A Short Life and Merry: Pirates of New England

1 April 2008 through 31 October 2008

Art Museum

 Due to popular demand, Our Pirates of new England Exhibit will re-open for 2008, bigger and better than ever!

  Pirates may seem like an exotic subject for a museum exhibit, especially one in New England. Most people associate the very word “pirate” with the warm waters, tropical beaches and islands of the Caribbean. Few would associate pirates with peaceful Jamestown, Rhode Island (where a West Indies Buccaneer found retirement) or the bustling streets of downtown Boston (where the notorious Captain William Kidd was arrested). Yet as the exhibit A Short Life and Merry: Pirates of New England will show, this corner of the North Atlantic has as rich a pirate history as any other part of the world. And it was New England that played the pivotal role in creating the popular image of pirates as we know it today.

Pirates are sailing on a surge of popularity these days. Blockbuster movies are making millions of dollars. Bookstores are filled with dozens of fiction and non-fiction titles. The New York Times has run articles on skull and cross bones appearing as fashionable clothing statements; making the Jolly Roger the equivalent of the yellow Smiley Face of the 1970s. This fascination is nothing new and certainly not recent. Pirates have been fascinating people for more than three centuries. Their stories were published as first hand accounts in books and ballads, pamphlets and broadsides while they still sailed during the Golden Age of Piracy from 1690 to 1730. Tales of pirates, either sailing out of New England or printed (and re-printed) by New England, provided the source material for later fictional writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Raphael Sabatini, and for artists like Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth.

A Short Life and Merry: Pirates of New England explores how pirates were transformed from welcomed mariners bringing in rare goods and hard currency, to criminals of Puritan execution sermons and perennially reprinted compilations of their exploits, to the fictional characters of literature, plays and swashbuckling movies. The reality of New England’s historical pirates will be explored through paintings by N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle and objects like a swivel gun, ship models and items used in the courtroom during the prosecution of pirates. Visitors will also be able to experience what it was like to live on a pirate ship, smell some goods that pirates seized (like sandalwood and nutmeg), listen to songs about pirates, watch some old pirate movie clips and touch a genuine “piece of eight” coin. The true stories of New England pirates like Captain Ned Low, a vicious man who despite his cruelty never forgot a daughter left behind in Boston, or William Mayes who was hunted by Captain Kidd in the Indian Ocean but managed to take over the family business of operating a tavern in Newport—a tavern still open for business-will be told. It’s the lasting fascination with pirates, from seventeenth-century Boston to today’s casual appearance of the once-feared Jolly Roger on clothing, toys, and party kits that’s the subject of this year’s exhibit, A Short Life and Merry: Pirates of New England.