Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (2 page)

T
his book attempts to answer little mysteries of everyday life, tackling subjects ranging from bottle necks to vultures, medicine balls to barbecues, and yes, parrots and pirates. Our goal is simple. To make all Imponderables walk the plank so that we may live in a world free from the nagging conundrums that plague our everyday life. The trouble is that as soon as one Imponderable is vanquished, more mysteries smack us in the face.

We’re here for you. Almost all of the Imponderables in our eleven books come from readers, and we offer a free, autographed copy if you are the first person to pose an Imponderable we answer in a book.

You might have noticed that this book is dedicated to our readers. Your ideas are the lifeblood of our enterprise. We identified five readers by name, but we could have just as well cited Dallas Brozik, Debra Allen, Craig Kirkland, Fred Beeman, Ariel Godwin, Gail Dunson, the Itzcowitz family, or scores of other readers whose enthusiasm brightens up our inbox. Thank you readers—this one’s for you.

You may notice a few special features in
Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?
Just as some Web sites include a frequently asked questions section, we’ve devoted a section to Unimponderables, frequently asked irritating questions that may not fit the precise definition of Imponderables, but are posed to us frequently—incessantly, actually. And we’ve included an Updates section to spread the latest research about some Imponderables discussed in previous books.

You can’t enjoy the full
Imponderables
experience without visiting us on the Web at http://www.imponderables.com. In some cases, we’ve expanded our discussions in this book on the site, have photos to illustrate the text here, and have comments from readers letting us have it. If we have updates on any of the Imponderables in this book, we’ll post them online. The
Imponderables
Web site offers a master index of all the
Imponderables
books and a blog written by Dave Feldman—and absolutely no popup or banner ads.

In some discussions here, the book, we’ve added URLs of other Web sites, places to look for more information or illustrations. Web sites have a nasty habit of changing URLs, and we apologize in advance if you hit a dead end; all the links were accurate as of March 31, 2006.

We hope you dive into the ocean of Imponderables presented here and plunder freely. If you feel like you are drowning in Imponderables, we’ll try to throw you a life preserver—the back of this book will tell you how to get in touch with us. Until we meet again, may you always have some swash in your buckle: Ahoy, matey!

O
ur image of the colorful parrot astride the peg-legged, patch-eyed pirate might come from cartoons and comic strips, but the inspiration was surely Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, published in 1883. The beloved pet of cook Long John Silver, the parrot squawks “Pieces of eight!” with annoying regularity, and becomes the “watchbird” for the pirates after the miscreants take over the treasure hunters’ fort on the island.

Stevenson admitted that he borrowed the idea of the parrot from Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
. After being stranded on the island, Crusoe knocks a young parrot out of a tree. He teaches the bird to speak its own name (“Poll”), “the first word I ever heard spoken in the island by any mouth but my own.”

But did pirates really carry parrots on their ships in real life? The evidence suggests yes. Kenneth J. Kinkor, director of project research at the Expedition Whydah Sea-Lab and Learning Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, told
Imponderables
that “Many pirates kept parrots and other animals, as many sailors did.” Kinkor says that parrots were most common among the Central American pirates who spent some time ashore, logging in places not under direct control of Spain, such as Belize, that possessed large parrot populations.

David Cordingly, former curator of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England wrote in his book,
Under the Black Flag
,

Call us cynical, but pirates never struck us as the most sentimental of men. Perhaps some parrots were kept onboard as pets or mascots, but might there have been other, less humanitarian considerations? In the most-often cited contemporaneous account of the pirate world, Captain William Dampier’s
A Voyage Around the World
, written in 1697, Dampier claims that his band of privateers (pirates who are authorized by a country to commandeer ships sailing other states’ flags) ate parrots along with other birds, while cruising off of Venezuela.

No pirate would get fat from eating parrots, so our bet is that the primary purpose of carrying parrots was financial. In his research on pirates, David Cordingly found government records from Elizabethan times indicating that pirates gave parrots to well-placed employees of government officials, presumably as bribes.

But other folks were willing to put down hard cash to buy parrots. Dampier discusses his shipmates buying “an abundance” of cockatoos and parakeets, presumably to sell or trade. Pirates had a ready venue to sell their booty, for there were established bird markets in London and Paris in the eighteenth century, and exotic birds from the New World presumably were attractive purchases for the wealthy and status-seeking. Indeed, Cissie Fairchild wrote an entire book,
Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris,
about the bustling trade in exotic animals (the Sunday bird market still exists on the Île de la Cité in Paris).

Pirates might have admired the colors of parrots, been amused by their mimicking ability, and have been satiated by their succulence. But love? Only money can buy a pirate’s love.

Submitted by Tina Ritchie of Oceanside, California. Thanks also to Travis Cook of Cool Ridge, West Virginia.