MAJOR SPOILER WARNINGS FOR “Black Sails” seasons 1-4.
“They paint the world full of shadows, then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgements. Because in the darkness, ‘there be dragons.’ But it isn’t true. We can prove that it isn’t true. In the dark, there is discovery. There is possibility. There is freedom in the dark, once someone has illuminated it. And who has been so close as we are to doing it, right now?”
— Captain James Flint, from Black Sails episode 4×10
Black Sails (STARZ, 2014-2017) might be the most underappreciated show of the “peak TV” era. On paper, Black Sails doesn’t seem all that unique, or all that impressive: a Game Of Thrones-inspired prequel to Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, starring a young, hot Long John Silver in his early days as a pirate (played by Australian actor Luke Arnold, and his beautiful locks). The first few episodes are pretty rough, and lean too heavily into the exploitative tropes that have come to define lesser “prestige” television: excessive nudity, graphic violence, and at least one gratuitous rape scene against a female character from the main cast (it turns out not all pirates are nice guys). Once the story proper begins, however, Black Sails quickly abandons any pretense of following the expected formula. The only significant connection the supposed prequel has to Treasure Island is that a few of Black Sail‘s characters share their names with characters from Stevenson’s book.
Instead of adapting a piece of fiction, Black Sails comes into its own as a historical drama, set during the “Golden Age Of Piracy”, and told from the perspective of the residents of a multiracial democratic confederacy based in Nassau, The Bahamas — based on the real-life “Republic Of Pirates” that was established by outlaws, escaped slaves, and other assorted outcasts who fled imperial authorities to the Bahamas in the early 1700s. The cast of Black Sails is filled with fictional versions of real-life pirates and other historical figures: “Calico Jack” Rackham, Anne Bonny, Charles Vane, and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach are all featured characters (played by Toby Schmitz, Clara Paget, Zach McGowan, and Ray Stevenson, respectively — all of them give fantastic performances, as does the rest of the cast). The kinds of historical figures Black Sails focusses are usually portrayed as villains or, at best, rogues with no real loyalties but to themselves, who either redeem themselves by siding with more respectable members of society or condemn themselves by continuing to break the rules. In Black Sails, the pirates who sailed the high seas in the early days of Britain’s conquest of the “New World” are the tragic heroes, fighting a losing battle to fend off the forces of imperial “civilization”.
“England takes whatever, whenever, however it wants. Lives, loves, labor, spirits, homes. It has taken them from me. I imagine it has taken them from you… And they will come for more. [But] there are thousands of men, [here] in the West Indies, living under the same yoke [as us]. Chained in fields, pressed on ships, sold into indenture. When they see the sitting governor, protected by His Majesty’s Navy, deposed by an alliance of pirates and slaves, how many consider joining that fight? How many thousands of men?… What does a colonial power do when the men whose toil powers it lay down their shovels, take up swords, and say, ‘no more’?”
— James Flint to the Maroon Queen, from Black Sails episode 3×5
Most contemporary tragic TV dramas are content to ask no more questions about men like Flint other than, “How far is too far for one man to go in pursuit of his ambitions,” or, “where is the line between a relatable hero and an irredeemable villain?”. Black Sails looks past those questions to ask a different, much more profound question: “When is the cost of civilization too high?” Most significantly of all, Black Sails explores that question from the perspective of the British Empire’s most antisocial outcasts, and starts from the assumption that if civilization inevitably means tyranny, oppression, and slavery, then the cost of civilization is already too much. By the end of the series, John Silver has negotiated an alliance between his pirate crew and a secret colony of escaped slaves, who agree to join the pirates’ war against the colonial authorities only after the pirates help them slaughter a family of white slave owners — an act most of the pirates have no problem taking part in. Meanwhile, the moderates in Nassau, who want to negotiate with the British, are dragged to their dooms by a do-gooder imperial governor — a fictionalized version of the real-life slave trader and British imperial governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers — whose sympathy for the people under his authority turns into murderous resentment once allowing the lowlifes of Nassau to live costs him too much money.
In a typical post-Breaking Bad, post-Game Of Thrones prestige TV series, Woodes Rogers or someone like him would be the main character, and would be portrayed as a morally complicated antihero whose evil acts are inspired by good intentions; that kind of portrayal would line up with how Rogers, and most other ambitious conquerors and imperialists of his type, are remembered by history, as well. Black Sails goes in the opposite direction: Rogers and every other colonial official are portrayed as irredeemably greedy, treacherous, and only interested in themselves, with no lasting sympathetic traits to make them particularly tragic or relatable. The establishment figures, such as Rogers, who present themselves as progressive reformers from within the system are always revealed to be the most craven and self-interested characters in the show, Rogers most of all. Black Sails universally condemns fairweather progressives and profiteers in sheep’s clothing; not for wanting to preserve their own wellbeing, or for their willingness to make hard decisions, but because they inevitably collaborate with the forces of tyranny that they claim to oppose as soon as their own personal standings in society are threatened, or the opportunity comes for them to grab a sliver of power and influence in exchange for compromising away any chance at positive change. Worst of all, Rogers and the others like him always blame the people they harm for not appreciating what a difficult decision it was to betray them, and demand the people below them carry the burden of feeling guilty for the sins of the powerful.
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