Tortuga is a vital location throughout the entire Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but is it a real place and if so, what is the true history behind the island? Understandably for a series of summer blockbusters, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies play fast and loose with history. With the Kraken, the sea goddess Calypso, and the legendary villain Davy Jones all appearing in the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy alone, it is fair to say that the series is more fantasy than fact. However, many elements of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are based on real history and touch on actual events and locations.
For example, while the monstrous villain Cutler Beckett may be a fictional invention, the East India Trading Company was a very real corporation that did play a major role in the crackdown on piracy. The inclusion of real-life elements like this has left some Pirates of the Caribbean fans wondering whether the island of Tortuga, the pirate stronghold seen throughout the franchise, is real too. Tortuga appears as a location in numerous movies in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, but so does the Fountain of Youth, so viewers are right to be unsure of its existence.
Like Jurassic Park's 'five deaths' archipelago, Tortuga plays a pivotal role throughout the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. However, unlike Isla Sorna and company, Tortuga is both a real-life place and did serve the same function that its fictionalized counterpart does in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Tortuga was once home to international piracy thanks to its length history of warring factions attempting to lay claim on the small, strategically vital location, and thus, its depiction as a pirate port in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is only a little more fanciful than real-life history illustrates.
There are few things that the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels have in common other than recurring series stars Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbossa, but Tortuga is one of them. The island is the location where Jack heads in the first movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl, to recruit a crew with Will Turner near the start of the action. In the first sequel Dead Man’s Chest, Tortuga is where Will heads in search of Jack, and later on, it is where Jack secures the crew who will go on to hold down the Black Pearl during the climactic attack by Davy Jones’ Kraken. Later still, Tortuga is where Barbossa sets sail from after obtaining the Black Pearl in At World’s End’s ending after both the Kraken and Davy Jones are dead and the world of piracy has been restored to its usual state of perpetual disorder.
While not seen onscreen since that third movie, Tortuga has still been reliably referenced throughout the later Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. For example, the island is the location where Barbossa promises to take Blackbeard’s commandeered ship at the close of On Stranger Tides. The island goes unmentioned in the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Dead Men Tell No Tales, but the fact that the infamously troubled franchise outing went through as many revisions and rewrites as it did means the movie may have featured a mention of location in one of its earlier incarnations.
Tortuga is both a real place and an actual historical pirate stronghold. Characters like Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow would have taken advantage of the setting’s strategic convenience and civil unrest around the time that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies take place, and Tortuga remains a popular destination for tourists to this day. Off the north coast of Haiti, the small (180 km squared) island was a haven for pirates in the 1600s due to the French, Dutch, Spanish, and English fighting over ownership of the land (along with, of course, the natives). By 1700, the age of piracy had largely died out, though Tortuga’s strategic location made it a popular home for buried treasure since it was easily reached from numerous directions.
Ironically, the real Tortuga is not seen on-screen in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The franchise was plagued with production troubles, with the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie On Stranger Tides repeatedly revising its plans during production and still ending up with the largest movie budget of all time by the time the movie was finished. As a result of these sorts of issues, it will come as no surprise to readers to learn that, instead of shooting in the real-life Tortuga, the small island nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines stood in for the island in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. This may have been entirely down to the logistics of shooting on the actual island, or it may have been because Tortuga offered fewer tax incentives for the filmmakers.
While the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are far from historically accurate, the inclusion of occasional elements of real-life history helped elevate the series and made the franchise a cult classic. Jack Sparrow confronts original trilogy villain Cutler Beckett in one deleted At World’s End scene about an earlier incident wherein the amoral Beckett commanded him to ferry slaves, and the striking sequence is a stark reminder that many of the historical injustices seen in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are as real as the locations found in the franchise. Tortuga’s own history has been defined by both the triumph of Haiti’s slave revolution and the barbarism of the slave trade, which made it particularly unfortunate that this pivotal scene was cut from the last movie in the series to feature the famous location onscreen. That said, there is no denying that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies have been a boon to the local tourism industry in the small island off Haiti's coast, as many fans of the franchise travel to see the idyllic location made famous by the blockbuster series.
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