"There were hearts that were stabbed with little blood drops falling out. "Different crews … would riff on the theme, sometimes with full skeleton bodies, sometimes skeletons engaged in activities like holding a sword or a flame," Leeson says. Instead, pirates stuck to black flags with different insignias. Skeletons, hearts and hourglassesīy the 18th century, the red flag was not as popular, Simon says. And it was often used in maritime logbooks, next to a name of someone who had died," Simon says.Īs the years went on, pirates got more creative - meaning there was not one Jolly Roger but all sorts of variations for each vessel. ![]() "This was actually a symbol that had been used since the Middle Ages, basically to symbolise death. The pirate flags would sometimes feature a skull and crossbones. "There are also some people who say that Roger was a term for 'the devil at sea'." " think that maybe Roger came from 'rouge', the French word for red, which makes sense because that would also be from the buccaneering period, where it was mostly French pirates … So 'joli rouge' ," Simon says. It may have been this use of red that led to the name Jolly Roger. It was far from Europe, so it took a lot of effort for the various European countries to enforce any kind of law and order," David Head, a history professor at Orlando's University of Central Florida, says. The era was known as the 'golden age of piracy'. ![]() The golden age of piracyįrom the 1650s until the 1730s, the cutlass-wielding, rum-drinking pirates we know from film and television were indeed roaming around the Caribbean, and then further afield. It struck fear in sailors for decades and helped to define one of the world's most intriguing criminal enterprises. Leeson, a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, who's written a book titled The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, soon realised he was wrong. " more like it should be in a movie, than having been actually used by historical pirates." "When I started studying pirates … I was absolutely certain it was going to be part of pirate lore," he tells ABC RN's An Object in Time.
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