To celebrate the release of his new book, Richard Blakemore explores the musical side of pirate history.

Pirates and music: I imagine what comes into your head is that haunting refrain from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, or perhaps the soaring chords of an orchestral film score and the thumping rhythm of a sea shanty. Maybe you think of the much later history of ‘pirate radio’. Music is such an important element in our image of pirates today. In Sea of Thieves, an online game, players can get together for a nautical jam session; and who doesn’t love the stirring main theme to Pirates of the Caribbean?

Yet the popular image of pirates gathering below decks to sing a shanty is not quite accurate. While sailors in those centuries probably sang rhythmic work songs of some kind, the shanties we know today were collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even if some may have older origins. Modern representations often depict pirates playing the accordion (also featured in Sea of Thieves), but those instruments did not exist until the 1820s, long after the so-called ‘golden age’ of piracy.

So what were pirates and other plunderers singing at sea? Musicians could often be found aboard ships in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, from Francis Drake’s circumnavigation in 1577-80 to naval ships of the Napoleonic wars two centuries later. Trumpeters and drummers had an important job signaling orders to the crew or to other ships, but entertainment was no doubt a vital role as well. Bartholomew Roberts’ pirate code supposedly included the rule that ‘Musicians [are] to have Rest on the Sabbath Day, but the other six Days and Nights, none [i.e. no rest] without special Favour’. Roberts’ fearsome crew did indeed capture four musicians from other ships, forcing these prisoners to play for their amusement. The musicians got their revenge in the end, testifying against the pirates at their trial.

Perhaps those captive musicians performed some of the many ballads about sailors and pirates circulating in this period. When Woodes Rogers’ ship stopped off in Brazil during a round-the-world plundering trip, he recorded, the ship’s musicians entertained local dignitaries with ‘Hey Boys up go we!’, a dancing tune appearing in John Playford’s popular music books, along with ‘all manner of noisy paltry Tunes’. ‘Hey Boys up go we!’ was used in many ballads, including one about a 1692 naval victory, and another describing the various ‘wanton Girls of Graves-end Town’, a common point of departure on the Thames, who were ‘Maintained by the Seamen brave’. A particularly popular song about Scottish plunderer Andrew Barton remains a folky favourite under the transmogrified titles of Henry Martin or The Lofty Tall Ship.

Besides these cheerful and often obscene ditties, you might have heard psalms and religious songs. On merchant ships – aboard which many pirates originated – it was customary to gather for a prayer or psalm at the changing of the watch. Edward Coxere, a sailor who served aboard warships and merchant vessels during the 1650s and 1660s, recalled the same sailors singing both psalms and profane lyrics. Other plunderers took their religion more seriously. French missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat was once called upon to perform Mass for some flibustiers in the Caribbean, and when a crewmember misbehaved during the divine service the capitaine abruptly shot the miscreant.

Another possibility is that pirates played some form of banjo, a peculiarly Atlantic instrument, played among enslaved people in the Caribbean, later migrating with them to North America. Similar instruments, descended from a common musical tradition, are played in West Africa today, sometimes with techniques that resemble those found in America.

Travelers commented on these instruments, including Jean-Baptiste Labat and Hans Sloane, a doctor who visited Jamaica in the 1680s and whose collection of flora, fauna, and other objects formed the beginnings of the British Museum. Sadly, the ‘Jamaican strum strums’ he acquired have not survived, but his Voyage to the Islands printed the first ever musical notation of Caribbean enslaved peoples’ songs, written down for him by one Mr Baptiste, possibly a free person of colour from the French colonies.

I have no proof of this putative connection, beyond the fact that buccaneers and banjos existed in the Caribbean at the same time, but some people escaped slavery to join the buccaneers and it is possible that they brought musical traditions with them, or that buccaneers encountered this music ashore. Those traditions developed into jazz, blues, rock, calypso, reggae, gospel, and a host of other styles that profoundly shaped modern popular culture. It’s a curious connection between the musical exchanges of the early modern era and the later world of ‘pirate radio’ in the twentieth century.

The fact that this particular idea occurred to me shortly after acquiring an antique banjo of my own is, of course, pure coincidence.

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This blog was originally shared by the History Press. Richard’s book, Enemies of All: the Rise and Fall of the Pirates, is available now.