Real Pirates Salem Museum General Admission Ticket

The exhibit begins with a 5-minute film that provides basic information about Sam Bellamy, a young man who turned to piracy when his initial attempt at salvage failed, his ship the Whydah, and the discovery of the wreck in the 1980s. Then you enter the exhibits. The authentic artifacts recovered from the Whydah’s wreck are plentiful and the explanations educational. What is perhaps most interesting is how the museum makes the pirates sympathetic without romanticizing them. The way they ran their ships was surprisingly democratic and egalitarian, many of the cliches we’re used to seeing in pirate films turn out to be myths, and in an age during which legitimate ships flying under national flags and their crews made their living from the slave trade and plundering indigenous civilizations, a group of men (and the occasional woman) who didn’t care about a person’s race, religion, or ethnicity, shared their profits (almost) equally, and gave every man a vote seems comparatively admirable. I mean, sure, they were pirates and piracy is theft. But “How dare you plunder what we’ve plundered!” and “You can’t steal our profits from human trafficking and then offer positions in the crew to the men we planned to sell into slavery!” are rather hollow complaints. The docents are friendly. There is no pressure — you can spend as long as you like. My two kids, who are nine and six, thoroughly enjoyed the 90 or so minutes we spent there. My expectations were not incredibly high. Salem has a lot of kitschy stuff in it. But this was an excellent experience. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in Colonial Era or Maritime history.