Pirates
You love them don’t’ you? The mere thought of pirates puts a smile on your face. Swish swish, shiver me timbers Jim lad. Pieces of eight. Walk the plank.
We have an affinity with them – we like pretending to be them. Geocaching has a Piratemania event. According to the Guinness Book Of Records - the largest gathering of pirates (as at July 17) is 14,231 which was achieved on 22 July 2012 in Hastings. Penzanze tried to beat this and reclaim their title in 2015 but fell short by 77 people! They spent £56,000 in trying to achieve it which caused a lot of outcry - the Guinness World Records team themselves cost £5,000 to attend. Penzanze is trying to win back the title in late August 2017.
Let’s get back to basics with some definitions and derivations :
- Dictionary – “Pirates are sailors who attack other ships and steal property from them.”
- Dictionary – “Piracy, any robbery or other violent action, for private ends and without authorization by public authority, committed on the seas or in the air outside the normal jurisdiction of any state.”
- The English word Pirate comes from the Latin term “pirata” which means sailor or sea robber - and from the Greek word “peirates” which means “one who attacks ships.”
So….. Pirates are brutal, ruthless murderers and thieves committing robbery for private gain. Piracy still happens today – Somalia has pirates raging along the coast, the Malacca straits suffer. We’ve gone from cutlasses & brigantines to AK47s & RIBs. In modern parlance Piracy is also applied to theft of intellectual property (think Pirate Radio, Films and CDs). The heyday of Piracy was in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The Caribbean had lots of them – Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Calico Jack, etc. These people were hunted down and executed when possible – when Blackbeard was killed Great Britain celebrated with a National Holiday. So why do we love them?
- We’re gullible folks who love a good story. Pirates in many popular literary works were romanticised. Their deeds portrayed in a roguish swashbuckling manner. From the Pirates Of Penzanze to Peter Pan and Johnny Depp. We have Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19th. We treat them as fun characters.
- We envy them. We like the idea of a life of adventure, thrills and excitement. We like the idea of freedom – the life on the ocean wave. The dreams of treasure.
- We like the fact they rebel against authority. Governments and the large empowered trading companies.
Love them? Hate them? Let me know
Congratulations to GafferGamgee, theswerve, s2zero & Missy, jewelandarlin and zkzkz on the FTF of this cache.