.
In any case, Misson took Caraccioli's sermons to heart, as did the rest of the crew, and they collectively decided to put Misson in charge and to embark on a career of piracy. The General History doesn't say who the captain of La Victoire beforehand was, or what he had to say about this eventuality, but Misson took over anyhow to joyous shouts of acclaim from the crew, and they decided to found a piracy-based colony named Libertatia on the east coast of Madagascar. The colony was intended to be a direct democracy run on socialist guidelines, where everything was shared and the people held the reins with regard to leadership, laws, and practices.
Hell, if Arthurian England could have an anarcho-syndicalist commune, why not a socialist pirate colony in seventeenth century Madagascar?
Well, there's only one sticking point to all of this, and you've probably already guessed it.
Libertatia, and James Misson, seem to be nothing more than a tall tale.
The first clue is that the only records of Misson are written at least forty years after his heyday, and in them he's variously called "Olivier" (not James) and "Mission" (not Misson). But names were frequently messed about with back then, so that by itself isn't conclusive. However, historians and archaeologists have tried like crazy to figure out where Libertatia was, and have found not a scrap of evidence that it ever existed. There were several settlements made on Madagascar by pirates -- Abraham Samuel started one at Fort Dauphin, Adam Baldridge on the island of Ile Ste.-Marie, and James Plaintain at Ranter Bay, for example -- but all of these are reasonably well documented, and none of them match the details of James Misson and Libertatia from the General History.
This is unfortunate, because it makes a good story, doesn't it? Good enough, in fact, that it's appeared in a number of works of fiction (notably two novels by William S. Burroughs), films, documentaries, and at least four different video games.
So, like I said, it seems like a lot of us love a good pirate yarn. A pity this one turns out to have been fashioned from whole cloth. Like the strange story of Prester John, though, it seems like there being exactly zero evidence of its veracity hasn't slowed it down any. And in this case, the mythical figure of James Misson is someone we can at least grudgingly admire -- little as we've followed his utopian vision of how society should run in the intervening three centuries.
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