An exceptionally uncommon artefact, a tattered, century previous piece of blue cotton no larger than a pillow case, is being conserved within the laboratories of the Nationwide Maritime Museum in Greenwich in order that it may be exhibited for the primary time subsequent spring. Chinese language characters establish the textile as a pirate ship’s false colors, a flag purporting to be that of a military commander, flown to deceive an approaching vessel till it was shut sufficient to assault.
“The survival of any materials genuinely related to piracy is astonishingly uncommon,” says Robert Blyth, senior curator of world historical past on the Nationwide Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the place the flag can be included in Pirates, a serious exhibition opening in March 2025.
The marginally wonky batik dyed characters and low cost cotton—in all probability imported from Lancashire, Blyth says—counsel the flag was handmade. It claims to signify Li Jishen, then commander-in-chief of China’s Guangdong Military. In 1926 the pirates crusing underneath the flag threatened one ship too many, and had been captured by the British HMS Nessus off the coast of Southern China.
The pirates had been handed over to the Chinese language authorities and summarily decapitated on shore, however Lieutenant J A H Hunter introduced the flag again to Britain as a memento. He saved it for the remainder of his life.
The newly-conserved textile onsists of two flags on the identical hoist. The smaller higher one reveals the Kuomintang white solar in a blue sky design.
© Nationwide Maritime Museum
Hunter’s widow introduced the flag to the museum in 1984. Nonetheless, it was too fragile to show till textile conservator Aisling Macken started her current work, attaching the disintegrating cotton with close to invisible stitches to a chunk of high-quality silk specifically dyed to match. The article seems to have been broken by wind and salt water—Macken has discovered no charring from pictures or proof of sword slashes.
The exhibition will demolish cherished myths about pirates, together with strolling the plank and maps of buried treasure. It should additionally reveal that some saved disappointingly pragmatic guidelines on board—Bartholomew Roberts, higher often known as Black Bart, insisted on lights out by 8pm. Blyth doesn’t imagine in tales of ladies pirates disguised undetectably as males both. There have been ladies, however he believes they wore snug working garments, similar to the boys.
A permanent glamour has been hooked up to pirates’ tales, endlessly repeated with ever extra gory particulars since Captain Charles Johnson revealed Basic Historical past of Pirates in 1724. Blyth believes the “Captain” to have been a bankrupt London printer, who bought no additional to sea than the banks of the Thames.
The exhibition will retell these tales with loans from worldwide collections, and with many objects leaving the museum’s personal shops for the primary time. Nonetheless, it should search to signify the brutal actuality behind the romance. As Blyth says, “these had been horrible individuals”, and most got here to violent ends.
Nonetheless, in 1690, one Henry Avery captured a Mughal treasure ship full of gold within the Indian Ocean, and was by no means heard of once more. “The cargo was valued at £600,000 then, someplace north of £100 million as we speak,” Blyth says. “Fairly a helpful retirement fund.”
Pirates, Nationwide Maritime Museum, from March 2025
