Arrrr: We ask an expert why pirates talk that way on Talk like a Pirate Day

On September 19 some break out their eye patches, peg legs and parrots to mark the parody holiday of Talk like a Pirate Day.

Author of the book Pirates of the Atlantic, Dan Conlin, said most of our pirate stereotypes come from two sources.

“One is Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote Treasure Island in the 1880s,” the historian told NEWS 95.7's The Sheldon MacLeod Show. “He came up with, out of his imagination, a lot of those phrases like, 'shiver me timbers,' and the idea of parrots and treasure maps.” 

Other cliches come from actor Robert Newton, who starred in several pirate movies, including Walt Disney's version of Treasure Island.

“Robert Newton was from Devon, England where people used 'arrr' and 'yarrr' a lot, it's a regional dialect there and that just caught on among people as the way pirates talked,” he explained.

Even though piracy has been around for hundreds of years, and still goes on today, most of the folklore comes from one time period.

The typical pirate costume reflects the 'golden age of piracy,' which peaked in the 1720s.

“It sort of started in the 1690s when after about 70 years of war, peace was declared and there were all of these sailors out of work,” he said. “A lot of them turned to piracy in the far-flug corners of the empire.”

“You had this explosion in the 1720s of desperate men who were being paid very low wages by ship owners who felt they had nothing to lose by taking over their ships and living a short-lived life of plunder.”

The era has been romanticized, but Conlin said most were vicious criminals who tortured and murdered people.

“The appeal was for a brief time you could answer to no one, share what you captured equally, and eat and drink as much as you wanted,” he said, adding there was a downside.

“The penalty for piracy, regardless of whether you hurt anyone, was always death.”

The Caribbean is the location most associated to the legacy, but Halifax has its own ties to piracy.

Edward Jordan immigrated to Nova Scotia from Ireland and tried to make it is a fisherman, but built up a significant debt.

“When the men he owned money came to seize his fishing schooner, he basically killed them and then tried to sail off to Ireland, but one of the crew survived.”

Jordan was convicted of piracy. His punishment was to be covered in tar and hanged from an iron cage gibbet at Black Rock Beach in Point Pleasant Park.

“Once you executed a pirate you would actually hang his bones up in this cage as a warning to other people … this display of human remains was quite common in the British colonies until the early 1800s.”

Conlin will be teaching a course at Saint Mary's University for undergraduate students in January.

“It's not a how-to course,” he said. “We'll be studying the history, culture and economics of piracy and privateering.”