FGHJ GM

According to National Geographic, some members of pirate crews were literate and were essential for reading navigational charts. Books were even sometimes part of the b***y taken from ships that the pirates pilfered.

Pirates may have been searching for gold, silver, jewels, and rum while plundering ships, but they were also on the lookout for something that was just as valuable: maps. For instance, National Geographic describes one particular stolen Spanish atlas from 1680 as "extremely valuable pirate b***y" that "overjoyed" pirates when they seized it, according to their detailed journals.

While men have definitely dominated the world of piracy, there have been several notorious women pirates, including France's Jeanne de Clisson, England's Mary Read, and Ireland's Grace O'Malley and Anne Bonny (that's an illustration of her, above).

For as long as there have been ships, there have been criminals who have taken to the sea. For example, historians have found evidence of pirates in the Mediterranean as far back as 1353 B.C. During that time, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten complained of pirates who had raided his coastal cities and ports. The tyrants also threatened the trading routes of ancient Greece and looted cargoes of grain and olive oil from Roman ships, according to Royal Museums Greenwich.

"Pirates had extensive networks on land that kept them in touch with the outside world," Geanacopoulos told Georgetown. "They had a mail system of sorts (ships ferrying letters back and forth) that enabled them to communicate with relatives, and even a commuter service to take 'retiring' pirates from their famous haunts in Madagascar to more mundane lives in America."

When pirates accessorized with earrings, they weren't just trying to be fashionable. According to National Geographic, sailors believed that applying pressure to the earlobe would ward off seasickness. In many cases, the pirates would accomplish this by popping on an earring.

Unfortunately, though your inner ears do affect your sense of balance, putting earrings in your earlobes does nothing to mitigate seasickness.

There are a few other fictitious-sounding details about pirates that are accurate. For example, battling pirates surely lost limbs from time to time and some of them would have replaced their absent appendages with a hook or a wooden peg, according to National Geographic.

In order to help their eyes adjust more quickly between the bright ship deck and the dark belowdecks, pirates would patch one eye so it was always adjusted for the darkness, according to E. Bruce Goldstein's Sensation and Perception.

The pirates we know from modern movies may have a signature style, but that onscreen fashion isn't exactly accurate. As historian Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos, author of the book The Pirate Next Door, told Georgetown University, "Only Johnny Depp looked like Jack Sparrow [in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean]. Pirates wore typical maritime clothing of the day, with pirate captains and those with more money donning more expensive outfits."

September 19th marks the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day. But the truth is, pirates didn't actually have a uniform accent. Many of the phrases we associate with them today actually originated from the 1950 Disney film Treasure Island, starring Robert Newton as Long John Silver, which was based off the 1883 novel of the same name by Robert Louis Stevenson.