It was no fun being captured by pirates. Hanging from the yardarm or walking the plank was the least of your worries. According to Alexander Exque- melin’s eye-witness account in Buccaneers of America:
Worse still could be expected from a French pirate known as Montbars de Languedoc, aka ‘the Exterminator’, who allegedly would slit open a prisoner’s belly, nail his intestines to the mast and thrust red-hot pokers to his buttocks to make him dance until his guts were pulled out.Amongst other tortures then used, one was to stretch [the victims’] limbs with cords and at the same time beat them with sticks and other instruments. Others had burning matches placed between their fingers, others had slender cords twisted about their heads, till their eyes burst out of their skull.
Gross or what? Yet, from the publication in 1678 of the first among many editions of Exquemelin’s book, no one ever went broke selling stories about pirates, or was thought the worse of for portraying them sympathetically. Of course tales of land-based lawbreakers from highwaymen to train robbers have always done well, but with the possible exception of the Krays no popular criminal has ever rivalled the pirates for sadism. And it is hard to imagine the Queen rewarding Ronnie or Reggie with a diamond-encrusted snuff-box as Charles II did Henry Morgan after he had sacked Portobello in 1666 with much murder, torture and all-round East End criminal behaviour. Clearly pirates had something else in their favour.
It helped that their exploits happened at sea, while the books were read on land, and that the typical victim was a Spaniard whose Inquisition was deemed no less cruel but much more reprehensible because it acted in the name of religion.
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