Today’s Notorious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
It was the great Hollywood dream factory that turned the pirate into a figure of romance. When Douglas Fairbanks Senior leapt aboard a Spanish galleon with a cutlass between his teeth, or Errol Flynn bowed with elaborate courtesy to a captive lady in crinolines, who could believe that the original buccaneers were mostly criminal degenerates? But that is the unromantic truth. Throughout the history of civilization, pirates, like brigands and highway robbers, have been a kind of vermin, as useless to the human race as the cholera germ.
As soon as humans began to live in cities, the bandits began to infest the roads between the cities. And as soon as enterprising merchants started to link the cities of the Mediterranean and North Africa, the bandits of the sea began to waylay their ships. There was one basic difference between the pirate and the brigand. If a brigand committed wholesale murder, he was likely to enrage the authorities into hunting him down at all costs., If a pirate killed everybody on board a merchant ship then burned the ship down to the waterline, he was lessening his chances of being detected. So piracy made for a kind of sadistic criminality seldom met with among brigands.
The earliest and most notorious of the pirates were Greeks – the people we now think of as the founders of European civilization. The trade of piracy was still flourishing when the Romans came to power, and Rome finally decided it had to be got rid of at any price. The Rome of Julius Caesar depended on Egyptian wheat, and there were so many pirates plundering the supply ships that the country was starving. The pirates were literally terrorists. They would often besiege a fortified city, then burn everybody in it; other cities would take warning, and everybody would flee before the pirates arrived, leaving them to pillage at leisure.
Then the day came when the Romans decided it was time to forget internal squabbles and destroy the pirates. They selected their greatest general, Pompey, whose huge forces descended on them and gave them a taste of their own tactics.
There was mass slaughter; the strongholds were turned into smoking ruins, full of corpses. The sea wolves were no match for Roman legions. In 40 days, all the major pirate villages had been destroyed. Then, having shown that he could be cruel and merciless, Pompey announced that Rome was prepared to pardon all pirates who surrendered voluntarily. Most of them had no alternative; forced off the major sea routes, they would have starved to death. They surrendered by the thousand. Pompey had cleared the Mediterranean for many years to come.
Culled from: Crime and Punishment, the Illustrated Crime Encyclopedia, Volume 20
Here’s a bust of the great Pompey himself! Kind of looks a bit like Karl Malden, doesn’t he? Doesn’t exactly instill fear and awe.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
Speaking of pirates, they found infamous American pirate Blackbeard’s flagship – the Queen Anne’s Revenge – off the coast of North Carolina a few years ago and they’ve been excavating it ever since. Recently, some rather fascinating medical supplies have been uncovered, including a urethral syringe used to treat syphilis. Now that’s what a call a pirate’s booty!
Creepy Medical Supplies Found Amid Wreckage Of Pirate Blackbeard’s Ship
He looks more to me like a chunky Harvey Keitel, or maybe Rod Steiger.