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Bartholomew Roberts, Black Bart, Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Hsi Kai, Johnny Depp, Madame Ching, Mark Twain, pirates, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ripley, Ripley's Believe it or Not
When my grand uncle John Hix launched Strange as it Seems in 1928, his comic strips included a challenge to his readers, “if you doubt this, write for proof to the author”.
Although there were many others seeking a niche in the oddity genre Robert Ripley created with Believe It or Not!, John Hix became Ripley’s #1 competitor overnight. He was only 20 years old at the time, the youngest syndicated artist in the country.
In 1929, Time Magazine published an article entitled “Hix vs. Ripley” reporting how “fresh astounder Hix” had risen to challenge Ripley by publishing stories whose accuracy could be proven. To this day, when someone writes in to Ripley’s Believe or Not! to question an innacuracy, they receive back a stock postcard that simply reads, “Believe It or Not!”
In contrast to Ripley, John Hix insisted from the outset that every published fact be proven by a minimum of 3 sources. One of my most treasured family heirlooms is a row of file cabinets that lines an entire wall of my garage. Inside each cabinet is a treasure trove of letters (many handwritten), photographs, notes and sketches stapled to each published cartoon providing proof of every story published to anyone who inquired.
With the advent of television in the 1950’s, the popularity of comic strips waned and Strange could no longer employ a team of researchers. The feature was solely produced in that decade by my grandmother Elsie Hix, who toiled late into the evenings researching and writing the feature after coming home each day from a full time job as an executive secretary. Providing 3 sources for each fact was no longer feasible. Nonetheless, Elsie meticulously upheld the standard by focusing on quality vs. quantity, researching stories from reputable sources such as Smithsonian Library newsletters or correspondence with academic experts attesting to the validity of a published fact.
My children can hardly imagine the world of the 1920’s when the hometown daily newspaper and a trip to the library was the way most people accessed the world outside their town’s city limits. I wonder how John and Elsie Hix would marvel at the ease in which we can find hundreds of thousands of references for a fact or story in seconds with just a few keystrokes.
As we launch Strange as it Seems again in this 21st century, upholding John and Elsie Hix’s standard of veracity poses an altogether different challenge. Finding 3 sources to corroborate a claim is easy, but in this “cut and paste” multimedia world with thousands of news and information sites echoing stories across the sphere, dozens of sources can easily report (and often do) a story that later proves to be patently false.
So in spite of all the resources available to us in this digital age, we find ourselves researching just as much and likely more than our predecessors did to uphold the burden of proof, combining John Hix’s model with Elsie’s, seeking a myriad of reputable if not irrefutable sources.
But truth was not the brand’s only ideal we feel a responsibility to uphold. At its core, my uncle, grandparents and parents were storytellers. Across the myriad of people I’ve encountered over the years that remember reading the comic strips, seeing the film shorts or listening to the radio shows, what I hear most in their recollections is the wild and wonderful, unknown and unusual stories they heard that made their eyes pop and their jaws drop.
If Uncle John were standing over my shoulder today (as I often imagine him doing), I chuckle when I think how he might react seeing our first episode unfold with a title that ends in a question mark. Although one couldn’t necessarily prove a coincidence to be stranger than another, we did source our first episode from perhaps the greatest list-maker of all time, Irving Wallace (along with his two children Amy and David) who published the New York Times #1 bestseller The Book of Lists in 1977. Irving Wallace was one of the most widely read novelists and respected researchers of his day.
As we publish our 2nd Strange as it Seems internet episode, I’m afraid we’ve done it again. Just like our first episode, The Most Successful Pirate in History! hinges it’s claim on an adjective – this time it’s “the most successful” pirate rather than the “strangest” coincidence.
Nonetheless, I’m supremely confident Uncle John would recognize his brand in an instant in yet another wonderful story that very few people know about an extraordinary pirate who roamed the South China Sea in the first decade of the 1800’s.
Extraordinary, yes. But the most successful? How does anyone prove that?
For starters, we conducted a not-so-very scientific experiment when our narrator Rachel Reenstra took to the streets to ask people who they thought was the most successful pirate in history. Perhaps not surprisingly, our whimsical “man on the street” study showed the answer to be … Jack Sparrow.
Those more well-versed in the history of pirate lore would more likely assert that Bartholomew Roberts, the real “dread pirate Roberts” notoriously known as Black Bart, was the most successful pirate in history. Even his wikipedia entry purports him to be “the most successful pirate of the golden age of piracy” having captured over 470 ships.
But is the number of captured ships the true measure of a pirate’s success? Most pirates commanded only a single ship, or at most a handful. The pirate we feature in our episode controlled a force of 50,000 pirates spread amongst 1,000 ships, a fleet so massive it challenged the combined navies of China, Britain and Portugal for control of the South China Sea.
But as Mark Twain once wrote, “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates”. As the box office receipts of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies attest, there’s perhaps a little bit of pirate in all of us. The archetype endures because of what pirates represent – freedom, adventure, living by one’s own rules beyond the confines of authority.
Upon becoming a pirate, Bartholomew Roberts was said to have remarked, “In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.”
So by this measure, I assert that real success in being a pirate is how long you can get away with it.
Captain Kidd was captured, hanged (twice) and gibbeted in 1701.
Edwin Teach, the dreaded Blackbeard, was killed in 1718, shot in 5 places and cut in twenty more.
Black Bart died a picture perfect pirate’s death in February of 1722, shot through the throat with grapeshot in the midst of battle and buried at sea by his men according to his wish. To this day, February 10th is known as The Blackest Day for it signaled the end of the Golden Age of Piracy.
But strange as it seems, 85 years later this same Chinese pirate who commanded the largest pirate fleet in history retired – with complete amnesty and the lion’s share of loot – to live out the rest of their days in peace, dying quietly of old age.
Now that’s what any true pirate would call real success.
All the more if they also knew she was a woman.