Did Pirates Have Children?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disney’s Jake and the Neverland Pirates

 

 

 

Plenty of questions arise about pirates due to their ever growing popularity in film, media, and entertainment. As I learn more about pirates and compare the facts to what I’ve seen or watched, I became interested in knowing whether some aspects of these stories are true and which ones are fictional. One topic that interests me most is whether pirates had families, such as wives and/or children. 

Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean

The Adventures of Tin Tin

In films like Pirates of the Caribbean series and The Adventures of Tin Tin, both of which have been fairly recent films, there are characters who are either children of pirates or descendants of them. In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, Will Turner (played by Orlando Bloom) runs into his pirate father Bill Turner. It is also assumed that Will and Elizabeth, his lover (played by Keira Knightley), had a son together. Another example is in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides when Jack Sparrow discovers that Blackbeard has a daughter: Angelica. The last example I have is from Tin Tin. Tin Tin joins a man named Haddock on a treasure hunt to find a pirate ship called the Unicorn in which the captain was Haddock’s ancestor. With this in mind, my question is “Did Pirates Have Children?”

  

In the chapter A True Account of Three Notorious Pirates part 1 in Great Pirate Stories by Joseph Lewis French, Blackbeard is said to have had 14 wives. Did some of these women bare his children? Upon some research, I stumbled upon this website that claims that Blackbeard occasionally “shared” his wives with his crew. Could any of the children that came from these women, if there were any, be from the crew-members and told that they were Blackbeard’s? Or did the women who bared these children, in order to protect them, claim that they were not Blackbeard’s nor any other pirate’s? Hopefully as I continue my research I will find more about his lineage as well as other pirates’ lineage. http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/jun11_pirates.php 

 

The picture above is from last Halloween and those “Pirate Princesses” (as they like to call themselves) are my daughters. As a mother, I feel that this topic suits me well. My children are my biggest motivators so why not incorporate them into my research? 

 

-Mai