Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Pirates. The word conjures images that have been with us for centuries: a white skull and cross-bones on a flag of black silk; a parrot on the captain’s shoulder; buried treasure; daggers clenched in teeth; walking the plank; eye patches; black-bellied schooners roving free under a Caribbean moon and of course – a lot of Rum…

Pirates drank while eating, they drank while sailing, they drank before, during, and after fighting. People molested by pirates routinely complained that their oppressors smelled of two things: tar and rum.

The word Rum produces close association with pirates in Connotative system of many cultures. This makes pirates a great tool in the marketer’s hands.

Think pirate and you probably get an image in your head of Henry Morgan. Why? Because his name and face appears on the label of the second biggest-selling brand of rum in the world.

Morgan never made rum. His image was borrowed by Seagram’s as a marketing ploy in the early 1980s. But even though he never made his own rum, Morgan did make a tremendous effort to drink as much of it as humanly possible. On a typical evening he could tip six pints of the stuff and show no exterior effects at all.

Handsome, genial, and well-educated, Henry Morgan moved with ease through high society (King Charles II was his personal friend), but his first love was the high seas. He was an expert seaman and, unlike his contemporary, Captain Kidd, his crew loved him.

There has always been some question as to whether or not Morgan was a pirate at all. He always carried a letter of marque from the British crown, after all, and confined his attacks to Spanish shipping, striking blows for king and country. On the other hand, his fleet was made up of ships captained by known pirates and he never hesitated to use pirate-style trickery and brutality to achieve his goals. He was also, at age 32, made admiral of a group called the Brethren of the Coast, a loose confederation of pirates and privateers who, sailing the Caribbean, became known as the Buccaneers.