Brief History of The Piracy Golden Age

The Piracy Golden Age generally refers to a period from the late 17th century to the early 18th century, roughly from the 1650s to the 1730s. This era is characterized by the proliferation of piracy in the Caribbean Sea, along the American coast, and in the waters around the Indian Ocean and West Africa.

The Piracy Golden Age has left a lasting legacy in popular culture, inspiring countless books, movies, and folklore. The romanticized image of pirates as swashbuckling adventurers continues to captivate audiences today.

Defining the Terminology, Early Historical Accounts of Maritime Crime, Outlining the Golden Age Defining the Term «Pirate»

Most people have a vague idea of what a pirate is, and if we were to break it down in the simplest terms, the definition would be «an individual who attacks and robs ships at sea». However, this definition is not particularly helpful since it omits more than a few details. The most important detail is who the attacker is. Sir Francis Drake, for example, would routinely attack and rob ships at sea, but if you were his fellow English citizen and you were to call him a pirate back in the day, he would be offended. Of course, if you were Spanish, i. e., Drake’s enemy in combat, and used the same term to describe him, he wouldn’t much care. As an aside, Drake was a prominent privateer who died in 1596, half a century before the beginning of what we call the Golden Age of Piracy. Though he perfectly fits the personalities and experiences of many pirates described in this tome, he was active long before any of them were even born.

Over the years, the sea brigands were referred to by various names interchangeably. Terms like:

• «corsair»;
• «buccaneer»;
• «privateer»;
• and others were bandied around as synonyms to the term «pirate».

However, they are not the same. The confusion becomes even bigger when the terms overlap, as certain people involved with maritime activities would essentially shift from, for instance, being a privateer to being a pirate and vice versa. With that in mind, it is instrumental to define these terms as best as possible. «Pirate» is a universal term for any type of crime that involves a huge body of water and a boat of any size. In other words, you can have sea pirates, lake pirates, river pirates, etc. Furthermore, the crimes don’t even have to happen at sea. If you were a shipowner or a crew member, and you were committing crimes on land:

• looting;
• robbery;
• rape;
• murder;
• gambling;
• smuggling, etc.

you were a pirate. The word itself is Greek in origin, read as πειρατής (peiratḗs) and meaning «brigand».

So, what about the other terms? Let’s start with «corsair». The term itself is French, originally written as corsaire, and it draws its roots from the Latin word cursus, meaning hostile attack or plunder. In other words, it draws roots from an illegal act, so it’s linked to piracy, at least to some extent. However, the French did not use the term «corsair» for illegal activities when related to their own seamen. In fact, the term was specifically related to privateers from the small harbor town of Saint-Malo in the northwestern region of Brittany. Over time, Europeans would also refer to Muslim privateers from the African Barbary Coast as «Barbary corsairs» or «Turkish corsairs», though, in reality, these seafaring folks from Africa would not always be privateers. Sometimes, they were legitimate naval commanders from the Ottoman Empire; other times, they would be regional lords and outlaws, thus making them outright pirates. Furthermore, they were not all Berbers (a term used for the African native groups living in what is today Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). Since the Ottoman-commissioned Barbary corsairs would often attack Christian ships and wage war against the Christian soldiers, the term «corsair» also gained a bit of a religious undertone.

When we break it down, corsairs are effectively privateers. But what is a privateer? As its name suggests, it refers to a private vessel not owned by the state or the monarch. The term also refers to the officer in charge of the ship. To put it simply, both Sir Francis Drake and his vessel, Golden Hind, are privateers.

A privateer would work outside of the navy as a free agent mainly because there was no real royal navy among any of the seafaring empires during the Late Middle Ages. His job (more than 99 percent of privateers were men at the time) was usually to plunder and attack ships that belonged to nations against which his country was warring. For example, Amaro Pargo, a Spanish corsair/privateer, made a name for himself by attacking mostly English and Dutch ships. Richard Hawkins, one of Drake’s men, also became famous for attacking ships that belonged to the Spanish Armada. But the activity of a privateer was not limited to warfare. In fact, it was expected they would go after merchant ships and other vessels that carried precious cargo. Not only would it provide rich plunder for them and their monarch, but it would also significantly cripple the economic well-being of a rival country. For that reason, a privateer of one country would be a notorious pirate of another. Both Oruç Reis (known as Oruç Barbarossa in Europe due to his ginger beard) and his brother Hayreddin (a later Ottoman navy admiral and beylerbey – «chief governor» – of Ottoman North Africa) were known as fierce pirates among the Western European sailors but were hailed as heroes and loyal subjects in the Ottoman Empire.

Of course, each privateer would be granted full permission from their monarch to plunder ships; these written permissions are called letters of marque, and every Western Christian nation, from Spain, Portugal, and France to England and the Netherlands, issued these permissions. Naturally, the permissions would be null and void the very second the two countries made peace, as doing so was seen as an act of goodwill and a step toward smooth peace negotiations. An immediate annulment of a letter of marque would leave privateers unsatisfied, which is, in fact, one of many contributors to the rise in piracy during the several decades that comprise the Golden Age.

While privateers had permission by the state to do whatever they wanted to an enemy ship, their actions were really no different from those of a common pirate. They would frequently be just as monstrous and brutal as some of the worst outlaws in maritime history. For these reasons and more, people, even back then, would consider privateering nothing more than state-sanctioned piracy. The letter of marque was really the only thing separating a privateer from a life of outright piracy, hence why such a document was incredibly important, legally speaking. Owning a letter of marque could get privateers a lenient sentence in case they went over the line.

Unlike corsairs, privateers were not always religiously motivated, although religion did play a huge part in their activities. For example, most of the privateers would prey on ships from nations with a completely different theological background. England and the Netherlands, two heavily Protestant countries, would wage war with Spain and Portugal, whose majority of people were staunch Catholics. But to a privateer, the target ship merely had to come from a nation with which their homeland was at war. In other words, if England and the Netherlands were skirmishing, Dutch ships would become fair game to privateers and vice versa.

Finally, there’s the term «buccaneer» to consider. If corsairs were linked to the Mediterranean Sea and privateers to the Protestant nations of the Atlantic and Western Europe, buccaneers found their place in the Caribbean, more specifically in the islands of Hispaniola (divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti today) and Tortuga (just north of Haiti). The name itself derives from the French (or rather Caribbean Arawak) word «buccan». A buccan was a type of wooden framework that hunters would use to either slow-roast or smoke meat. Interestingly, buccaneers were originally nothing more than French-born hunters who settled in Hispaniola and made their living from hunting wild game.

With the Spanish efforts to cleanse most of their West Indies’ territories from French interlopers, the early buccaneers moved to Tortuga, a far smaller isle than Hispaniola with fewer natural resources. This course of events pushed them further into piracy, and soon enough, they would be attacking Spanish galleons with alarming frequency, prompting other nations such as the Dutch and the English to provide them with letters of marque and employ them as privateers. Some of the biggest names among the buccaneers, including Daniel Montbars and François L’Olonnais, would be active during the very early days of the Golden Age of Piracy. While they are often counted among some of the most famed pirates of their time, they were effectively privateers or regular seafarers (or not even seafarers at all) who were pushed into effective piracy by the Spanish.

A Brief History of Piracy

Most of the terms related to piracy that we’ve listed above stem from either the Middle Ages or modern times. However, the very act of piracy itself is quite old. To put it in the simplest terms possible, maritime crime is as old as seafaring itself. In antiquity, Tyrrhenians, Phoenicians, and Illyrians all frequently dabbled in piracy, while in ancient Greece, it was considered a legal and morally justified venture (though this changed in later years). In fact, a rather famous anecdote from antiquity regarding pirates involves none other than the most famous Roman ruler ever, Gaius Julius Caesar. On his voyage across the Aegean Sea, the former priest-turned-military commander Caesar was captured by a group of Cilician pirates. They reportedly ransomed him for a sum of twenty talents of silver. For reference, one talent roughly corresponds to 33 kilograms of raw metal, so in today’s currency, that would be around $25 040 per talent, making the ransom $500 080. Caesar, however, felt insulted by this ransom, demanding that they raise it to fifty talents, or $1 252 000 in today’s money. During Caesar’s captivity at the island of Pharmacusa (modern-day Pharmakonisi), a small section of the Dodecanese Islands off the coast of modern-day Turkey, he promised that he would crucify each and every one of his pirate captors, which they took as a joke. As soon as his ransom was paid and he was back in Rome, Caesar raised a massive fleet, hunted down his former captors, and captured them. True to his word, he crucified them all, but he did show a bit of leniency by having their throats cut so they could die quickly.

The Early Middle Ages also saw lots of pirate activity. Vikings of Scandinavia were constantly raiding the European coast with plenty of success, and their seafaring warriors would frequently go after the British Isles as well, which even led to early Scandinavian settlements in what would later become England. Off the coast of modern-day Netherlands, the Frisian sea brigands would often attack the Holy Roman Empire’s ships, with the most prominent commanders being Pier Gerlofs Donia and Wijerd Jelckama. The south Mediterranean coast of Europe was under constant assault by the so-called Moorish pirates, while the Slavic tribe known as the Narentines would frequently raid the Adriatic coast. People across Europe had their own brand of pirate attackers to worry about, and brigands would vary in nationality, culture, and efficacy. Anyone, from the Baltic Slavs and Cossacks to the Arabians and Greek Maniots, could be atop a ship’s deck and raiding the nearest seaborne merchant vessel. And while there were exceptions to the rule in every century of European history, pirates were considered a threat to society and criminals who deserved brutal punishment.

Of course, piracy is by no means limited to Europe. In fact, entire armadas of pirates could be found in ancient and medieval:

• China;
• Japan;
• Vietnam;
• and the many Indian states.

There were even pirates off both the east and west coasts of Africa. In fact, many of these ships would actually come across European vessels, and depending on the relations between the countries, there would either be plundering or a peaceful departure. In fact, if a piratical act were to take place between, for example, the English and the Mughal Empire of India, it would amount to a political scandal, and we intend to cover one such event later in this book.

Every single navigable ocean has seen its fair share of piracy throughout the entirety of human history, and each culture would have differing views on piracy as a phenomenon. As you will see later, despite the act being highly illegal and condemned by society, there were even contemporary citizens that found the lifestyle fascinating. Millions of people would willingly abandon their regular lives and sail the seven seas looking for plunder.

Outlining the Golden Age of Piracy

Defining what exactly the Golden Age of Piracy was can be a bit daunting, especially considering the whole issue of defining the terms such as «pirate» or «privateer». Most experts would agree that there were roughly three periods that marked the so-called Golden Age, and they use several different factors when considering this issue. Firstly, in order for a time span to be the Golden Age of anything, there has to be an increase in frequency. Next, there has to be an exact cut-away point, i. e., a point in time where a certain activity starts to significantly wane or stop altogether. Finally, a Golden Age has to show certain trends in society, trends that would set the stage for the Golden Age to take place and thrive.

In relation to piracy itself, there are a few issue-specific factors to consider. Firstly, a Golden Age of piracy has to have prominent personalities that marked the age, so much so that they became the very stuff of legends. Next, for pirates to thrive, they need safe ports and places to congregate, i. e., semipermanent or permanent pirate settlements. Lastly, the extent of piracy has to be so significant that it actually leads to changes in legal proceedings and gain attention from the very top of the state.

When we take every single factor listed above into consideration, we can more or less connect the dots and draw a concrete timeline of the Golden Age of Piracy. Most experts (though not all) would divide the Golden Age into three separate time periods, all perfectly leading one into the other. Those three would be:

• The buccaneering period (roughly between the early 1650s and 1680).
• The Pirate Round period (throughout the 1690s).
• The period immediately following the War of the Spanish Succession (between 1715 and 1726).

Before we move on, we should address a few discrepancies. Namely, despite the fact that the Golden Age, as outlined above, lasted around seventy-five or more years, it is by no means the only period with massive surges and resurgences in piracy. Typical Activities Aboard the Pirate Ship, the Pirate CodePiratical activities in the Mediterranean and in Southeast and East Asia were well underway for centuries before the buccaneers took up arms against the Spanish. On top of this, the piratical attacks did not necessarily decrease after the deaths of the most prominent pirates of the Caribbean in the late 1720s. In fact, some of the fiercest pirates in the world actually rose to prominence an entire century later, including one of the most successful female pirates to date, a former Chinese prostitute and pirate leader named Zheng Yi Sao. However, that topic is widely outside of the scope of this book.

Furthermore, these facts don’t take away from the historical and cultural importance of the Golden Age of Piracy. It would, indeed, be this particular period that would push the pirates into the global mainstream, and some of the most prominent images we have of pirates today, complete with misconceptions and false attributions, will come from this exact timespan. Events in this particular age would directly influence the creation and standardization of national navies and the improvement of conditions of a common sailor. As odd as it might seem, the pirates that operated during these three-fourths of a century had a far more profound influence on the world than historians and everyday people give them credit for.

Prelude to the Golden Age: Events in Europe, Early Pirate Bases

Events in Europe Prior to the Golden Age of Piracy

In the early 17th century and beyond, Europe was a colossal battlefield due to a series of skirmishes known collectively as the European wars of religion. Nearly every single major European power was involved, including:

• England;
• France;
• the Netherlands;
• Spain;
• Portugal;
• the Holy Roman Empire;
• the Italian lands;
• and the Scandinavian kingdoms.

While religion was one of the main motivators behind these conflicts, with the rise of Protestant factions in Christianity and the waning Catholic influence over much of Western Europe, they were far from the only factor. Oftentimes, two Catholic or Protestant nations would clash against one another while allied with a country that would be deemed an enemy. Some of the bloodiest wars took place during these times, including the Thirty Years’ War within the Holy Roman Empire (1618-1648), The Eighty Years’ War, also known as the Dutch War of Independence (1568-1648), and the War of the Three Kingdoms that involved England, Scotland, and Ireland (1639-1651). Moreover, the wars in England would directly lead to Oliver Cromwell overthrowing the king and establishing himself as Lord Protector of the Realm, effectively making England a republic for the first and, so far, final time in its existence.

Also, during this turbulent period, European maritime forces started colonizing other corners of the globe, creating new trade routes and importing brand-new products and raw materials. The English East India Company was still in its infancy, and both the French and the Portuguese were already active in the Indian Ocean. Of course, the future colonizers also sought good fortune across the Atlantic, with both Americas seeing a lot of activity.

The most prominent scrambles for supremacy in the region, however, happened in the so-called West Indies or the Caribbean. The many islands that comprise the region would serve as bases for several great European powers, with Spain holding sway until the waning years of the 17th century. Many seafarers of French, Dutch, and English origin found their calling here either as plantation owners, hunters, sailors, or outright pirates. As the decades went by, more and more territories were ceded from Spain to the other European powers. For instance, Jamaica was held by the Spanish until 1655, when Admiral William Penn conquered it and subjugated it to English rule. In addition, the western part of Hispaniola was Spanish, though the French managed to establish a settlement there in 1670, with the western half of the island officially being ceded to France nine years later. This region would eventually become Haiti.

The ethnic makeup of these islands was interesting, to say the least. Each island had its own native population of various people groups, and interbreeding with Europeans was common at the time. However, most invading powers also imported thousands of slaves from Africa to the region, therefore further diluting the native population. Because of so many various people groups essentially being forced to work side by side with one another on a daily basis, they had to find a way to interact, which led to the creation of early Creole languages.

Interestingly, the trade route from the Caribbean to Europe was not the busiest, as most Europeans still frequently traded with East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The powerful Mughal Empire was still the dominant force, both on land and at sea, having reached its peak during the reigns of two rulers known as the Great Moghuls colloquially – Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658) and especially Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707). The empire’s influence was so vast that it could wipe out any of the European trading companies in an instant. The English East India Company, in particular, was essentially forced into keeping good relations with the empire, considering they only had a few factories on the subcontinent at the time. More importantly, the region was known for its spices and other materials, of which the European elites were incredibly fond. Foreign ships had to maintain their strenuous relationships with the Mughal Empire as best as they knew how, and that meant preventing any piratical activity from targeting Indian merchant ships. With the wars in Europe draining the court treasuries and the colonies growing increasingly restless, violent, and – most importantly – lawless, the seeds were sown for the first prominent pirates to emerge.

Early Pirate Bases

One common myth, which we will delve into deeper a bit later, was that the pirates during the Golden Age were so prominent that they essentially established a «Pirate Republic», which was free from all European powers and responsible only to itself and its maritime citizens. However, nothing can be further from the truth. Throughout the Golden Age, there was no such thing as a pirate utopia. However, pirates did often congregate in specific areas, be they small islands or port towns. Unsurprisingly, they were all prominent spots on major trade routes, and even less surprisingly, they were all spots where illegal trade was allowed and where officials turned a blind eye to contraband retail.

Before we move onto the prominent pirate bases themselves, we should discuss the legal activities of maritime empires at the time. It is no secret that the law had little to no effect in certain corners of huge seafaring empires. However, the laws regarding trade were not that different from our own in the 21st century. For example, if a person came into possession of a huge sum of wealth overnight, the matter would be investigated thoroughly. Seafarers, in particular, were subject to these investigations, considering the prominence of piracy and the insecurity of contemporary ocean trade. Moreover, if pirates from one country attacked ships that belonged to an ally nation, the matter would become an international incident, and unless the native authorities dealt with the issue, the matter could easily lead to war.

These matters became exceptionally difficult during times when peace treaties were signed between two nations. Back in the day, news traveled slow, especially across the ocean. So, if, for instance, Spain and England signed a treaty that demanded an end to all hostilities, privateers on either side would have to cease attacking ships from their former enemies. Since said news would sometimes take months to reach people outside of Europe, a privateer could easily attack a ship, thinking they were doing so fully protected by the law. In reality, though, the attack would be considered an act of aggression and a breach of the treaty, resulting in another potential war or monetary compensation. It was a vicious circle and a legal nightmare for everyone involved.

Of course, these factors were not the only ones that played a major role in forming regular pirate bases. In fact, everyday seafaring might have been far more influential in that regard. Generally speaking, if you were a sailor in the mid- to late 17th century and early 18th century, no matter what country you were living in, you would be living a miserable life. Average wages of common sailors were incredibly low, and most people who held high positions, such as admirals or captains, didn’t fare much better during a typical nautical voyage. More importantly, as a sailor, your chances of advancing to a ranked position were almost impossible. You would essentially be risking life and limb to import some fabric, spices, wood, and other raw materials, and those risks would seemingly come from everywhere. You might die from malnutrition, drown at sea due to a storm, be killed by locals in any number of non-European ports, get stranded somewhere for even the slightest insubordination, contract and succumb to one of countless diseases, be murdered by the local wildlife, end up being sold into slavery if you had the misfortune of being attacked by a slave-selling nation, and, of course, be killed by pirates. And to make matters worse, you would be at the mercy of your commanding officer, and your amenities were practically non-existent. The job essentially trapped you into a life of utter misery.

Compared to these conditions, the life of piracy was almost seen as a blessing, although working aboard a pirate ship was no better than being on an ordinary vessel in terms of simple living and working conditions. Many young men turned to piracy for the same reason they would become factory workers in the ever-growing East India Company – it was a position that would, at the very least, offer them new wealth and a chance to be, to a certain extent, their own bosses. The main difference, of course, was the social attitude toward the men who chose these career paths. East India Company employees, be they ordinary workers, factors (mercantile fiduciaries of the EIC), writers, etc., were usually disliked by the English upper classes, but their work was not illegal or even particularly unethical for the time. Piracy, on the other hand, was an out-and-out crime, and few men actually confessed to being pirates openly. In fact, the punishments for acts of piracy were severe, usually consisting of hanging, beheading, being drawn and quartered, or a combination of these acts. Furthermore, a pirate’s body would usually be coated in tar or hung in chains above a prominent port as a reminder to other seafarers what awaited them if they turned to piracy. Despite all of that, thousands of men, usually those in their twenties, would opt to sail under the black flag and, if necessary, die under it.

An average successful pirate ship could haul in massive booty. And considering their targets were usually massive galleons that transported tons of goods and valuables, a typical pirate could earn himself a wage that was hundreds of times larger than a regular sailor’s daily salary. Naturally, a pirate ship would need a safe place to deposit all of the riches stolen from a ship, mainly because the authorities would certainly get suspicious if a small, ill-fit vessel entered a harbor and its sailors, all poorly dressed and lacking in basic manners, were in possession of exotic goods worth tens of thousands of pounds. Not only would pirates need a port at which to resell all of their stolen goods quickly, but they also required an area where they might rest, eat, drink, enjoy a woman or two, and repair their ships. Such ports already existed in the Mediterranean, with the Barbary Corsairs using them prominently, but as the decades progressed, a few new key areas arose as potential pirate bases, one of which would serve as the potential inspiration for a fictional pirate utopia.

One of these ports was Tortuga, a small island north of Hispaniola. Originally settled by the Spanish in 1625, it would be the home base of French buccaneers, as well as both English and Dutch pirates, for many decades, with the Spanish retaking and losing the island several times. By 1640, the French eventually built a permanent fortress on the island called Fort de Rocher, allowing them to fend off Spanish attacks in the coming years. And even as the piratical activity moved to different islands in the region, some of the most Review of Pirate Tactics in Ship Combatfamed pirates of the time, including Henry Morgan, frequented Tortuga. Morgan would be an instrumental member of the so-called Brethren of the Coast, a very loosely connected group of seafaring outlaws mostly of French Huguenot and British Protestant descent. This brotherhood was, to an extent, responsible for making the Caribbean an economic hub thanks to their illegal trade, and many of the pirates would try to retire on the islands as farmers or plantation owners with varying success.

West of the Caribbean, within Mexico, we find another early pirate base, the town of Campeche. Originally a trading town formed in the 1540s, the place would become a hotbed of piracy, with the Spanish government unable to quench the problem for at least a century and a half. Sir Francis Drake was one of the first privateers to sail the waters near Campeche, but the city itself would host, in one way or another, a vast array of famous pirates, buccaneers, privateers, and other men of the sea. Possibly the most famed men to be in or near the city were the brutal French buccaneer Jean David Nau (better known as François L’Olonnais), Dutch mercenary and pirate Laurens de Graaf, and the renowned Welsh pirate and later lieutenant governor of Jamaica, Sir Henry Morgan. In fact, Morgan would be one of many seafaring bandits that would sack Campeche and rob it of its riches.

Staying within the Caribbean, we move onto possibly the most famous bases for any pirate during the Golden Age, namely Nassau on the island of New Providence (the Bahamas) and Port Royal in Jamaica. Port Royal was inhabited as early as 1494 by the Spanish, but it officially became an English territory in 1655 after a successful invasion. Around the same time, the Bahamas were being settled, with New Providence getting its first settlement in 1666. Charles Town, the fort (and later the town), was founded in 1670 and served as a privateering base for the British, who renamed it Nassau in 1695, a year after it was raided by the Spanish. Both Nassau and Port Royal were infamous pirate dens even during their early days, with contemporary reports mentioning drunkards, illegal traders, prostitutes, and general lawlessness. The situation would improve slightly in the early years of the 18th century when the local governors and other officials started to crack down on piracy, with business slowly turning to:

• slavery;
• plantation maintenance;
• legal trade;
• and other venues.

Interestingly, no less than three early pirate bases were founded thousands of miles away from the Caribbean off the southeastern coast of Africa — more specifically, on the island of Madagascar. The northeastern part of the island housed two such bases, those being Ranter Bay (modern-day Rantabe) and the island of Île Sainte-Marie, while the third base, the former Fort Dauphin (modern-day Tôlanaro), was located in the southeast. Madagascar’s pirate bases were strategically located thanks to the continuous trade between the Europeans and the South and Southeast Asians. All sea routes had to go around the south of Africa, and aside from Madagascar, there were few landmasses within the Indian Ocean where traders could dock their ships. Furthermore, ships from the Middle East and the Mughal Empire would often trade in the waters of the Red Sea, which was right between Africa and Asia and north of Madagascar. These routes proved to be a wealthy source of potential booty for pirates, and indeed more than a few famous pirate raids took place in these waters.

However, Madagascar is also important in pirate lore for a different set of reasons. Namely, despite not having its own Brethren of the Coast like the Caribbean, it did house a few territories that would inspire the existence of the so-called Libertatia, or the Republic of Pirates. As we will see, some of the pirates who made their stay on Madagascar did go on to influence the local people into engaging in skirmishes and even full-on wars, with a few of the seafarers even going as far as to declare themselves kings. However, these events did not last long, and the influence of piracy more or less waned on the island within a few decades after the Golden Age.

Rise of Piracy: Prominent Pirates and Their Exploits

With the Golden Age encompassing three-fourths of a century, it had no shortage of well-known pirates, and their exploits would become legendary even in their own time. However, historians run into a few problems when it comes to exploring the subject of piracy. First and foremost, the contemporary records on these brigands are scarce; they are often quite barren and lacking in substance, and more often than not, they would be one-sided or even full of fiction. We will focus on the mythical image of the pirate in the later chapters, but for now, let’s focus on the problem of «pinning down» the prominent sea bandits of the era. As stated, most of what we know from these pirates comes from criminal records of the era, as well as local news sources, naval reports, and the scant diaries and journals found aboard some of these vessels. In addition, locating the remains of these men is often an exercise in futility considering how many of them died at sea. Furthermore, it’s difficult to locate some of their original ships due to the same problem; if a ship was decommissioned at the time, it would either be broken down for scrap parts or sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A rather large number of such pirate ships was actually located and extracted from the ocean for research, but such efforts are rare, expensive, and still don’t provide a complete picture of what pirates might have been like.

In order to best cover the entire Golden Age, it’s best to break it down period by period, covering some of the most prominent names that sailed the high seas and robbed wealthy ships of their precious cargo. The list will overwhelmingly deal with English pirates since they were the most prominent brigands at sea during this period. However, it will also go over several key individuals from contemporary France and the Netherlands, mostly ones active during the earliest part of the Golden Age.

The Buccaneering Period (1650-1680)

The 1650s were a time of turmoil and unease for Europe. While the major maritime powers were at peace, there was still a lot of friction between Catholic Spain and the increasingly Protestant countries like England, France, and the Netherlands. Eager to deal with the local non-Hispanic populace, the Spanish began to invade many islands in the Caribbean in an attempt to force the foreigners out. Hispaniola’s French population of hunters, who were at the time called buccaneers, had to flee and establish a base on the small island of Tortuga. By the time the 1650s rolled in, these former hunters and meat smokers were already actively attacking Spanish galleons and making life a living hell for them, with the first supposed attacker to do this being a French sailor called Pierre le Grand. The adjective «supposed» needs to be stressed, as only a single source mentions this pirate by name, and he is not found anywhere else in historical records of the time. Consequently, the man who would reference this buccaneer was a buccaneer and a seafarer himself, one Alexandre Exquemelin. Though he is extremely important for this particular period of the Golden Age of Piracy, we will be covering him in a later chapter.

Up until the 1680s rolled in, the buccaneers were not only raising hell in the Caribbean, but they also found themselves invading and plundering the coastal and continental cities in Central and South America. In fact, they would often invade the same cities multiple times, often with brutal and bloody results. The number of buccaneers only increased with the English capture of Jamaica in 1655. Interestingly enough, the original mission that Oliver Cromwell gave the two English commanders, Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables, was to lead a surprise attack on the Spanish territories in the Caribbean, which the two men failed at spectacularly. Them capturing Jamaica was, in reality, more of an afterthought, and when the two men returned to England to report on their failures, Cromwell had them both imprisoned. However, the capture of Jamaica proved to be a step in the right direction; fifteen years later, Spain would officially cede the island to the English Crown, thus allowing both legal and illegal enterprises on the island to flourish.

As early as the 1660s, both the English governors of Jamaica at Port Royal and the French governors at Tortuga would provide letters of marque to both ex- and current buccaneers. With this documentation, the seafarers had legal backing when it came to raiding Spanish ships, though this didn’t necessarily prevent them from raiding crafts of their country or its allies. The buccaneers of the time had set certain trends that would become common practice with the pirates who followed, and in terms of sheer gruesomeness or boldness, it’s incredibly difficult to differentiate which generation of pirates was worse. So, it would be instructive to take a look at some of these pirates and what made them stand out.

Sir Christopher Myngs

A vice admiral with a successful career, Sir Christopher Myngs was a complex individual with an incredible life. As early as the 1650s, he was already in the Caribbean, attacking Spanish vessels and raking in a decent amount of booty. Even in these early days, Myngs was earning his infamy as a cruel, brutal commander who encouraged his men to rape and pillage as often as possible during each raid. But more importantly, Myngs had developed a questionable yet undeniably effective practice of hiring buccaneers and commanding large fleets of ships. With these men of ill-repute as his allies, Myngs successfully sacked several important cities on the South American continent, including regions of New Granada (modern-day Colombia), such as:

• Tolú and Santa Maria;
• and the cities of Cumaná;
• Puerto Cabello;
• and Coro.

He conducted this last series of raids in 1659.

The Spanish urged Cromwell’s government to do something about Myngs, and while the English paid no heed to the Spanish pleas, Myngs would see some form of justice the same year he managed to sack three key Spanish settlements. Namely, the Jamaican governor at the time, Edward D’Oyley, urged the captain not to share his loot from the raids with the buccaneers, which Myngs ignored. Over a quarter of a million pounds went to the pirates who helped Myngs with his efforts, a hefty sum that the officials deemed worthy of an embezzlement charge. Myngs was arrested and sent to England for trial, but with Cromwell dead and the Restoration taking place, he was pardoned and offered a position as a naval officer again. Late 1662 saw him back in the Caribbean, and while the English and the Spanish were no longer at war, he was still allowed to plunder Spanish ships, which he intended to do on a grander scale than before.

Thanks to the efforts and encouragement of the new governor of Jamaica, Thomas Hickman-Windsor, 1st Earl of Plymouth (better known as Lord Windsor), Myngs was employing buccaneers left and right, promising them infinite Spanish plunder. With his new seafaring soldiers, he sacked Santiago de Cuba, the biggest city of Cuba, and took control of it. And while this was a feat worthy of praise, especially considering how strong the Spanish defenses were, it would be his next feat the following year (1663) that would cement his name as a legend among buccaneers. During that year, Myngs assembled a massive fleet of 14 ships, which collectively held over 1 400 buccaneers of various national origins. At the time, this was easily the biggest pirate fleet ever assembled, and Myngs did it with an express purpose. In February of 1663, his fleet attacked and sacked Campeche, leaving behind a massive trail of devastation and ruin. Myngs himself was badly wounded during the attack, so he left the command to the Dutch corsair Edward Mansvelt as he retreated for a much-needed recovery. By 1664, Myngs was already back in England, his wounds healing.

The last two years of Myngs’s life actually saw him receive the position of vice admiral and a subsequent knighthood for his services in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Sadly, he would not see the end of this war, as he died in action during the Four Days’ Battle, which took place between June 1st and June 4th, 1666.

Myngs’s story is admittedly astounding, though it pales in comparisons to the vast majority of the other pirates represented in the passages that follow. However, his life is vital for the story of the Golden Age of Piracy for two important reasons. First and foremost, the fact that he was knighted and received a high naval position shows that pirates could sometimes manage to leave their past behind and continue their lives as, more or less, law-abiding citizens. In that regard, however, Myngs is a rarity, considering that the average pirate’s fate was death. The other major reason behind Myngs’s importance is his willingness to employ and encourage buccaneers. During his more famous raids, sacks, plunders, and attacks, some of the most famous pirate captains and buccaneers came to prominence, and he was arguably the biggest influence on the early Golden Age pirates to increase their area of operations.

Henry Morgan

To anyone who has tasted the famous Captain Morgan rum, the naming of this beverage should be no surprise, nor should the rather flamboyant and larger-than-life image of a pirate adorning the drink. This rum was, after all, named in honor of one of the most famous buccaneers of the early Golden Age of Piracy. Arguably, the man known as Henry Morgan might be the first-ever archetypal pirate «superstar» and the first person in the illegal trade to achieve both instant infamy and widespread popularity, even during his own time.

Henry Morgan was a Welsh sailor born sometime in 1635. It’s still not known how he made it to the Caribbean, but early accounts suggest that he served under Sir Christopher Myngs shortly before the sack of Campeche. He would also serve under Edward Mansfield, a seasoned privateer who had the backing of Sir Thomas Modyford, the governor of Jamaica in 1664 and the man who would provide Morgan with the letter of marque and instructions to attack Spanish settlements. (Ironically, Modyford was appointed governor with the task of reining in piratical, privateering, and buccaneering activity, and initially, he was incredibly strict and brutal in this practice but more or less completely flipped on the issue soon after.) Of course, Modyford would not be the first governor to support Morgan in his endeavors. In fact, Modyford’s predecessor was none other than Edward Morgan, Henry’s uncle and the father of Henry’s cousin and future wife, Mary. These connections gave Henry Morgan unlimited access to local resources and support in his future privateering endeavors. Interestingly enough, Edward Morgan would go on to conquer the Dutch-held islands of Sint Eustatius and Saba in 1665; he would die in December of that same year. The control of these two islands went to yet another Morgan; this time, it was Henry’s cousin and Edward’s other nephew, Thomas.

Henry Morgan made use of these connections well. His first major successes were the invasions of Puerto Principe and Porto Bello, modern-day Cuba and Panama, respectively. His letter of marque, however, did not allow him to attack people on land, only at sea. He circumvented this rule by letting Modyford know that the Spanish were planning a future invasion of English lands in the Caribbean and that his own attacks were preemptive in nature. The 1668 invasion of Porto Bello, in particular, was a stunning affair. Morgan achieved this feat by having his men paddle several miles on twenty-three small canoes and invade the city at dawn. While there were some casualties, Porto Bello was taken rather quickly, and Morgan immediately held it for ransom, demanding 350 000 pesos from the president of Panama, Don Agustin. The president tried to recapture the city, but having failed in his endeavor, he resorted to bargaining with Morgan and renegotiating the ransom down to 100 000 pesos. Of course, Morgan had plundered the city dry by that point, taking anywhere between £75 000 and £100 000 of both money and goods to Modyford in Port Royal. Having overstepped the boundaries of his letter of marque, Morgan was reprimanded by Modyford, with the governor even writing to King Charles II letting him know of Morgan’s disreputable ways. However, the English public, both in Jamaica and back home in London, hailed Morgan as a hero.

Morgan would go on to attack two settlements on Lake Maracaibo in modern-day Venezuela, those being the towns of Maracaibo and La Ceiba (modern-day Gibraltar, not to be confused with Gibraltar in Europe). The events at both Maracaibo and Gibraltar saw Morgan and his men enter and ransack an empty city, invade another city, retreat due to the Spanish counterattack back at Maracaibo, negotiate a retreat with no result, and then attack and utterly beat the Spanish. And to add insult to injury, he escaped back to Port Royal with the loot from both cities and the ravaged Spanish fleet. Unfortunately, King Charles II’s government would move on with a pro-Spanish stance in the late 1660s, which prompted Modyford to admonish Morgan for his acts but not arrest him outright.

What followed was probably Henry Morgan’s most infamous sacking of a city: the partially successful sack of Panama, which took place between 1669 and 1672. Once again, Morgan proved himself a master tactician, using guerilla methods and the element of surprise to invade the city. In order to leave no corner unturned, Morgan assembled as many as thirty ships and one thousand men – a massive fleet that outdid even his former employer, Sir Christopher Myngs. The result was a massive rout, with only about fifteen privateers dying compared to at least four hundred Spanish men. However, Morgan would not enjoy the spoils of war as he intended. Following the orders of Panama’s governor, most of the city’s wealth was burned in a massive fire caused by an explosion from hidden caches of gunpowder. A huge portion of wealth was also hauled away by ships out of the city. Morgan took off with what was left, which was still not a small sum at the time, but it was far lower than what the privateers had been expecting from a city as big as Panama.

As was the case with his previous raids, Morgan was accused of torture and other crimes, as well as retaining most of the loot and not providing the allotted share to the Crown. He was arrested alongside Modyford and sent to England in 1672, but as soon as he touched English soil, he was hailed as a hero and even knighted. Morgan would go back to Jamaica in 1675 and live out his days as a plantation owner until his death on August 25th, 1688. He would be actively involved in Jamaican politics, even serving as the governor of the island on three separate occasions.

Interestingly, Henry Morgan, though being the epitome of a pirate in the early Golden Age, vehemently refused to be addressed as such. He was a privateer, and according to his own words, he vehemently hated pirates, buccaneers, and the like. He even publicly refuted most of the accusations that were levied against him, especially ones that referred to his supposed torture of locals, misuse of nuns and other religious figures during his raid of Porto Bello, and embezzling money after each raid. In fact, Alexandre Exquemelin, who wrote about the Welsh privateer, lost a very public lawsuit, and publishers were forced to retract some of the information from future printings of Exquemelin’s works. But no matter what Henry Morgan called himself, he was far from a clean privateer who stuck to his letter of marque.

David Marteen

David Marteen was a Dutch privateer, and he was known as one of the people who willingly joined Henry Morgan in his raid of Spanish settlements in Central and South America, collectively known as the Spanish Main. Taking a contingent of men in 1664, Marteen sacked Villa Hermosa (modern Villahermosa) in the Tabasco province in a surprise raid after having marched fifty miles inland to do so. Upon his return, he had to face the Spanish patrol and retake the ships they had captured. His raids continued in Central America after this incident, with the sack of the city of Granada, Nicaragua, being the last one before Marteen departed in 1665. In the coming years, he would serve Governor Modyford as a privateer, a career he continued even under Modyford’s successor, Governor Thomas Lynch.

Marteen is not particularly famous for his raids, brutality, or eccentricity, unlike many of the other pirates covered in this volume. However, he is significant to overall pirate lore and history as being one of the first men at sea who was rumored to have buried his valuables, thus creating the legend of the so-called «buried pirate treasure». Supposedly, Marteen set up camp near Salmon Brook in modern-day Connecticut, United States, sometime in 1655, a little after raiding the Spanish galleon Neptune. However, the locals did not appreciate the pirate’s presence there, so he and his crew sailed away, burying vast amounts of their wealth at the spot. Other sources even claim that Marteen’s men established a full-fledged settlement that was wiped out more than two decades later. However, nothing in the historical records suggests an event like this happened, and Marteen probably never even sailed anywhere close to Connecticut.

Laurens de Graaf

Laurens de Graaf was a Dutch privateer who spent most of his life in the service of the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). His early life is somewhat obscure, with the most likely account being that he was sold into slavery and worked on a plantation in the Canary Islands. He somehow escaped his capture, married his French-born wife in 1674, then moved to the Caribbean and started as a privateer in the service of the French soon after. In fact, there are even some records of him helping a raid of Campeche in 1672, two years before his marriage and well before he made the Caribbean his permanent place of residence. During the late 1670s, he managed to capture a large number of ships, each larger than the last, and converted all of their crews to piracy. His biggest early success was capturing a Spanish frigate from the imposing Armada de Barlovento (a huge Spanish force of fifty ships that had the task of overseeing Spanish American territories and protecting them from advances of other nations) in 1679. By the early 1680s, he had become so prominent that Henry Morgan himself, during one of his stints as a governor, sent a pirate-hunting frigate after him.

De Graaf’s career in piracy, however, had only just begun. The Spanish decided to take vengeance for their armada’s defeat and the loss of a ship, but de Graaf took them head-on and defeated them after a prolonged sea battle. Soon enough, he would ally himself, albeit reluctantly, with another Dutch privateer, Nicholas van Hoorn. The two men forged a plan to sack the city of Veracruz (in modern-day Mexico). Their plan came to fruition on May 17th, 1683. However, the two men would end up in a massive quarrel not long after. With the Spanish fleet appearing to help the people of Veracruz, de Graaf and van Hoorn retreated to a nearby island called Isla de Sacrificios with the hostages. There, they shared the spoils and waited for the ransom on the hostages to be paid out. However, van Hoorn grew impatient and executed multiple hostages, sending their heads to the Spanish as a consequence of not receiving the ransom on time. This act infuriated de Graaf, who was by no means an angel (in fact, the Spanish would see de Graaf as the Devil incarnate), but he was firmly against the mistreatment of hostages. The two supposedly fought a duel over the matter, and while no man died, van Hoorn was wounded. His wound would soon fester and grow gangrenous, and he died not long after.

This willingness to treat the hostages well was not new behavior for de Graaf, and he would exhibit it again when his men wanted to tear into their prisoners during the Dutch privateer’s second sack of Campeche in 1685. He would go on to fight the Spanish for a few more years, leading attacks in Cuba, but at some point, he also started going after English ships. He remarried, in the meantime, to a female buccaneer called Anne Dieu-le-Veut. Around 1695, the English launched counter-offensives on de Graaf, beating his fleet and capturing his family after an attack on Port-de-Paix in Saint-Domingue. De Graaf’s later whereabouts are a mystery to historians, with one plausible outcome being that he died in Louisiana while helping to establish a French colony there.

De Graaf’s life, much like Marteen’s, doesn’t seem too important on the face of it when we compare it to other pirates who came after him. However, his naval battle against the Spanish would inspire the long-standing trope of massive pirate naval battles with swords, musket fire, and huge cannonades. Like most things regarding the subject of pirates, the idea of naval battles was blown out of proportion, and de Graaf’s skirmish with the armada was the exception, not the rule. But de Graaf also inspired another pirate myth, that of honorable pirate duels. While dueling was generally seen as a way to settle the score, it was nowhere near as dramatic or impressive as the one between de Graaf and van Hoorn. In fact, it was rare for two pirate captains to go at it; the majority of said pirate duels happened between regular sailors, mostly over sharing the spoils of a raid.

Nicholas van Hoorn

As we saw earlier, Nicholas van Hoorn would inevitably die due to the consequences of his duel with Laurens de Graaf. And indeed, the previous attack on Veracruz was the highlight of his career. However, it was merely the crowning moment of what were decades of successful seafaring notoriety, both as a privateer and as an outright pirate.

Van Hoorn was, at first, enlisted in the service of France, attacking both Dutch and Spanish ships, but he would soon turn on his own masters and go after French ships as well. In fact, van Hoorn was so infamous yet so effective that all three countries would employ his services at one point or another. During the early 1680s, he was known for plundering the west coast of African in search of slaves. His escapades became well known in the Caribbean, and the English were on his tail, though nothing came of their pursuits. Van Hoorn would soon reach the French part of Hispaniola and gain a letter of marque from its governor, enabling him to go after the Spanish settlements – an endeavor that ultimately led to the sacking of Veracruz and his famous episode with Laurens de Graaf.

In terms of infamy, van Hoorn was far from benevolent. Considering that he was capable of turning against his employers if a better opportunity arose, he was one of those contemporary pirates who perfectly fit the stereotypical depiction of a buccaneer. He was, however, far from being one of the worst to emerge during this era.

François L’Olonnais

Millions of people worldwide are aware of a particular Japanese manga called One Piece. Since its inception, this story of Monkey D. Luffy and his fellow pirates has sold close to five hundred million volumes, and it’s still an ongoing series and a huge media empire. Sharp-eyed fans will, of course, know about one particular member of the One Piece cast, a particularly rugged, manly, dangerous sword-wielder named Roronoa Zoro. What most fans probably don’t know is that he was the only member of Luffy’s crew who was named after a real-life pirate, a buccaneer who is arguably far more gruesome and deadly than his manga counterpart.

François L’Olonnais, whose real name is Jean-David Nau, was most likely born in the small French town of Les Sables-d’Olonne (hence his nom de guerre, «the Frenchman of Olonne») and was sold as an indentured servant in the Caribbean early in his life. After his servitude expired in 1660, he began sailing around the Caribbean islands until finally settling in Saint-Domingue, where he became a buccaneer. The most fateful event of this period was when L’Olonnais shipwrecked near Campeche around 1661 or 1662, which was followed by the Spanish massacring his entire crew. He survived by supposedly covering himself in blood and hiding among the dead. Once he managed to depart Campeche, he settled in Tortuga. Not long after, he held a Spanish town hostage with a group of other buccaneers. Once the Spanish sent out a ship to deal with him, he ordered every single crew member to be beheaded save for one. That one man was to relay a message to the Spanish authorities, which more than explained L’Olonnais’s raison d’être from that point forward – «I shall never henceforward give quarter to any Spaniard whatsoever».

True to his word, L’Olonnais would go on many raiding parties against the Spanish in the Caribbean and the surrounding continental lands. His most famed raid was the ransacking of Maracaibo, modern-day Venezuela, in 1666. The rape of this city took place over a few months, with L’Olonnais and his men torturing, raping, and killing its inhabitants with cruel and brutal proficiency. His next target was Gibraltar, and despite the city’s protection by a Spanish force that greatly outnumbered the buccaneers, L’Olonnais managed to beat them and hold the city for ransom. Despite getting said ransom, the French pirate still looted the city, and the inhabitants were left in a state of utter chaos. News of L’Olonnais’s brutality quickly spread throughout the Caribbean, and he was aptly dubbed the «Bane of Spain».

However, his most brutal reported act (if it really happened since there’s only one source mentioning it) came to pass when L’Olonnais and his men were pillaging through what is now modern-day Honduras. After raiding the city of Puerto Cavallo and moving onto San Pedro, the buccaneers were ambushed by the Spanish and only barely managed to escape. L’Olonnais took two Spanish prisoners with him, and while he was interrogating them for a safe, clear route to San Pedro, he cut open one of them, tore his heart out, and gnawed at it right in front of everyone’s eyes.

His subsequent exploits saw him attacking other Spanish-held cities, such as Campeche, Guatemala, and San Pedro Sula, and he even managed to sail to Jamaica and sell one of his old ships to a fellow buccaneer. Interestingly, L’Olonnais’s death came not at the hands of the Spanish but of native tribes that lived in Central America. Somewhere in modern-day Panama, L’Olonnais and his men were captured by the Darién in 1669, and those natives were, in turn, captured by the Kuna. The Kuna actually killed L’Olonnais and, according to scarce sources, dismembered his body and burned the remains.

Few men were as feared as François L’Olonnais, and if there’s one thing that his life proves without a shadow of a doubt, it’s that an effective pirate captain who wanted to maintain his position needed to have either immense charisma, perfect leadership skills, or the ability to terrify everyone on board beyond belief. This point will become relevant later when we cover the everyday life of pirates during the Golden Age.

Roche Braziliano

As stated earlier, François L’Olonnais managed to sail all the way to Jamaica and sell one of his old ships to a fellow buccaneer. It just so happened that this buccaneer, a Dutchman whose real name is still a matter of historical debate, shared a lot of the same traits as his French counterpart, and though his career is not as well-known as that of L’Olonnais, he has nonetheless remained one of the most brutal Dutch pirates of the early Golden Age.

The man known as Roche Braziliano (with many alternative spellings; consequently, the lack of a single proper spelling for pirate names was common during the Golden Age, nor was taking up pseudonyms) was an exile living in Brazil, parts of which were controlled by the Dutch at the time.

Braziliano started his privateering career there, soon moving to the Caribbean and capturing scores of ships. During his activities in the West Indies, he was captured, arrested, and sent to Spain. Upon his escape, he swore that he would end his enemies, sharing the same burning hatred for the Spanish as the man from whom he would later buy a ship.

With his new ship, Braziliano was ready to do some raiding, and throughout the 1660s, he would sail under the command of none other than Henry Morgan during one of his many raids into the Spanish Main. Much like L’Olonnais, Braziliano enjoyed torturing his captives, with one brutal example being him roasting Spaniards alive over an open fire. Braziliano was also known to be a loud, obnoxious drunk who was willing to kill a man who wouldn’t drink with him. His booming buccaneering career, however, ended somewhat abruptly after 1671, as all traces of his activities disappear. Braziliano shared his cruelty with L’Olonnais, and that’s what initially made him infamous. However, his real claim to legacy is his drunkenness. It is a well-known stereotype that pirates love to get drunk both on and off duty, and indeed, it was one stereotype that held true in the vast majority of cases, with some notable exceptions. Of all the recorded pirates in the early Golden Age, Braziliano was certainly the biggest drunkard and quite possibly even the proudest of that fact.

The Pirate Round Period (the 1690s)

As the 17th century was nearing its end, the major maritime forces increased their efforts in reducing piracy in the Caribbean. Furthermore, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 taking place and William of Orange taking the throne of England, the country renewed its hostilities with France and its eccentric king, Louis XIV. And while that topic is fascinating in and of itself, it’s merely the backdrop behind the first collapse of the buccaneering period of the Golden Age. Namely, the Brethren of the Coast was an international crew of people, and once hostilities between England and France reignited, the men simply refused to collaborate with one another. In other words, gone were the days when Henry Morgan could lead a raid with dozens of ships sailing under many different colors. Furthermore, the cities in the Spanish Main and on the islands were drained of their resources. Piracy did continue, but the sea brigands needed a new, fresh pool of resources. And they did, indeed, find one, hundreds of miles away, near the eastern shores of Africa.

There was no better time to sail the Indian Ocean than the 1690s. The Indian subcontinent and the surrounding lands were laden with resources that Europeans craved at the time, such as:

• silk;
• calico;
• tea;
• spices;
• and even art.

Furthermore, South and Southeast Asia housed several dozens of factories from a few East India companies from Europe, and the ships coming and going to these factories would often carry valuables on board and even years’ worth of wages for each factory worker. And considering how thinly the European maritime forces were spread at the time, policing these waters was a task doomed to fail, as everyone, from a small fishing boat to a huge trading galleon, was a target for pirates. And it didn’t just stop with European ships. Vessels sent out by the Great Moghul would also find themselves on the pirates’ radar, and considering the vast wealth of the Moghuls, plundering their vessels would be quite lucrative. That’s why European pirates also found themselves in the Red Sea, which was a popular trading spot for both the Mughal Empire and the local Muslim merchants (either Arabian or Ottoman).

The lengthy route that the pirates would take from either the Caribbean or Europe to the Indian subcontinent had a fitting name: the Pirate Round. And while the period of the Pirate Round was the briefest of all three that encompass the Golden Age, it was probably more significant than the buccaneering period. After all, it was the pirates who made up this period that showed the world just how alluring, engaging, and profitable the pirate trade could be. But more importantly, it helped put piracy on the map as an issue the major powers could no longer ignore.

Thomas Tew

Thomas Tew, an English seafarer born somewhere in the American colonies, might not have had a career that involved countless voyages and city sackings like his buccaneering predecessors did. In fact, he only made two significant pirate cruises in his entire life. However, not only was he successful in being a pirate, but he was also arguably the progenitor of the Pirate Round, as he was the first pirate to show the immense possibilities of sailing east rather than west.

Tew began his career in the early 1690s in Bermuda, where he had obtained a letter of marque to go after French settlements in the current-day Republic of The Gambia in West Africa. However, shortly after sailing on this journey, Tew openly declared to his crew that he wanted to turn to piracy. According to reports, his crew accepted this change of pace with open arms, and his ship, the Amity, set sail for the Red Sea.

Once there, Tew and his men attacked a rather large dhow (a type of single or multiple mast ship common in that region; the particular dhow that Tew went after was a ghanjah), and he did so with no casualties on either side; the dhow crew simply surrendered. Tew’s plunder was massive, with his own share of the loot being valued at anywhere between £5 000 and £8 000 in contemporary currency. He and his men divided the plunder when they docked at Madagascar to careen the ship (flip it on the side during the low tide for necessary repairs) before sailing onward to New York. Interestingly, they docked in Île Sainte-Marie, where Adam Baldridge (another pirate who will be covered later on) had built a sturdy fort and hosted numerous pirates over the years.

Back after his first successful pirate run, Tew became close friends with Benjamin Fletcher, the governor of New York. He would finance another of Tew’s expeditions in 1694. Tew was back at the mouth of the Red Sea, but this time, he found it swarming with other notable pirates. His story, it seems, had become widespread, so everyone wanted a piece of the new Pirate Round. Tew, among many other captains, decided to sail under another famed seafarer at the time, Henry Every. Tew’s ship actually attacked a vessel from a powerful Mughal convoy, with Tew believing that they were going after the famous Fateh Muhammed, a particularly wealthy ship with bountiful plunder. However, during the skirmish, Tew lost his life. However, the story doesn’t end there. His men, demoralized after his death, surrendered to the Mughal forces, though they would later be rescued by none other than Henry Every during his own successes over the Muslim ships. One of Tew’s crew members, a pirate known as John Ireland, took the Amity to Baldridge’s pirate safe haven to have the ship refitted. Both Thomas Tew and John Ireland had been targets of Capitan Kidd and Buried TreasureCaptain William Kidd, at least according to the commission he had received from King William III.

Thomas Tew was undoubtedly important for pioneering the Pirate Round cruises and plunders, and though he did not enjoy the fruits of his crew’s final plunder, he was nonetheless effective throughout his life. Furthermore, Tew became the source of another famous pirate myth, that of a seafarer getting involved with a native woman of royalty and producing offspring. According to legend, Tew had an affair with a Malagasy princess, and as a result, his son, Ratsimilaho, was born. The boy would use this supposed familial connection to rule over a large region in the island known as the Betsimisaraka confederation. Of course, it’s unknown if Ratsimilaho was actually the son of a pirate and a queen, and even if he was, only the first name of the pirate is given, that being «Thomas». Considering how common of a name that was in contemporary England, his piratical father could have been anyone, Tew included. Of course, pirates and native Malagasy women often intermarried and interbred, so it wasn’t all that rare for their offspring to play prominent roles in Malagasy sociopolitical events.

Henry Every

Western history gained its first «Arch Pirate» in 1694. This man would only be an active pirate for roughly two years, but he still achieved the seemingly impossible: he acquired a massive amount of wealth from a huge raid of important Mughal ships and managed to escape justice unscathed. If Thomas Tew inspired people to turn pirate and rob the ships in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, the honor of catapulting piracy into the stuff of legends belonged to none other than a clean-shaven, stocky, pale-faced man of a medium, unimposing height with piercing cold eyes: Henry Every.

Every’s birthplace was most likely a village in England known as Newton Ferrers, some distance away from Plymouth. Based on his skills, it’s likely that he had seafaring experiences at a fairly young age. Some legends claim that he fought in the waters around Algiers and Campeche and around the Caribbean in the 1670s, but none of that can be substantiated by historical evidence. The earliest record we have of Every’s activities was during the Nine Years’ War between France and England. Every was a midshipman on the HMS Rupert in his early thirties; by this time, he was already married with a family to support. In 1690, he participated in various battles, including the infamous Battle of Beachy Head. Soon after, he was discharged from the navy. Following his discharge, Every began his early illegal enterprises, sailing as an interloper (i. e., an unlicensed slaver). He had the sneaky habit of capturing both the slaves and their former slaveowners.

In 1694, Every’s inevitable turn to piracy took place when he was elected as the first mate of Charles II, one of four ships that were part of the so-called Spanish Expedition Shipping venture. The venture’s goal was to expand trade with the Spanish and prey on the French ships in the Caribbean. However, due to a series of misfortunes and due to Charles II’s Captain Gibson being an unreliable drunk, the men soon started to talk about mutiny. Every spearheaded the movement, and the men indeed mutinied and marooned Gibson onshore, taking Charles II and renaming it the Fancy. Unsurprisingly, Every was elected captain of the ship.

Every began his piratical career in Cape Verde, attacking three English merchant ships and recruiting some men to his crew. After a few brief stints on the Guinea coast and at Benin, where he had his ship fitted to sail faster, Every moved to the island of Principe, where he captured two Danish privateers and added more men to his crew. Near the Comoro Islands, specifically the island of Johanna, Every captured a French pirate ship, looted it, and recruited more men, with his force now rounding up to a neat 150 men. But this was all merely preparation for his biggest success to date, if not the single biggest success in the history of the Golden Age of Piracy. Entering the Mandab Strait (modern-day Bab-el-Mandeb) into the Red Sea, Every ran into five other pirate captains:

• Richard Want;
• William Mayes;
• Joseph Faro;
• Thomas Wake;
• and the aforementioned Thomas Tew.

The men agreed to unite their ships into a massive fleet, with Every as the admiral, in order to capture a convoy of twenty-five Mughal ships. The two biggest ships of the empire were part of the convoy, with the 600-ton Fateh Muhammed (the one Tew lost his life and crew to) being the escort to a far larger, far fiercer ship that was the pride and joy of the Great Moghul:

• the 1 600-ton;
• 80-cannon strong Ganj-i-Sawai («exceeding treasure»).

After about five days of pursuit and the loss of the Amity’s crew and captain, Every managed to capture Fateh Muhammed, whose own crew gave up without any resistance. Ganj-i-Sawai, however, put up a massive resistance, which resulted in a fierce battle.

Every was incredibly lucky in at least two instances during the battle. The first instance was during his initial attack when the Fancy struck the broadside of Ganj-i-Sawai’s mainmast, damaging it significantly. His next stroke of luck came from some of the cannons on board the Mughal ship exploding, which killed or seriously injured a huge number of crew members on board. Every reportedly ordered his men to loot, rape, and pillage as ruthlessly as possible, with some of the Muslim women on board who were part of the royal entourage reportedly killing themselves by jumping overboard into the sea to avoid becoming rape victims. An unsubstantiated legend suggests that Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s own granddaughter was on board and that Every had his way with her. While most of these tales of brutality are exaggerated, there was a lot of illicit behavior aboard the captured Ganj-i-Sawai, at least according to the testimonies of Every’s crew members, who were arrested years later.

The spoils from both Ganj-i-Sawai and Fateh Muhammed made Every and his men rich beyond their wildest dreams. However, what ensued was a veritable death sentence to every single one of the pirates involved with this raid. Once the stripped Ganj-i-Sawai made its way to the Indian shores, the local governors immediately briefed Emperor Aurangzeb of the situation, and they imprisoned the English East India Company (EIC) factors in the meantime. Beside himself with absolute rage, Aurangzeb forced the closures of four separate EIC factories and put their officers behind bars. He almost went as far as to attack the English-controlled city of Bombay.

Both British Parliament and the EIC had to find a way to appease the Great Moghul since their East Indian trade quite literally depended on his good spirits. As such, an award of £500, later to be doubled at £1 000, was offered for the capture of Henry Every, thus beginning the first-ever worldwide manhunt in history. And fate would have it that this manhunt ended in failure; after 1696, there are no reliable records of Henry Every’s activities anywhere. There were some rumors that he either spent the rest of his days in Madagascar, lived in England alongside the Great Moghul’s granddaughter, or wasted away in the English countryside, dying destitute. Whatever the case may be, one thing is for sure – Every remains one of the few pirates to have completely escaped facing justice and paying for his crimes, thus cementing him as the «Arch Pirate».

The historical importance of Henry Every cannot be overstated. And like many other pirates, he also pioneered, or rather improved upon, the trend of using false names and aliases. To many crews on the open sea, he was known either as:

• John or Jack Avery;
• Benjamin Bridgeman;
• or Long Ben.

This last alias, in particular, was a favorite of his crew and associates.

William Kidd

Most of the famed pirates became involved with the practice willingly, mostly out of necessity. Of course, as we will see later, a few did so out of a sense of adventure and even took pride in being sea brigands. However, it was (and still is) incredibly difficult to find someone who became a pirate by way of an odd cosmic coincidence. It’s also rare to have an infamous, influential pirate who vehemently refused to be referred to as one.

Despite how his story unfolded, William Kidd was not an inexperienced man in terms of sailing. In fact, he had been at sea for decades before his short-lived and turbulent stint as a pirate hunter in the late 1690s. In fact, it would be Kidd and his future crew, which included future infamous pirates such as Robert Culliford and Samuel Burgess, who would take a ship with a successful mutiny, rename it Blessed William, and, as privateers, go on to defend the British territory of Nevis (a small island in the Caribbean) during the early years of the War of the Great Alliance. As early as 1690, Culliford mutinied against Kidd and stole the ship, sailing away with it to Madagascar. By the time 1695 rolled around the corner, Kidd was living the good life in New York; he was well in his forties and married to Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, a twice-widowed woman who was one of the richest people in the city at the time. In December of the aforementioned year, Kidd received a letter of marque from Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, who became governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, for a pirate-hunting mission. Kidd was to apprehend notorious pirates, including Thomas Tew, who sailed in the Pirate Round. The expedition was supported by the Whigs, a political party in England, and it was backed by a lot of powerful men of the English aristocracy. Thus, Kidd took it pretty seriously.

One of the main reasons behind Kidd’s decision to accept the mission was the potential of becoming a Royal Navy commander, which he saw as his goal. His new ship, the Adventure Galley, was a massive vessel containing 34 cannons, and it had a crew of 150 men. Kidd personally chose his crew members based on experience, talent, and reputation. However, the first snag on his voyage supposedly came from this same crew exposing their naked rear ends to the Royal Navy yacht anchored at Greenwich, which prompted the yacht’s captain to press most of Kidd’s crew into naval service. Kidd had to replace his crew in New York City. He had already lost a lot of time from completing his mission, and quite a few of the new crew members were convicted felons and former criminals, so there was a high probability that a lot of them were active pirates as well.

The commission that Kidd acquired stipulated that he had to report to Lord Bellomont until March 20th, 1697. He also had permission to attack and raid French ships, considering that England was at war with France at the time. The document stipulated that 10 percent of all plunder would go directly to the Crown, with the rest being divided by his crew. King William III signed this paper himself, with some sources even implying that he financed the expedition, at least in part.

Nearly everything went wrong on Kidd’s journey to the East African coast. He ran out of money and provisions quickly, but despite his crew members’ protests, he vehemently refused to attack privateer ships from the Netherlands and England due to the conditions of his letter of marque. The crew was openly mutinous early on, and they would argue with Kidd frequently, with one of these fights resulting in Kidd killing his gunner, William Moore, by hitting him over the head with an ironbound bucket. The murder took place on October 30th, 1697, more than half a year past Kidd’s due date.

Soon enough, Kidd would commit his first unwitting act of piracy by capturing an Indian trading vessel called Quedagh Merchant. The ship itself was hired by Armenian merchants, and the crew had French protection passes obtained through the French East India Company. However, the captain of the ship was an Englishman, so the capture of his ship technically still counted as a breach of Kidd’s commission. The crew refused to return the stolen goods to the English captain, though, and soon enough, Kidd had to find a way to sell all of the stolen goods. He did so by sailing to a few ports in Madagascar and dealing with the local merchants, nearly all of who dealt with stolen pirate goods and who had been pirates themselves. Kidd kept both the ship and the French passes, confident that these documents would prove that he had no other choice but to attack the vessel. In the waters around Madagascar, Kidd would meet with Robert Culliford, possibly the only pirate he came across during his journey. Their meeting resulted in a huge number of Kidd’s crew deserting to join Culliford.

Upon Kidd’s return to the American coast, he was already a wanted man in England, and Lord Bellomont ordered his arrest on July 6th, 1699. Kidd was taken back to England soon after, and throughout his subsequent trial, he kept claiming that he was innocent of any piratical activity. The passes he had with him mysteriously vanished during the trial, and his former colleagues offered no support. It’s no secret that his entire trial was used by the Tories (another political party in England) in order to discredit the Whigs who had backed Kidd and his mission. The tactic worked. Kidd was sentenced on two accounts, the first being the murder of his gunner, the second being his acts of piracy. He was hung on May 23rd, 1701, with his execution almost symbolically marking the end of the middle period of the Golden Age of Piracy.

Kidd was far from a successful or fearsome pirate, and he would vehemently refuse to call himself that, as he was convinced that everything he did was perfectly legal. But Kidd’s accidental stint of piracy isn’t what made him famous or a prominent figure of pirate history. In fact, it would be one particular act of his that would cement one of the biggest pirate myths. Namely, while he was returning to New York, Kidd stopped at Gardiners Island, a small territory in the Long Island Sound. After conversing with the island’s proprietor, John Gardiner, Kidd reached an agreement and decided to hide some of his loot in a swamp between Bostwick Point and the island’s manor. Supposedly, he buried several chests of gold and jewels. This simple act of stashing away some of his ill-gotten gains catapulted the legend of secret buried pirate treasure, a phenomenon that was so influential that people back then would head to the island and the surrounding areas in order to dig up said treasure. Of course, none of that supposed treasure was there since Bellomont ordered its confiscation during Kidd’s trial.

Adam Baldridge

Adam Baldridge was one of the earliest pirates to inhabit a settlement near Madagascar and start a lucrative business trading with illicit pirate goods.
He had been on the island since at least the late 1680s, having escaped there from Jamaica to evade a murder charge. He built a stockade fort that had forty guns, and it was strong enough to protect any ships from incoming enemies. Furthermore, Baldridge also traded with the natives of Madagascar. He occasionally dabbled in slavery; at one point, he even subdued the local tribes and forced the chieftains to pay tribute to him. He would dispense law locally to both the natives and the white inhabitants (most of whom were pirates), and he ruled from his home on Île Sainte-Marie, which was just as fortified and sturdy as the main fort he built. In essence, he was one of the earliest «kings of Madagascar», with his reign remaining unchecked due to his influence, affluence, and the vast number of European weapons and guns that no native could handle in an open fight. However, Baldridge would not remain in Madagascar. Some sources claim that he eventually became a legitimate businessman and that he died well in his seventies. And though he might have been one of the first de facto kings of Madagascar and its territories, he would not be the last.

The Interim Period: The War of the Spanish Succession

Between 1701 and 1714, piracy seemed to wane a bit, mainly because Europe had been engulfed in a series of massive conflicts that would determine the continent’s power balance. It was actually, in a sense, a proto-world war; the main conflict took place across central, western, and southern Europe, but there were dozens of related wars in the Americas and the Indian subcontinent. In fact, the consequences of these wars would directly lead to what is known as the single most profitable, most active, and most famous period during the Golden Age of Piracy, and it all happened because of complicated European succession rights.

The Spanish king at the time, Charles II, was famously of poor health and had no heirs. During his lifetime, he named Philip of Anjou (later King Philip V), who was the grandson of French King Louis XIV, as his heir. However, Charles had familial relations with other royal houses of Europe, most notably the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs’ own Archduke Charles (later Emperor Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire) would be the next best claimant to the vacant throne of Spain, and if either of the two men, be it the French prince or the Austrian archduke, took the throne, it would have tipped the scales of power in Europe.

Multiple nations did not approve of that, especially England, which had been seeking to divide the Spanish Empire for years, mainly because the new shift in power would severely affect the English in various ways. When Philip was declared king on November 16th, 1700, war was inevitable. The main belligerents were:

• France and Spain, with their allies in the Italian Peninsula, Bavaria, Cologne, and Liege on one side;
• and the so-called Grand Alliance (England, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire) and their allies of Portugal, Prussia and the pro-Habsburg parts of Spain, on another.

This massive battlefield spanned several continents and dragged on for almost a decade and a half, and it was appropriately named the War of the Spanish Succession. It ended with a massively divided and chaotic Europe, with all of the countries depleted of their resources and unprepared for other large conflicts, which were inevitable.

One section of the War of the Spanish Succession took place in the Americas, and it was known as the Third Indian War or Queen Anne’s War in England and the Second Intercolonial War in France. During this time, the forces of France and England, each assisted by a host of native tribes across North and Central America, clashed in brutal warfare that ended with the same treaty that ended the wars in Europe, that being the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.

An important theater of the American side of the conflict took place in the West Indies. Both the English and the French employed privateers to go after their enemy’s plunder, which helped disrupt shipping and trade from the West Indies to Europe. One reason pirating waned during this period was because seafarers, who had proper and legal letters of marque, pretty much had legal carte blanche to essentially do what pirates do openly. And since a privateer could earn far more than a regular navy seaman, it was a lucrative endeavor in which a lot of men decided to partake.

However, with the wars finished and peace treaties signed, all hostilities between England and France in the colonial territories were, at least on paper, to cease. This led to a sequence of events that left contemporary men and women desperate to earn a living. Thousands of privateers were out of a job overnight, and their letters of marque were suddenly null and void. Furthermore, there were plenty of men who had participated in the wars who came out dirt-poor and devastated, with no other option but to turn to plantation work or maritime jobs. And even if they had valid letters of marque, going after Spanish ships would not amount to much considering how devastated the country had been after the war. Most importantly of all, policing along the Caribbean and the American coastlines was sparse since the majority of naval forces had been decimated during the wars; on top of that, the countries were slow to recover and rebuild. In other words, the stage was set for what was probably the best-known period of piracy in the entire recorded history of mankind.

Post-Succession Period (1715–1726)

A decade might not seem that long, especially considering that the conflict that immediately preceded this period lasted for almost fifteen years. However, these ten years of piracy would be so influential that they would ingrain pirates as an unmistakable staple of culture at large. Both the men and women of this period would become the stuff of legends, largely because of the number of written works that covered the topic of piracy, the vast majority of which were romantic in nature – be they lauding or critical of the practice. This was the proper period of:

• black flags;
• excessive drinking;
• and fighting the power in the most literal sense.

Furthermore, it’s also the period where piracy became a stated goal for many and, while not as prevalent as the romantic proponents of piracy would like to suggest, a preferred way of life that put freedom front and center.

Benjamin Hornigold

English by birth, Benjamin Hornigold became a privateer at an early age, but he slipped into full-on privacy in late 1713 when he was about thirty-three years old. Hornigold was an instrumental figure in forming what was later called the Pirate Republic on the island of New Providence. At the time, the island was almost exclusively inhabited by pirates and ex-privateers who came there throughout the duration of Queen Anne’s War. The island was originally English, but after a few successful attacks by a French fleet in the Caribbean, most of the families who lived there, normally with no illegal activities to their name, fled, leaving New Providence and its capital, Nassau, practically empty and ripe for the taking. Pirates and privateers made the island their home, spending their time there trading stolen loot, which they spent on alcohol, prostitutes, food, and repairing their ships. And while there was no single leader on the island, the two men who influenced nearly all the other pirates there, Captains Henry Jennings and Hornigold himself, tended to have the last say in many matters due to how powerful they were.

And Hornigold was, indeed, powerful. During his time at sea, he had commanded a small fleet of five ships at one point, with around 350 men in total, adding more ships and men to his crew after each successful raid. Some sources suggest that Hornigold, unlike most pirates, was usually considerate toward his prisoners, rarely (if ever) killing them. He also maintained a strict rule of not going after English ships, possibly to maintain his status as a privateer and not an outright pirate. These particular details of his personality were responsible for his crew mutinying and voting him out as captain in 1716.

But the fascinating story of Hornigold does not end there. A few years after his crew kicked him out, Hornigold learned that a new governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers, was providing royal pardons issued by King George I to all pirates who were willing to accept them. The royal pardon of 1717 offered a clean slate and the erasure of one’s criminal record, while the updated pardon of 1718 also provided a cash prize to all of the ex-pirates who helped quell piracy in the region. The capture of each captain was worth £100, and £40 was offered for each captured boatswain and lieutenant. Hornigold took the opportunity and acquired a pardon from Rogers, who wisely and prudently employed Hornigold to hunt down other pirates. Hornigold did not manage to capture some of the biggest names, but he did capture a large number of pirates, some of whom were his own. Merely a year after the issuing of the royal pardon, Benjamin Hornigold would meet his end when his ship wrecked on an uncharted reef.

In terms of both piracy and pirate hunting, Hornigold was an expert with years of experience, despite dying at the age of thirty-nine. However, Hornigold is perhaps more famous for all of the other pirates he «tutored» in his early days, a few of whom we will talk about below.

Charles Vane

As we saw with François L’Olonnais and Roche Braziliano, cruelty and viciousness were not unheard of among the early buccaneers of the Golden Age. However, it was the exception, not the rule. More often than not, pirates avoided battle if they could help it, and though pirate captains were in charge of looting and sacking vessels, they rarely committed brutal acts. In fact, quite a few pirates were renowned for their decent behavior toward their crew and captives (their treatment of slaves was, at best, spotty but also not entirely cruel). During the last decade or so of the Golden Age, pirates who acted like L’Olonnais and Braziliano were sparsely found in the Caribbean, with one very notable exception, that of Charles Vane.

Vane, a native Englishman, was an active pirate under the command of Henry Jennings, one of the influential people of the so-called Pirate Republic and a rival of sorts to Benjamin Hornigold. Jennings’s crew specialized in attacking ships that would come to salvage the goods of sunken Spanish galleons. It was here that Vane distinguished himself enough to captain his own ship in 1717. He was already starting to build his reputation by torturing the captives of his many raids, of which his crew did not approve. Some sources also suggest that he was just as vicious with his own men, a practice that was also freakishly uncommon among the Golden Age pirates.

Vane was one of those pirates who took pride in his craft to the point where he rejected a royal pardon twice. The first time was when King George I of England extended his offer to pardon all pirates in early 1718, at which point Vane’s sloop was captured by an English naval captain named Vincent Pearse; Vane would initially accept the pardon after being captured, especially considering that several other pirates, including Hornigold, urged Pearse to release the cruel seafarer. However, Vane would not turn his back on piracy that easily. In March of the same year, he set sail with his crew, which included future prominent pirate captains like Edward England and Jack Rackham. By June, he had regained his notoriety; he took several ships and added them to his fleet, including a sizable French vessel with twenty guns.

His second refusal of a pardon came when his fleet came face to face with the ships of Woodes Rogers. Vane decided to set fire to his French ship and send it straight for Rogers’s fleet. The governor’s ships, save for one, took next to no damage from the fireship, but Vane did manage to escape, and he fired a few shots at Rogers’s ships in the process.

Vane remained active throughout the summer of 1718. At one point, Hornigold was sent to capture him but failed to do so. In the meantime, Vane moved to the coast of the two Carolinas, at one point entering and blockading Charleston Port, making that the second time the port had been blockaded by a prominent pirate. The governor of South Carolina then commissioned a couple of armed ships to go after Vane, with one of those ships being commanded by Colonel William Rhett, a man who would never capture Vane but who would run into a different infamous pirate along the way. Vane made his way to Ocracoke Inlet (modern-day Outer Banks, North Carolina) and spent a few weeks reveling with the other pirate who had blockaded Charleston Port, with the two separating early the next morning.

Vane’s fortunes were not good after this evening of revelry. In late November of 1718, his ship attacked a French frigate, and once Vane figured out just how well equipped the ship was, he ordered a tactical retreat. His men, who had already been mutinous once before, saw this as an act of cowardice.

Soon enough, Vane was voted out as captain, with Jack Rackham taking over. Vane and a few of his accomplices were ditched, with his former crew leaving them in a small sloop. The former captain managed to scrape by, going after several small sloops in the region, but in February of 1719, his already tiny remaining crew was caught in a hurricane in the Bay of Honduras, which killed nearly everyone on board except for Vane and another pirate. The two managed to survive for a few months on an uninhabited island before they were rescued. Unfortunately for Vane, a man, one Captain Holford, recognized him from the days when he was in Vane’s service. After telling Vane’s crew everything about their past, Vane was arrested and taken to Port Royal.

Thanks to the testimony of his former compatriots, Vane’s trial was short and predictable. And so, on March 22nd, 1721, Charles Vane hung for his crimes. His body was hung in chains at Gun Cay, an island in the Bahamas, as a warning to other pirates that their crimes would not pay.

Edward Teach (Blackbeard)

If there was ever an epitome of piracy, it would undoubtedly be the single most popular sea brigand in history, the man who would become the very synonym of the word «pirate»: the dark-haired, tall, broad-shouldered English gentleman, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. Despite only being a pirate for a year and a half, he managed to become a legend even in his own time. The first third of the Golden Age had Henry Morgan, and the second had Henry Every. But the third period of this tumultuous era unquestioningly produced the most recognizable pirate ever.

Very little is known about Teach’s life, which is common for most pirate captains. Based on what was found in the wreckage of his famed ship, the aptly called Queen Anne’s Revenge, Teach was probably a member of the nobility, as he was literate and intelligent, and he was likely born in Bristol. He was in his thirties when he reached the Caribbean, and he acted as a privateer during Queen Anne’s War. Of course, after the treaty, he and his colleagues were left without a job, so he began a career in piracy, acting as one of Benjamin Hornigold’s crewmen. During his time with Hornigold, Teach distinguished himself so much that he became a captain of his own sloop, and soon enough, the two men would meet another pirate, Stede Bonnet, and add his own ship to the fleet. In 1716, Hornigold was voted out as a captain, and Teach would take over the title, one that he would keep until his final breath.

The early days of Teach’s piracy were incredibly successful. He managed to capture a French ship called La Concorde in November of 1717, a vessel that was once called La Concorde and that belonged to the English before being captured by the French in 1711. In other words, renaming the ship Queen Anne’s Revenge was intentional, and neither was the fact that the French sailors renamed a ship they received in the tradeoff for La Concorde as Mauvaise Rencontre («Bad Meeting»). Between 1717 and 1718, Teach captured a decent number of ships, plundering every vessel be it French, English, Dutch, or Spanish. One such ship was the merchant sloop Margaret, which was captained by one Henry Bostock. According to Bostock’s later account given to Governor Walter Hamilton, Teach would be described as a «tall spare man with a very black beard which he wore very long». This was the first-ever instance of those words being mentioned in relation to Teach. Soon enough, the most famous pirate nickname ever, Blackbeard, became prominent, as did the black-bearded pirate himself.

Teach was a master strategist, both when it came to attacking his targets and handling his crew. There are somewhat exaggerated accounts of him sticking long fuses under his thick black hair and beard, then setting them on fire so that his enemies would be under the impression that hellfire itself was burning behind him. Furthermore, he supposedly wore two holsters with three rows of pistols, meaning he was always ready for action and a dangerous man to trifle with. As stated, we can’t be sure of the truthfulness of these accounts, but the gist of them remains extremely likely – Teach used fear as an effective tool to keep his crew in line. This tactic also helped him retain his position as captain, considering that even the worst captains could end up being replaced by the crew, as we saw with Charles Vane.

By far, Edward Teach’s greatest claim to fame was his infamous blockade of Charleston Port in late May of 1718, the same town that Vane would blockade mere months later. After entering with his fleet, Teach would capture every single ship that tried to pass the Charles Town Bar, ransack them, and relieve them of their valuables. Charleston was an important port for the English American colonies, and the blockade was a lot more than a pirate harassing entering ships; it effectively crippled the economy of the British Empire. Interestingly, Teach required nothing from the town other than medical supplies for his crew, and he threatened to execute the captured hostages from the ships he ransacked if the local governance did not comply. Of course, Teach got away with all of these crimes due to bribing the right people in the town and intimidating the rest.

After leaving Charleston, Blackbeard learned of Woodes Rogers and the pardons he gave to pirates. Both Teach and Bonnet, albeit at different times, went to a town named Bath and received a pardon from North Carolina’s governor, Charles Eden, who was known for collaborating with Teach in the past. In October of 1718, Teach, now with a privateering letter of marque, would return to piracy, going to Ocracoke Inlet to spend most of his time. Ocracoke was his favorite spot to visit, and some historians speculate that he even had plans to make it a new pirate hub, one similar to Nassau or Port Royal. And considering he would enjoy a week of drinking and reveling with Charles Vane and other soon-to-be-prominent pirates (Jack Rackham being among them) there, such a hypothesis is not entirely implausible.

Teach’s recent activities raised a few eyebrows among the American governors, in particular one governor named Alexander Spotswood of Virginia. After a lengthy and complex campaign, Spotswood finally managed to secure the means of capturing Blackbeard; he had two ships, HMS Pearl and HMS Lyme, which were captained by George Gordon and Ellis Brand, respectively. The two ships, however, were too big to navigate in the waters around Ocracoke, so the crews had to take two small sloops instead. The command of both was given to Gordon’s lieutenant, an experienced naval officer named Robert Maynard.

Maynard was a professional soldier with years of experience and skills, and he had a military-like demeanor. In the early morning of November 22nd, his two sloops advanced on Teach, whose own ships started moving. The vessels exchanged fire, and one of Maynard’s sloops was so badly damaged that it was instantly out of commission. At least a third of Maynard’s men died in the attack. However, soon enough, Teach’s ship, Adventure (Queen Anne’s Revenge had been done away with months ago), ran onto a sandbar, effectively leaving Teach grounded. He and his men waited for an attack, which came as soon as Maynard’s crew managed to get their own ship off a sandbar and into the water. Reportedly, before the ships ran atop the sandbar, Teach howled over the deck at Maynard’s crew, promising he would give them no quarter. Maynard’s famously brief and concise notes of the event do mention something similar taking place.

Cleverly, Maynard ordered most of his remaining crew to hide under the deck, with only himself and several others left on board. Blackbeard’s men fired at the ship as it approached, and as soon as they saw the smoke clearing, they boarded the ship with guns and blades out. However, Maynard’s remaining crew jumped out, and the success of the surprise attack was all but guaranteed. Teach’s undisciplined pirates did manage to put up a fight against trained, professional men of the English navy, but it was not to last.

During the chaos, Maynard and Teach locked eyes and engaged in what is possibly the single greatest duel involving a pirate during the Golden Age. Of course, both men did so strategically; Maynard was significantly shorter than Teach, and going against Blackbeard head-on and beating him would have a powerful psychological effect on the pirate captain’s crew. On the other hand, Blackbeard beating the commander of the two English vessels would be the best possible rallying point for his men. The two seafarers first shot their pistols at each other, with Blackbeard missing and Maynard hitting his opponent with a non-lethal strike. The men then exchanged several blows with their swords, and Blackbeard supposedly broke Maynard’s sword in the process. However, Maynard’s crew would soon surround the duelers, and they would either shoot or slash at the pirate captain, inflicting plenty of injuries. Maynard was getting ready to shoot Teach again, and the pirate wanted to use this opportunity to lunge at Maynard and kill him. However, one of Maynard’s crew, supposedly a Scottish Highlander by birth, sliced the back of Teach’s neck with a broadsword, injuring him badly. Moments later, another blow from the Highlander decapitated the pirate captain, and in a millisecond, Edward Teach’s lifeless body fell onto the ground. His surviving pirates were either killed in action or taken prisoner. The whole fight lasted, at most, around ten minutes.

Maynard’s inspection of Teach’s body revealed that the pirate was shot at least five times and cut at least twenty times, not counting the decapitation. Maynard took Blackbeard’s head with him as proof of his mission, and he tossed the captain’s body overboard. His crew took about £90 each from Blackbeard’s booty, which goes some way in explaining why no award (which was offered to any man who managed to apprehend or kill Blackbeard) was given to him for four years. And though he would eventually get several promotions, Maynard faded into obscurity, dying peacefully at the age of sixty-six in Kent.

Many details about Blackbeard were left out of this section, mainly because few of them can actually be verified as accurate. In fact, on the face of it, it’s a miracle that someone like Blackbeard managed to become such a feared and remembered pirate, especially if we consider the bizarre fact that he had, at least according to contemporary reports, never killed a single person during his time as a pirate. Nevertheless, his life remains a fascinating tale of a man who used fear and intimidation as accurately as he used a pistol and blade to become one of the most notorious sea brigands that the world has ever seen. Nearly every single stereotypical image of a pirate somehow mimics him and his antics.

Stede Bonnet

Stede Bonnet was a prominent pirate captain who had encounters with heavyweights like Blackbeard, Vane, and Rackham, and he would, in fact, be the pirate whom William Rhett captured on route to locating Vane. However, none of these facts make Stede Bonnet a fascinating figure. This man, known to his contemporaries as the «Gentleman Pirate», became famous (or rather infamous) because of his sheer incompetence and bizarre sets of circumstances. Namely, he was someone who had willingly left a cozy, comfortable, well-to-do life of a wealthy landowner, bought a ship, hired a crew, and willingly became a pirate, a decision that was indeed unique and incredibly mind-boggling, even to his contemporaries. In a sense, he was the first real fan of the concept of piracy, and he took his admiration for the practice a step too far.

When Bonnet was close to turning thirty, he was the owner of a large estate near Bridgetown in Barbados. He inherited this land after his father’s death in 1694, and a few years later, he would marry a woman by the name of Mary Allamby, who went on to give birth to his three sons and a daughter. He wasn’t entirely without experience in fighting, as he served as a member of the Barbados militia and earned the rank of major. But in terms of sailing, he knew next to nothing. In early 1717, for reasons that are still not completely known to history, Bonnet bought a large ship, named it Revenge, and staffed it with seventy experienced pirates. Unlike other pirate captains, he did not capture his ship in a battle or gain it through mutiny, and furthermore, he and his men did not earn massive loot from plunders at first. He instead came to the mind-boggling decision to pay his pirates regular wages as if they were his employees.

Considering his lack of knowledge on everything sea-related, he relied on the advice of his quartermaster and officer. The rest of the crew showed no respect for Bonnet, often openly mocking him for his actions. Nevertheless, his ship managed to capture and raid several decent targets in the coming months, possibly thanks to Bonnet’s experienced officers more than himself. In late 1717, however, Bonnet would be badly wounded after a skirmish with a Spanish man-of-war (a powerful frigate used by navy officers during maritime battles), and he would make his way to Nassau for much-needed repairs and to replace his crew, as half of them died in the fight against the Spanish.

Bonnet would meet Blackbeard on Nassau, and the two men decided to cooperate. During their sailing endeavors, Teach was effectively in charge of Bonnet’s ship. The Gentleman Pirate was unable to give any orders, which only prompted his crew to mock him more. However, we can reasonably assume that Teach had a soft spot for Bonnet, as he kept Bonnet around the ship and did not kill or maroon him somewhere along the way. Perhaps Teach did this out of sheer pity. After the infamous Charlestown blockade, Teach confided in Bonnet that he wanted to take the king’s pardon, a decision with which Bonnet would come to agree and proceeded to do so himself. He received his pardon from Charles Eden, along with permission to go to the island of St. Thomas and obtain a letter of marque, which would enable him to work as a privateer against Spanish ships.

Of course, Bonnet couldn’t resist pirating, so after adopting an alias and renaming his ship, he went back to plundering small vessels around the Caribbean and the American coast. Over the months, he actually became somewhat proficient in this practice, at least enough to regain some of his old notoriety. In the summer of 1718, Colonel William Rhett would be sent on his mission to capture Charles Vane and other notorious pirates, and his two ships would eventually run into Bonnet on October 3rd, who was stationed at Cape Fear River (modern-day North Carolina), waiting out the upcoming Atlantic hurricanes. A long, protracted battle ensued between Rhett and Bonnet, with the Gentleman Pirate’s men holding their ground at first. However, Rhett would eventually triumph, and he arrested Bonnet then and there.

Bonnet was taken to Charleston, where he was imprisoned. Soon after, on October 24th, he managed to escape with another fellow pirate, but he was soon recaptured and sent right back behind bars. The court ruled him guilty, but Bonnet pleaded with South Carolina’s governor, Robert Johnson, for clemency. At one point, Bonnet even suggested that Johnson cut his own arms and legs so he could never be physically able to go pirating again. Supposedly, this little outburst convinced the governor that Bonnet was of an insane mind, so the execution was delayed until December 10th. Bonnet met his demise on that day by hanging.

The story of Stede Bonnet is far from a typical pirate yarn. Some of his decisions and motives still baffle historians today, and they question everything from his intelligence and self-awareness to his reasoning. If anything, his story clearly shows us that anyone back in the day could be a pirate, especially people who clearly don’t belong in that group.

Howell Davis

Howell Davis’s career as a pirate was not particularly long, lasting just short of a year (he was active between July 18th, 1718, and June 19th, 1719). However, during those eleven months, this Welsh gentleman left an impression on his contemporaries as a cunning, shrewd, intelligent, and even somewhat noble pirate.

Initially a mate on a slave ship, Davis would become a captive, then a recruit, of famed pirate captain Edward England. There are indications that Davis willingly chose a life of piracy due to England’s own character as a captain, as he vehemently refused to kill captives and treated the people he raided humanely. Davis was in control of the same slave ship he had been on when he joined England’s crew, but the pirates on board were not thrilled with how Davis commanded, so they mutinied and took his ship to Barbados, where Davis would be arrested. Astoundingly, he was released after just three months, which almost never happened with captured outspoken pirates. Governors of the region, including Woodes Rogers himself, were notorious for almost always sentencing pirates to death, so historians speculate that Davis’s charm and charisma must have somehow worked in his favor. Davis wanted to reach New Providence next, but after learning of Rogers’s anti-pirate stance, he instead went the other direction. He reached Martinique, and with the help of six other sailors, he mutinied and took control of the ship after being elected captain once more. He chose Coxen Hole (in modern-day Honduras on the island of Roatán) as his base, which was no accident; the spot itself was named after a French buccaneer, Captain John Coxen, and the island it was on used to house over five thousand pirates during the early period of the Golden Age. From this base, Davis conducted several successful raids before settling on a new target: the West African coast.

Davis tried avoiding fighting as much as possible, instead resorting to completely different means of depriving ships and settlements of their wealth. For example, when he reached the Cape Verde islands off the coast of Africa, he began to dress like a dandy and posed as an English privateer, tricking the local governor into letting him pass. At one point, while still in disguise, Davis entered a Royal African fort on the Gambia River and tricked the local Portuguese governor into inviting him over. Davis proceeded to keep the man hostage and released him only after taking £2 000 as compensation. His West African raid campaign saw him team up with two other pirates:

• French Captain Olivier La Bouche;
• and the English brigand Thomas Cocklyn.

Together, they raided a slave ship called Bird Galley at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, later releasing its captain, William Snelgrave, with a small sloop and some meager supplies. Snelgrave’s account of Davis actually lets us know just how influential and charismatic he had been. Apparently, it was Cocklyn who originally captured the Bird Galley, but he was extremely hostile to the captured crew and even tortured them. Davis intervened; he confronted Cocklyn and made sure the prisoners were treated well. This behavior and the captain’s charm left a huge impression on Snelgrave, who was noted as saying that Davis, despite the profession he had been in, was a generous and humane man.

Davis continued to raid the African coast, eventually capturing a ship with a fellow Welshman who begrudgingly joined Davis’s crew, one Bartholomew Roberts. However, at one point, Davis bit off more than he could chew. In mid-June, he came to the island of Principe while posing as a pirate hunter. He captured a French vessel along the way with a shoddy claim that it housed pirates wanting to raid the island’s fort. He was on his way to speak to the local Portuguese governor in an attempt to kidnap him and hold him for ransom. However, somehow, the governor’s guards found out about his plan and ambushed Davis. He was killed on the spot, with his crew taking revenge for his death not long after.

By all accounts, Davis was a respected man and one of those rare pirates who actually had a lot of natural charisma. In fact, few pirate captains would inspire such loyalty for their crew to avenge them after death. But Davis’s crew would do just that, and they would go on to commit more acts of piracy, this time under a captain that would prove to be a much more prominent, famous, and intimidating pirate than Davis.

Calico Jack Rackham

For fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Captain Jack Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp) might seem a tad excessive, with his exaggerated moves, staggering walk, mumbling language, and eccentric sense of fashion. But like all fictional pirates, Sparrow’s character draws inspiration from several real-world sources. One of those would be Howell Davis due to his charisma and sense of flair. However, the more prominent inspiration for Sparrow was undoubtedly a man who was born as John or Jack Rackham. He would bear the nickname Calico Jack.

Rackham, called Calico Jack due to his choice of wearing calico clothing (calico is a type of coarse fabric made from unprocessed cotton), was an Englishman who, at first, served as Charles Vane’s quartermaster until the mutiny of 1718. After taking over Vane’s ship, Rackham made a career of capturing small fishing vessels and intimidating the locals, never straying too far from the coastline. By all intents and purposes, Rackham was not a notorious, noteworthy pirate captain who would have been remembered, unlike his more famous colleagues (including his former captain). Though he would capture a few larger ships, he remained a small-time criminal up until 1719 when he asked Woodes Rogers for a royal pardon. Rackham would receive this pardon, but it would not stop him from pirating.

After receiving the document from Rogers, Rackham sailed to Nassau and spent most of his time with other pirates, plotting, scheming, and drinking the days away. Once there, he met and got involved with a woman by the name of Anne Bonny, and the two began a love affair. Since Bonny was married at the time, the affair caused a scandal, which prompted the couple to sail away from Nassau. Rackham resumed pirating, with Bonny now a member of his crew. Of course, he reverted to attacking small fishing boats and merchant ships, and he captured and recruited more members along the way, including yet another female pirate, Mary Read.

Rackham’s activities became well known in the region, and Rogers, knowing that Calico Jack had broken the terms of his pardon, sent two pirate hunters after him, those being Captain Jonathan Barnet and former pirate Jean Bonadvis. The two men managed to locate Rackham’s ship on the Jamaican coast. A battle ensued, with the pirate hunters severely damaging Rackham’s ship and the pirate crew asking for quarter. Everyone was arrested and brought to Spanish Town, Jamaica, in November of 1720 for their trial.

It was this trial that actually made Rackham famous and «saved» him from being just another footnote in history. Both Bonny and Read managed to escape hanging by claiming that they were pregnant, which astounded both the jurors and the general public. Female pirates were extremely rare, yet Rackham somehow had two women among his crew – to call this situation sensational would be a massive understatement. The women were not sentenced, but Jack and most of his crew faced the gallows. Rackham himself was hung for his crimes on November 19th, with his body being coated in tar and hung on a gibbet on an island just outside Port Royal. The island is now morbidly called Rackham’s Cay in honor of his execution.

Rackham’s set of circumstances made him a «household name» among both fans of piracy and their fiercest opponents, despite him only preying on local ships that had little real value. He was far from a competent captain, having made many mistakes throughout his career, but the mere fact that his crew was so unorthodox and that he was hunted by some of the most prominent men of that age goes to show that anything in life is possible.

Anne Bonny

As stated earlier, female pirates were incredibly rare during the Golden Age of Piracy. There are multiple reasons behind this, not least of which was the harsh and deadly life of a pirate. Furthermore, pirates were known to deal in some disturbing criminal activity, which included rape. So, having a woman on board a ship surrounded by men out at sea was dangerous, to say the least. In addition, pirates would fight amongst themselves for the affection of a woman on deck, which would bring about discord and result in severe consequences. However, that still did not prevent some women from becoming pirates. In fact, nearly two centuries before the third segment of the Golden Age period, one of the most notorious pirate captains was an Irish noblewoman called Grace O’Malley, whose exploits became the stuff of legends.

Interestingly enough, the two prominent female pirates of the Golden Age would be part of the same crew under the same captain, and they, most likely, would end up in a sexual relationship with him. Also, it should be noted that neither of these women was a captain of her own ship. They were both regular crew members serving under the same man.

One of those women was Anne Bonny, a red-haired firebrand who was most likely born somewhere in Ireland. Her entire life prior to meeting Jack Rackham is unknown and left to speculation, and the only source that references it is full of fancy and exaggeration. What we do know is that prior to meeting Rackham on Nassau, she was already married and had a reputation as being an independent go-getter and a bit of a tomboy. Some sources claim that Rackham insisted she divorce her husband, but it never happened, so the two simply escaped at sea. At that point, she became a full member of his crew.

Contrary to popular belief, neither Bonny nor her other female associate, Mary Read, wore male clothes aboard Rackham’s ship, though Read did wear male uniforms early in her piratical career. It should be noted that the practice of women dressing as boys or men to join the navy was not unheard of, as uncommon as it may have been.

At some point, Rackham’s crew picked up new crew members from a ransacked ship, a disguised Mary Read among them. Bonny apparently took a fancy to Read, but when they both exposed themselves to each other, they remained friends. Jack did not enjoy Bonny’s flirtatious side; despite that, the two remained a couple, with Bonny even giving birth to his child. Before she did, Rackham sailed to Cuba and left her there so that the birth could happen without problems. Not long after she gave birth, though, Bonny got right back at sea and rejoined Rackham in his exploits.

During the trial after their capture, both Bonny and Read pleaded with the court, claiming that they were pregnant. According to law, pregnant women were not to be executed. Killing a pregnant woman, even one who was sentenced to death, was considered a grave sin in England, so authorities either waited for the woman to give birth and then dispatch her or expose her as a fraud for lying about her pregnancy, which also resulted in death. We will likely never know what happened to Anne Bonny, as all sources stay silent on her fate after the trial.

Mary Read

A native of London, Mary Read was the second woman on Rackham’s ship, and she was the only one of the two who actually had a bit of a cross- dressing military career behind her. While she was still young, she wore boy’s clothes and enlisted in the army as a foot soldier, soon earning a cavalry rank after her bravery during either the Nine Years’ War or the War of the Spanish Succession. It was apparently around this time that she fell in love with a Flemish soldier. She exposed her sex to him at some point, which prompted the two to get married. They acquired an inn near Breda Castle in the Netherlands called The Three Horseshoes (De Drie Hoefijzers) and ran it until her husband’s early death. Devastated, Read once again wore male clothes and went back into service.

Back at sea, Read joined a privateering vessel on its way to the Spanish Main, but the vessel would be attacked and ransacked by none other than Jack Rackham. Read joined his crew, and Bonny, mistaking Read for a man, took an instant interest in her. Once they revealed who they were to each other, the two women continued working alongside Rackham, at times proving to be even fiercer than his male pirates. One account at the time described them as brash, loud, and just as prone to cussing as the male pirates. Apparently, the women had no trouble ordering other pirates to murder the captive women on board.

Read evidently showed a lot of bravery and savagery during the final battle between Rackham’s crew and Barnet’s men, as she supposedly shot in the crowd of unready pirates and berated them for their cowardice. Once the crew had been captured and taken to court, both Bonny and Read pleaded with the court not to sentence them to death due to their pregnancies. However, of the two women, it was evident only Read was actually with child; she had conceived it with a crew member on Rackham’s ship. Sadly, unlike Bonny, we know exactly what happened to Read. She contracted a severe fever while in the dungeon and died not long after, with her child probably also dying while still in the womb.

Interestingly, Bonny and Read would prove to be somewhat contradictory in their bearing. For example, Bonny behaved like a brutish tomboy and a free spirit, despite looking incredibly feminine and actually bearing a child first.

On the other hand, Read was a lot more feminine in behavior – she actually wanted to fall in love, bear children, and live as a common housewife – yet she dressed as a man and had a more manly demeanor to her actions than Bonny.

John Taylor

Like Every and Bonny before him, John Taylor was another pirate whose ultimate fate is unknown. However, what we do know is that his life as a pirate was full of success after success, with two of the biggest pirate plunders involving him in a huge capacity, either as a quartermaster to Edward England or as a captain in his own right.

Taylor showed a lot of promise as a pirate while under England’s control. Unlike most pirates during the last decade of the Golden Age, Taylor actually operated in what used to be the haven of the Pirate Round, i. e., Madagascar and its surrounding waters. He started off as one of the men aboard the Buck, the same ship Howell Davis would take over during his mutiny. Taylor actually tried to overthrow Davis, but he ultimately left and joined a few different crews, befriending Olivier La Bouche and Thomas Cocklyn and raiding around Madagascar before joining England’s fleet. England’s ship Fancy and the deceased Cocklyn’s ship Victory sailed side by side in an attempt to take a massive prize: the English East India Company’s Cassandra. The ship’s captain, James Macrae, put up a strong resistance, but after the pirates more or less devastated his ship, he and some of his crew retreated to the forest close to the shore. Macrae, to his credit, came back by himself to face the pirates, who were looting en masse from the damaged Cassandra, and he negotiated a ransom for his ship. England admired Macrae’s boldness, and he was soon given a small ship and half of his old cargo to return safely to India.

However, Taylor and a large number of England’s crew were livid at this decision for two reasons. Firstly, a huge portion of the booty went back to the man they had just raided. Secondly, and more importantly, Macrae had been responsible for killing more than a few crew members of both England and Taylor, and that was unacceptable. Once they were back at sea, Taylor gathered enough people to vote England as unfit to lead, and they made him leave the ship on a small boat. Taylor was now in command, being on board Cassandra with La Bouche and another famed pirate, Jasper Seagar, as his allies. In December 1720, the pirates, after a successful season of raiding and robbing, stopped off at Madagascar to trade with a man who would become an incredibly prominent name in Malagasy history, a pirate trader called James Plantain. It seemed like Taylor was on a winning streak, but his victories were nothing compared to what happened in April of the very next year.

Taylor, Seagar, and La Bouche sailed to Reunion Island (today a French overseas territory near Madagascar), where a massive prize waited for them. It was none other than the huge seven-hundred-ton treasure-heavy vessel called Nossa Senhora do Cabo («Our Lady of the Cape»), and it was relatively easy to capture since it had lost its mast in a storm. And the loot was incredibly bountiful – the three pirates escaped with gold, jewels, and church regalia that had a combined worth of 1 million pounds. Furthermore, the pirates also took Nossa Senhora do Cabo as part of their fleet.

Seagar would die soon after the raid while the three were in Madagascar, with the British Royal Navy now hot on their trail. Taylor and La Bouche each took a ship (Taylor chose Cassandra), and they went their separate ways, with the English pirate going to the West Indies. He reached his destination in 1723, and he visited Portobello and asked for a pardon from the Spanish governor there. Taylor received one, becoming a member of the Armada de Barlovento (the same one that Laurens de Graaf had humiliated decades before). He was tasked to hunt for logwood cutters around the Caribbean. That was the last time Taylor was mentioned in historical documents, with his future exploits and even the date of his death left for speculation.

Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart)

In terms of popularity, Black Bart was almost as well known as Blackbeard and Every, and in terms of brutality, he was nowhere near Vane or L’Olonnais. However, he would go down in history as probably the most successful pirate, as he captured up to 470 ships in his lifetime. Granted, most of those ships were small sloops and fishing boats, but the number still stands as a highlight of his career, and it would merely be one of many details that made Black Bart a staple of pirate culture.

Bartholomew Roberts was born in Wales, with his birth name actually being John. He had been a sailor since he was thirteen years old, and as fate would have it, a ship he was on would end up being boarded by pirates, with Howell Davis at the helm. Davis took an instant liking to Roberts, and though he was extremely reluctant to do so, the Welshman joined Davis’s crew.

The night Davis was killed by the men of the governor of Principe, his crew swore vengeance. The best man possible to lead them in this endeavor was the only other Welshman on board: the moody, brooding, and cold Roberts. As captain, his first order of business was to go after the governor. Under cover of night, the men sailed to the island, killed most of the governor’s men, and took off with plenty of looted valuables. After a few successful seizures of ships, the crewmen found themselves in Brazil. It would be between 1719 and 1720, the first year of Roberts’s captaincy, that they would capture their first major prize. As they were on the Brazilian coast, they spotted a fleet of forty-two armed Portuguese ships, with the richest and the biggest being Sagrada Familia. Despite being outnumbered, Roberts and his men actually captured the ship and escaped with it to the Caribbean. Not long after, he would capture a brigantine near the Surinam River, but while he was busy capturing it, the man left in charge of Black Bart’s main ship, Walter Kennedy, sailed away. Enraged, Roberts vowed vengeance upon Kennedy. He renamed the new ship Fortune, and with overwhelming agreement from his crew members, he drafted a set of rules that would be just one of many examples of a so-called pirate code.

Ships from both Barbados and Martinique were sent after Roberts while he was sailing in the Caribbean, with the ones from Barbados actually crippling his fleet and forcing the captain to take his ship somewhere for repairs (it also caused many deaths as well, with at least twenty of Roberts’s men dying from wounds obtained in the skirmish). It was at this time that Roberts supposedly commissioned a new black flag to be made for him. On this flag, Bart himself stood on top of two skulls, with «ABH» and «AMH» written under each skull. The first acronym stood for «A Barbadian Head» and the other for «A Martinique Head», underlying his hatred for the two islands and his desire for vengeance.

Between June 1720 and April 1721, Black Bart and his crew sailed in the waters around Newfoundland and the Caribbean. This period was extremely prolific for Roberts. In a single outing, on June 21st, while he and his crew were in an abandoned Trepassey harbor in Newfoundland, he spotted 22 merchant ships and 150 small fishing boats. He captured all twenty-two ships, and once the time came, he burned all the rest and sailed away. During this period of ten months, he managed to capture several ships around Cape Breton, a dozen vessels in the Ferryland harbor, nine French ships after leaving Trepassey, a fairly large number of vessels before reaching the West Indies, several more ships in Basse Terra Road (a roadstead) near St. Christopher’s Island, fifteen ships near Saint Lucia, and possibly even a ship owned by the contemporary governor of Martinique. That’s several hundreds of ships in under a year, and it was only the beginning.

Roberts next set sail for West Africa, and the following eight months saw him raiding and claiming more ships. In early June, he captured two French ships near the mouth of the Senegal River. Next, he moved to Sierra Leone, as he had learned about the Royal Navy ships that had left the region. One of those ships, the HMS Swallow, would be a key element in the events that occurred during Roberts’s final days. Cestos Point in Liberia was Roberts’s next stop, and there, he captured two large ships. By January of next year, he had taken about a dozen more ships before entering Ouidah (in modern-day Benin). Immediately upon entry, he took control of several more ships, releasing them quickly after and receiving a ransom for them. Despite his propensity for capturing ships, Roberts only had three vessels when he was operating around the African coast:

• the Royal Fortune (one of several, as this was Roberts’s favorite ship name);
• the Ranger;
• and the Little Ranger.

They were all careened on Cape Lopez in modern-day Gabon.

Roberts even managed to capture another ship a mere day before his demise, with the crews of both ships drinking themselves into a stupor before the navy arrived on February 5th. The HMS Swallow tactically picked them off one by one, and during the final battle against the Royal Fortune, Black Bart wore his finest clothes and was on deck giving orders. A single grapeshot from the HMS Swallow’s cannon hit Roberts directly, killing him in an instant. His followers fought a protracted battle and eventually lost, with the navy arresting them and taking them elsewhere for trial. Most of his crew were executed, with the black members (all former slaves) being sold back into slavery. However, a number of people managed to survive their trial.

Roberts was a fascinating figure for several reasons. Not only was he an effective navigator and a skilled seafarer, but he was also a man who spoke his mind and rarely gave up. Sources also claim that he drank very little beer and that he abstained from sex completely, devoting himself to the task at hand instead. Of course, he did not prevent his own men from drinking, but he did have strict rules about other acts. His pirate code, in particular, gives us a glimpse of what the atmosphere on a pirate ship was like, as well as an idea of what constituted a crime or a breach of trust among pirates. Furthermore, Roberts was also a flamboyant dresser, at least according to some sources. His preference for red coats and big shiny crosses speaks of a desire to stand out and maintain his position among his men. However, it also speaks of his religious leanings, as Roberts was a devout Christian. Finally, despite his clear apprehension for many piratical practices, his supposed famous quote sums up how a pirate captain might have felt during the Golden Age of Piracy:

«In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labor; in this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking. No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto».

Abraham Samuel

Abraham Samuel’s story is one that more or less started the beginning of what would be the closing chapter of the Pirate Round during the Golden Age. Much like Baldridge at Île Sainte-Marie, Samuel would establish a base at the old French fort known as Fort Dauphin (modern-day Tôlanaro) at the southern coast of Madagascar. From there, he would dedicate his time to trading with pirates and other illicit merchants, amassing a fortune. Samuel and another pirate would usher in an interesting age in Madagascar that took place over the final decades of the Golden Age of Piracy, namely the age of the self-proclaimed pirate kings of Madagascar.

Samuel was a mixed-race man (a mulatto, i. e., of mixed Caucasian and African origin). He was originally from Martinique and served as a quartermaster on a pirate ship in the Arabian Sea in 1696. A year later, he found himself shipwrecked, along with his fellow crewmen, on the southern shore of Madagascar, and so, they set up camp at Fort Dauphin, which was abandoned at that time. In an interesting twist of fate, an elderly princess of a local Antanosy tribe (the Antanosy are a tribal group in the south of Madagascar) spotted them and singled out Samuel. She thought he was her son, who was born to a Frenchman who had abandoned her while she was young. Samuel, of course, had nothing to do with the Antanosy, nor was he really French himself, but he readily accepted this newfound label and began to see himself as the lawful heir to the Antanosy throne. By deposing the current monarch, Samuel and at least three hundred Antanosy soldiers and roughly twenty pirates took over the area around Fort Dauphin. Samuel styling himself as the «King of Port Dolfphin, Tollannare, Farrawe, Fanquestt, and Fownzahira in Madagascar».

He would frequently wage war with the surrounding Antanosy tribes, especially one king known as Diamarang Diamera. Lots of local chieftains and officials paid him tribute and served as his personal guard. In the meantime, Samuel outfitted Fort Dauphin and made it so strong and durable that it began to rival Île Sainte-Marie in strength and brilliance. From Fort Dauphin, Samuel would receive many different pirates and trade with them. Samuel’s reign ended in 1705 when, as an elderly man, he went to war against a neighboring tribe and died two months later. As early as next year, a different king took over and refused to discuss what happened to Samuel with a visiting Dutch slave ship’s captain.

Abraham Samuel is, at least historically speaking, one of the few non-white pirates to reach any kind of prominence during the Golden Age; to be more precise, he was one of the few non-white pirates operating entirely within the areas where European piracy thrived. His presence at Madagascar, much like that of the pirate in the paragraphs that follow, radically shifted the local Malagasy political scales (or rather, the political scales of the many different tribal groups on the island), and his compatriots, like those of Baldridge, would frequently intermarry with the local women and produce offspring. A few would even be buried in nearby cemeteries.

James Plantain

If we count oddness and unpredictability alone, Madagascar was by far the most interesting place related to the Golden Age of Piracy. Even in its late stages, it was a prominent spot for seafarers to gather, exchange goods, revel in vice, and repair broken ships. It was also a spot where everyday men could literally declare themselves royalty and, more importantly, maintain that position with actual power and an iron hand. And while Abraham Samuel was indeed a great example of a successful «King of Madagascar», he was neither the only one to bear that title nor was he even the most successful monarch of European (and piratical) descent. That honor belongs to a young English upstart called James (or John) Plantain.

Plantain’s tale is one of the most incredible globetrotting yarns about an everyday man who reached greatness and became connected to some of the most important people of the day, be they lawful or otherwise. Born in 1700, at the dawn of the War of the Spanish Succession, Plantain started his piratical career early, and soon enough, he would be part of Edward England’s crew. In fact, he was present when England and his fleet went after Macrae and his ship, Cassandra. When John Taylor took over as captain and England was banished, Plantain joined Taylor, and the two moved to the north of Madagascar. Here, Plantain used some of the loot he had taken from the raid of Cassandra and rebuilt the fort at Ranter Bay in northeast Madagascar in the summer of 1720. Even though he was a mere twenty-year-old, Plantain was so charismatic and determined that the local tribes began collaborating with him, and some of the older pirates from England’s former crew decided on following the young man in his quest to establish himself as an important fixture on the island. And this he did, styling himself as the «King of Ranter Bay». He would maintain his power through:

• trade;
• intimidation;
• cunning;
• warfare;
• and even marriage.

The northeast of Madagascar was home to some colorful individuals of nobility, most notably a chieftain called Mulatto Tom, who claimed, among other things, to be the illegitimate son of Henry Every. Mulatto Tom frequently visited Plantain’s fort, along with another local chieftain called King Dick. King Dick’s granddaughter, a mixed-race beauty called Eleanora, became the object of Plantain’s affections. He wanted to marry her, but King Dick vehemently refused the marriage. What followed was possibly one of the most interesting events in 18th-century Madagascar history. The young king of Ranter Bay, with three regiments of native warriors under the command of his two pirate compatriots – James Adair from Scotland and Hans Burgen from Denmark – attacked King Dick. King Dick’s forces were formidable and, amusingly, contained multiple aged and experienced European pirates in their ranks. It was a proper multiethnic war, and Plantain emerged victorious, forcing King Dick to flee. Plantain caught up with him, and another battle ensued. Once again, King Dick was defeated. Plantain then burned his village in front of him and took Eleanora (nicknamed Holy Eleanora due to her very basic Christian upbringing), but he flew into a fit of rage when he found out that she had already been impregnated by a different pirate. King Dick felt Plantain’s wrath since he was executed then and there. Plantain kept Eleanora as his wife, however, and she would go on to give birth to many of his future children.

Read also: Historical Facts About Famous Women Pirates

All of these events took place in 1722 when Plantain was merely twenty-two years old. In that same year, the British Crown sent four men-of-war, under the command of the experienced Commodore Thomas Mathews, to deal with the pirates of the Pirate Round and to protect the interests of the East India Company. During the war against King Dick, Plantain received Mathews and his crew, and the two even exchanged some goods, which would later lead to Mathews losing his position as a commodore due to dealing with a pirate and neglecting his duty.

Plantain’s next move was to expand his territory since he was no longer satisfied with being the (now rightful) king of Ranter Bay. In the years that followed, Plantain would take land after land, going south all the way to Fort Dauphin. The fort was now under a new, unnamed native king, as Samuel had been dead for twelve years at that point. Plantain besieged the fort for a grand total of eighteen months before its king was defeated. The pirate upstart from Jamaica had now become the proper «King of Madagascar», from north to south, and he was barely twenty-four years old.

Yet, his reign was not to last long. All of the wars must have depleted his supplies or his spirit, and he had made a lot of enemies across the island. Like most monarchs, he gave into his excesses and acted like a tyrant, though strangely, he remained somewhat loyal to Eleanora and her to him. At some point in 1728, he had a sloop built, and as soon as it was finished, he filled it with his ill-gotten riches and sailed away from Madagascar with Eleanora and his many children. At some point, he even reached India or, more specifically, the Maratha Empire, which at the time was ruled by Shahu Bhosale I. Shahu’s navy had employed a large number of European seamen, and it was controlled by the skilled and powerful Admiral Kanhoji Angre. Angre immediately recognized Plantain’s skills and gave him the post of chief gunner. It’s at this point where history loses track of James Plantain; most historians speculate that he spent the rest of his days in India with his family.

Plantain’s tale is a genuine adventure that took him in so many different directions that they could fill many novels. Not only was he a successful pirate in his early days, but he was also an incredible tactician, warrior, leader, and monarch. Furthermore, he was a skilled tradesman who managed to amass huge wealth and still maintain his position as the king of an island nation to which he had literally zero real relation. In addition, he met some of the most important people of that age, including:

• Edward England;
• John Taylor;
• and Kanhoji Angre.

And as if that weren’t enough, there are two more segments of his story that are worth mentioning. First and foremost, he and his compatriots were singlehandedly responsible for a massive ethnic shift on the island, as they produced so many mixed-race offspring that an entire ethnic minority would form. A lot of them would try to claim a ruling position in local tribal politics. The second segment ties into the myths about pirates in general, as Plantain was known to bury and unearth small portions of his massive wealth whenever he needed them, in effect creating his own myth of the buried pirate treasure (which some people of Madagascar still look for to this very day with no success).

The End of the Golden Age: Woodes Rogers and the End of Prominent Pirate Captains

When we talk about the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, we have to keep in mind a few things. Firstly, the end of the Golden Age does not mean the end of piracy as a whole or even the end of piracy in the 17th century. Records from ports across the known world, from East India Company’s many factories to harbors in France, England, and the Netherlands, all show that importers continued to suffer massive losses due to maritime crime, and the papers of the day continued to show a steady flow of arrests and trials of various pirates well into the 18th century and beyond. Of course, the frequency of pirate attacks in the Caribbean and around Africa did go down significantly, and few noteworthy pirate captains of renown appeared during this period. More importantly, the governments of each country started to take piracy seriously, and little by little, they began to weed it out as the Golden Age came to a close.

The second thing we need to keep in mind is that the end of this illegal enterprise was not sudden but rather came in phases. After all, if your waters are infested with thousands of pirates, and your navy has been decimated due to an entire decade of warfare, you can’t exactly go all-out and take care of the problem in one fell swoop. The matter had to be taken care of delicately, and it had to be dealt with mostly by local governors, either with the king’s permission or on their own accord (and at their own expense). By far, the most effective solution seemed to be simple; in order to appease the pirates, the king would issue pardons if they confessed to previous crimes, but if there were pirates who refused to comply, pirate hunters would be deployed to track them down. Furthermore, the known pirate bases such as Nassau, Port Royal, and so forth needed to have a pirate hunter who was directly in the thick of things and micromanaging the whole affair. One such individual was found and sent to Nassau, a man who was soon to be hailed as a hero by the English despite not getting nearly enough credit at the time.

Woodes Rogers

Contemporaries have described Rogers in realistic yet not unflattering terms. He was a tall, paunchy man with soft auburn hair and permanently frowning brows. His demeanor was calm and collected, and he rarely yelled or exploded in anger. Instead, he had a cold and calculating countenance everywhere he went. However, by no means did his demeanor match what he was capable of. When pushed hard enough, Rogers was able to exact some of the most draconian penalties, such as hanging eight men for simply going against their word. Nevertheless, Rogers was an honest man and a devout Christian who tried to maintain his honesty to the best of his abilities. That alone made him a good choice to deal with the pirate problem in the Caribbean, but it was by no means the only reason for his selection.

The other important reason Rogers was chosen as the next governor of the Bahamas was his experience at sea. From 1708 to 1711, Rogers circumnavigated the globe. He lost a brother in the voyage and sustained a massive injury while capturing a Spanish galleon called Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación y Desengaño. It was during this voyage that Rogers rescued Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who was stranded on the island of Más a Tierra for four years and whose story would inspire Daniel Defoe to write his bestselling novel, Robinson Crusoe. Rogers wrote of his experiences at sea in his own book, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, which became a bestseller.

To sum up, Rogers was not only a man of some repute with an honorable personality that a prospective governor and pirate hunter needed, but he also had lots of practical experience at sea, both as a sailor and as a privateer. Furthermore, he already enjoyed the status of a hero. But those were not the only reasons behind his employment by the English Crown. Another major reason was the fact that Rogers more or less had no choice but to do it. By the time he was back in England, Rogers had to declare bankruptcy and was going through a divorce. His crew successfully sued him for failing to pay them their proper wages during the expedition around the world, and though his book was successful, the earnings from it were far from enough to cover the costs of the lawsuit and the compensation of his former crew. After having sold his property and separating from his wife, Sarah, Rogers decided to go on another expedition in order to attain more wealth, so he made his way to Madagascar. His original mission was to purchase slaves and resell them to the Dutch West Indies with the permission of the English East India Company, but in reality, he was gathering intel on the local pirates and even managed to convince a few of them to take pardons and reform. He proposed a solution of turning Madagascar into a colony, but the EIC turned it down, deeming it dangerous for business. With that in mind, Rogers turned his attention to the Caribbean. The Crown supported his endeavors, mainly because it didn’t have to spend nearly as much as it would on colonizing Madagascar. Rogers was given the title «Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of the Bahamas», a title that came with no salary. More importantly, he was given permission to pardon pirates for any crimes they had committed prior to January 5th, 1718, as long as the pirates themselves surrendered to him.

When he arrived in the Caribbean, Rogers set out to establish his authority among the brutes that inhabited the islands, especially those of New Providence and its main town, Nassau. Rogers’s plan was threefold:

1. Establish his reputation as governor and show himself as the main locus of power.
2. Allow the pirates to do as they pleased as long as they did not commit open acts of piracy while ashore.
3. Grant pardons to and convert at least several pirates while in office.

Rogers worked tirelessly while he was the governor of the Bahamas. He managed to build himself a fort and reinforce it in case of attacks from other nations. Furthermore, he established a basic system of governance on the island, with both his own associates and some of the local brutes serving in high positions. Next, he strived to turn Nassau and other shantytowns into:

• places with decent living conditions;
• complete with roads;
• wells;
• workable fields, etc.

However, not everything went according to plan. The year 1718 would prove to be a trying one for Rogers, as plague broke out on the island while Spanish galleons loomed in the waters. Furthermore, Charles Vane was still at large, and the notorious pirate had sworn vengeance upon Rogers, who had little means of defending himself. Rogers did manage to convert Benjamin Hornigold and another pirate to his cause by that point, but he still had an unfinished fort to complete and few ships with which to defend the island, an island that was full of pirates who were about as loyal as they were sober. In fact, during one desperate mission, Rogers sent two ships to get supplies from Hispaniola. The pirates on board those ships refused to return. Hornigold was dispatched to find them, which he did – they were severely mauled by the Spanish, with only thirteen men surviving and three of the survivors being mortally wounded. Hornigold took them back to Rogers, who then decided to do what was tantamount to a potentially suicidal task: he would hold court over the traitors in the open, in front of all the pirates on the island. In other words, he was about to invoke English law in the most lawless place possible, surrounded by people who could gun him down without batting an eye.

However, Rogers was undeterred. He held court over the traitors and sentenced them all to a public hanging, which occurred several days later in the open view of everyone. Surprisingly, not a single pirate went after Rogers, and they all watched the proceedings quietly. Rogers was effectively proving to the pirates that he was, indeed, the authority on the island and that his rock-solid unwavering nature represented England itself and her willingness to do away with the pirate menace. Some pirates did hatch an assassination plan, but Rogers caught wind of that through an informant and flogged them all publicly. Shockingly, he let them go afterward. This tactic was to show the pirates that such petty attempts at assassination were beneath him and that he had far more important work to do, thus cementing his authority on the island.

The following months were just as harsh, with Rogers working hard on building his fort while keeping the pirates pacified. He did so by providing them with alcohol and food, which, coupled with his open acts of authority against anyone who spoke out against him, proved to be a decent strategy. In early 1720, the Spanish came to Nassau, ready to go against the English, but at that point, Rogers was ready. The past year, the Crown had extended the royal pardon to all of the Caribbean pirates, which enabled Rogers to enlist the help of many other sea brigands. Of course, he did not provide privateering licenses to all of the pirates who accepted the pardon – Calico Jack, for instance, was refused a license – which was prudent on his part since Rogers could discern which former pirate captains would serve him well and which ones would not. Since Rackham went back to his piratical ways shortly after escaping with Anne Bonny, Rogers’s strategy had again proven prudent. Either way, with the pirates now receiving pardons en masse, Rogers could count on several small fleets to defend New Providence from the Spanish, and indeed, the mere presence of these ships made the Spanish vessels turn tail.

In November of that same year, Calico Jack, the last of the notorious pirates of the Caribbean, would meet his end with a quick drop and a sudden stop. It was an impossible task, but Rogers managed to quell the pirate threat in the Caribbean and sow the seeds for a new colony on New Providence. His fort stood strong, the pirates were in disarray and hunting each other, and any outside menace was handled. However, Rogers would not enjoy the fruits of his success; throughout his tenure as governor, he had paid for everything in Nassau out of his own pocket, with his pleas for further financing from the Crown going unanswered. When he finally had enough, he sailed back to England in March, where he learned that the government was not ready or willing to compensate for his expenses in the new colony. He fell into a debtor’s prison, once again declaring bankruptcy, and a new governor was sent in his place.

Over the next year or so, Rogers would stay in prison, but he continued to press his case with the authorities. Thanks to his friends and to him selling more of his property, he managed to pull himself out of debt, though he was still not entirely well with his health, and his honor had not yet been fully restored. Then, as if by fate, several events saw Rogers get what he deserved. Firstly, the army provided him with the rank of an infantry general, enabling him to earn half of a general’s salary. Next, an author approached him to collect information about an upcoming book, which would prove to be a massive bestseller, as we will see in the upcoming chapters. This happened at some point before 1724. When that book was published, Rogers immediately saw a resurgence of support from everyone, including King George I himself. The king provided Rogers with compensation of his previous salary, all the way to 1721, but his successor, King George II, went one step further and appointed Rogers as the governor of the Bahamas once more in 1728.

During that same year, Rogers reunited with Sarah and his family, and they would go back to the same place he had helped pacify. Nassau was now a peaceful colonial plantation city, with a few more shanties left here and there. The only pirates present were retired old sea dogs who would still talk about the good old days of the sweet trade but who had little real interest in going back to it. The tiny fort Rogers had so much trouble building and fortifying now stood strong, protecting the island and the waters around it.

But best of all was the official colonial seal that Rogers was presented with upon his return to Nassau, which bore an inscription in Latin that read:

• Expulsis Piratis;
• Restituta Commercia;
• meaning «Pirates Expelled, Commerce Restored».

It also bore an image of pirate vessels retreating, an accurate representation of everything Rogers had done for the Bahamas. And indeed, his legacy would last well beyond his death, with the colonial seal inscription serving as the official motto of the Bahamas until the islands became an independent nation in 1973.

Rogers died on July 15th, 1732; he was roughly fifty-three years old and in poor health. Much like Robert Maynard, he was a man whose greatest efforts in subduing the pirate threat didn’t always find favor with the men at the top. However, his contribution to ending the Golden Age of Piracy is truly one for the history books.

The End of Prominent Sea Captains

Some scholars tend to cap off the Golden Age of Piracy with the year 1726. In that year, a minor pirate, William Fly, was hanged in Boston. And indeed, by the time Fly was raiding the high seas, most charismatic captains and pirates in general were either dead, had disappeared, or took advantage of their pardons and turned to privateering or even pirate hunting. A lot of these deaths were by hanging, a fate that was met by Calico Jack, the «Gentleman Pirate» Stede Bonnet, and the cruel Charles Vane. Others met their end during battle, like Blackbeard, Davis, and Black Bart. Quite a few died while in captivity, including Mary Read and her child. But not a single one of them managed to live out their lives with their riches intact and with the law not being on their heels. The Golden Age had proven that piracy might be a lucrative and often rewarding trade, but it was one that doomed people to their deaths from the very outset.

Another interesting detail of note is the fact that few pirates lived past forty, including retired or reformed ones. Blackbeard was roughly forty when he met his match, but the vast majority of pirates who were not captains were usually young men, anywhere between fifteen and twenty. Moreover, if you managed to survive for over three years while engaging in the sweet trade, you were one in hundreds of thousands to do so, as most pirates barely made it past their first month on a ship. Pirate captains themselves averaged about a year or a year and a half of activity, at most. Black Bart’s motto of a merry yet short life seems to have been accurate, considering how few of his brothers in arms actually managed to live to old age. And let’s not forget that there were no real prospects for former pirates that were as lucrative or as liberating as being on the open sea and plundering cargo from wealthy unsuspecting ships. Even privateers had to give a percentage of their loot to the Crown; otherwise, they would suffer legal repercussions. Indeed, engaging in the sweet trade was a short-lived pleasure that was inevitably succeeded by a gruesome end, as most of the men who made up the Golden Age came to find out.

Life at Sea: Typical Activities Aboard the Pirate Ship, the Pirate Look, the Pirate Code, On-Deck Atmosphere

Typical Activities Aboard the Pirate Ship

For years, Hollywood and entertainment in general have provided a highly romanticized image of pirates, and we will cover most of the particularities in the following chapter. Possibly the most prevalent one was the daily life of a regular pirate aboard a vessel being an exciting and testosterone-fueled affair, with scurvy dogs gambling, going after each other’s throats, or singing sea shanties while their captain stared off into the distance, pondering on his next target. And as bizarre as the next sentence might seem, one of the most accurate depictions of a typical pirate crew’s day was shown in the opening episodes of Space Pirate Captain Harlock, an anime adaptation of the science fiction manga of the same name created by Japanese author Leiji Matsumoto. In the show, we see pirates lazing around their massive spaceship, sleeping, or generally having fun, with the titular captain Harlock himself rarely forcing them to do anything. However, the minute danger strikes, the entire crew springs into action, and Harlock takes command, front and center.

But before we delve into what a regular day was for a pirate, we first need to address how a pirate ship operated and how people got involved in the sweet trade to begin with. Pirate ships rarely recruited sailors in a similar manner to the Royal Navy or a privateer; indeed, the majority of people would join pirates either willingly (after their vessel had been raided and plundered) or by force. And even then, a pirate ship was not going to pick up just anyone. You had to be a skilled sailor with at least a basic knowledge of seafaring to be spared or invited aboard. Other people were either left on board the plundered ship or set adrift.

Like other ships at the time, a pirate vessel had a simple hierarchy, though it wasn’t as enforced as it might have been on an official ship of the navy. Starting from the top, there was the captain. His command was only absolute during a raid or a fighting engagement. At that point, he had complete control, and disobeying him would have been considered an offense. However, while on board the ship, the captain really was no different than any other pirate.

For instance, regular pirates could freely walk into the captain’s cabin and use it at their leisure. Captains could also be removed via a majority vote, from the most brutal like Charles Vane to the kindest like Edward England. The ship’s second most important person was the quartermaster. He was usually in charge of the day-to-day duties on board the ship, including the division of plunder and settling of petty disputes; he even doled out some of the punishments himself. Quartermasters, like captains (in most cases, at least), had to be literate and had to know at least basic mathematics in order to divide the spoils properly and maintain the ship’s log. Frequently, quartermasters of one ship would become captains of another if a mutiny were to take place.

Boatswain, or bosun, was the next in line, and his job was to keep track of what the ship needed. He would look after the wood, the ropes, and the canvas for sails, and he often would go ashore with the crew and look for materials for repairs or supplies for restocking. He also oversaw the anchor dropping (and raising) and maintained the deck and the sails. Considering he was one of two men who kept the ship in good shape, a boatswain was an incredibly valuable member of the crew. Another member of equal importance was the carpenter, whose task was to perform repairs on the ship while at sea. He reported directly to the boatswain and had to do most of the grunt work regarding filling holes, keeping the mast in good shape, etc. On rare occasions, he would also perform the duties of a surgeon if a surgeon could not be found.

And speaking of, a surgeon was incredibly vital to any crew. In fact, they were so vital that anytime a pirate ship raided a vessel, they would recruit that vessel’s surgeon by force. Injuries and diseases were frequent on every voyage, so a person well-versed in the medical arts (or handy with a saw if a limb needed to be cut) was a valuable asset. Of equal value was the ship’s navigator. While a skilled captain would usually be able to navigate the ship himself, he would never turn down a crew member who was skilled in reading maps and keeping the ship on the right track. Much like surgeons, navigators were also often recruited against their will.

All ships had guns, and maintaining those guns was the job of a gunner. He would keep the guns in battle-ready shape, as well as take care of the gunpowder and other related items. Usually, a gunner was assisted by several young boys who carried powder to the cannons during a fight, earning them the unfortunate nickname «powder monkeys». Every single gunner in pirate history started off as a powder monkey at some point.

The last member of the crew who was more than a mere pirate was the musician. As odd as this might sound, a musician was as important to the pirate crew as the gunner or even the boatswain. Musicians kept the pirates entertained during long, dull voyages across the ocean and kept their spirits up in harsh times. And like surgeons and navigators, they almost exclusively joined pirate crews after being forced to do so.

Now we know who made up a typical pirate crew. So, what was a typical day for these men like? Well, unless they were in the middle of a raid or ashore drinking themselves to a stupor, their life at sea was incredibly mundane. As stated, most of these men were skilled sailors, and just like any other sailor, their entire time on deck was filled with them working around the ship and keeping it from sinking. They would hoist sails, raise or lower anchors, steer the vessel, tighten or loosen ropes, clean the deck, fish, do minor repairs, or none of the above. It was a dreadful existence, one that these men knew full well even before joining a pirate crew. Fresh food and water were luxuries on the open seas, and most pirates had to settle for stuff like:

• salted beef;
• crackers;
• fish;
• or similar provisions.

These provisions would almost always go bad during the journey. And yes, the pirates still had to eat the rotten food, considering they had no choice in the matter – the captain very much included. The crew all slept together, with their body odor and the stench of the sea quite prevalent. Bathing was definitely not an option until they reached shore. That’s why it was no coincidence that scurvy and other diseases often struck ships, resulting in thousands of pirates dying without even seeing any action.

The Pirate Look

Pirates of legend tend to be colorful individuals with scarves tied behind their heads, hooks for hands, eyepatches, peglegs, long flowing coats, Cavalier boots, tricorn hats with feathers in them, and parrots on their shoulders. It might come as a surprise to learn, then, that nearly none of these were typical or even common pirate garments of the era. In fact, pirates dressed more or less the same as typical sailors of the time, and in the vast majority of cases, their garb was nothing to write home about.

A regular pirate’s outfit consisted of either a narrow band-collared shirt or a sleeved waistcoat on the upper body and either trousers or wide-legged petticoat breeches on the lower body. They would usually cover their head with either a simple leather cap, a knitted Monmouth cap, a cloth cap that was trimmed with fur (some captains preferred this cap), or a low-crowned hat with a narrow brim. If the weather was cold, a pirate would wear a long woolen smock and a pair of knitted gloves or even mittens. Contrary to popular belief, pirates did not wear Cavalier boots, as they would be incredibly cumbersome during a raid, so they either went barefoot or, especially during the winter months or while going ashore, wore round-toe shoes with small buckles over stockings that were held up by tied garters.

Captains might choose to dress with a bit more flair, copying the maritime officers of the age. For instance, his upper body would be bedecked in a moderately long waistcoat, held tight by a short sash, and with a sleeved waistcoat of harder material that went up to his knees. His lower body would be dressed in breeches of higher quality than those of his crew, and he would wear fashionable shoes, albeit not as deep or square as is often depicted in fiction. Very few captains wore tricorn hats or put feathers in them, as tricorn hats would be incredibly cumbersome and could even impair a captain’s vision. And speaking of head garments, the captain’s crew rarely wore scarves on their heads, and even if they did, they usually tied them at the front, not the back. Finally, when it comes to peglegs and eyepatches, only pirates who lost limbs or eyes in battle would wear those, which did happen quite a bit.

Naturally, the key aspect of a pirate’s look is his accent. And despite what fiction has given us in the past century and a half, there was no discernible pirate accent. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that a pirate said, «Shiver me timbers!» or «Avast there, maties!» It is also not likely that a pirate grunted, «Arr!» Most pirates simply spoke with the dialect of their birthplace or their last place of residence. Blackbeard, for example, almost certainly spoke with an upper-class accent, considering where he was from and the fact that he was literate and a recreational reader. Some pirates, like Davis and Roberts, were bilingual or even multilingual, which helped when they wanted to register as privateers aboard vessels of countries other than their own.

The Pirate Code

As disorganized as pirates could be, at least in comparison to lawful naval officers of the time, they still operated under a set of rules. Each crew had a particular code that they had to follow, which varied from captain to captain, sometimes even varying from one voyage to the next. Such a document was called a pirate article or, more commonly, a pirate code.

There are several such codes preserved from historical documents, with probably the most famous one being that of Black Bart. His article contained eleven sections, and they went as follows:

1 Every crew member has the right to vote regarding the affairs of the moment. He is entitled to an equal share of fresh provisions, as well as strong liquor, to use as he pleases unless necessity and scarcity dictate that the provisions be shared.

2 Every crew member is to be called fairly in turn, by list, on board of prizes. Aside from their proper share of the loot, they are allowed a change of clothes. However, if they defraud the company to the value of one dollar in jewels, plate, or money, they are to be marooned as a punishment. If a robbery took place between two crew members, the guilty party is to have his ears and nose slit, then be left in an inhabited place to encounter hardships.

3 No man is to gamble with cards or dice for money on board.

4 All lights and candles are going off at 8 o’clock at night. If any man wants to drink after that, they will do it on the open deck.

5 Every man is to clean his pistol and cutlass so it is ready for action.

6 No woman or young boy is to be allowed on board, and if any man is discovered to be seducing them or taking them to sea in disguise, their punishment is death.

7 Ship desertion or abandoning the post mid-battle is punishable by either death or marooning.

8 Nobody is allowed to fight on board. Any and all differences are to be settled onshore via a duel.

9 No man is to break their way of living until they have shared 1 000 pounds. If a man loses his limb or becomes a cripple while in service, he will receive 800 pounds from the public stock and a proportional amount for any lesser injuries.

10 Of the loot, the captain and the quartermaster receive two shares; the master, boatswain, and gunner each receive a share and a half; and the other officers receive a share and a quarter.

11 Musicians are allowed to rest on the Sabbath Day, but they are required to work all six of the other days and nights unless they receive a special favor.

Most other pirate codes contain similar sections that generally deal with splitting the loot, ship responsibilities, or settling disputes. Every time a new member was recruited, the senior officers (usually the captain or the quartermaster) would present them with the code and ask them to sign it. Then the pirate would have to swear to abide by the article, usually on a copy of the Bible. These rules applied to every single member of the crew, including the captain. In other words, the ability to vote the captain out of his position was not just a frequent occurrence; it was pretty much a requirement if the need arose.

These articles are often used by some historians to show that pirates created a de facto democratic society on board their ships. And while there’s some truth to that, a pirate ship was far from a liberal democratic society where everyone got their say in the matter. For example, young officers and new crew members, usually powder monkeys, had very little say in the everyday matters of the voyage and were usually ignored by the senior members. Furthermore, both current and former slaves, if they found their way on board a pirate vessel, also had no say in any matters. As far as democracies go, these ships were not that different from any other corner of the planet in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

More importantly, the ships were nowhere near as «independent» from their native country as people might think. There were definitely pirates who went against authority, but by and large, they were loyal to the country from which they originated. Benjamin Hornigold, for example, refused to attack English ships, partly to preserve his guise of a privateer but mostly because he was genuinely a patriot in a sense (which goes some way into explaining his loyalty to Woodes Rogers during his first term as governor).

On-Deck Atmosphere

As outlined earlier, life aboard a pirate ship was largely uneventful. When they were not busying about with the ship’s affairs, the pirates on board would either drink excessively, sleep for hours, or laze around doing nothing in particular. Musicians helped pass the time, sure, but their music made little headway in quelling the many issues that a pirate might face on the open sea. Problems were aplenty, whether it was two pirates fighting over a mundane issue or a crew member stealing an extra ration of food. Each crime had a suitable punishment, and they were usually carried out by most of the crew or the quartermaster himself. Captains would dole out punishments too, but real brutalities, like those of Charles Vane, were rare.

By far, the most prominent punishment was marooning, where the belligerent(s) would be left on a desert island to fend for themselves. This was a common penalty for mutineers and seditionists, but a wide range of crimes could be punished by marooning if the captain and crew deemed it necessary. Of course, this punishment was not the most brutal. That dishonor goes to the act known as keelhauling. The pirate who committed a crime would be stripped naked and tied to a rope, with the rope then pulled underwater from one side of the ship to the next under the ship’s keel (the bottom part of the ship, i. e., the structural element that stretches down the ship’s whole length). Sailors would then drag the rope with the pirate underwater, pulling him back and forth. One of several things could happen next. Either he would drown, the rope would break and drag him under the ship, or his skin could be lacerated and slashed by the barnacles that grew on the keel, which were as sharp as razors. Most monstrously of all, if the pirate survived this absolute torture, the captain could order the crew to do the whole process all over again.

Some of the other punishments included tying a pirate to the mast and leaving him to suffer against the elements, selling him into slavery, dunking him in the water over and over again from the yard ram, flogging him with a whip called the cat o’ nine tails, being clapped in irons, getting tossed overboard, or getting a rope tied around his eyes with someone tightening it until both eyeballs popped out (a practice known as woolding). Interestingly, walking the plank, although incredibly popular as part of pirate lore, was extremely rare and not particularly efficient. In fact, one of the only instances of recorded plank-walking among pirates happened in the 19th century, decades after the last pirate captain from the Golden Age met his end.

Myth vs. Fact: The Growth and Expansion of the Romanticized Pirate, Early Written Works on the Subject, Modern Misinterpretations of the Golden Age

Early Written Works on Piracy

Unfortunately, the life of a pirate was not particularly well documented back in the day, mainly because of the nature of the trade and the fact that few men were interested in the subject. However, once the first comprehensive written works on the subject of piracy came out, they captured the imagination of thousands of people from all walks of life. The problem with these accounts is that they tend to play fast and loose with facts, opting to sometimes invent entire sections whole-cloth purely to sensationalize the sweet trade and sell more copies. It was a great marketing tool, indeed, but it further complicated all later attempts at studying piracy from an objective, historical point of view.

Two works, in particular, had a profound effect on popularizing piracy. The first was written in Dutch by a former French buccaneer called Alexandre Exquemelin, and it bore the title De Americaensche zee-roovers (The American Pirates). Originally published in 1678, it went on to reach international fame through its translations in German, English, French, and Spanish. The book covered the lives and exploits of 17th-century buccaneers, but it had an air of authenticity to it, considering that Exquemelin was himself a member of several buccaneer crews, most notably that of Henry Morgan. The illustrations of the many pirates he described, including:

• Roche Braziliano;
• François L’Olonnais;
• Henry Morgan;
• and Bartolomeu Português,

proved especially engaging, so much so that the original copperplates of these pirates’ portraits were bought and reused by printers all over Europe. Eventually, they wore out and had to be reengraved over and over again. The books sold immensely well, earning Exquemelin fame and a decent amount of money.

However, not everyone was pleased with this tome. Henry Morgan, in particular, took umbrage with it. He successfully sued the English publishers of the book, demanding that some sections of it be retracted (for instance, the ones where he supposedly used nuns and innocent locals as human shields during his capture of the third castle of Portobello in 1668). The publishers compensated him with £200, and all subsequent editions of the book retracted the sections in question.

While Exquemelin’s 1678 book has proven that there was definitely a market out there for books on piracy, another author’s work would skyrocket piracy into fame (or rather infamy). This author is still unknown to historians (some speculate it was Daniel Defoe using a pseudonym), but he went under the alias of Captain Charles Johnson. His work, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, was published in 1724, and it contained biographies of twenty-one different pirates, including the most famous names like Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, Calico Jack, and Black Bart. However, while the men and women mentioned in his book did exist historically, he took a considerable creative license when it came to their appearance, dialogue, and overall events in which they took part. For example, this tome would be the first to describe Black Bart’s lavish outfit, as well as his dramatic death on deck during a fight. Furthermore, he would ascribe famous words to Anne Bonny while she and Jack were in captivity; namely, before Jack was about to be executed, he spoke to her in prison, and she told him, «I am sorry to see you here, Jack, but if you had fought like a man, you would not be hanged like a dog». Johnson’s most famous inventions found their place in Blackbeard’s biography. Some choice examples include the following:

• Blackbeard once shot a crew member out of nowhere. When asked by his crew why he did it, he simply said, «If I don’t kill someone now and then, you’ll forget who I am».
• At one point, he said to his crew, «Let us make a hell of our own and try how long we can bear it», and they all went down the ship’s hold. He closed the hatches, filled a few pots with brimstone, and set them on fire, engulfing the room in sulfurous fumes. All of the men started suffocating and rushed out, but Blackbeard remained and came out last.
• Evidently, a dark figure would often appear on board Blackbeard’s ship. Pirates assumed that it was the Devil himself, keeping an eye on Blackbeard.
• Blackbeard evidently married an underage girl after accepting his pardon, then had his men take turns raping her after he had his own way with her.
• Though not without basis in reality, the famous «Damn you for Villains, who are you?» exchange between Blackbeard and Maynard was definitely an embellishment on Johnson’s part.

Johnson’s book was rife with inaccuracies, but that didn’t stop the public from buying it en masse. It was so popular, in fact, that a second expanded volume was published in 1726. There’s no denying that the fascination with pirates in the coming centuries, one that lasts to this very day, originated with Johnson’s book. Whoever he may have been, he was definitely responsible for creating and promoting the modern conception of pirates, much more than Exquemelin did over half a century prior.

The Growth and Expansion of the Romanticized Pirate

Both The American Pirates and A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates were, for a long time, the only authoritative sources on contemporary and past piracy. As such, they served as an inspiration to many great fiction authors who chose to include piracy, either as a central motif or as an element. Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous work Treasure Island actually drew inspiration from Johnson’s book, with Stevenson himself openly stating that the work had a profound influence on him. The same book went on to influence Sir James Matthew (J. M.) Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, who crafted his villainous Captain Hook based on the pirates described by Johnson. Some of the most prominent pirate tropes, such as the eyepatch, the parrot, the pegleg, and the act of burying treasure, found their way into the public consciousness directly from Treasure Island itself. In addition, once cinema had become a new and popular art form, a 1950 Disney adaptation of Treasure Island saw the first instance of the infamous «pirate accent»; actor Robert Newton, who portrayed Long John Silver, spoke with an exaggerated West Country English accent, and due to the popularity of the film, said accent became engraved in popular culture and remains linked to pirates to this day.

Quite a few myths related to piracy also came out of Hollywood, especially the swashbuckling aspect of a dashing pirate captain brandishing a rapier and swinging from ship to ship. In reality, most pirate captains were equipped with cutlasses and pistols, and if they did wear flamboyant clothing as they did in films, they would be rendered useless in any real battle. The same can be said about prolonged battles between ships, with broadsides firing ammo at each other for hours. However, such battles at sea were rare. In fact, pirates generally avoided battle if they could since their main goal was to plunder valuables and sell them off. Fighting was done as the very last resort, and even then, it wasn’t nearly as epic or long-lasting as Hollywood movies made it out to be. In fact, it was far more likely that pirates would retreat at the mere sight of a warship.

One of the most persistent myths that actually has some basis in fact is the infamous black flag, the Jolly Roger. Most of the flag designs given for various captains:

• Blackbeard;
• Thomas Tew;
• Edward England;
• Black Bart, etc.

were likely inventions by Johnson. However, pirates did raise flags when going after their target. For example, if they wanted to approach a vessel, they would raise the flag of any maritime nation, be it England, Spain, France, or any other. Once they got close enough, they would raise the black flag, letting people know that they were pirates and that they intended to board the ship. This was usually followed by a warning shot from a gun. However, if the other ship persisted and failed to surrender, pirates would raise the red flag, signaling that no quarter would be given to the other ship. Initially, pirates before and during the buccaneering period almost exclusively used the red flag; the practice of raising the black flag emerged somewhere around the War of the Spanish Succession.

Finally, there’s the prevailing myth of pirates burying their treasure. Save for a few scarce examples of questionable authenticity (Captain Kidd, David Marteen, and James Plantain), pirates never buried anything. In fact, burying one’s treasure would be counterproductive at best; one of the crew members could simply mutiny and find the treasure, then unearth it for himself. Furthermore, there was always a danger of someone else finding the loot and picking it up. In reality, pirates almost always sold their loot, which hardly ever consisted of huge chests of gold, silver, and diamonds, as shown in movies. Such chests would be incredibly heavy for even two people to carry, even without the precious cargo in them. Pirates actually stole a wide variety of items, including:

• fabrics;
• spices;
• herbs;
• food;
• liquor;
• charts and maps;
• tobacco;
• instruments;
• weaponry;
• clothing;
• and even ornamental items.

A few myths also came out of the somewhat flawed view of early historians and intellectuals. Prominent left-leaning critics, largely adherents of communism and socialism, would often proclaim that piracy was the precursor to democracy and social justice, that the average pirate freed the slaves, that there was no racism or prejudice aboard a pirate ship, and that they were liberators who stood against oppressive governments. And while it is true that pirates had no love for authority and that they would often free slaves, they were far from being paragons of virtue. A pirate’s main goal was and always will be profit, and more often than not, they would simply resell the liberated pirates or maroon them somewhere. True, some slaves did join the crew, but that didn’t make the pirates any more or less tolerant than any other person of the age. In fact, some pirates would even go as far as to buy slaves from native African slaveowners of the West African coast and then capture the slaveowners themselves and put them in chains. (Slavery was already booming on the African continent shortly after the Europeans set up factories along the coastline, and the local chieftains were earning insane amounts of money from selling slaves.) If a pirate ship ran into a slave-carrying vessel, they would capture it and then ransom it back to the captain or the company for a hefty sum, making the slaves a simple bargaining chip.

In terms of modern leftist ideas, some scholars even champion pirates as the early acceptors of homosexuality, considering that they allowed no women on board and that some sources spoke of pirate captains abstaining from sex and even having male lovers. (Johnson’s book claims that Black Bart had a male lover on board, but that was more than likely another one of the author’s many sensational inventions; Roberts was indeed abstinent, but that was due to his strong Christian beliefs and his sense of discipline.) There is a very strong possibility that at least some of the men on pirate crews had homosexual leanings, though none of it has been recorded, so we don’t know the extent of this phenomenon one way or the other. Furthermore, as we saw with Roberts’s pirate code, people who practiced sodomy were subject to harsh punishment. Usually, that would entail being marooned on a desert island with one’s suspected partner, and oftentimes, they were left with a pistol or a knife in order to take their own life if they so chose. Similar punishments were also in place if a pirate were to sneak a woman on board. Rackham’s crew had two women employed, but he was the exception to the rule; in other words, pirates were hardly champions of women’s rights, and the same could be said about racial and sexual equality. As always, a pirate’s goal was to get loot, and saving slaves or canoodling with people of either sex was a detriment to that.

Interestingly, one myth that was heavily steeped in fact was the infamous pirate binge drinking. Nearly all pirates were heavy drunkards (with notable exceptions like Black Bart), considering that there weren’t too many things to do on board a pirate ship. What’s more, some documented raids from the time saw Benjamin Hornigold and Blackbeard specifically raiding a ship to take its liquor, leaving everything else behind (except for hats; apparently, they were indulging in some heavy drinking the night before and threw their hats overboard in a drunken state). Pirates would drink just as heavily onshore, a detail that helped Woodes Rogers keep them in check during his first stint as the governor of the Bahamas.

Ultimately, there were both positive and negative points to being a pirate when compared to regular naval work. Pirates did have more freedom than regular sailors since they did not have to suffer under their captain’s yoke.

On the other hand, the captain of a naval ship was the supreme authority and was not to be questioned, much to the chagrin of the crew. However, pirates were largely undisciplined fighters, as we’ve seen above. In contrast, English commanders who ran the ships were experienced, battle-hardened men and fierce tacticians with utmost discipline, meaning they were well-equipped for battle. That was one of the main reasons why pirates generally avoided fighting, as they knew there would be a good chance they would be soundly defeated. That’s why Lieutenant Maynard, though a much shorter and less intimidating man than Blackbeard, chose to fight him one-on-one and why his crew ultimately came out victorious. As liberating as it was to be a pirate, it didn’t teach one discipline or proper warfare on the open sea; at most, it taught a person how to be an expert plunderer and how to successfully flee from danger (although the success of those escapes was shoddy and short-lived at the best of times).

Yet, despite all of the dangers that ultimately came with the sweet trade, people still willingly, for the most part, chose to be pirates. They were ready to risk losing a limb or, worse yet, losing their life for the simple reason of being able to drink whenever they wanted, eat whenever they wanted, sleep whenever they wanted, and be as wanton and as lecherous as their pocketbook allowed them to be. It was a form of freedom few free men of low status experienced, and this fact ultimately attracted people to piracy the most.

After the Golden Age: Piracy and Maritime Law Enforcement

The mid- and late 1720s were not particularly active when it comes to piracy. The last pirate of note to be executed was not even particularly notorious, and the high seas were a proverbial wasteland. Of course, piracy never really ceased, but its frequency went down significantly, and the Golden Age was pretty much over. Even if the few surviving pirates didn’t call it by that name, they knew that the end had come. The question is, what made this particular decade, i. e., the 1720s in general, the nadir of the sweet trade?

Generally speaking, we can break the end of the Golden Age down into five parts that correspond to the different events that affected it. First and foremost, the deaths of prominent pirates all took place roughly between 1717 and 1726, sometimes mere months apart from each other. The death of Bartholomew Roberts, the last of the extremely notorious pirates, in 1722 might not have moved too many people to reconsider pirating, but the gruesome end that his crew met at the hands of the authorities certainly roused a few men. Of course, their deaths were far from being the only public displays of anti-piracy justice that the men of the Caribbean and beyond saw. Pirates that sailed with:

• Henry Every;
• Calico Jack;
• Stede Bonnet;
• Charles Vane;
• and even William Kidd,

all met brutal demises at the hands of the law long before Black Bart’s men even set sail. But with such a powerful pirate crew as that of Roberts being wiped out easily by the government (we should remember that Roberts captured hundreds of ships), some men most assuredly chose not to engage with maritime theft any longer.

The second prominent reason behind the end of the Golden Age is the disappearance of piratical safe havens, whose many bases were scattered around the Caribbean and the coast of Africa. Nassau had become a respectable town in a respectable colony thanks to Woodes Rogers, and Port Royal had been dismantled as a base long before the third period of the Golden Age even took off. On the other side of the globe, most of the bases on Madagascar were either destroyed or belonged to tribal kings, including Plantain himself, who wasn’t really pirating all that often during that time. Ocracoke and the American coast were definitely off the table, with the island, in particular, becoming a notorious spot after Blackbeard’s demise.

Naturally, there were plenty of other illegal sites on the planet where pirates could have made their haven. Bases along the coasts of Brazil, South Africa, and Zanzibar and areas in the Gulf of Mexico were already rife with illegal activity. However, few pirates ever bothered to find their fortune in these places. Few would even try to trade there, despite some of these areas readily accepting contraband goods. And speaking of, a typical pirate could no longer sell stolen loot at American ports, largely because port towns fought against piracy by refusing to purchase anything that wasn’t legally acquired. The pirates lost some of the most lucrative markets with that trade ban, which meant they couldn’t even make their loot work for them in the rare event they stole some.

Of course, some events outside of the pirates’ direct purview also affected the situation on the high seas. The third reason behind the ultimate end of the Golden Age was the Royal Navy’s actual push to protect their waters from pirates. Some of the steps had been taken a lot earlier, with a few ships being sent to the Indian Ocean to patrol the waters and protect the East India Company’s ships. But it was during the 1720s that such steps became more common. Each overseas governor petitioned the central government to send vessels to patrol their waters, and more often than not, they would employ reformed pirates as pirate hunters. This did not end piracy altogether, and for many more decades to come, lots of ships with rich cargo would sail the former pirate routes without protection. Nevertheless, the mere increased presence of navy ships deterred pirates from even trying anything, considering that no matter how equipped a pirate fleet was, it almost always avoided direct contact with navy vessels and men-of-war.

The fourth major reason concerns the conditions of everyday English sailors. As the 1720s pressed forward, the lot of a regular seaman greatly improved. For example, sailors were given regular pensions and compensated adequately with a solid salary increase. Furthermore, all sailors were provided with improved and mandated medical aid, making the profession just a smidgeon safer than it used to be. But most importantly, each sailor now had an incentive to avoid turning to piracy if he was unsatisfied with his service. In fact, the navy provided awards to any sailor who successfully resisted pirate attacks, meaning that seafarers would actively go out of their way to hunt for pirates for an added bonus. Of course, these changes were small steps toward a complete reformation of the navy, and the typical life aboard a naval ship was still a living hell for the most part, but it was still a step in the right direction nonetheless.

Finally, the fifth and final reason that contributed to the end of the Golden Age of Piracy was the birth of new ideas across Europe, those of freedom and individual human rights. While both the American and French Revolutions were still decades away, the ideas they would champion were already put into practice by lawmakers across the European continent. Capital punishment, for example, was no longer used for petty offenses and was reserved only for the gravest of crimes, while prisons and workhouses adopted more humane treatments. In addition, the elites were abolishing torture as a viable method of extracting information and turning to different, more effective methods.

In addition to this newfound loosening of the yoke of state authority, the little man could also enjoy a bit of personal freedom directly. The American settlers were now moving ever inward from the Atlantic coast, and new workable fields were discovered along the way that required more people to work them. As such, local governments encouraged more newcomers to settle and work the fields legally. So, instead of turning to piracy, everyday people simply migrated to America and started settling it by the thousands. It was a way for the common man to strike out on his own and live a free, secure life without authorities breathing down his neck. Furthermore, there was a clear financial incentive in striking out on your own in America and other settlements; you could earn money without worrying that someone might blow your arm off or cut you down, leaving you to bleed to death on the open sea, your body being tossed overboard and swallowed by the cold waves. Given the opportunity, even the most hardcore pirate would have chosen this kind of life, which was why quite a few of them turned to owning plantations and fields even during the height of the Golden Age (though, as we saw, they all eventually went back to their old trade, which cost them dearly).

Conclusion

Seven and a half decades is quite a long time for a trade to last, to thrive and expand, and to rise and fall. Few trades, illegal or otherwise, can have as rich of a history as piracy during its heyday, which wasn’t called the «Golden Age» for nothing. Of course, it was almost nothing like it is described in popular fiction, nor did it look remotely like it is portrayed in famed Hollywood movies, but as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. After all, what’s a more exciting story than that of hunters and meat smokers, of men with little maritime experience turning into some of the most feared sea brigands alive? How many stories contain a wannabe pirate who bought his way into illegality and paid the ultimate price for it? How many men can boast about capturing hundreds of ships and commanding the respect of drunks and brigands while barely taking a sip themselves? How many men can boast about arriving in an equivalent of a no man’s land and turning it into a respectable colony with proper defenses and thriving trade? What man can boast about becoming a king of an entire island, an island that was larger than both his native and his motherland’s island combined? And where can you find a better «tragedy of errors» than that of a privateer who turned pirate almost by accident, despite claiming otherwise? And indeed, what duel can outshine one between a stern, professional lieutenant and a massive, rowdy pirate who terrified the men around the American coast and the Caribbean? A duel that ultimately ended with a beheading and the birth of an absolute legend?

Make no mistake, the life of a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy was far from glamorous or even exciting. These were harsh men bred to endure the terrifying conditions of seafaring life, people who risked life and limb to plunder massive quantities of loot and spend it all on drinking, whoring, and reveling until the waves called again. They were free, in a sense, but in another, they were not entirely different from any other people of the time. To some people, like Bonnet, Davis, Roberts, and Morgan, piracy was a way of life that they embraced with open arms. But to others, it was often the only viable option to make a living, which went some way to show just how grim the prospects of an everyman in 17th- and 18th-century Europe (or one of the European colonies) could be.

Indeed, stories of pirates were exaggerated and changed over the years, with details added and other details removed. Few pirates, if any, were swashbucklers like Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood or charismatic losers like Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow. Even fewer were as colorful and jolly as Monkey D. Luffy and his crew or as stoic and honorable as Captain Harlock. And sadly, none of them spoke with the same accent that Robert Newton made popular. There was no walking the plank, no treasure burying, no Libertatia (Republic of Pirates), no epic broadside cannonades on the open sea, or no tricorn hat-wearing, parrot-spotting, long-coat wearing, Cavalier boot-stomping captains who sailed gigantic ships with three masts. As all things tend to become over time, the sweet trade was made to look even sweeter through romanticizing, and impressionable authors would use limited information and their own imagination to build a cult. However, the only reason they did so in the first place is because of how powerful the pirate phenomenon had been. After all, these people, these notorious criminals, were all real-life historical personalities – from Laurens de Graaf and François L’Olonnais to Henry Morgan and Henry Every, from William Kidd and Charles Vane to Edward Teach and Jack Rackham, from Anne Bonny and Mary Read to James Plantain. They were all alive and active at some point, and they all had goals, aspirations, and dreams, as well as problems and setbacks. They were an inseparable part of everyday life during the 17th and 18th centuries, much like hackers and political activists are part of our own. And the fact that they managed to stir up such an uproar with their acts makes them all the more amazing, notwithstanding the fact that, at their core, they were criminals of ill repute who sometimes committed highly questionable or even downright despicable acts.

The Golden Age of Piracy is an inextricable part of our collective history, and as such, it should remain as an interesting, if a bit romantic, subject that deserves further research, but it also serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when law breaks down and people get desperate. With the resurgence of piracy in some of the more destitute parts of the world, such as the Somalian coast and sections of the Indonesian archipelago, it’s definitely worth considering how we handled piracy throughout history. In order to figure out how to stop the modern pirate problem, we need to look at how the issue was handled during the time when the sweet trade was the undisputed lord of the open seas.