Avast! It's Pirates At The National Maritime Museum

Get ye to Greenwich for a new exhibition about pirates.

Long-John Silver, Jack Sparrow, Pugwash... the list of fictional pirates is as long as your arm (assuming you're not Captain Hook). The National Maritime Museum's latest exhibition sails at ramming speed into the pop-cultural side of pirates, before navigating into something altogether more interesting.

It really is a show of two halves. The opening section "The Pirate Image" explore the portrayal of piracy in novels, films, theatre and beyond. Treasure Island is, of course, the ur-text in this regard. Long-John Silver and his mates set the benchmark for our modern image of the swashbuckler. Not immediately, though. The first edition of Treasure Island contained no illustrations. It was only in later prints and movie versions that the patch-wearing Yaaarsters truly emerged, fuelled by the lesser-known Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates (1921).

This first section is a bit of a nostalgia-fest, with original illustrations from Captain Pugwash, costumes from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and a motley crew of film and theatre posters. We occasionally sail into unexpected waters. Vivienne Westwood's 1981 'Pirate' collection, for example, shows how even the world of fashion has drawn inspiration from the aquatic plunderers. Best of all — for people of a certain generation — is the cabinet of early computer games featuring pirates. Ah, Monkey Island. (Sadly, no photography allowed of those.)

The exhibition then transitions into your actual pirates. Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd... all of them led complicated lives and spent only the shortest of times engaged in actual piracy. It's all diverting stuff, especially the section on the links between piracy and the slave trade. But the nature of the subject means we have few artefacts to consider, other than representative cutlasses, pistols and the like.

Things get back on an even keel when we turn to starboard and enter the Global Pirates section. Here we're reminded that there are plenty more pirates in the sea than the jolly-roger-yarrr-splice-the-mainbrace fellows of the Caribbean. This section has some big stories to tell, including the scourge of Barbary pirates, the bombardment of Algiers, and an unlikely Anglo-Chinese fleet that saw off Asian pirates in the mid-19th century. Any of these could be an exhibition in its own right.

If ye come seeking treasure, then you might be a little disappointed from an exhibition that presents many intriguing stories, yet never quite hits the 'wow' moment. Like a pirate crew of legend, it has plenty of hooks, but patchy vision. Perhaps that's a bit unfair, though. The final section on global piracy revealed a 50-fathom gap in my knowledge that I now want to plug. I left, eager to find out more, and that is surely the hallmark of a shipshape exhibition.

Pirates is at National Maritime Museum in Greenwich 29 March 2025-4 January 2026. Adults £15, children £7.50. Various concessions available.