eli5 what was the point of the skull and bones pirate flag? why would you give away that you are a pirate?
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You’re not outrunning a pirate ship in a cargo vessel. Not by the time they drop their flag. And you’re on a merchant ship. At best you’ll have a couple cannons. Likely yours are painted on to fool people from a distance.
You’re likely underpaid or gangpressed into work. You aren’t throwing your life away fighting veteran sailors armed to the teeth and sailing on ships modified to outrun the British navy’s hardest hitters.
If you do, the pirates will make an example out of you. Likely they won’t kill you. Buy they may take a finger, or. Tooth. Maybe give you a beating or if someone really pisses them off, they force you onto the life boats if they are feeling generous and sink your ship. Leaving you stranded at the mercy of the sea.
You’re not fighting them. Not without being armed and ready. If they have the flag down they want you to see it. And if you see it, they have already caught you.
Most sailors were not fanatically devoted to their captains, especially on merchant ships where the pay was light, the food awful, and the work excessive. At the sight of a well known pirate flag, many sailors who had a chance between risking death and definitely NOT dying chose the latter. The cargo was no skin off their nose because their shares were tiny, it was the owner that ate that loss, if the ship went under there’d be another to work on sooner or later.
So yeah, when it came down to it the captain might want to fight, but the crew usually had no interest, and occasionally even joined the pirates. Pirates who were famous enough could secure some impressive loot for very little effort.
IIRC some of the most famous pirates, such as Bartholomew Roberts, were former merchantmen who switched sides in this way.
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It’s like the sirens and lights on a cop car. Pull over or else. Different flags had different meanings.
It was easier (and often preferred), lots of times, to just put your hands up and let them take stuff than it was to fight off a ship load of pirates.
Beyond that, different pirates had different flags. They weren’t all skull and crossbones.
An important note is that not all pirates flew the classic skull and crossbones flag. Many notorious pirates had their very own flag designs and it was a calling card of sorts.
For example, the flag of the infamous Edward Teach AKA Blackbeard was a horned skeleton piercing a heart with a spear.
Some pirates had red flags too. If you look up pirate flag designs it is really quite interesting.
The “skull and bones” flag is mostly a movie myth, but some famous pirates did have distinctive battle flags. The real point is the black “flag of no quarter,” which signaled that an attacking ship would not offer quarter – ie, accept a surrender – once the fighting began. They didn’t sail around flying it all the time; in fact, most ships of whatever kind or nation, didn’t fly their flags while just sailing in the open ocean. They only hoisted them when they needed to identify themselves to another ship or upon entering a port. Pirates might fly whatever national flag suited their purpose, especially if they wanted to lull a victim into a false sense of security.
The black flag was to intimidate the quarry’s crew into giving up without a shot being fired. Their pop culture image notwithstanding, real pirates during the so-called “Golden Age” in the Caribbean and west Atlantic were not simple roving murder and mayhem bands. They were criminal collective enterprises. The crew entered into a contract that among other things specified how shares of plunder would be distributed among the crew. They really didn’t want the targets to resist, because fighting risked damage to the quarry’s cargo, and also to the pirates’ ship (repair costs would cut into their profits) and injury to the crew (bonus payments were typically made for injuries in battle). So the best outcome from the pirates’ point of view was if there was no fighting at all. Pirate captains wanted to cultivate a fierce reputation and they wanted a victim crew to feel there was no point in fighting, so if they gave up before the fighting started, they might be robbed of all they had but they would live.
The show *Black Sails* gets a lot wrong about the real history – it’s basically historical fiction and a prequel to *Treasure Island* – but it does capture pretty accurately how pirate ships and crews and the economy of piracy during the Golden Age actually functioned.
There’s a great book about this too – [*The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates*](https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095)
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The pirate flag only went up once the pirates were close enough that there was little escape. When that flag appears, the goal is to scare the target ship into giving up immediately.
Let’s say pirates raid a merchant ship. The merchants just want to sell their stuff on shore. Sure, they have cannons and their people can fight, but they are a big, slow, fat target. The pirates have a fast ship and are used to combat. So now, the pirates are too close, and they use their preferred tactic: boarding. After all, you don’t want to sink the ship you’re attacking. Your goal is to get in, steal stuff, and leave.
The second that flag appears, most of the crew will just give up. After all, most pirates had a reputation that if you hand over your stuff, like a mugger, they leave you be. But if you don’t, they will come aboard and butcher some of you, and some will torture your fellow crewmen to death while others watch. The crew on most ships just wasn’t paid enough compared to the officers on board, to give a shit about giving up their lives for the products on board. (In fact, if they particularly hated their captain, sometimes the pirates would kill him, or the crew would bail and join the pirates, because one haul of good loot was more lucrative per pirate than living as a low-tier crewman on a trading vessel and working for slave wages.)
The pirates fly that flag to get this result. After all, they can’t just dock and get repairs at any port. They’re wanted men, and they will hang if they’re caught. Also, if the enemy crew fights, they have a chance of death. Surrendered men don’t shoot you or cut your throat or cannon your ship.
Intimidation. The pirates preferred that ships surrendered to them instead of fighting them and their reputation worked in their favor. Revealing they were pirates at the right time was key when approaching another vessel. That’s where the unique flag designs came into play too, since if the pirates had built up a reputation, often filled with falsehoods and tall stories of the horrors they supposedly committed, then the target vessel was much more likely to surrender without a fight.
Piracy was a numbers game, and a surrender was the ideal scenario. If the target vessel did not surrender a fight would break out anyways when the pirate vessel reached them so really they had nothing to lose to try. That being said pirate ships didn’t fly their pirate flags all the time. As I said above they chose when to hoist it up at the most opportune time.
[There were lots of different designs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Roger#Historical_designs) of Jolly Rogers, some similar and some very different to the skull and crossbones, which was the most popular design
You only use it to reveal that you are a pirate when you are close to your target ship to scare them into surrendering. You don’t fly your pirate flag all the time
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