Wyeth, Long John Silver leading Jim Hawkins, 1911
Ever since Long John Silver clomped around on a wooden leg
with a parrot on his shoulder, the literary and pop-culture conception of
pirates has involved the parrot. But at this point, fact is very hard to
separate from fiction. What, exactly, about a classic pirate Halloween
costume—the parrot, the peg leg, the eyepatch, the bandana, the snarling
vaguely Scottish accent—is actually real? Is any of it real?
“The parrot trope is almost certainly grounded in reality,”
says Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and
Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.
Long John Silver, the star of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island,
was the first major fictional pirate character to walk around with a pet
parrot, but this, according to Woodard and other experts in the field of
classic piracy I spoke to, was based on real truths. And the reasons why the
parrot became associated with pirates actually give us a pretty good glimpse at
the real, true-life existence of a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy.
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