Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Cannons roar across the Caribbean as Captain Jack Sparrow’s ragtag crew, sailing the Interceptor, a stolen Royal Navy ship, fires whatever comes to hand at the Black Pearl, the black-sailed ship of the cursed pirate, Captain Barbossa. Captain Sparrow’s crew also fires forks. One fork clips a Black Pearl pirate’s wooden eye clean out of its socket and sends it rolling across the deck. The one-eyed pirate drops to his knees and scrambles after it, like a man chasing a lost coin.
advertisement
This is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Johnny Depp’s swashbuckling debut as Captain Sparrow, and the unlucky pirate is Ragetti, played by Mackenzie Crook. He wears a wooden eye in that scene, and later swaps it for an eyepatch. Nobody in the cinema questions it, because films have taught us that a pirate without a missing eye or a patch is barely a pirate at all. Captain Sparrow himself is the exception, since he wears no eyepatch in the films. But science suggests the patch had little to do with a lost eye, and a great deal to do with the dark.
WHY DID PIRATES WEAR AN EYEPATCH?
The popular answer is injury. Sailors and soldiers did lose eyes in an age before modern surgery, and patches were common among them. Yet pirates rarely wore them aboard ships, and there is no firm evidence of patch-wearing pirates before several popular 19th-century novels.
Exceptions exist, such as Rahmah ibn Jabir al-Jalhami, a well-known pirate of the Persian Gulf who wore one after losing an eye in battle. The pirate in a patch, it seems, owes more to storybooks than to ship logs.
WHAT IS DARK ADAPTATION, AND WHY DOES IT TAKE SO LONG?
Step from a sunlit street into a dark cinema hall and you are briefly blind. That fumbling wait is dark adaptation, the eye’s slow switch from day vision to night vision.
At the back of your eye sits the retina, a thin layer of cells that catch light and turn it into signals for your brain. It has two kinds of cells. Cones work in bright light and give you colour and sharp detail. Rods work in dim light, which is why the world looks grey at night. Each rod contains a light-sensitive chemical called rhodopsin. Bright light breaks it down, and the rods stop working until the chemical is rebuilt. That rebuilding takes time, and it is why your eyes need a while to adjust after you step into the dark.
A 2022 review in The Journal of Physiology notes that full night-time sensitivity can take over 30 minutes to return after a near-total bleach.
This slow adjustment is called dark adaptation, and it is the very problem an eyepatch may help pirates solve.
HOW CAN A SINGLE EYEPATCH HELP YOU SEE IN THE DARK?
Picture a pirate ship mid-raid. On deck, the sun glares. Below deck, it is nearly black. A pirate charging down the stairs with sunlit eyes would be half-blind for minutes, exactly when he can least afford it.
Now cover one eye on deck. It stays in darkness, its rhodopsin undisturbed and its rods primed. Each eye adapts on its own, so flip the patch to the other eye on the way down and the brain simply relies on the one that is ready. In 1934, Charles Sheard of the Mayo Foundation described this very idea in the Minnesota Academy of Sciences Journal, calling it the pirate’s patch. Pilots have used the same trick, closing one eye to protect night vision while flying over bright cities.
HAS ANYONE ACTUALLY TESTED THE PIRATE EYEPATCH THEORY?
Yes. The television show MythBusters tested it in 2007 and found it plausible. Researchers at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota then took it into a lab. They recruited 70 undergraduates, and half wore a patch for 20 minutes. Each student was then blindfolded and sent into a completely dark room to find a table, solve a toddler’s puzzle and find the door again.
The patched pirates finished overwhelmingly faster, the university reported. They also showed a marked drop in cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, after the task. One caution: this was a student project presented at a psychology conference, with the team planning to submit it to a journal, so treat it as a fascinating clue rather than a final verdict.
SO IS THE PIRATE EYEPATCH MYTH BUSTED OR CONFIRMED?
Neither, exactly. The science holds up, since a covered eye really does stay ready for darkness. The history does not, because no historical naval manual documents pirates using it.
So the next time a film pirate squints beneath a patch, spare a thought for the retina underneath. Perhaps it was never a wound. Perhaps it was a plan.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
