Did it live up to my lofty expectations?
Not quite. For a piracy nerd deeply steeped in the topic, it was a bit disappointing. I didn’t really learn anything new, and I found the quantity of items on display a little underwhelming. But I’m very far from your average punter here. I suspect most visitors will find it an entertaining overview. The material on pirates in fiction is great fun, and the sections on piracy in the Far East and modern piracy may be new to many. I just wanted more—and had been hoping for a far larger exploration than what’s essentially a three-gallery show.
I definitely enjoyed the first part the most, which focuses on pirates in fiction. The key points here are that pirates have long fascinated us—especially since the Victorian era—and that we tend to create the pirates we need for our time. The Boys’ Own stories of the 19th century and the gentleman adventurers of Hollywood’s golden age bear little resemblance to Johnny Depp’s staggering, comic Jack Sparrow, or to the same-sex love stories now imagined for Anne Bonny and Mary Read, or Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet. (There’s no evidence for either pairing, but they fit the current zeitgeist.) I particularly appreciated the detailed look at Captain Pugwash, not part of my American childhood and thus mostly new to me. I also loved a case full of haute couture inspired by tricorn-topped adventurers.
It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more video from The Pirates of Penzance or the swashbuckling films of the ’50s and ’60s. The latter are only represented by a few clips flashing by on a wall.
The middle section tackles what’s come to be known as the Golden Age of Piracy. This is the source material for the fairy tale: mostly poor white European men seizing opportunities otherwise impossible for their social class, operating largely in the Caribbean (though a few have cracking good stories in the Indian Ocean), and mostly confined to the brief window between 1650 and 1730. The mythologising started early. Captain Johnson published his A General History of the Pyrates in 1724, a compendium of dramatic, often salacious biographies. It was an immediate bestseller and remains, along with a similar book by the writer Exquemelin, “the Bible” of pirate lore. There’s an original copy in the exhibition.
There’s a visually lush recreation of a captain’s cabin that helps you understand the details of a pirate’s working life, an impressive row of weapons and flags, and a painful-looking cage that drives home how bad things got when the law caught up. But I was surprised there wasn’t more—particularly on personalities.
We’re missing my favourite pirate of all time: Henry Avery. Supposedly so persuasive, he convinced his crew to get in one boat while he and the treasure got in another, setting off for the coast of Ireland where they would divide the spoils. He disappeared with the loot. Most of his men were picked up, tried and executed. Avery is one of the great mysteries of history—rumoured to have reinvented himself as an English squire. One of the works of historical fiction I’d like to write is about his children discovering the truth, and how that unravels their lives.
We also don’t get nearly enough of Henry Morgan, the man who went from pirate to governor and conducted one of the most thrilling attacks against the Spanish of all time. There were a few panels on famous names, but not nearly enough for my taste. I would also have liked much more on pirate lifestyle. I might have missed it, but I didn’t see anything on the rise of Port Royal as a pirate capital—surely a model of what now lies underwater thanks to an earthquake would have been in order.
There are no model ships in this section, and little overall on pirate sailing technique or why they favoured certain vessels. Given the number of pirate-themed video games in the world, it’s a missed opportunity not to include an interactive game to demonstrate strategies for attacking much larger prey … perhaps sponsored by one of the game makers.
I found the final section on global piracy the most interesting—both because the territory was less familiar and because there was simply more to look at. There’s a particularly impressive ship model, a gorgeous table centrepiece celebrating victory over sea bandits, and lots of dramatic 19th-century paintings. That century seems to offer a much stronger visual record. This section explores the Barbary Corsairs, who were a thorn in European sides for centuries. (The curators resisted linking the historic trend to today’s migration patterns across the Mediterranean. I think that could have been fascinating, but dangerous.)
Forget another tired instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I want to see a film about Zheng Yi Sao, the Chinese pirate queen who built a fleet of 1,800 ships and 80,000 men to terrorise Asian seas. She was so successful, the Chinese government had to buy her off—including a pardon—which allowed her to retire and become one of the early leaders of Macau’s gambling industry.
The exhibition ends with a digital heat map showing where modern piracy occurs today—a sobering reminder that real pirates are still out there, and they’re not lovable rogues.
The curators of this show faced challenges well beyond walking the proverbial plank. This is a topic for which there simply isn’t that much surviving material. Pirates didn’t leave a lot behind, and even the most dedicated fans have a limit to the number of battered cutlasses they can examine with interest. Enhancing the record with models and digital interaction takes cash, and doing too much of it risks intellectual snobs accusing the show of drifting from education to entertainment. Plus, with a topic like this, you know you’ll be flooded with children. Balancing fun for them with real depth for adults—and confronting the unsavoury realities of pirate life—is a tough brief.
While I might have wanted more, the National Maritime Museum does a solid job of working within those parameters to create something both entertaining and informative. X marks the spot—if you can to Greenwich before the show closes on 4 January 2026.
The middle section tackles what’s come to be known as the Golden Age of Piracy. This is the source material for the fairy tale: mostly poor white European men seizing opportunities otherwise impossible for their social class, operating largely in the Caribbean (though a few have cracking good stories in the Indian Ocean), and mostly confined to the brief window between 1650 and 1730. The mythologising started early. Captain Johnson published his A General History of the Pyrates in 1724, a compendium of dramatic, often salacious biographies. It was an immediate bestseller and remains, along with a similar book by the writer Exquemelin, “the Bible” of pirate lore. There’s an original copy in the exhibition.
There’s a visually lush recreation of a captain’s cabin that helps you understand the details of a pirate’s working life, an impressive row of weapons and flags, and a painful-looking cage that drives home how bad things got when the law caught up. But I was surprised there wasn’t more—particularly on personalities.
We’re missing my favourite pirate of all time: Henry Avery. Supposedly so persuasive, he convinced his crew to get in one boat while he and the treasure got in another, setting off for the coast of Ireland where they would divide the spoils. He disappeared with the loot. Most of his men were picked up, tried and executed. Avery is one of the great mysteries of history—rumoured to have reinvented himself as an English squire. One of the works of historical fiction I’d like to write is about his children discovering the truth, and how that unravels their lives.
We also don’t get nearly enough of Henry Morgan, the man who went from pirate to governor and conducted one of the most thrilling attacks against the Spanish of all time. There were a few panels on famous names, but not nearly enough for my taste. I would also have liked much more on pirate lifestyle. I might have missed it, but I didn’t see anything on the rise of Port Royal as a pirate capital—surely a model of what now lies underwater thanks to an earthquake would have been in order.
There are no model ships in this section, and little overall on pirate sailing technique or why they favoured certain vessels. Given the number of pirate-themed video games in the world, it’s a missed opportunity not to include an interactive game to demonstrate strategies for attacking much larger prey … perhaps sponsored by one of the game makers.
I found the final section on global piracy the most interesting—both because the territory was less familiar and because there was simply more to look at. There’s a particularly impressive ship model, a gorgeous table centrepiece celebrating victory over sea bandits, and lots of dramatic 19th-century paintings. That century seems to offer a much stronger visual record. This section explores the Barbary Corsairs, who were a thorn in European sides for centuries. (The curators resisted linking the historic trend to today’s migration patterns across the Mediterranean. I think that could have been fascinating, but dangerous.)
Forget another tired instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I want to see a film about Zheng Yi Sao, the Chinese pirate queen who built a fleet of 1,800 ships and 80,000 men to terrorise Asian seas. She was so successful, the Chinese government had to buy her off—including a pardon—which allowed her to retire and become one of the early leaders of Macau’s gambling industry.
The exhibition ends with a digital heat map showing where modern piracy occurs today—a sobering reminder that real pirates are still out there, and they’re not lovable rogues.
The curators of this show faced challenges well beyond walking the proverbial plank. This is a topic for which there simply isn’t that much surviving material. Pirates didn’t leave a lot behind, and even the most dedicated fans have a limit to the number of battered cutlasses they can examine with interest. Enhancing the record with models and digital interaction takes cash, and doing too much of it risks intellectual snobs accusing the show of drifting from education to entertainment. Plus, with a topic like this, you know you’ll be flooded with children. Balancing fun for them with real depth for adults—and confronting the unsavoury realities of pirate life—is a tough brief.
While I might have wanted more, the National Maritime Museum does a solid job of working within those parameters to create something both entertaining and informative. X marks the spot—if you can to Greenwich before the show closes on 4 January 2026.
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