18th Century Pirate’s Jolly Roger in Portsmouth, England

The National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth displays a genuine Jolly Roger, captured from pirates off the North African coast in 1790 by Admiral Richard Curry. Surviving pirate flags are almost unheard of anywhere in the world, since they were cheap, disposable items never meant to outlast the voyage, let alone two and a half centuries. Only two or three historically authentic, preserved pirate flags are widely known to exist in the world today, including this example in Portsmouth.

Most of what historians know about pirate flag design comes secondhand, from court records and books like Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 A General History of the Pyrates  which makes an actual surviving example one of the few pieces of primary evidence for how pirates really signalled and terrorised at sea.

The flag most people picture – black background, white skull and crossbones – was not the only standard. Early Jolly Rogers were typically dyed blood red. This colour was chosen deliberately to signal “no quarter will be given” if the crew did not surrender immediately, choosing to kill instead of capture their opponents.

Even the skull-and-crossbones motif has a bureaucratic origin, borrowed from the symbol used in ships’ logs to mark a death on board. The story of the flag doesn’t end in the 18th century: Royal Navy submarine crews adopted the Jolly Roger themselves from WWI onward, turning Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson’s insult in 1914 – that submarine warfare was “underhanded” and fit only for pirates – into a badge of pride, hand-sewing symbols onto their own flags to record successful wartime patrols.