ABSTRACT
In 1725, a fascinating catalog of piracy is Charles Johnson's A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates. Brian Taves marks the pirate narrative as one of five subsets in the genre of the "historical adventure movie", one structured around "agency". The wildly popular Pirates of the Caribbean franchise opened in 2003 with The Curse of the Black Pearl. This film joins the cinematic history of the "historical adventure movie" in that it plays on the parodic elements of the 1980s by introducing a caricature of the swashbuckling early pirate captain who has his moments of heroic seriousness. Peter Linebaugh's and Marcus Rediker's Many-Headed Hydra employs the term "hydrarchy" to describe the social organization of the ship. These pirate films are useful in illustrating the fluidity of concepts in the past and the present. The notion of a transcoded mosaic defies the separation of concepts into clearly delineated paths of origin.
