Lisa Briggs was a third-year undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh when she made her greatest discovery: underwater archeology.
“I was an archaeologist on land for several years before I even discovered that underwater archaeology was a thing,” says Briggs, who will be appearing at Werklund Centre Nov. 1 and 2 with her National Geographic Live presentation of A Pirate’s Life.
Briggs explores the golden age of pirates, using the recovery of ancient artifacts from undersea to piece together a story about how pirates shaped ancient cities.
But before there was any of that, there was a student smitten by Indiana Jones movies –– until she found out about the possibilities of underwater exploration, which comes with a whole separate set of complications Indy never had to deal with in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“I went to learn how to dive in the Red Sea in Egypt,” Briggs says, “and on my first-ever scuba dive –– the first time I ever breathed underwater –– the instructor was taking me to this [underwater exploration] site where everyone else was just looking at the beautiful coral in the Red Sea, but [then] she said, ‘Oh, there’s these ancient Roman amphorae underwater on this site. Do you want to go see them?’”
“So on my first-ever dive [of my life], I saw a 2,000-year-old underwater archaeological site, and I’ll tell you what: it just took my breath away.”
“Which –– when you’re breathing underwater –– you don’t really want to have happen,” she adds, “but I quickly recovered and got to see these beautiful amphora, which were the big clay jars people would use to transport things like wine or olive oil in the ancient world –– but these amphora –– which I had seen thousands of on land in museums and other archaeological sites –– underwater, they’re covered in coral, and sponges and little tropical fish are swimming in and out of them.
“And it was at that moment –– the third year of my four-year undergraduate degree –– I made a decision and said, ‘That’s it. I want to do underwater archaeology as opposed to archaeology on land.’”
In her presentation, one of the periods Briggs explores is the late 17th and early 18th century, which turns out to have been prime time for pirates.
“It runs from about the 1670s up until about the death of Blackbeard in 1718 or maybe the 1720s at a stretch,” she says.
“The golden age of piracy really focused on the Caribbean and the Atlantic seaboard and the Indian Ocean,” she says. “This was really as a result not only of the age of exploration but also a series of basically early versions of a world war, [like] the War of Spanish Succession, for example, where you had huge amounts of treasure leaving Central and South America and crossing the Atlantic to come to Europe.
“So the pickings for pirates were thick and fast at that time,” she adds.
“In the same vein, perhaps the most successful pirate of all time, Henry Avery, who we talk about in my talk, plied his trade around the Indian Ocean, so there you had vast treasure ships coming over from India to Portugal and back and forth from India to the east coast of Africa –– there were basically just a lot of opportunities for pirates to disrupt this international trade.”
It wasn’t always about plundering gold: in the case of Blackbeard, who blockaded the harbour in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1718 until his demands were met for a ransom that consisted of medicine for his ailing crew.
“It was really surprising,” Briggs says, “[because]unlike what we think of in terms of goods a pirate was after –– casks of rum or gold coins or emeralds –– all they wanted was a chest of medicine!
“It’s one of those fascinating intersections between the historical record –– because we know what he asked for –– from court depositions, from pirates who were amongst him, and then later, were captured and put on trial and subsequently hanged –– we compare these historical depositional court documents to the archaeological remains that I have personally found underwater, and that’s where history and archaeology really come together.
“It’s one of my favourite examples of an instance where we have historical records that can be compared to the archaeology itself.”
Briggs says the popular mythology of the marauding pirate was partly a creation of 17th-century media.
“Pirates were the first international celebrities,” she says. “But in order to make them famous, the people selling the broadsheets –– and this is in the very late 1600s and the early 1700s –– it was within their financial interest to make it sound as dramatic as possible, number one.
“So they would overinflate all of the drama associated with one commandeering a ship, number one; but then number two, it was also in their interest on some fundamental level to make these pirates relatable and make them someone you could relate to as an everyday person.
“While most of the people walking around on the streets –– let’s say in London in the early 1700s –– they weren’t wealthy people.
“And so if they heard about a case, the pirate Henry Avery, for example, commandeering a ship out in the Indian Ocean and becoming one of the world’s richest men overnight, then his celebrity was really being celebrated by those common people.
“A lot of these broadsheets and the way they were depicting the exploits of the pirates was in really a frankly positive light.
“They were kind of the good guys in these stories at the time.”
Pirates didn’t start out as good guys, however.
“A lot of my work focuses on ancient pirates of the Mediterranean as well,” Briggs adds, “but in almost every instance, the ancient pirates of the Mediterranean were not talked about in a positive light at all.
“They actually talk about pirates a lot in The Odyssey because throughout the book…there’s a device that was used where every time you meet someone, you would say, “Who are you, where are you from? What are your parents’ names?”
“Because the world was very small back then,” she adds, “so there was a chance if somebody said they were from the Island of Rhodes in Greece you might be like, oh, my uncle's friend's brother lived in Rhodes! Maybe I know your parents –– or maybe they do. And that was a way they could connect.
“But pirates were people that didn’t have a strong familial connection to any [ancient Greek] island,” she adds.
“They were sort of scurrilous people who had no hometown to anchor themselves to –– and so in almost every instance, when people talk about pirates in the ancient world, it almost always seems very negative where they came in and absolutely disrupted the tiny bits of precious order that had been established in the world.”
And while the word a lot of people might think of if they only got one word to describe a pirate’s life is ‘lawless’, Briggs points out that the golden age of piracy actually forged a written code of rights.
“It gave equal voting rights to all of the common pirates; it established a separation of powers between the captain and the quartermaster and the crew so that the captain could not just be a tyrannical leader on the ship.
“The pirate code was written down and kept aboard the ship on all vessels for a few decades before the [U.S.] Declaration of Independence was even written,” she says, “so in many ways, the pirate code kind of is a version of a proto-democracy in the Caribbean.
“If you think about it, these people [pirates] couldn’t really rely on anyone else to represent them.”
“Pirates were people who were sort of fed up with the current system they had,” she said. “In many instances, they had been mutinous on a past crew and sailed on like a royal vessel from England. A lot of them had deserted crews or been mutinous or overthrown evil, overbearing captains on those ships, then they took this opportunity to in many ways create their own society where they played by their own rules, and I think made a big effort to ensure that people had equal representation and were treated more fairly than they had been.”
And as far as how her adult life was originally inspired by Indiana Jones movies –– her phone ringer is still the theme song from Raiders of the Lost Ark –– she says it all led to the right destination, even if the job of being an underwater archaeologist isn’t terribly lucrative or glamorous.
“It’s a very difficult job,” she said. “We’re not paid the way that tech bros or bankers are, so sometimes I say that Steven Spielberg has a lot to answer for to archaeologists –– but I kid, because it’s the best job in the world!
“I wouldn't do anything else.”
A Pirate's Life with Lisa Briggs comes to the Jack Singer Concert Hall on November 1 & 2 at Werklund Centre. Tickets available now.