Yo-ho-ho!
Piracy has been a serious scourge for thousands of years. Because piracy threatens freedom of navigation and other lawful uses of the ocean, international law has since antiquity considered piracy a crime against humanity as a whole. This history explains the title of Steven Johnson’s book The Enemy of All Mankind.
Why then have pirates so captured our imaginations? From Robert Louis Stevenson to J.M. Barrie to the creators of Disney World, pirates have attained the sort of romantic status not commonly associated with other types of criminals. It is hard to imagine, for example, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta on the Perjurers of Penzance or a series of hit films featuring the Carjackers of the Caribbean.
In searching for a quote about pirates and piracy, we looked for one that gave voice to the tension between the often barbarous acts of pirates and the unusual mythology surrounding them. The one we stumbled upon rather pinned us to our seats. We also found a plethora of words and phrases associated with pirates to sprinkle into the puzzle, including a reference to a famous Pittsburgh Pirate, Ralph Kiner. And as for William S. Gilbert, hats off to anyone who thinks to rhyme “lot o’ news” with “hypotenuse”! But why, pray tell, are those facts about the square of the hypotenuse “cheerful”? Any theories out there?