Yo ho ho! It’ll be on the test

There weren’t a lot of Johnny Depps sailing around on real pirate ships.

But the actor’s popularity in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies may help a University of Idaho professor sneak a little history into his students’ holds. Starting in January, Ian Chambers is teaching a course he devised on the real history of piracy – one that includes as much brutish reality as it does swashbuckling adventure.

“The pirate we have in our eyes is a cross between Long John Silver, Captain Hook and Johnny Depp in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ ” Chambers said in a recent interview. “They were never as clean or as beautiful or attractive (as that). They were dirty, smelly, grubby men, most often.”

There’s an awful lot of interest in those grubby men. Chambers, who proposed the course in his first year at the UI, found himself flooded with students when registration for the course was opened. He increased the size of the class from 60 to 80 students, and still there’s a waiting list.

Chambers said it only makes sense to teach a subject that has a “high degree of history coinciding with a high degree of interest.” Studying piracy – focusing on the “golden age” of piracy from the mid-1600s to early 1700s – brings together a lot of different chapters of history that are often taught separately, Chambers said.

“It shrinks the distance between Europe, Africa and America during that time,” he said.

Pirates are generally defined as “mobile thieves on the high seas … who flew under no nation’s flag,” Chambers said. They’ve been around dating back to the Greeks and Romans, but they flourished along with the colonial ambitions and maritime wars among European countries in the 1600s. As commerce and warfare opened up, so did opportunistic piracy. In addition to that, though, was the growth of privateers – ships hired by nations that operated on a freelance basis, under pirate-like rules.

When European nations signed a peace treaty in 1713, there was another boom in piracy, as navy men and privateers looked to stay at sea. Meanwhile, exploration in the Americas was creating new lanes of commerce in the Atlantic, and piracy was also thriving in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean.

“There’s just a huge amount of money traveling across the ocean,” Chambers said.

Early American history was entangled with piracy, as well. Pirates were hung in Boston and elsewhere in New England, and the famous fire-and-brimstone preacher Cotton Mather once gave a sermon titled “Useful Remarks: An essay upon remarkables in the way of wicked men: A sermon on the tragical end, unto which the way of 26 pirates brought them; at Newport, on Rhode Island, July 19th, 1723.”

Pirates have often been considered less wicked than romantic. In the golden age, pirates were typically poor, marginalized people – including African sailors and some women – fighting against the established order.

“These pirates were the poor attacking the rich,” Chambers said. “They were Robin Hood-type figures. … That’s something that’s always very romantic.”

The story of Blackbeard, among the best-known of pirates, is a good example of the way history and mythology combined. At his peak, Blackbeard ran a kind of piracy corporation – with four ships and 400 men. He once blockaded the port of Charleston, S.C., and he is said to have “married” 14 women.

His image often preceded him, even during his own time. He grew a long black beard and during battle he was known to tie in little streamers of hemp and set them on fire. The resulting smoke enveloping his head contributed to a devilish appearance. Eventually, Blackbeard captured ships simply by promising the men aboard that he’d let them live if they surrendered – his fearsome image was often enough to secure victory.

It’s not as though piracy has vanished today, though images like Blackbeard’s have. Especially in the waters off Indonesia, Nigeria and Somalia, attacks on merchant and pleasure boats increased in the past year, Chambers said.

“It’s still going on,” he said.