Pirates raised a black flag before a red one so victims could choose to surrender

问题

Every raid risked costly combat pirates themselves wanted to avoid

背景

换别人会怎么做

The available approach was threatening violence in the abstract, an armed crew approaching a merchant ship simply presenting an implicit threat of force, leaving a target with no real information about whether resistance would be met with mercy or slaughter, and therefore no good basis for deciding whether to fight or surrender.

他们看到了什么

Pirate crews saw that a vague threat carried no actionable information for a target trying to decide whether surrender was actually worth it, and a reputation for slaughtering everyone regardless of surrender removed any incentive to surrender at all, since a crew facing certain death either way would simply fight to the last. The fix was making a real, credible, staged promise, comply now under known terms or face a specific worse consequence next, communicated visibly and in real time as the pirates closed in, so the target could trust the offer was genuine rather than a bluff.

那一手

Golden Age pirate crews used a two-flag protocol before engaging: raising a black flag (the Jolly Roger) signaled that a target who surrendered immediately and gave up its cargo would be spared, while raising a red flag signaled that the offer was withdrawn and no quarter would be given if the ship resisted or delayed. The switch from black to red, at a range where pirates had already closed in and the threat was visibly actionable, made the ultimatum credible rather than empty.

为什么管用

Raising the black flag first, signaling that immediate surrender would be met with mercy, gave targets a genuine reason to comply, while the credible threat of the red flag, no quarter, if that offer was refused or delayed, made resistance visibly costlier than compliance, and the staged sequence itself, visible at the range where the threat was actionable, was what made the ultimatum believable rather than empty. Because both outcomes, mercy for compliance and no quarter for resistance, were consistently enforced across many raids, a target's decision to surrender was based on real, accumulated evidence that the black flag's promise held, not blind hope, which is why most targeted crews chose surrender over combat. This let pirates achieve their actual goal, plunder, more efficiently than violence would have, since a battle risked casualties and cargo damage on both sides that a credible surrender option avoided entirely.

值了多少

The system let most targeted crews choose to surrender under the black flag's terms rather than fight, sparing both sides the casualties and cargo damage a battle would have caused — an outcome that served pirates' actual goal, plunder, better than combat would have.

什么时候会失灵

The mechanism depends on the threatening party's reputation for consistency actually holding, a crew that raised the black flag but slaughtered surrendering targets anyway, even occasionally, would destroy the credibility the entire system depended on, since targets would have no reason to trust the next black flag they saw. It also depends on the target actually being able to observe and respond to the staged signal in time, a threat delivered too late or too ambiguously to allow a real decision would collapse back into the same uninformative threat the staged system was built to improve on. And the approach only works when the threatening party genuinely prefers the compliant outcome to the costly one, pirates preferred plunder without combat losses, meaning a party that would benefit more from actually following through on the costly escalation regardless of compliance would have no real incentive to honor the credible-commitment signal, undermining the whole basis for the target's trust.

后来呢

The black-flag/red-flag signaling system is cited by maritime historians as an early, functioning example of a credible commitment device in an adversarial negotiation — a staged, visible signal that let compliance and its alternative both be understood and trusted by an opponent with every reason to distrust an armed party's promises, a pattern later analyzed in game theory as a case of costly, credible signaling.

资料来源

1. [1]Blackbeard's Flag: The True Story of the Jolly RogerTheSea.org (Blane Perun), 2024thesea.org
2. [2]Bloody flagWikipedia, 2025en.wikipedia.org
3. [3]The Jolly Roger and Its Not-So-Merry OriginsHistoric Hudson Valley, 2014hudsonvalley.org

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