When the movie Pirates of the Caribbean came out a few years ago, and piracy reared its bandana-clad head in an all but ubiquitous range of ad campaigns and on Halloween and at kids’ birthday parties, etc., a little joke made the rounds: Why are pirates so popular?
And the answer was, Because they Arrrggghhh! Which, in its jokey simplicity, is a pretty good assessment of the truth about the portrayal of piracy in popular culture in recent decades. Guys with sabres in their teeth, parrots on their shoulders and shapely girlfriends in low-cut blouses and laced-up bodices have had an extraordinarily uncritical run in the public consciousness over the past 60 or 70 years. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that a wider disjunction could exist between the swash-buckling images of, say, Johnny Depp or Errol Flynn, in eye patches on the high seas of Hollywood and the realities of 18th- or 19th-century piracy.
The latter was a veritable syllabus of...
Charles Wilkins’s book Walk to New York: A Journey Out of the Wilds of Canada (Penguin, 2004) describes a hike he took in 2002 from Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the north side of Lake Superior, to New York City. His book Little Ship of Fools, about rowing across the Atlantic with a crew of 16, will be published in 2013.
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