Why Are We Talking Like Pirates Today? Could It Be Walt?

Posted on Mon, 09/19/2011 - 06:00

Avast there, ya bilge rats! Today marks the 16th anniversary of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but there be tales behind the origins of that day that steer a course to our old shipmate Walt Disney, yarns that ye might not have heard! 

International Talk Like a Pirate Day (ITLAPD) is a parody holiday created in 1995 by John Baur (Ol’ Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap’n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon, who proclaimed September 19th each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate. For example, an observer of this holiday would greet friends not with “Hello,” but with “Ahoy, matey!” The holiday, and its observance, springs from a romanticized view of the Golden Age of Piracy.

Historians of Walt Disney feel a bit proprietary on this day, since he so directly influenced the late 20th Century public perception of pirates through two major projects.

The first is the 1950 live-action film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which featured British actor Robert Newton as what Newsday writer Frank Lovece calls “a pirate’s pirate—the archetype for all who came after. The complex antagonist and father-figure of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 children’s novel Treasure Island has nearly all the accoutrements we associate with pirates today: The wooden ‘peg leg,’ a crude prosthetic of the time. A buried treasure chest. The pirate’s parrot. Even the stereotypical pirate sea shanty, ‘Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.’ Everything but the eye patch and the hook. And you know how pirates growl ‘Yarrrr?’ That originated with British actor Robert Newton—honored every September 19 on International Talk Like a Pirate Day—as Long John Silver in the Disney film Treasure Island (1950).”

Of course, the iconic 1967 Disneyland attraction Pirates of the Caribbean has carried along a swashbuckling tradition that the movies did not—until a series of feature films inspired by the attraction began a new pop-culture tradition…but with roots in a familiar source. In the audio commentary on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean DVD, Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski discuss Robert Newton’s influence on their film:

Verbinski:…[I]t was very important to me to cast as many Brits as possible because in looking at the genre and saying “Why hasn’t it worked?” I found a lot of sort of dialect that felt like it wasn’t really that Robert Louis Stevenson, you know, [in pirate voice] “The black spot;” you know, it didn’t have any of that kind of pirate flavor that was in…Treasure Island and all that stuff. It seemed to be that stuff kinda went away in some way. And these guys, you know [pirate voice] “Here ‘tis!” And it was nice that, you know, if you look at the movie, Barbossa [Geoffrey Rush] is the only one really doing the hard “R.”

Depp: Yeah, the “Arrrr!”

Verbinski: Yeah, the Robert Newton sort of...

Depp: Yeah, which is great. I think it’s nice that—It’s a nice homage, I mean, it’s a nice salute, you know, back to that—and to the genre… 

So there ya be, mateys, and here’s hopin’ for fair winds and following seas, and long may your big jib draw!