January 21: The Jolly Roger

Today is the Feast of Jolly Roger. So here are some facts you might not have known about the pirate flag:

1. Jolly Roger is used today as a name for the iconic pirate flag, a Skull and crossbones on a Black background. However, in the 18th century, pirates had any number of flag designs which they would refer to as "Jolly Roger". They might be red, or green as well as black and have different designs on them, although symbols of death did tend to be a theme.
2. The name Jolly Roger could have come about in a number of ways. It was a term used to describe a happy, carefree man, and may have been applied to the grinning skull; "Old Roger" was an old nickname for the devil; or it might have evolved from the red flags used by French pirates, which they called the "Jolie Rouge" or Pretty Red.
3. The skull and crossbones on black may have been first used by Barbary pirates, although the colour was unlikely to have been selected with reference to the historic Muslim black flag - as Muslim pirates tended to fly Green flags at that time.
4. 18th century pirates may have seemed to be acting independently but it's possible they were actually part of large, interconnected groups - which is why the pirate flag eventually became standardised and known by the name Jolly Roger - by about 1730.
5. In those days it was virtually a criminal offence to even possess such a flag - it would be considered proof that a person was a pirate, and piracy carried the death penalty. Only an actual pirate, then, would dare fly it.
6. They didn't fly it all the time. When chasing down a victim, they'd usually fly no flags at all, or false ones to give the victims a false sense of security. They'd only raise the Jolly Roger when they were in firing range, often along with a warning shot, to give the victim ship a chance to surrender. If they didn't surrender, the pirates would lower the Jolly Roger and fly a red flag instead, meaning they would take the ship by force and would have no mercy.
7. In the 20th century the Jolly Roger was flown by British Navy Submarines in both world wars. This started after a comment by Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, the First Sea Lord of the British Royal Navy, who expressed the opinion that submarines were "underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English", and that enemy submariners should be executed as pirates. When in September 1914, the British submarine HMS E9 successfully torpedoed the German cruiser SMS Hela, the crew remembered this statement and made a Jolly Roger flag. They made a new one every time they had a successful mission - and eventually they filled up all their flag flying space with Jolly Rogers. At that point they made a large one and added symbols for each successful mission.
8. There are fifteen Jolly Rogers in the Royal Navy Submarine Museum. The symbols on them mean different things, for example, A bar denotes the torpedoing of a ship: red bars indicated warships, white bars represented merchant vessels, and black bars with a white "U" stood for U-boats; a dagger indicated a 'cloak and dagger' operation; A Lighthouse or torch symbolised the boat's use as a navigational marker for an invasion force. At least 20 different symbols have been recognised.
9. Nowadays, pirates are less of a feature on the high seas and the flag has taken on more light-hearted uses. It was the name of the pirate ship in J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, and has appeared on the covers of LPs. The song "Jolly Roger" appears on the Adam and the Ants album Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980).
10. Sports teams use it as well, especially those nicknamed "pirates" or "buccaneers", such as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and The South African Football Association soccer team Orlando Pirates.