Claire got a note from Suzanne asking if I knew there were pirates on the Great Lakes. Being that I’ve always wanted to be a pirate and the fact that Talk Like A Pirate Day is my very favorite holiday, I’m not sure why she’d even ask such a question. But the answer is — of course I knew that!
From what I know about them, the pirates of the Great Lakes generally didn’t have parrots on their shoulder, or walk with a stick for their leg, but they were pirates, nonetheless. Actually, Great Lakes pirates didn’t really fit the popular image of a pirate at all…. but they were practical. They wore wool caps and mittens and sweaters — usually a pullover and probably a turtleneck, because it gets mighty cold around that region in October and November. And when the lakes iced over, the pirates, in their sweaters, would head home until May.
The pirate ships on the Great Lakes looked like every other boat — a schooner or a sloop. No Jolly Roger flags in the Great Lakes. In the time-frame that the pirates operated, there was no phone or telegraph, so it was easy to steal a cargo and take it 20 miles down the road and sell it before word of the heist could get out. The pirates usually stole beaver pelts and timber — and sometimes entire ships.
One tactic the pirates used was to put up fake port lights so that ships coming in would crash on the rocks. Then they would board the ship and steal its cargo.
Interestingly, there were boats that sank with gold on them — banks on the East Coast shipped gold to banks in Chicago, Detroit and other cities around the Great Lakes. But the gold was insured, and the people that ensured the gold went to any length to get it back, so the odds are that it’s all been recovered.
If you want to know more about pirates, you can check the entries on this blog on or about September 17 every year — that’s Talk Like a Pirate Day. If you do that, you’ll discover no real pirate probably ever “talked like a pirate.” Unfortunately, they just didn’t go around saying “arrrgh” very much. They sounded just like everyone around them — those from around the Wisconsin area may have had a Scandinavian accent and those from Ohio more of a German-Irish dialect. The pirate talk we’d all like to hear is from the movies…
But yes, Suzanne, there were pirates on the Great Lakes.
— 30 —