Pirates really are “just your basic thugs,” said Mike Carraway, exhibit designer at the North Carolina Maritime Museum, where workers are excavating what is supposedly the 18th-century wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge. “We’ve for some reason romanticized them.”
The proof: Any museum can be assured of visitors with a pirate exhibit. “It’s like dinosaurs, or the Titanic,” Carraway said. “They’re our aces in the hole.”
Historian Marcus Rediker, author of several books on pirates, said they were folk heroes long before they became staples of children’s literature.
“They’re outlaws, like Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde,” Rediker said. “And being an outlaw is a very popular thing in American popular culture.”
Later, pirates became an object of popular fantasy, from “Treasure Island” to Captain Blood to Captain Hook to Captain Jack Sparrow, portrayed by Johnny Depp in the three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films.
“They’re always kind of roguish in these depictions, not bad so much as saucy, mischievous rather than sinister,” said Jay Wolpert, one of three screenwriters on the first film in the trilogy. “They use rapiers. That’s a lot more romantic than an AK-47.
“Of course, they’re not like any of today’s real pirates,” he added, except for one thing: “They’re interested in money.”
This story falls under the category of project validation rather than new information, but in case anyone was curious, we already have a visit to the North Carolina Maritime Museum planned!
The article also mentions the role of the media in popularity of pirates. The results of a recent poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press show how closely the Captain Phillips rescue story was followed:
No comments:
Post a Comment