Past Perfect sentences with "before"

I had seen a documentary on the Whydah before we visited it in Providence.
Sir Francis Drake had worked for the British Navy before he became a pirate.

These two sentences seem quite awkward to me because of the use of the Past Perfect. If Past Perfect clarifies which of two past events occured first, does the word before render it unnecessary, and could they simply be written in past tense?

I saw a documentary on the Whydah before we visited it in Providence.
Sir Francis Drake worked for the British Navy before he became a pirate.

Solution 1:

There is no difficulty. The sequence of events in the first is (1) speaker sees documentary, (2) speaker and others visit the ‘Whydah’. One event happened before the other. The same is true in the second example: (1) Drake works for the British Navy, (2) he becomes a pirate. Before is required in both sentences. You can’t write two clauses without linking them in some way, and before is the appropriate conjunction in each of these cases.