History’s Real Peg-Legged Pirates 

While peg legs weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as popular culture suggests, they weren't entirely fictional either. We do know of a couple of documented cases involving high-profile pirates with prosthetic limbs.

The most famous is arguably François Le Clerc, a 16th-century French privateer. When not being paid by various European rulers to act on their behalf, Le Clerc sailed independently as the leader of a pirate fleet. He was one of the first notable pirates of the Caribbean and was known for his peg leg. His nicknames included “Jambe de Bois” and “Pata de Palo” (in French and Spanish, respectively), both of which translate as “wooden leg” or “peg leg.”

Another example is Cornelis Jol (1597-1641), a Dutch corsair, admiral, and privateer — in other words, pirate-adjacent — who was nicknamed “Houtebeen” (Dutch for “peg leg”) due to his wooden leg. It’s worth noting, however, that both Le Clerc and Jol were sailing the high seas before the golden age of piracy, which is the era typically associated with peg legs, parrots, and eye patches.

The Rise of the Peg-Legged Pirate in Popular Culture 

The image of the peg-legged pirate is so pervasive in large part due to literature, in particular Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island. The character of Long John Silver, with his amputated leg and pet parrot, became — and remains — the archetypal image of the pirate in the public imagination. 

Stevenson’s original Long John Silver, however, was missing his leg entirely and moved around on crutches. It was only in later adaptations, including on stage and screen, that Silver was often portrayed with a wooden leg. This image began to permeate the public consciousness — so much so that many people erroneously believe that the original Silver had a peg leg, too. The iconic pirate image was most recently reinforced by the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (the character Hector Barbossa has a prosthetic leg) and the popular television series Black Sails, which features the character of John Silver with a peg leg. It’s safe to say, then, me hearties, that the image of the peg-legged pirate is very much alive, despite actual historical examples being rare indeed. 

Myth: Nero Played the Fiddle While Rome Burned

Strictly speaking, the Roman Emperor Nero couldn't possibly have fiddled while a conflagration swept through much of the city in 64 CE, simply because the instrument wasn’t invented for another 1,000 years. Beyond that, there are other problems with the common narrative of Nero being indifferent to or even rejoicing in the suffering of his subjects. The myth largely stems from the writings of Roman historians Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, which describe how the theatrically inclined emperor recited a poem about the fall of Troy as he watched the flames from a safe distance. However, these accounts were all compiled well after the subject’s death, and Tacitus even acknowledges that this event was only alleged to have happened. 

Meanwhile, records show that Nero responded to the emergency by providing food and shelter for the homeless and enacting new building codes, which hardly sounds like the acts of a callous tyrant. While the emperor didn't help his reputation by ordering the construction of a lavish palace across a large swath of the destroyed real estate, the characterization of his flippant reaction to the disaster is likely closer to exaggeration than truth.

Myth: The Vikings Wore Horned Helmets

As with many historical myths, we can thank Hollywood for this particular misconception, as popular films helped perpetuate the image of horned-helmet-clad Vikings looting and pillaging their way across Europe. And yet the common depiction of these seafaring Scandinavian troublemakers goes back even further, to the initial staged performances of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen operas in the late 19th century. In reality, the only extant helmet found in Scandinavia and confirmed to be from the Viking era, which covered the ninth through 11th centuries, has no protuberances. Two other horned helmets, unearthed from a bog in Denmark in 1942, have since been found to predate the Vikings by two millennia, and were more likely used for ceremonial purposes than for protection in combat.

Myth: Magellan Was the First Person to Circumnavigate the World

Ferdinand Magellan indeed changed the course of human history with his quest to find a westward route from Spain to Indonesia's Spice Islands (present-day Maluku Islands). Yet he didn't come close to completing the global odyssey he still gets credit for today. The Portuguese explorer only made it as far as the Philippines, where he was killed in April 1521 after an ill-fated attempt at the forced subjugation of a local tribal chief. Just over 17 months later, the largely forgotten Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano captained the expedition’s sole remaining ship, with a mere 18 of its original 260 sailors, back to Spain to complete the circumnavigation. And yet, even they may not have been the first to accomplish the task. Some historians believe that honor goes to an enslaved man named Enrique, who was either purchased or captured during Magellan's earlier trip to Malaysia, and possibly returned to his homeland, just 1,200 miles away, after abandoning the European crew in the nearby Philippines. If he indeed made it back to Malaysia, he would have circled the entire globe.

Myth: Enslaved People Built the Egyptian Pyramids

Thanks in large part to the writings of the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus, and the influential imagery of Hollywood films such as The Ten Commandments, it's been widely accepted that enslaved people undertook the backbreaking task of constructing the Giza pyramids for the ancient pharaohs of Egypt. Yet a series of excavations begun in the late 20th century around the Giza plateau provided ample evidence that the scale of forced labor has been grossly exaggerated. Among the discoveries were the remains of vast quantities of meat and fish in a nearby port city; graffiti revealing nicknames for various labor crews; and the skeletons of workers buried with jars of beer and bread for the afterlife, all of which suggest they were treated as paid workers rather than enslaved labor. That said, questions remain about the social hierarchies that may have driven less privileged individuals to partake in what was unquestionably a difficult job.

According to Plato’s myth, Atlantis was an island of demigods located beyond the Pillars of Hercules (in the modern-day Strait of Gibraltar), which in Greek mythology represent the boundary of the known world. The half-god, half-man Atlanteans let their greed surpass their ethics, and as they pushed to conquer more territory, the gods sent catastrophic earthquakes and floods that sank Atlantis into the ocean within about a day. While Plato's account is widely considered a philosophical allegory for his ideas about the ideal state and moral decay, some have taken the story literally, sparking centuries of speculation and searches for the so-called lost civilization.

So why is Plato’s fable often taken as historical fact? The belief that Atlantis really existed is widely attributed to 19th-century American writer and congressman Ignatius L. Donnelly (who also went on to write a book aiming to prove that English philosopher Francis Bacon was the true author of William Shakespeare’s plays). In his 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Donnelly argued that the mythical island described by Plato was not only real but also the cradle of all ancient civilization. Donnelly’s idea captured the imagination of the public, and while it has since been debunked as pseudoscientific, it inspired additional research and theories over the years. 

One such theory links Atlantis to the disappearance of the architecturally and artistically advanced Minoan civilization that lived on the Greek islands of Crete and Thera (modern Santorini) around 3000 BCE to 1100 BCE. A catastrophic earthquake resulting in a volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunamis most likely contributed to the end of the Minoans, and, some think, align with Plato’s account of a sudden disappearance of a thriving civilization.

Proponents of the Atlantis myth also point to an underwater discovery known as Bimini Road as evidence of the ancient city. Discovered in 1968 off the coast of North Bimini, an island in the Bahamas, the submerged rock formation consists of a series of rectangular limestone blocks whose symmetry and layout appear to be human-made. Despite the attention the diving discovery received at the time, carbon dating concluded that the Bimini stones were a natural geological occurrence created by erosion.

Other, more far-fetched theories speculate that Atlantis may have been located on Antarctica before it was covered in ice, or that it was a large continent in the Atlantic Ocean that became submerged due to geological shifts — or because of the Bermuda Triangle, another “mystery” that is actually a persistent myth. Yet another theory suggests the Atlantis tale is a retelling of real ancient floods such as the deluge of Mediterranean seawater into the Black Sea around 5600 BCE. 

Though most modern scholars and archaeologists consider Atlantis to be imaginary, that hasn’t lessened the allure of the legend, and believers continue to hunt for proof of the existence of this storied ancient civilization.