When William Kidd’s crew testified at his 1701 trial, none of them said “arrr” or called him “cap’n.” They used the ordinary nautical English of any sailor of the period, because that is what pirates actually spoke. The vivid “pirate speak” most people know today — the growled r’s, the “shiver me timbers,” the “yo-ho-ho” — is a 19th- and 20th-century invention laid over a much plainer historical reality.
No Special Pirate Language
Golden Age pirate crews were overwhelmingly former merchant sailors, naval deserters, and privateersmen. They spoke the Early Modern English of the ships they came from, sharing the same working vocabulary as the navy and merchant marine they preyed on. There was no separate pirate dialect, accent, or slang tied specifically to piracy as a profession — what set pirate speech apart from any other sailor’s was context, not vocabulary.
The Real Nautical Vocabulary
What pirates did use was genuine, well-attested seafaring language, much of it still in nautical use today. “Ahoy” and “avast” (an order to stop or pay attention) were standard shipboard commands by the 18th century. “Belay” meant to secure a line, and later came to mean “stop talking.” A “prize” was a captured ship or cargo; “booty” was the plunder taken from it and divided among the crew under the ship’s “articles” — the written contract that set shares, rules, and compensation for injury. The principle of “no purchase, no pay” meant a crew received nothing unless they took a prize. “Keelhaul” and “maroon” both named real, documented punishments, even though marooning was far more commonly threatened than carried out.
“Going on the Account”
One phrase genuinely belonged to piracy specifically: sailors who turned pirate were said to “go on the account,” recorded repeatedly in trial testimony and in Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724). The phrase cast piracy as a kind of freelance venture, working for a share of the take rather than a wage — on one’s own account, at one’s own risk, instead of the king’s or a merchant’s.
Where the Accent Actually Came From
The rolling “arrr” that now defines pirate speech has no basis in the historical record at all. It traces to a single performance: actor Robert Newton’s exaggerated West Country drawl as Long John Silver in Disney’s 1950 Treasure Island, a role he reprised so often it calcified into the default “pirate voice” of film and television.
Words Robert Louis Stevenson Invented
Several of the most iconic phrases came from fiction, not the forecastle. Robert Louis Stevenson coined “shiver me timbers” for Treasure Island (1883) as a mild oath of shock, and likely adapted “yo-ho-ho” from real sailors’ work chanteys like “yeo heave ho.” “Blow me down” has no documented use among actual pirates either. Stevenson’s novel, more than any trial transcript or ship’s log, is responsible for the sound of “pirate talk” as the world knows it today.
Sources consulted: trial records and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724); World History Encyclopedia; and historical linguistic surveys of nautical English.
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