I think you might be interested in this older thread on a similar issue. Adapted from what I had to say in it:
Not to go all Obi-Wan on you, but: Everything we know about history is true, from a certain point of view. That's because we're really dependent on the point of view of our sources. Because you're interested in piracy, you're probably already quite aware of the subaltern problem (PDF warning) but I threw that link in there for those who aren't; this MM from u/Commustar breaks it down a bit more. Basically the idea is that the history that's come down to us, in primary sources, is for the most part the history of the elite, told by other elites; there are very few primary sources from the point of view of an actual pirate, and a lot of those have to be weighed for their value based on the context in which they were created (transcripts of pirates' defense at trials, for example -- were these designed to be investigatory or to reinforce social order? How much can we trust what's given to us in the sources?) The subaltern problem asks whether people in history who were part of the underclass, which is the great majority of all people in history, can actually speak to us, whether we can actually know anything about their lives.
To illustrate this, because it's an example that's come up recently, I was having a Twitter conversation yesterday with another mod (which I won't reproduce here so as not to dox us) about the Taino, which is the name we use for the group of people that inhabited the area where Columbus first landed. The problem is that slave raids, disease and other genocidal acts on the part of the Spanish have wiped out not only the ethnic group, but their name -- Taino seems to have meant something like "friends," and was applied to ethnic groups across a lot of islands, but there's not any evidence that the Taino referred to themselves that way. So there's your problem summed up in a nutshell -- how do we write the history of the Taino when we don't even know how they self-identified? We can write what Columbus and his men described; but we can't know what their lives were REALLY ACTUALLY like.
To the question about "objective" history, the issue that we run into is that we just can't really write an objective history (but that's ok). Objectivity is literally impossible -- we are biased by who we are, what languages we speak, what sources we have access to, what our theoretical orientation and biases are. But the good news is that if we accept that, and strive not for objectivity but fairness and accuracy to the best of our abilities, we can still write good history.
To illustrate this, we could look at the historiography of the Battle of Midway. The authoritative account for many years was Prange's Miracle at Midway, which cemented in the American imagination the idea that American dive-bombers struck Japanese carriers loaded with planes, five minutes from taking off for a strike that would doom the American navy. Prange based his account largely on what he learned from Fuchida Mitsuo, who not to put too fine a point on it, both spoke English and was a compulsive liar. (Prange did not speak Japanese and did not engage with Japanese sources, other than some veteran interviews in English.) It took until the late 1990s for Parshall and Tully, who spoke Japanese and were able to take deep dives into Japanese primary sources, to disprove many of the myths that have sprung up and been propagated in works that drew on Prange.
That's not to say that Prange was doing anything wrong -- just that his access to sources was incomplete, and thus he did not understand enough about the differences between Japanese and American carrier operations to know that his assumptions about how the Japanese would run their flight decks were leading him to incorrect assumptions about what options were available to Nagumo and his captains.
So the overall point I'm getting to is that our knowledge of the past is always incomplete. And that's ok, because we wouldn't have more jobs for historians if it were complete. Accepting that we don't know and can't know what history was actually like doesn't mean that nothing is real and truth is a lie (although we all go through that phase in grad school), but it does mean that we can accept that there are multiple versions of any historical event that can be true, or at least truthy.
From a different reply ITT:
There are objective historical facts in each narrative -- the date of the attack, the names of the aircraft carriers, the types of aircraft they carried -- but the books are concerned with a different level of narrative, which is to say why the battle happened as it did, and how else it might have turned out.
The difference between what Prange and what Parshall and Tully were writing is rooted in the different level of access to sources that they had -- that doesn't make Prange's history unethical, but it brings up the point that what we think of as "objective truth" may well be overturned in the future.
Finding new ways to access that information is awesome, and it doesn't necessarily have to be as "simple" as learning the language and searching the other side -- you can look at e.g. Barbara Hanawalt's groundbreaking The Ties that Bound, in which she used a deep study of about 3,000 coroners' reports to understand the context in which people died (and thus how they lived) in East Anglia, but we simply don't know whether those coroners' reports are factual, how complete they are, how the investigations would have been influenced by people keeping things into our out of the record, etc. Some of the claims they make are supposed by archaeology, some are not, some are unclear. We can use sources to write the best possible version of history available to us at the present time, but not necessarily What Actually Happened. We may well find more data in the future that overturns that narrative.
We can say it's an objective truth ^using ^one ^system ^of ^dating that Waterloo happened on 18 June 1815, and that Napoleon was routed; but you're not going to find an "objective" summary decision on whether the Emperor's hemorrhoids, or Ney committing his cavalry at the wrong time, or Blucher's arrival, or Wellington's stubbornness, was the key factor in the victory. Similarly, we can say "objectively" that the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in early August 1945; but there are vigorous and ongoing disagreements as to the relative weight of the atomic bombings, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, and the overall war-weariness of the Japanese empire, and which of those led to the Japanese surrender.