Why Did Pirates Wear Earrings? What the Evidence Shows

The Short Answer

No reliable record explains why pirates wore earrings, and contemporary accounts of the Golden Age of Piracy (about 1650 to 1730) do not show that they commonly did. The popular explanations, such as paying for a funeral, marking a voyage around Cape Horn, or improving eyesight, come from later sailor folklore, mostly of the 19th and 20th centuries. The gold hoop became a fixed part of the pirate image through illustration and film.

• Contemporary evidence: The major period accounts, Exquemelin (1678) and Johnson (1724), do not mention pirate earrings
• Men’s earrings in Europe: Fashionable among English gentlemen around 1580 to 1650, before the Golden Age of Piracy
• Burial-money theory: Folklore with no documentary support
• Cape Horn and equator theories: Tied to 19th-century sailing lore, not to 17th- or 18th-century pirates
• Eyesight belief: Recorded in British folklore from the 19th century onward
• Wax-earplug theory: A modern internet explanation with no historical source
• Origin of the image: Book illustration and Hollywood costume design

What Golden Age Sources Say About Pirate Dress

The two most important early sources on piracy in the Americas are Alexandre Exquemelin’s De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, published in Amsterdam in 1678, and A General History of the Pyrates, published in London in 1724 under the name Captain Charles Johnson. Exquemelin had sailed with the buccaneers himself. Johnson drew on trial records, newspapers and interviews. Between them they are the foundation of most later pirate history.

Neither source describes pirates wearing earrings. Johnson’s descriptions of dress are specific when he gives them. He describes Blackbeard (Edward Teach or Thatch) with a long beard twisted into tails with ribbons, lit slow matches tucked under his hat, and a sling holding three pairs of pistols. He describes Bartholomew Roberts at his final battle in 1722 wearing a crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, and a gold chain with a diamond cross. If either man had worn a gold earring, it would have fitted naturally into these descriptions. It does not appear.

The absence does not prove that no pirate ever wore one. Pirates seized jewelry along with cargo and coin, and some men of the period did wear earrings. But no surviving description of a named Golden Age pirate, as far as the standard sources show, includes the feature that modern costumes treat as essential.

Men’s Earrings Before the Pirates

Pirates did not invent the custom. Earrings for men have a very long history. Leonard Woolley’s excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Iraq, published in 1934, recovered large gold crescent earrings from graves dating to about 2600 to 2500 BCE, including the burial of the woman known as Puabi. Earrings appear across ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt and beyond, worn by both women and men in different cultures.

In England, men’s earrings were briefly fashionable among courtiers and gentlemen in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. A 1588 portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh shows him with a pearl drop earring. The Chandos portrait, traditionally identified as William Shakespeare and painted around 1600 to 1610, shows a small gold hoop in the visible ear. King Charles I wore a pearl earring, which he is reported to have worn at his execution in 1649.

This fashion faded among the English upper classes in the later 17th century. That timing matters. The age of Elizabethan privateers fell within the period when men’s earrings were fashionable on land, but the Golden Age pirates of the early 1700s sailed after the fashion had passed. Any earring custom among them would have to be explained on its own terms, and the sources do not do so.

Why only one earring?

The single earring is partly an artifact of portraiture. Many portraits of the period show the sitter in three-quarter view, so only one ear is visible. Charles I is recorded as wearing his pearl in the left ear. Later pirate illustrations and costumes repeated the single hoop, and it became a visual shorthand. No early source explains a rule about wearing one rather than two.

Pirates Were Sailors First

Most Atlantic pirates of the early 18th century had been merchant seamen, naval sailors or privateers before they turned pirate. The historian Marcus Rediker, in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987), showed that pirate crews were drawn overwhelmingly from the ordinary maritime labor force, often men who joined pirates when their own ships were captured. Their habits, speech and beliefs came from the wider world of working sailors.

This is why the earring question is really a question about sailors in general. If an earring custom existed, pirates would have brought it with them from merchant and naval service. The problem is that the documentation for sailors’ earrings is strongest for a much later period. Photographs, paintings and folklore collections from the 19th and early 20th centuries show sailors and fishermen with earrings and record the explanations they gave. Projecting those explanations back to the 1700s is guesswork.

The Burial-Money Theory

The most repeated explanation holds that a sailor wore a gold earring so that, if he drowned and washed ashore, whoever found the body could sell the gold to pay for a Christian burial. A variant says the earring was engraved with the sailor’s home port so the body could be identified. Both versions express a real fear. Sailors died far from home in large numbers, and many were never recovered.

No 17th- or 18th-century source describes this practice. The story belongs to later maritime folklore and circulates today mainly in popular books and websites. It also faces a practical difficulty. A small earring weighing a few grams held less gold than a single English guinea, a coin of about 8.4 grams of 22-carat gold. A sailor who wanted to leave money for his funeral had simpler options, and burials of the drowned were in any case often handled by local parishes.

The idea that gold was valued as portable wealth is reasonable in general terms. Gold was accepted almost everywhere and could be hidden or traded. But “gold was portable wealth” is a general truth about gold, not evidence that sailors wore earrings for that reason.

Cape Horn, the Equator and Earned Earrings

Another explanation says a sailor earned the right to an earring by crossing the equator or by rounding Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America and one of the most dangerous passages in the world. In versions told today, a gold earring marks the Horn, and sometimes a silver one marks another milestone.

Crossing the line

The ceremony for crossing the equator is genuinely old. Sailors of several European nations were holding initiation rites for first-time crossers by the 16th and 17th centuries, later formalized as a visit from “King Neptune.” Early descriptions focus on mock shaving, ducking in seawater, and forfeits of drink or money paid by newcomers. The earring is not a standard element of these early accounts.

Rounding the Horn

The Cape Horn tradition is tied to the great age of sail in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when clippers and later steel windjammers carried grain, nitrate and wool around South America. The proud identity of the “Cape Horner” grew in that era, and the International Association of Cape Horners was founded in Saint-Malo, France, in 1936. Customs linked to rounding the Horn, including the earring, belong to that later sailing world. They long postdate the pirates of the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast, few of whom ever sailed around the Horn at all.

Superstition and the Eyesight Belief

A belief that piercing the ears or wearing earrings improves eyesight is documented in British folk tradition. Iona Opie and Moira Tatem’s A Dictionary of Superstitions (1989) records the idea from the 19th century onward. It was held widely on land, not only by sailors, though it plausibly mattered to men whose work depended on spotting sails, land and weather at a distance.

The belief has no medical basis. It does, however, offer the best-documented folk explanation of the three, because people actually recorded it. Even so, the records come from long after the Golden Age of Piracy and say nothing specific about pirates.

Sailors were known for superstitions about whistling, women aboard, sailing on Fridays and other omens. An earring as a charm against drowning or bad luck fits this world, and some later sailors described it that way. The likeliest conclusion is that sailors who wore earrings gave different reasons at different times and places, and that no single original meaning ever existed.

How the Gold Earring Became a Pirate Symbol

The modern pirate costume was assembled largely between the 1880s and the 1950s. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) supplied the one-legged cook, the parrot and the treasure map. The American illustrator Howard Pyle and his students, especially N. C. Wyeth, gave pirates a romantic, colorful look of sashes, head scarves, sea boots and flashy jewelry. Pyle’s pirate pictures were collected in Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1921).

Stage productions of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and a long run of Hollywood swashbucklers carried this image into mass culture. The maritime historian David Cordingly, in Under the Black Flag (1995), traces how much of the familiar pirate look comes from these artists, writers and filmmakers rather than from the documentary record of real pirates. The gold earring became one more piece of a standard costume, alongside the eye patch and the parrot.

Modern films continued the tradition. The Pirates of the Caribbean series, beginning in 2003, gave its characters beads, coins and trinkets in hair and clothing. These are costume designs for fictional characters, not reconstructions of how 18th-century pirates dressed.

Common Misconceptions About Pirate Earrings

• “All pirates wore gold earrings.” No contemporary source shows this. The famous descriptions of Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts do not mention earrings.
• “The earring paid for a sailor’s funeral.” This is undocumented folklore, and a small earring held little gold.
• “Earrings marked a Cape Horn voyage in pirate days.” The Cape Horn tradition belongs to 19th-century sailing ships, not to Golden Age pirates.
• “Earrings held wax earplugs against cannon noise.” No historical source supports this. It appears to be a recent invention.
• “Sailors invented men’s earrings.” Men wore earrings in many ancient cultures and among English gentlemen around 1600.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did pirates wear earrings?

There is no documented answer. Contemporary accounts of Golden Age pirates, such as Exquemelin (1678) and Johnson (1724), do not mention earrings at all. Explanations about funeral money, Cape Horn voyages and better eyesight come from later sailor folklore, mostly of the 19th century. The gold earring became a fixed pirate symbol through book illustrations and Hollywood films.

Why did sailors wear one earring?

Sailors of the 19th and early 20th centuries gave several reasons: luck, a belief that earrings improved eyesight, pride in a hard voyage such as rounding Cape Horn, or money for a burial. Only the eyesight belief is well recorded in folklore collections. The single earring has no documented rule behind it. It was likely personal habit, later fixed by artists.

Why do pirates only have one earring?

The single hoop is mostly a costume convention. Portraits of earring-wearing men around 1600, such as the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, often show only one ear, and Charles I is recorded wearing a single pearl. Later illustrators and filmmakers repeated the single gold hoop until it became the standard pirate look. No historical rule about one earring is known.

What was the original purpose of earrings?

Earrings are far older than any written explanation of them. Gold earrings were buried in the Royal Cemetery at Ur around 2600 to 2500 BCE. Across ancient cultures they served as adornment, signs of wealth or status, and sometimes protective charms. Purposes varied by society, and no single original purpose can be identified from the evidence.

Did pirates wear earrings to protect their hearing from cannon fire?

No historical source supports this. The idea that earrings anchored wax earplugs during gunnery appears to be a recent invention that spread online. Naval and pirate gunners certainly suffered hearing damage, but no account from the 17th or 18th century links earrings to ear protection.