Anno Domini 1650 — 1730
Eighty years in which a few thousand people, most of them poor and most of them dead before forty, made themselves the terror of four oceans. Here is who they were.
The Ground of It
Piracy in this period was not a lifestyle so much as a labour dispute conducted with cannon. Merchant sailors worked under brutal discipline for wages that were often withheld; naval crews were pressed into service outright. A pirate ship, by contrast, elected its captain, could depose him by vote, divided plunder by written articles, and paid compensation for a lost limb. Most of the men who signed those articles were in their twenties. Most were dead, hanged, or scattered within three years.
What follows is a roster of twenty-nine of them — buccaneers, privateers who slipped their commissions, and the outright rovers of the last great wave. Some were monsters. Some were unemployed sailors who made one catastrophic decision. A few were both. Where the record is thin or the story is likely embroidered, this page says so.
1650 – 1688
Cattle-hunters turned raiders, based on Tortuga and Port Royal, licensed by England and France to gut the Spanish Main. Half pirate, half instrument of state policy.
1689 – 1700
Ships sailing from New York and Rhode Island around the Cape to Madagascar and the Red Sea, to rob the pilgrim and treasure fleets of the Mughal Empire. Enormous prizes, and an international incident.
1700 – 1730
Peace in 1713 threw thousands of trained fighting sailors onto the beach. Many went straight to Nassau. Within a decade the Royal Navy had hunted nearly all of them down.
The Trade
Strip away the flags and the rum and piracy in this period was an economic response to a specific set of conditions. Long wars trained tens of thousands of men to fight at sea and then discharged them all at once. Merchant service paid badly, late, or not at all, under captains with legal authority to flog. The Royal Navy pressed men off the street. And the Atlantic was suddenly thick with valuable cargo and thin on warships.
Against that, a pirate ship offered an almost absurd proposition: an equal vote, a written contract, a share of everything taken, insurance against injury, and a captain who could be removed by show of hands. Historians have called it the most democratic institution in the English-speaking world of its day, which is true and also beside the point — it was a robbery syndicate, and it stayed one.
The arithmetic was brutal. A successful cruise could pay a man more than twenty years of honest wages. The odds of surviving to spend it were poor.
Very few people set out to be pirates. The overwhelmingly common route was to already be a sailor and have the decision made around you.
The distinction between forced and volunteer mattered enormously later, at trial: a man who could produce witnesses that he had been compelled might live. Pirate crews knew this, and sometimes kept a written note of who had signed under duress — occasionally as a genuine kindness, occasionally as leverage.
Before a cruise began, the company drew up and signed articles. These were real contracts, read aloud and sworn to, and several survive because they were entered into evidence at trials. Bartholomew Roberts’ articles are the fullest we have.
The captain held absolute authority only in the moment of chase or battle. Everywhere else the quartermaster — elected, and the crew’s representative against the captain — held the real power, including custody of the plunder.
The galleon of the popular imagination is the wrong ship. Pirates overwhelmingly wanted small, fast, shallow-drafted vessels — above all the Bermuda or Jamaica sloop: single-masted, perhaps 30 to 100 tons, carrying eight to fourteen guns and a very large crew for its size.
The reasoning is entirely practical. A sloop could outrun anything it could not fight and outmanoeuvre anything that could catch it. It could slip into shoal water and creeks where a navy frigate drew too much to follow. And a big crew mattered more than big guns, because the objective was almost never to sink a prize — you wanted the cargo intact and the ship afloat. Battles were won by boarding.
Larger ships appear when a captain got ambitious. Blackbeard converted a captured French slave ship into the 40-gun Queen Anne’s Revenge; Bellamy did the same with the Whydah. Both proved to be liabilities — expensive to feed, hard to careen, and impossible to hide.
Careening was the constant chore. Every few months the ship had to be run onto a beach, heeled over and scraped clean of weed and shipworm, which meant days ashore, guns landed, and complete vulnerability. Pirates chose their hideouts largely by where they could do this safely.
Combat was not the main danger. Disease was — dysentery, malaria and yellow fever above all, and scurvy on long passages. Bartholomew Roberts lost far more men to fever off the African coast than to the Royal Navy.
The standard diet was salt beef or pork, dried peas, and hard biscuit that reliably went weevily. Fresh food meant turtles, which could be kept alive on deck for weeks, and whatever could be taken or bought ashore. Salmagundi — a chopped stew of whatever meat, fish, pickles, eggs and spices were to hand, dressed with oil and vinegar — was the one dish pirates were genuinely known for.
Water went foul in cask within weeks, which is a large part of why everyone drank beer, wine and spirits instead. Rum mixed with water, sugar and nutmeg made bumbo. Drunkenness was constant and occasionally fatal: Rackham’s crew were too drunk to fight when they were taken, and it hanged them.
The Golden Age did not fade out. It was deliberately closed down inside about eight years, by a state that had finally decided the cost was intolerable.
The Royal Navy also simply put more hulls in the water on the right stations, and colonial governors who had profited from piracy found the arrangement had become dangerous to them personally. By the time William Fly was hanged in Boston in 1726, the trade was effectively finished in the Atlantic. Olivier Levasseur, hanged on Réunion in 1730, is usually counted as the last of them.
The Armoury
Boarding weapons, not naval artillery. Everything here is built for a crowded deck at arm’s length, where a fight lasted a few violent minutes and almost nobody reloaded.
Slops and Ribbons
Almost nothing. A pirate dressed like the merchant sailor he had been last month, because that is what he was. The exception was the captain, whose clothes were a deliberate instrument of terror and authority.
A thick knitted wool cap, cheap and near-universal at sea. A tricorne appears on captains and on men who had recently robbed one.
Worn to keep tar and sun off the neck, and pulled up over the mouth in gunsmoke. Purely functional.
Cut deliberately short and close so it could not foul in rigging. The long coats of pirate films are shore clothes, or a captain’s vanity.
Coarse linen or cotton check, issued as slop clothing by the ship’s purser and bought against wages.
The one tool every sailor carried. Aboard some ships the point was deliberately broken off to make it less useful in a quarrel.
Wide, loose knee-length breeches — the garment that gave “slop clothing” its name. Easy to move in, easy to roll up, quick to shed if you went over the side.
Standard working rig on deck. Bare soles grip wet planking and feel a footrope far better than any shoe of the period.
Things that are not true
Essentially unknown in this period. The handful of documented cases are from the 1820s and later. Pirates who wanted a man dead had faster methods; pirates who wanted him gone used marooning.
One documented instance in the whole era: Kidd’s cache on Gardiners Island, dug up within months and used to convict him. Plunder was divided immediately and spent almost as fast.
Amputation was real and articles compensated for it, but there is no evidence these were common enough to be characteristic. The look is largely nineteenth-century stage costume and Robert Louis Stevenson.
West Country pirate-speak is an invention of the actor Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver in 1950 and leaned hard on his own Dorset vowels. Real crews were polyglot — English, Irish, French, Dutch, West African.
Reading the Colours
A pirate flag was not decoration, it was a message with legal and practical content, and merchant captains were expected to read it correctly and quickly. Ships normally approached under false colours — a national ensign borrowed for the occasion — and ran up their own only at the last moment, once escape was impossible.
Quarter offered. Strike your colours now and the crew will not be harmed. The whole business model depended on this being believed, so it was usually honoured.
No quarter. Resistance had already gone on too long, or the captain wanted the message sent. The red flag was older than the black and considerably more feared.
Your time is running out. The commonest motif after the skull, and the most precise: it referred to the shrinking window in which surrender was still on offer.
A slow and painful death, usually paired with a dart or a dagger. Stede Bonnet flew a heart and a dagger flanking a skull.
Willingness to board and fight. Rackham’s version became the archetype — it is the flag most people now picture, from one of the era’s least successful captains.
Any national ensign the ship happened to carry in its flag locker. Flying them to close on a prize was standard practice and, oddly, legal — firing under them was not.
The Cruising Grounds
Pirates worked specific hunting grounds, chosen for trade routes, prevailing winds and the absence of navies. Mark a ground to filter the roster below.
The Roster
Eighteen of these twenty-nine left no likeness at all. The engravings that do exist were cut for a bestselling book years after the events, from description and imagination — treat every face here as an illustration rather than a portrait. Where none exists, the card carries a mark for how that person’s life ended.