Digital ID Ahoy

Dateline: Newcastle NSW, 20th August 2023.Why do people like dressing up like pirates? Why do people like movies about pirates? Why do people like theme park rides about pirates? I mean… WTF? Pirates were horrible.Me dressed up as a pirate in the 1970s.Subscribe nowWhat we think of as the “Golden Age” of piracy with dashing cutlass-wielding rebels leaping from magnificent galleons down to sun-kissed golden beaches was actually rather short, running from around 1690 until around 1730, when the Royal Navy turned up to put an end to murder, rape, torture and plunder around the Caribbean Islands and the east coast of North America.Unlike brave adventurers like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, who were licensed by the Crown to raid enemy ships and share the booty, the pirates of the golden age were in it for themselves. They were simply criminals, although exceptionally violent ones, on boats.How these murderous thugs slipped into popular legend is easy to trace. Just as the Golden Age was coming to an end, the pseudonymous Captain Charles Johnson published a famous compendium of the biographies of these desperados, called “A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates” (1724). It was full of bloodthirsty detail, breathlessly narrated, and secured the legends of Edward Teach (“Blackbeard”) , Black Bart, Sir Henry Morgan and a host of others.(Blackbeard was very much of the Elon Musk school of management and he maintained his legendary status with random acts of violence, including occasionally…Digital ID Ahoy