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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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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