Welcome to the Deep Dive. I am so glad you're
here today because we have a truly wild mission
ahead of us. We really do. Yeah. I want you to
picture the ultimate blockbuster action movie
about a pirate. You've got high stakes duels.
daring escapes from, you know, subterranean dungeons,
hidden treasure, and this redemption arc that
just completely defies belief. Right. Today,
we're looking at the life of a 1670s Scottish
Barbadian buccaneer by the name of Redlegs Greaves.
And our source material for this entire journey
is a single, utterly fascinating encyclopedic
entry detailing his life. Just the one entry.
Just the one. And it is packed with moments that
will absolutely make your jaw drop. But as we're
going to see, this isn't It isn't just a simple
biography. No, it really is a remarkable narrative.
But our goal today isn't just to recount a swashbuckling
adventure for the sake of entertainment as incredibly
fun as that might be. Oh, absolutely. We're really
here to dissect the anatomy of a legend. We want
to explore what a story like the life of Redlegs
Greaves actually reveals about history. You know,
how historical records are kept and the incredible
power of myth -making. Because the line between
a rock -solid historical fact and a compelling
piece of fiction is often a lot blurrier than
you might think. Okay, let's unpack this. Because
we really have to start at the very beginning.
which is the exceptionally harsh origins of a
buccaneer. Right, in Barbados. Exactly. Kreese
was born in Barbados in 1649. And right off the
bat, I want to ask about that nickname, Redlegs.
Yeah, it sounds pretty intense. Right. Because
when you hear a pirate name like that, you immediately
assume it's something gruesome. Like he earned
it by wading through the blood of his enemies
or something. But looking at our source material,
that is not the case at all, is it? Not at all,
actually. Redlegs was just a historical term
used to refer to a specific class of poor white
people living in colonial Barbados. Wow. OK.
Yeah. And to understand how his family ended
up in that specific social class in the Caribbean.
We have to look back across the Atlantic at a
deeply turbulent time in British history. The
English Civil War era. Precisely. Greaves' parents
were sent into servitude in Barbados after being
tried for treason. This happened during the Wars
of the Three Kingdoms, which was this massive,
incredibly bloody series of conflicts that tore
through England, Scotland, and Ireland in the
mid -17th century. I think a lot of people might
be vaguely familiar with Oliver Cromwell and
the English Civil War. But how did Greaves' parents
fit into that massive conflict? The source notes
they were caught up in this as royalists and
covenanters. OK. To put it simply for anyone
who isn't a 17th century political historian,
royalists were those loyal to the king, Charles
I. And Covenanters were essentially a Scottish
Presbyterian movement fighting for their specific
religious and political rights. Got it. Ultimately,
they were up against Cromwell's parliamentarian
forces. And when they ended up on the losing
side, they faced the very brutal reality of the
era. Like many others who were deemed rebels
or traitors, they were exiled across the ocean
and forced into indentured servitude in the Caribbean
colonies. Imagine that transition. You're fighting
a political and religious war in Scotland, and
suddenly you are shipped off to the blistering
heat of Barbados as an indentured servant. It's
a staggering shift. So Greaves is born into this
incredibly difficult situation in 1649, just
a short time after his parents arrive. And the
tragedy really just compounds from there. It
does. As a boy, Greaves is the servant of a kindly
master. But then in a devastatingly short span
of time, both his parents and that kindly master
die. Leaving him totally alone. Right. You have
this newly orphaned teenager who is suddenly
completely alone in the world, and he gets sold
off to another master. Only this time, the man
who buys him is notoriously violent. The guy
frequently beats him. It is a completely brutal,
hopeless adolescence. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, you can see how perfectly this
origin story functions on a psychological level.
Think about how it frames Greaves for you, the
audience. He isn't some greedy aristocrat who
got bored and went looking for violent adventure.
He isn't someone who chose a life of crime out
of innate malice or a desire to hurt people.
He is the ultimate, deeply sympathetic underdog.
The victim of circumstance. Exactly. He's born
into servitude because of distant political wars
he had nothing to do with. orphaned at a young
age, and then systematically abused. Psychologically,
this primes you to completely root for him. When
he inevitably breaks the law just to survive,
you are already firmly on his side. You definitely
are. Because his breaking point is just incredibly
dramatic. Yeah. We are talking out of the frying
pan and into the pirate ship. Literally. Greaves
realizes he is simply not going to survive this
violent master, so he makes a desperate run for
it. He attempts to escape his servitude by swimming
across Carlisle Bay. Which is no small feat.
Right. I want you to just picture this young
guy, desperate, exhausted, swimming through the
dark water, looking for absolutely any way out
of a life of torture. He manages to reach a ship
that is preparing to leave Barbados, and he stows
away. He assumes, naturally, that this is a standard
merchant vessel on its way to some far -off port
where he can finally start a normal life. But
in a narrative constructed like this one, things
are never quite that simple. Exactly the opposite.
The twist is that it wasn't a merchant ship at
all. He had accidentally stowed away on a pirate
ship. Of course he did. And not just any run
-of -the -mill pirate ship. This vessel was commanded
by the notorious Captain Hawkins. Tell us a bit
about Hawkins, because he sounds absolutely terrifying.
He really is the ultimate antagonist. If you
look at the accounts of Captain Hawkins, they
paint a picture of a guy who didn't just steal.
He went out of his way to inflict pain. Right.
He was known throughout the Caribbean as an unusually
cruel pirate. He was highly successful in capturing
rich prizes, which is really the only reason
his crew followed him. But they also deeply feared
him. He tortured people, right? He regularly
tortured his captives. Yes. With a horrific and
specific emphasis on torturing women, actually.
So our sympathetic underdog, Greaves, is discovered
hiding on board this floating nightmare. He is
dragged out and thrown in front of this terrifying,
bloodthirsty captain. And the choice he is given
is just so incredibly cinematic. It really is.
Our source material has this highly specific
quote about the moment. It says, Greaves was
offered the ship's articles on a platter along
with a pistol. Basically, sign away your soul
to my pirate crew or I blow your brains out right
here on the deck. It is the ultimate coerced
choice. He's forced into piracy under the direct
and immediate threat of death. He has absolutely
no agency in becoming a criminal. So he signs.
And it turns out. Greaves actually shows a lot
of promise. He quickly gains a reputation among
the crew as a very capable, efficient sailor.
True. But he absolutely despises Captain Hawkins.
Understandably. He hates that he was forced into
this life. And more than anything, he vehemently
hates Hawkins' sheer brutality toward the prisoners
they capture. It is a ticking time bomb. How
does a guy who hates violence survive under a
captain who thrives on it? Well, that tension
inevitably boils over into a massive clash between
the two men. Now, the popular legend likes to
claim that they finally dueled because Greaves
bravely stepped in to physically stop the torture
of a prisoner. The classic hero moment. Right.
It makes for a great story. However, the encyclopedia
entry points out that realistically, it was more
likely because Greaves simply disobeyed orders
and Hawkins attacked him for the insubordinate.
That makes more sense. But whatever the exact
spark was that day, they fight. And Greaves ends
up killing Captain Hawkins. The crew, who we
already established lived in absolute terror
of Hawkins, doesn't avenge their captain. Instead,
they immediately elect Greaves to succeed him.
Here's where it gets really interesting. Greaves
doesn't just take over the ship and keep doing
business as usual. He completely rewrites the
ship's articles. the absolute code of conduct
for the crew. He essentially institutes a pirate
HR department. That is a great way to put it.
He institutes a radically reformed ethical version
of piracy. What? The new code he creates specifically
prohibits the mistreatment of prisoners. It explicitly
allows merchant captains to surrender peacefully
during a battle without any fear of being slaughtered
or tortured. And he completely bans his crew
from participating in any raids on poor coastal
villages. So he's an honorable thief. Exactly.
He sets himself up as an honorable captain stealing
only from those who can afford it and refusing
to shed unnecessary blood. I have to push back
on this a little bit, though. Wait, so he takes
over a ship full of hardened criminals, tells
them they can't torture people or raid vulnerable
towns anymore, and they just go along with it.
Does he actually pull off a successful raid under
these new rules without his crew turning on him?
He does, and it leads to what is arguably his
greatest success. The Margarita Island Raid around
1675. Off the coast of Venezuela. Right. Greaves
doesn't just attack a random lonely ship. He
goes after the local Spanish fleet. And the tactics
he uses are brilliant. He captures the Spanish
fleet, and then he turns the captured fleet's
own guns against the island's coastal defenses.
He successfully storms the town, takes a massive
haul of pearls and gold, and then... This is
the part that sounds completely contradictory
to every pirate story I've ever heard. The noble
pirate part. Yes. In true noble pirate fashion,
he just leaves. He doesn't burn the town down,
he doesn't harm the inhabitants, and he completely
forbids his crew from any further looting. He
gets his prize and sails away into the sunset.
It is the absolute finical of his career. He
achieves massive life -changing wealth without
compromising his newly established moral code,
which, naturally, gives him the means to retire
from the pirate life. Yes, the retirement. He
takes his gold and pearls and settles down in
Nevis to live out his days as a wealthy gentleman
farmer. It is the perfect peaceful ending for
our underdog. Until the past catches up with
him. Exactly. Despite his supposedly honorable
reputation, one of his former victims actually
recognizes him on the island. And this person
turns Greaves over to the authorities just to
collect the bounty reward. And you can imagine
the colonial authorities were not particularly
interested in his supposedly humane approach
to piracy. A pirate is a pirate. Oh, they showed
him absolutely zero leniency. He is put on trial,
found guilty of piracy, and the sentence is brutal.
He is condemned to hang in chains. A dark turn.
Very dark. So here... is our hero, locked in
a dark subterranean dungeon, just waiting for
the day of his execution. Seems completely hopeless,
but then an act of God. While he's in that dungeon,
a massive earthquake strikes and literally submerges
the town. How on earth does that happen? It's
an incredible, almost biblical intervention.
Now, as an analyst looking at the source material,
this is the moment where the variations in the
historical records start to really fracture.
Or the legend, rather. They start to show their
seams. What do you mean? The text notes significant
conflicting accounts about this miraculous earthquake.
Some stories claim this was the famous 1692 earthquake
and tidal wave that famously destroyed Port Royal,
Jamaica. Okay. But other accounts insist he was
imprisoned on Nevis and that Nevis suffered its
own earthquake and tidal wave in either 1680
or 1690. The dates and the locations blur significantly
depending on who is telling the story. But regardless
of which specific earthquake it was, the redemption
arc that follows is just beautiful. Greaves is
miraculously one of the few survivors of this
cataclysm. He manages to escape the ruined, flooded
prison and is eventually rescued at sea by a
passing whaling ship. A stroke of pure luck.
Out of pure gratitude for being saved, Greaves
joins the crew of that whaling ship. He works
his way up, and eventually he becomes a pirate
hunter. He uses his inside knowledge of the pirate
world to track down his former peers. He switches
sides entirely. He does. He actually earns a
full, official royal pardon for his efforts after
he captures a pirate ship that had been terrorizing
local whaling fleets. With his name finally cleared
by the crown, he retires once again, this time
to a plantation. He spends his later years known
as a beloved philanthropist, donating huge amounts
of his wealth to island charities and public
works, and eventually dies quietly of natural
causes. It is a flawless, deeply satisfying narrative.
It hits every single beat of the classic hero's
journey. It really does. It has everything you
could possibly want. You've got the tragedy,
the rise, the fall, the miraculous escape, and
the final redemption. Which brings us to the
ultimate bombshell for you, the listener. Because
despite everything we have just meticulously
discussed, the tragic origins in Barbados, the
cruel Captain Hawkins, the honorable pirate code,
the Margarita Island raid, the miraculous earthquake
escape, the philanthropy, Redlegs grieves almost
certainly now. never existed. Imagine finding
out your favorite historical hero was basically
just a movie character. That is the level of
shock we are dealing with here. He's completely
made up. Entirely fabricated. The encyclopedia
entry we are using as our source is very clear
on this. There are absolutely no period accounts
from the 1670s mentioning a pirate named Greaves.
None at all. None. There are no records of his
supposedly brilliant raid on Margarita Island
anywhere in the Spanish archives. His name does
not appear in any pirate trial records, which
were meticulously kept by colonial authorities.
And there are absolutely no historical documents
whatsoever confirming his birth in Barbados,
his royal pardon, or his death as a wealthy philanthropist.
Okay, wait. If there are zero primary sources,
where on earth did this incredibly detailed story
come from? How does a ghost get an encyclopedic
entry? What's fascinating here is tracing the
actual origin of the tale because it is a thoroughly
modern invention. The story of Redlegs Greaves
makes its very first appearance in history in
a 1923 book called In the Wake of the Buccaneers.
It was written by an author named A. Hyatt Verrill.
In that book, Verrill cites absolutely no sources
for the story. Now, Verrill did travel widely
in the West Indies, so it is conceivable he picked
up a highly embellished local folk tale. However,
the text notes that Verrill had a very strong
reputation among historians for fictionalizing
and outright inventing material just to make
his travel and history books more exciting for
the general public. But Verrill wasn't the only
one who wrote about Greaves, right? Because the
story doesn't become accepted history just from
one unreliable travel writer. Exactly. The story
spread because of what happened the very next
year. In 1924, an author named Philip Goss published
The Pirates Who's Who, which was a highly influential
encyclopedia of pirates. The Who's Who book.
Yes. And Goss simply repeated Verrill's story
of Greaves as if it were established historical
fact, completely failing to verify it. By putting
it in a serious sounding reference book, Goss
legitimized the myth for decades of future researchers.
But the timing is the real smoking gun here.
Verrill's book came out in 1923 and Goss's in
1924. Just two years prior, in 1922, the author
Raphael Sabatini published a massively popular
novel called Captain Blood. And Captain Blood
was pure, unadulterated fiction. It was a novel.
Completely. And our source text points out the
blatant, direct literary parallels. Let's look
at the beats of Sabatini's novel. The protagonist,
Peter Blood, is an honorable man who is wrongly
accused of treason during a rebellion. Sounding
familiar. Right. He is sent into slavery in the
Caribbean. He escapes his servitude during an
attack. He becomes a pirate captain, but a noble
one who treats prisoners humanely and refuses
to be cruel. And eventually he gets a royal pardon
and retires. That is just identical. Goss and
Verrill's supposedly historical description.
That is just wild. It's like a game of historical
telephone where the original message was just
a best -selling novel. What is crazy to me is
how this fictional character born out of the
1920s, just kept bleeding into real historical
texts all the way into the modern era. It really
did. Our source material mentions a much more
recent book by an author named Sean O 'Callaghan
called To Hell or Barbados. O 'Callaghan included
the story of Grease in his book as part of an
extensive nonfiction account of Scottish and
Irish prisoners who were exiled by Oliver Cromwell.
Yes. And we need to look at how that text was
received by the broader historical community.
Our source material notes that O 'Callaghan's
version of Greaves differs somewhat from the
older popular accounts, showing how the legend
continued to mutate. But more importantly, it
highlights that O 'Callaghan's book has been
widely criticized by historians for being historically
inaccurate. Specifically, the source references
a New York Times article debunking the book's
perpetuation of what is known as the Irish slave
myth. And we should note. Regardless of the modern
political debates surrounding that specific topic,
which our sources just note the existence of
rather than taking a stance on it, it is a textbook
example of how a fictional pirate got weaponized.
Exactly. It shows how it can support a broader
historical argument. An author used a made -up
character to add emotional weight to a historical
narrative. It just shows how deep the roots of
a good fake story can go. And Greaves wasn't
even the only one. Our source briefly lists a
whole crew of other likely fictional pirates
that somehow made their way into established
historical lore. Yes, there are quite a few.
We're talking names like William Lewis, John
Cornelius, Alexandra Bradaferrer, Charlotte de
Berry, Maria Lindsay, and Louis Le Goliff. This
wasn't just an isolated incident of one lazy
author. There was practically a whole cottage
industry in the early 20th century of injecting
fictional noble pirates into the historical record.
It really highlights a massive vulnerability
in how history was compiled and consumed 100
years ago. If a story sounded good enough and
it was printed in an authoritative looking book
like a who's who encyclopedia, subsequent historians
would just blindly cite it. Because it looked
official. Exactly. They wouldn't do the grueling
work of digging for the primary source documents,
which, in the case of Greaves, simply didn't
exist. So what does this all mean? We started
out today exploring what seemed to be one of
the most thrilling true stories of the Caribbean.
We followed an orphaned underdog born into servitude.
who makes a desperate swim to escape a violent
master, reluctantly joins a cruel pirate crew,
leads a mutiny against a monster. Establishes
a humane pirate code. Yes, establishes an incredibly
progressive and humane pirate code, pulls off
a brilliant and bloodless raid on a managed fleet,
survives a catastrophic earthquake by sheer luck,
and ultimately redeems himself as a pirate hunting
philanthropist. And we end up realizing that
it was almost entirely an early 20th century
work of fiction. Heavily inspired by a novel.
Passed off as fact to sell encyclopedias. Which
is exactly why this deep dive matters so much.
For anyone listening, this isn't just a fun debunking
of a pirate story. It is a masterclass in media
literacy, historiography, and critical thinking.
It reveals a profound psychological truth about
us. We love a good story. We do! We, as human
beings, deeply crave the archetype of the noble
rogue. We desperately want to believe that even
in the brutal, cutthroat, terrifying world of
17th century piracy, there were individuals who
op - Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And stay there
for nearly a century, simply because it tells
a story we so desperately want to believe is
true. It is the power of a good story completely
overriding the absence of facts. When the narrative
is that satisfying, people stop checking the
footnotes. Precisely. Next time you read a wildly
satisfying historical fact online, ask yourself,
with the explosion of AI -generated content,
deepfakes, and automated articles today, are
we currently generating in the red -legs greaves
of the 21st century? Are we seeding the internet
with perfectly crafted, entirely fictional narratives
that historians are going to have to painstakingly
untangle 100 years from now? Keep digging, keep
questioning those perfect stories, and we'll
see you on the next deep dive.