Updated: July 15, 2024
Today we look at the Pirate Museum in St. Augustine and it’s a great place to visit for Pirates young and old. A super cool thing they have here at the Pirate Museum is they give you a treasure map and what you do is you look for the skull and crossbones anywhere in the museum and you could find some hidden treasure like this. Pretty cool, huh? Here they even have an original Jolly Roger Flag. I asked Executive Director Cindy Stavely what the response has been to the museum since it opened. It’s been phenomenal, not only with our visitors the locals absolutely love it we’ve been voted best local attraction for the past couple years and the school groups, we have an unbelievable turn out of the school groups that come to St. Augustine. We did a thousand school groups here last year.
WOW, that’s a lot of kids. Yes, it’s a lot of kids and we love sharing this place with those kids. So I know there’s an interesting story about how Pat got started with Pirates and his fascination for Pirates all together can you tell me that.
[expand title=”Click to Read More”]hidden contentOne day he was sitting in the living room of his home outside of Philadelphia watching the movie Captain Blood. Ok. With his father, with Errol Flynn. Well, that movie totally fascinated him so from that point on he was fascinated and drawn into the culture and the philosophy of the life of Piracy. So he’s been into this his whole life basically? His whole life.
And it was about 30 years ago that he bought his first artifact and it’s actually a book, The Buccaneers of America. Antiques Roadshow was recently here in Jacksonville. Right. And they came to the museum to do an appraisal of that book. And it was appraised for tens of thousands of dollars.
He’s collected over 500 things, documents, weapons, swords, treasures, and then we’ve got things online from places too, not just his things, but the majority of what you see here is his personal collection that he’s been purchasing and collecting for over thirty years. Now, another thing that’s pretty cool here too is besides all the artifacts you guys are really well known for the interactive portion that you’ve created. Can you tell me more about that? Well, you’re going to hear it one second, hold on there. FIRE IN THE HOLE!
That is our interactive cannon firing, we actually have real cannons rigged up electronically so you can fire them. Shhhh, don’t wake him up. I like to let people know that when they’re coming in here what they are going to see is one of the world’s largest collections of authentic Pirate artifacts and I look at the kids and I’m like, you probably don’t know what I mean when I say that I say real things, that real Pirates and sailors used. hundreds of years ago.. [/expand]
As found on Youtube
