I’m currently reading Louisa May Alcott’s 1886 novel Jo’s Boys and a character pretending to be a pirate says “Avast me hearties!”
This is by no means shocking, but it has me curious about the origins of what we consider stock pirate lingo. I hadn’t previously thought about it, but if you asked me a week ago where that phrase comes from I might’ve guessed that it was a movie reference made popular by cartoons and TV. So it’s sort of surprising to me to hear someone using it exactly as we do today, like a generally understood cultural reference point, in 1886. Does anyone happen to have an idea how phrases like that came to be directly associated with pirates in the public consciousness?
This is a great question and to answer it, we must first look at where these sayings first arose from.
From the 16th century onwards, England was a piratical power regularly raiding the Spanish main. Many of these crews (called Privateers when they had letters of Mark from the Queen) were full of men from the coastal ports of the South West- perhaps the most popular for the 6th-17th centuries being Bristol in the West Country.
The Bristolian dialect is a broad one, where h's are regularly dropped, vowels elongated and grammar often not misused. Let's look at this phrase to see what I mean:
'Avast me hearties' can be translated as 'ahead my dears!' with 'avast' being an old word for 'ahead', the 'me' being the wrong pronoun for 'my', whilst 'hearties' was (and still is) affectionate slang for a person dear to you.
These crews that pirated in the Spanish main were also (in certain circumstances) perfectly legal crews and often had worked in or would later work in the royal navy. As crews spent many months at sea together, lingo and 'sailor cant' would be passed around. This is turn would spread when the crews returned to port - often in areas where they were not initially from.
Hence, to much of the public these phrases and expressions (which would seem commonplace aboard the ships and in the coastal towns of England) would take on a pirate-esque character when heard from crews on shore leave. From there, the image of the pirate, speaking a special 'Pirate Cant' was spread.
An interesting sidenote is that much of this vocabulary has taken a natural place in (particularly British) English.
Expressions such as 'not enough room to swing a cat' and words like 'toerag' and 'mate' have all come into common usage - though their origins lie in the ships and crews of the 16th centuries onwards.