I Liked This: Black Sails

 Besides living in Missouri, I can’t imagine a worse life than a 1700’s sailor.

I’ve found myself at sea quite a bit lately. I just finished up the Last Podcast on the Left series on the shipwreck of the Batavia and the following mutiny and horror. I’m reading David Grann’s The Wager about a shipwreck where the crew is stranded for 12 years but not before most of them are killed by disease on the ship. Then for a more sanitized (but not by much) version I’ve been watching Black Sails on Netflix, originally on Starz.

You could make a case that the trenches of World War 1 were worse, but I think I’ll argue that being a sailor on one of these ships, even a pirate would be the worst time and place to be alive in the history of the world. I’ll take dying of the plague in 14th century France because at least that’s just a bad week. These guys live shoulder to shoulder for months or years covered in fleas, rats and mold then either get to slowly die of typhus or being thrown overboard or stabbed over an insult. I consume quite a bit of violent content, Tipper Gore would be ashamed of me and The Wager provided one of the grizzliest methods of death I have ever heard of. The ship started to take on water and the lowest deck was full of men too sick to leave their hammocks so they got to watch the water slowly rise around them until they were “returned to the sea.” Give me pretty much any other way to go. At best sailors would succeed at whatever their task is and get to do it all over again.

Black Sails ended in 2017 and aired on Starz. I remember being aware of the show but this was during the Gold Rush of original content creators in the TV space and I didn’t have a Starz subscription. I also have found the topic of pirate stories to be kind of…lame I guess? This one doesn’t dwell too much on the violence and plunder of it all, although it’s there but it’s much more Game of Thrones on the water than how much graphic violence can be shown (again, there is still a lot). It’s also based on real events as much as these events can be considered real with all the mythmaking that has surrounded some of these characters. Real pirates such as Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Charles Vane and Benjamin Hornigold appear alongside fictionalized pirates. One of the main characters is John Silver and it took me until the second season to realize he’s the John Silver of Long John Silver and Treasure Island. It’s also very focused on colonialism and individual freedom in the Caribbean without very much whitewashing of the brutality of both the British and Spanish during this time.

I suppose one of the reasons I always kind of considered the pirate genre lame was the canonization of what amounted to water-based gangsters but this builds real people around the personas and gives lots of oxygen to marginalized people who often get narratively overlooked in stories like these. It also takes great care to shun the overly-masculine nature of “the account” as they call it, with one of the central aspects of the story being a homosexual relationship as well as numerous women who work themselves into places of influence and hold their own against the worst of the worst.

Toby Stephens, who I had never heard of before this plays the lead of Captain Flint and brings a heavy punch with his long monologues about leadership, loss and sacrifice. Flint was a creation of Robert Louis Stephenson in Treasure Island but inhabits the very real world of Nassau in the “golden age of piracy.” Jack Rackham was a real pirate and is played by Toby Schmitz. Rackham’s character has every opportunity to become a caricature and never does but rather remains the truth North of the entire series.

There are lots of older shows that seem to find new life on streaming, I'm not sure if this is one of them but it certainly grabbed my attention for a couple months. Now the most first world of first world problems begins, finding the next thing to watch.

Ahoy.