WE’VE bad news for the kids next time you’re reading them a pirate story: few pirates ever roamed the high seas wearing an eye patch as the result of a skirmish that had cost them half their sight.
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For while most did in fact have an eye patch, they actually carried it in a pocket, and put it on only when going into battle… bizarrely so they could see both above and below deck while fighting or plundering.
Pirates had twigged that while their eyes adapted pretty quickly when going from the darkness of the inside of a ship to the bright light of outside, it took much longer to adapt from bright outside light to the dimmer inside – particularly when wielding a cutlass in battle.
So outdoors they wore a patch over one eye, allowing them to fight with the use of the other eye.
And if they had to pursue their prey below deck to the indoor’s darkness, they could swing that eye patch off the eye it covered to the ‘outside’ eye they’d been using, thus allowing them to immediately see in the dim light with the eye that had been covered and kept in darkness until then.
If they didn’t it could prove fatal waiting for the time it would take their eyes to adapt from the brightness of outdoors, to the darkness of indoors.
And all along you thought they had only been given an eye patch by Hollywood.
While we’re on the subject of pirates myths, let’s talk about how they, well, talk.
We’re all familiar with the stereotypical pirate accent and well-used phrases such as ‘arhh, me hearties’.
The accent and the terms are typical of speakers from English coastal counties such as Cornwall and Devon.
But guess what? Not all pirates had a West Country accent. Many of them wouldn’t have spoken English at all.
So what did pirates actually sound like? If pirates did have a distinct way of speaking, it was only in the sense that they needed to employ nautical terms on a daily basis. The myth comes from – surprise – Hollywood, again.
In the 1950 Disney adaptation of Treasure Island, Robert Newton played a pirate from the West Country and made free use of the local idiosyncrasies in his character.
Two years later Newton used the same accent in Blackbeard the Pirate, and the stereotype was cast.