If there’s one thing to bring out your inner Herod, it’s the twee tendency in younger children’s books. It’s at its worst in the depiction of pirates. Ten Little Pirates shows them cute; The Pirates Next Door as rambunctious; Never Mess with a Pirate Princess as egalitarian; Pirates Love Underpants as… oh stop it.
It is the latest aspect of our long-standing obsession with pirates, though it’s never been so commodified or so anodyne. Well, there’s going to be a bracing corrective when the National Maritime Museum launches its Pirates exhibition next year. It’s not aimed at rehabilitation. Interestingly, although it focuses on the Golden Age of Pirates, roughly the 1680s to the 1720s – Blackbeard et al – it’ll expand the geographical scope to the South China seas and bring the phenomenon up to date: no one has ever tried to glamorise Somali pirates off the Gulf of Aden.
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