The history of pirates takes us to sailing ships in the Caribbean in the 1600s and early 1700s. This was the Golden Age of piracy.
The most notorious characters in the history of pirates were murderous plunderers of ocean freight, hiding in the coves and harbors of the Virgin Islands. Every vessel was fair game and the booties they took were immense.
Crippled, half blind, and peg-legged, the history of pirates is replete with brutal captains who rarely lived to enjoy the retirements they dreamed of. Their crews were volunteered or conscripted from desperate British and American sailors living a brutal and bloodthirsty life.
Pirate careers were brief but ruthless.
Violence in the History of Pirates
The history of pirates in the late 1600s featured murderous raids as pirates boarded their targets in a cloud of gunpowder smoke and blood from their slashing cutlasses. Those crew who survived were either executed or pressed into service as pirate crew.
Captain William Kidd was one of the most swashbuckling cutthroats in the history of pirates. In 1695, he sailed his stolen Spanish schooner, The Adventure, to the West Indies. With a death sentence on his head, he and his brutal crew plundered many cargo ships before he was killed in 1701.
Said pirate Batholomew Roberts,
“In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. 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.”
— A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), p.213–214
Calico Jack Rackham was prominent in the later history of pirates of that era. He was credited with designing the Jolly Roger pirate flag, well known in the history of pirates. He commandeered his first ship in 1718, on which he was a crew member, and started plundering small vessels along the East Coast of America.
Along with his bloodthirsty lover, Anne Bonny, they terrorized Cuba and the Bahamas. Calico Jack surrendered, was arrested, tried, and convicted in November of 1720 in Jamaica. He was sentenced to death for his misdeeds.
Said Anne Bonny, who had escaped,
“I am sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a man, you needn’t be hanged like a dog.”
Six of his crew were also executed. One of them, when asked on the gallows if he repented, said,
“Yes, I do heartily repent. I repent I had not done more mischief; and that we did not cut the throats of them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you aren’t hanged as well as we.”
Where’s All the Loot Now?
There are many tales in the history of pirates of vast stores of loot hidden in subterranean caverns, chests filled with gold and precious gems. Few caches of treasure have ever been found. It is safe to assume from what we know of the lives and character of these rascals that they spent all their gold in whisky houses and brothels as soon as they put their feet on dry ground.
A Lasting Legacy
Though the Golden Age of piracy is now long behind us, its rich history has never loosened its hold on our hearts and minds. To read more stories from the history of pirates, check out the work of the expert himself: Cap’n Fritz Seyfarth.
