Object : Pieces of eight
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‘Pieces of eight!’

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man," was supposedly said by the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius Loyola, though it probably ranks among the most misquoted, misrepresented and abused quotations in the book. Still, there is a basic truth, in that something fixed firmly in the mind by that age is unlikely ever to go away.

Something certainly fixed early on in many minds is an association between pirates and pieces of eight – in fact it’s an association made by huge numbers of people who couldn’t tell you what pieces of eight actually were.

It’s all down to Robert Louis Stevenson, and his classic adventure story, Treasure Island. The pirate Long John Silver’s parrot squawks ‘Pieces of Eight!’ repeatedly, and thanks to film and TV versions - which might well be more familiar than the book itself – it probably ranks among the world’s first great catch-phrases. In the last decade, Pirates of the Caribbean has come along to bump the great age of pirates and their treasure back up into the top layers of popular culture.

‘Pieces of Eight’ is one of many names for the large silver coins of the king of Spain, a multiple of the basic Spanish denomination, the silver real: so a piece of 8-reales, peso de ocho reales, or peso. It is also the original silver dollar, a name that starts out as a place in the Czech Republic in the sixteenth century and ends as the currency of the modern USA.

Pieces of eight pretty much ruled the monetary world from the 1570s till the French Revolution, the main vehicle for the transfer across the globe of silver from the great mines in Mexico and Bolivia in Spain’s American empire. It was a coin that would be familiar in every part of the inhabited world.

Throughout this period only infinitesimal quantities of pieces of eight ever fell into pirate hands. The Spanish operated a highly successful system of security and transport, the threats to which came from organised enemy fleets, not rag-tag pirate crews. Most of their silver sailed around the world paying for wars, encouraging trade, changing the fates of empires. You cannot write a history – especially an economic history - of the early modern world without engaging with pieces of eight. Pirates of the Caribbean merely nibbled on the insignificant fringes of this world.

In fact, our idea of pirates is probably even more distorted than our idea of pieces of eight. Piracy is an ancient and deadly trade, bringing ruin and suffering to millions across the millennia of human history. It is still rife today, as we know from horror stories on the news. Yet the word summons up the very specific world of the early eighteenth century Caribbean and the lives of individuals like Blackbeard and Henry Morgan, who were fictionalized practically while they still lived.

You can move from the early accounts of Blackbeard to fully fictional creations like Long John Silver, then to Captain Hook and Jack Sparrow and hardly ever touch much reality on the journey. Yet it does make for an exciting buccaneering voyage.

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