An exceptionally uncommon artefact, a tattered, century previous piece of blue cotton no greater 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 determine 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 will probably be included in Pirates, a significant exhibition opening in March 2025.
The marginally wonky batik dyed characters and low-cost cotton—most likely imported from Lancashire, Blyth says—counsel the flag was hand-crafted. It claims to signify Li Jishen, then commander-in-chief of China’s Guangdong Military. In 1926 the pirates crusing beneath the flag threatened one ship too many, and have been captured by the British HMS Nessus off the coast of Southern China.
The pirates have 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 exhibits 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 bit 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 photographs or proof of sword slashes.
The exhibition will demolish cherished myths about pirates, together with strolling the plank and maps of buried treasure. It would 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 comfy 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 Normal Historical past of Pirates in 1724. Blyth believes the “Captain” to have been a bankrupt London printer, who received 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 is going to search to signify the brutal actuality behind the romance. As Blyth says, “these have been horrible folks”, and most got here to violent ends.
Nonetheless, in 1690, one Henry Avery captured a Mughal treasure ship filled with 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
