Long before society realized that smoking might be bad for you, one enterprising cigarette manufacturer exploited a promotional strategy in another deadly trade: piracy.
In the late 1880s, as post-Civil War demand for tobacco soared, Virginia’s Allen & Ginter company began including illustrated cards as stiffeners in their cigarette packages. It did not take executives long to recognize that these small color lithographs had marketing value of their own. Soon, there were cigarette-branded card sets ranging from wild animals to Indian chiefs, flags of the world, and, of course, baseball heroes. Thus, the trading-card industry was born.
Pirates of the Spanish Main
Among the earliest and most striking of the Allen & Ginter cards was their 1888 Pirates of the Spanish Main series: 50 vividly colored portraits of the swashbuckling era’s most infamous figures. Captain Kid, Anne Bonny, Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Charles Vane, Jack Rackham, and Henry Morgan all made an appearance. The pirate set proved enormously popular and remains highly collectible today.
Each card measured 1 ½” x 2 ¾ inches. The front showed a stylized—and necessarily imaginative—portrait of the usual suspects in the “Golden Age” of piracy. Every portrait also had a background scene evoking that character’s infamous legend, including short but lurid captions, such as “Walking the Plank”, “Burying Treasure”, “Stabbing the Sentry”, and “Torturing a Yankee.”
The cards had a reverse side with biographical details, although it is unlikely these pirate “facts” were much more accurate than the portraits themselves. After all, there was not much visual reference material for how to depict an 18th-century pirate’s look beyond what was available in the mostly fictional record and in the public imagination at the time. Some collectors have noted that certain details of the card illustrations, such as dress and age, are inconsistent with the period and what we do know about the character’s life and death.
Art meets Aarrrgh!
Nonetheless, the cards themselves have maintained their appeal both as collectibles and as fine art. The illustrations were the work of George S. Harris and Sons, a Philadelphia-based commercial printer and lithographer known for nostalgic color illustrations on cigar box labels, trading cards, branded calendars, and other merchandise. All 50 of the Allen & Ginter pirate series are included in the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Pirates were not the only maritime theme explored by Allen & Ginter. The company also released a Famous Ships series, including the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María. And their Typical Ships series featured color lithographs of different sailing vessels around the world—from brigantine to dahabeeyah—to promote their Greenback brand smoking tobacco.
Over time, there were color lithograph cards of sports figures, hummingbirds, lady’s fans, military generals, chickens, fruits, fishes and more. But the buccaneer series was certainly the most fitting advertising vehicle for a company that eventually morphed into the world’s largest cigarette manufacturer. Both the puffing and the piracy harken back to another age—back when the leading cause of preventable death was setting sail for the Spanish Main.
