Page 90 - All About History - Issue 28-15

Reliving history with
HANNAHNEW

THE STAR OF THE EPIC NEW PIRATE DRAMA
BLACK SAILS TELLS US WHAT MAKES THIS
SHOW DIFFERENT FROM THE REST

SET: 1715, NEW PROVIDENCE, THE BAHAMAS

What can we expect from Black Sails?
Black Sails is a show that takes the real historical aspects of
piracy and mixes them in with Treasure Island. It’s different to
any other representation of piracy in that it portrays it in a very
gritty, real and brutal manner. It does away with a lot of clichés
and focuses on the fact that real people had to survive and
create a community for themselves in a place that was extremely
violent and dangerous. It’s a political drama on the high seas.
What role does your character, Eleanor Guthrie, play?
Eleanor controls the island economically and politically. She’s
inherited this business and the pirates really depend on her,
begrudgingly a lot of the time, because she’s the one who is
going to make sure they have enough supplies to hunt their
prizes. She’s the one whose favour they have to vie for. For me,
it’s a really amazing opportunity to play a woman who can hold
her own in a room full of pirates and tell them where to stick it.

So she’s challenging some gender stereotypes of the era?
You can always have the damsel in distress or the wench, and
that seems to be the standard representation of women in
piracy, but women had to play a role and it’s never really been
represented. There were women in London bars who basically
controlled everything pirates and sailors needed, from brothels
to supplies to actually trading. We talked about the idea that
women would perhaps play that role in the Caribbean.

There are quite a few real historical figures in the show,
was Eleanor was based on anyone in particular?
No, but I did some research to find women who could inspire
me. I came across people like Grace O’Malley, an Irish pirate in
Elizabethan times. You have these larger-than-life characters
who have broken the mould but haven’t been as infamous as
some of the males. Crews would go off to fight and it was mainly
women left to run things. That’s something that has always been
neglected – the island life and the fact that these men have to
come back to a functioning society.

How much of the show is fact and how much is fiction?
There’s so much about piracy that’s become mythological. We’ve
tried to tie in key historical figures such as Ned Lowe, Charles
Vane and Calico Jack and intertwine them in this story. The
media in London created these absolute monsters but we tried
to divert away from the really fantastical stories and delve into
the brutal survival stories and the real ships that were hunted.
Black Sails is on every Tuesday at 10pm on HISTORY

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