Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  Not all the pirate ships created by writers of fiction were schooners. Captain Cleveland’s vessel in Walter Scott’s novel The Pirate of 1832 is a three-masted ship, but Scott based his story on the true life of Captain Gow, taking details from newspaper reports and trial documents. Captain Hook’s vessel in Peter Pan is a brig, a two-masted vessel similar in size to a schooner but with square-rigged sails rather than fore-and-aft sails on both masts. J. M. Barrie provides a vivid description of her lying at anchor in a creek named after Captain Kidd, who was hanged at Execution Dock in 1719:

  One green light squinting over Kidd’s Creek, which is near the mouth of the pirate river, marked where the brig, the Jolly Roger, lay, low in the water; a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable, like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the cannibal of the seas.…

  While writers on piracy have favored relatively small vessels like schooners and brigs, the directors of the swashbuckling pirate films usually selected large, three-masted ships and Spanish galleons. There were practical reasons for this: a big ship looked more impressive on the big screen; space was needed for the hero to engage in a duel with the villain; spectacular acrobatics in the rigging were more exciting and easier to stage in a large ship; and wide decks made it possible to film crowd scenes with several hundred seamen and pirates involved. The fact that few pirates operated anything approaching the size of some of the ships shown in the movies is another instance of the pirate myth taking over from reality.

  As far as Hollywood was concerned, pirates provided an opportunity for buccaneering heroes to rescue beautiful women from picturesque villains in exotic locations. In common with westerns, they were a vehicle for exciting action sequences, but with swords instead of guns, and acrobatics in the rigging instead of chases on horseback. The filming of large sailing ships at sea posed problems, and sea battles were even more tricky, but much could be achieved with models and full-size mock-ups of one or two ships in the studio. The stories tended to be based on the privateers and buccaneers who operated in the Caribbean, rather than the Barbary pirates of the Mediterranean. The lives of Francis Drake and Henry Morgan provided useful material, and so did Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates, but realism was never a major objective. The pirate films of the twenties, the thirties, and the early forties were escapist adventures and were not meant to be taken too seriously.23

  The first swashbuckling pirate film of any note was The Black Pirate, a silent film made by United Artists in 1926. It starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who was also the producer and the author of the story on which the screenplay was based. Fairbanks was forty-two but still capable of the dazzling swordplay and physical stunts which he had performed in a succession of spectacular movies from The Mark of Zorro to The Thief of Bagdad. He had wanted to make a pirate film for some time, and when the two-tone Technicolor process was introduced, he decided to use it for a film which incorporated excerpts from every pirate story imaginable. Fairbanks played the part of the Duke of Arnoldo, who takes on the identity of the Black Pirate in order to avenge himself on the pirates responsible for his father’s death. He kills the pirate captain in a duel on a lonely beach and takes over command of his crew. In a spectacular debut as a pirate he captures a huge galleon single-handed; this involves disabling the galleon’s rudder, scaling her stern, which is the height of a three-story building, swinging on a rope up to the masthead, and then performing a stunt which became legendary and was copied in at least two other films: digging his knife into the sail, he skims down the surface of the canvas, ripping the sail in half as he goes. He pauses briefly on the yardarm of the mainsail and then repeats the stunt and slithers down to the deck. He commandeers two swivel guns, turns them on the crew of the galleon, and forces them to surrender, to the cheers of the men on the approaching pirate ship. A beautiful princess (played by Billie Dove) is a prisoner on board the Spanish ship. Fairbanks, the Black Pirate, falls in love with her and tries to help her escape, but his plans are uncovered by the villainous pirate lieutenant and he is forced to walk the plank. He manages to swim ashore, and he returns with a band of followers who help him retake the ship. There are more sword fights, the pirates are defeated, and the princess is rescued. The critics were not impressed by the story, but loved the color and the action. “With its excellent titles and wondrous color scenes this picture seems to have a Barriesque motif that has been aged in Stevensonian wood,” wrote Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times. “This is a production which marks another forward stride for the screen, one that the boy and his mother will enjoy and one that is a healthy entertainment for men of all ages.”24

  The Black Pirate led the way for a wave of pirate films. The best of these were based on the historical novels of Rafael Sabatini, in particular on his three sea stories: The Sea Hawk, which was first published in 1915, Captain Blood (1922), and The Black Swan (1932). Sabatini was born at Iesi in central Italy in 1875. His father was an Italian aristocrat and his mother an Englishwoman. He published his first novel in 1904 and thereafter his output averaged a book a year for the next forty years. In 1905 he married Ruth Dixon and moved to England, which became his home for the rest of his life. Sabatini’s books have gone out of fashion today but were immensely popular in the period between the two world wars, and six of them were made into films. A silent version of Captain Blood was produced by Vitagraph in 1925, with J. Warren Kerrigan playing Blood. It was a lavish production and was well received by press and public alike. Kine Weekly’s critic noted that “Brisk action harmonizes perfectly with artistic conception and authentic verisimilitude,”25 and the Daily Graphic thought the sea fight at the end was “the biggest and rowdiest thing yet seen on the silent screen.”26 But the Vitagraph film was totally eclipsed by the version produced by Warner Brothers in 1935. This version was remarkable for making stars of the two principal actors, and for being the first film with music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who went on to become one of the greatest of all film composers. The film also established its director, Michael Curtiz (later to make his name with Casablanca), as the master of the swashbuckling epic.

  Jack Warner had originally intended to cast Robert Donat as Captain Peter Blood, but difficulties over the contract led to his withdrawal. Warner’s other choices for the part were Leslie Howard, Clark Gable, and Ronald Colman, but none of these was available and Michael Curtiz was ordered to set up screen tests for Errol Flynn, a twenty-six-year-old unknown who had arrived in Hollywood a few months before. The son of an eminent professor of marine biology from Australia, Flynn had led an action-packed life since leaving school in Sydney.27 He had been manager of a copra plantation in New Guinea; he had gone gold prospecting and ocean voyaging, and had then spent a year as an actor in England with the Northampton Repertory Company. He had landed a small part with the Warner Bros, studio at Teddington, and on the strength of this he was sent to its Burbank studios in California. He had already been cast in a minor role in Captain Blood, but he showed up so well in the screen tests that it was decided to risk him in the lead part. The equally unknown Olivia de Havilland was cast opposite him in the part of Lady Arabella Bishop. She was only nineteen, but she had a timeless beauty which was ideally suited to costume dramas. Basil Rathbone was cast as the wicked French pirate Levasseur, and managed to steal every scene in which he appeared.

  Warner’s spent $1 million on the production of Captain Blood. Most of the filming took place in the studio, where sets were built to represent a Jamaican sugar plantation, the streets of Port Royal, and the deck of a three-masted ship. The sea battles were filmed using eighteen-foot ship models in the studio tank. The location sequences, notably the duel on the seashore between Flynn and Rathbone, were filmed at Laguna Beach. Curtiz was a perfectionist and would persevere day after day until he achieved the effects he wanted. “I don’t understand why we are still shooting close shots of the guns firing, and broadsides,” complained Hal Wallis, the producer. “There was nothing wrong
with the ones we have.”28 There were also worries about the amount of violence in the film. Robert Lord, a screenwriter, sent a warning memo to Wallis: “Why do you have so much flogging, torturing and physical cruelty in Captain Blood? Do you like it? Does Mike like it or do you think audiences like it? Women and children will be warned to stay away from the picture—and rightly so.”29 But all went well and the film was a triumph. The overall profit was nearly $1.5 million, and the film was nominated for the best motion picture Oscar (which it lost to another maritime epic, MGM’s version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton). Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland proved to be a magical combination and were so popular with the public that they subsequently starred together in nine other films, most memorably in the 1938 production of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

  In 1924 First National Pictures produced a silent film of Sabatini’s novel The Sea Hawk, with Milton Sills in the title role. This was one of the few Hollywood productions to feature the Barbary pirates, because in Sabatini’s story the hero is an English aristocrat who is falsely accused of murder and is sold into slavery. He becomes a galley slave on a Spanish ship, is rescued by Barbary corsairs, and joins their company. He is soon leading the corsairs into battle and acquires a formidable reputation as the Sea Hawk. The character was evidently inspired by the lives of the Elizabethan noblemen Sir Francis Verney and Sir Henry Mainwaring, both of whom became pirates. When Warner Bros, took over First National, it decided to remake The Sea Hawk, using some of the lavish costumes and sets which had been made for the 1939 production of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.

  Seton Miller was commissioned to write a new script, and a decision was made to revise Sabatini’s story entirely. The hero was to be Captain Thorpe, the commander of a privateer in the service of Queen Elizabeth I who fights the hated Spanish in the Caribbean. Although Drake was the model for Captain Thorpe, Miller was aware that he must be careful how he portrayed a national hero. “Although I based Thorpe’s character on Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher,” he wrote in a memo, “I believe it is a mistake to openly identify Thorpe with Drake in a subtitle. The raid on Panama is from Drake, but otherwise Thorpe’s adventures vary so widely from Drake’s history that the British may resent taking large dramatic liberties with their naval hero, where they wouldn’t with a presumably fictitious character.”30 With Europe and America engaged in the war with Nazi Germany, the film became a propaganda vehicle, with Spain cast in the role of Germany and some rousing patriotic speeches by Thorpe.

  Once again Michael Curtiz was asked to direct, Korngold was commissioned to write the music, and Errol Flynn was cast in the title role. This time Brenda Marshall was the heroine, and Flora Robson was flown over from England to play the part of Queen Elizabeth. Warner’s had recently built a deep-water tank in one of its studios, and this was used for the sea battle sequences. Two full-size galleons were constructed and floated in the tanks, which were twelve feet deep. Hydraulic jacks were used to rock the ships from side to side, and a painted sea and sky cyclorama provided the background.

  The Sea Hawk was released in 1940. It was a box-office success, and in spite of the enormous sums spent on the production (said to be $1.75 million), it made a profit of $977,000.31 Over the years the film has provoked mixed reactions from the critics. Some consider it to be one of the greatest swashbuckling films of all time; others have found it stagy and mannered, with an overwritten script. What is in no doubt is the performance of the principal actors: Flora Robson was magnificently regal as Queen Elizabeth, and Claude Rains was convincingly evil as the Spanish Ambassador; but the star was Errol Flynn, who was in peak form. He was consistently late on the set and frequently forgot his lines, but his looks and performance were not yet affected by his famously debauched lifestyle. He strode the deck of his ship with a commanding step and flashing eyes, and his duel with the traitorous Lord Wolfingham in the candlelit halls of the palace is one of the great set pieces of the cinema.

  Very few pirate films have matched the style and the panache of those which starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Errol Flynn, although there were some fine productions. Some of the most notable were The Black Swan of 1942, starring Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara, which was based on Sabatini’s story of Henry Morgan’s buccaneers; the 1938 version of The Buccaneer, produced by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Fredric March; and the best pirate film of the fifties, The Crimson Pirate, with Burt Lancaster looking his most heroic and performing his own stunts, and Eva Bartok as a spirited heroine.

  Robert Newton created a memorable pirate chief in the otherwise undistinguished Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), and Jean Peters was a dashing female pirate in Anne of the Indies, which also starred Louis Jourdan as a French naval officer and James Robertson Justice as a one-eyed Scottish pirate. The life of Captain Kidd, which seems to have all the elements for a great movie, has been the subject of some of the worst of all the pirate films. Charles Laughton reduced the part to a hammy caricature with a cockney accent in the 1945 version of Captain Kidd, and went on to star in the even worse Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd of 1954. Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl, which was made the same year, was a modest-budget film with competent acting but it took some liberties with history by getting Anne Bonny to fall in love with Captain Kidd, by introducing the long-dead buccaneer L’Ollonais into the story, and by throwing in appearances by Blackbeard, Henry Avery, and Calico Jack.

  More than seventy films have been made about pirates, buccaneers, and corsairs. While some film directors and producers have gone to considerable lengths to build pirate ships, stage elaborate sea battles, and film in appropriate locations in the West Indies and elsewhere, it is curious how few of the films follow the historical events with any accuracy. Most are based on works of fiction, or plunder the histories of the real pirates with a cavalier disregard for the facts. There is nothing wrong with this. Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Daniel Defoe, and Rafael Sabatini have entertained generations of readers with the adventures of their fictitious pirates, and there is no reason why the filmmakers should not do the same. But the fact remains that the lives of some of the real pirates and the men who hunted them down are as fascinating and as full of drama as any of the works of fiction.

  Chesapeake Bay lies on the eastern seaboard of North America and is a vast inland sea surrounded by innumerable creeks and estuaries. In November 1720 the ship Prince Eugene of Bristol entered the bay and headed for the entrance to the York River. Instead of proceeding a few miles upstream to Yorktown, she dropped anchor at the mouth of the river. That night the ship’s longboat was lowered over the side. Six bags filled with silver coins were stowed in the stern sheets of the longboat, and six heavy wooden chests were stowed amidships. The boat was rowed ashore in the darkness. The wooden chests were unloaded and carried up the beach and buried in the sand. When the longboat returned to the anchored ship, Captain Stratton gave the orders to get under way. The anchor was heaved up, the sails were set, and the Prince Eugene slowly made her way up the river, towing the longboat astern.

  One of the members of the crew was Morgan Miles, a twenty-year-old Welshman from Swansea. When the ship reached Yorktown, he slipped ashore and informed the authorities that his captain had traded with a pirate in Madagascar.1 He told them that the Prince Eugene had sailed to the pirate harbor at Sainte Marie in the north of the island and met up with Captain Condell, the commander of the pirate ship Dragon. A boatload of brandy had been sent across to the pirates, followed by other goods from the merchant ship’s cargo. He had observed Stratton drinking with the pirate captain under a tree, and had seen a great quantity of Spanish silver dollars brought on board the Prince Eugene. The ship’s carpenter had been ordered to make some chests to hold the money.

  Captain Stratton was arrested in Yorktown, interrogated, and imprisoned. A few weeks later he was sent back to England on board the British warship HMS Rye. Another member of the crew, Joseph Spollet from Devo
n, told the authorities that he understood that the value of the Spanish silver which Stratton had acquired from the pirates was £9,000 (the equivalent of more than £500,000).2 There is no record of what happened to the buried chests of silver. Presumably they were recovered by the authorities in Yorktown and confiscated.

  Although buried treasure has been a favorite theme in the pirate stories of fiction, there are very few documented examples of real pirates burying their loot. Most pirates preferred to spend their plunder in an orgy of drinking, gambling, and whoring when they returned to port. The case of Captain Stratton described above is one of the rare instances of treasure being buried, and although the treasure in question was looted by pirates, Stratton himself was a dishonest sea captain rather than a pirate. Another case which is well documented took place 150 years earlier. Following his attack on the mule train at Nombre de Dios, Francis Drake and his men made their way to the coast and found that their ships had been forced to sail down the coast to avoid a Spanish flotilla. Drake ordered his men to bury their huge haul of gold and silver, and while some of his crew stayed behind to guard the buried hoard, Drake and the others set off in a makeshift raft to contact his ships. After six hours’ sailing they sighted the ships and were picked up. That night they returned to the spot where the treasure had been buried, retrieved it, and set sail for England. While Drake’s raid at Nombre de Dios made his name and his fortune, the incident of the buried treasure never attracted much attention.

  The pirate who seems to have been largely responsible for the legends of buried treasure was Captain Kidd. The story got around that Kidd had buried gold and silver from the plundered ship Quedah Merchant on Gardiners Island near New York before he was arrested. Because of the extraordinary attention given to Kidd’s exploits in the Indian Ocean and his subsequent trial and execution, he became one of the most famous pirates of history and the matter of the buried treasure received more attention than it ever deserved. The irony of it all is that Kidd never intended to become a pirate and to the end maintained his innocence of all wrongdoing. It was his misfortune to became a pawn in a political game involving players in London, New York, and India.3