Piracy's golden age lasted less than fifty years, and much of what is famous about it was added later. These stories keep the documented parts: a celebrated ship that began as a slaver, a widow who commanded hundreds of junks and then negotiated her way out, a flag that meant no mercy, and a law still on the books that carries one penalty.
Every tile in a Pirates game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pirates
nine stories
1Smoke under his hat, or in his beard
On the tile: Blackbeard1716-1718
Where Blackbeard kept his smoke depends on who tells it. Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 history says that in battle he stuck lighted matches under his hat, where they showed on each side of his face. Some later accounts, the National Maritime Museum's among them, put slow-burning fuses in his long black beard instead. Either way, the look was likely designed to make crews surrender without a fight. Even his name resists us. North Carolina's state encyclopedia lists Thatch, Thack, Thatche and Theach among the spellings, with Teach the form most commonly encountered.
In May 1718 Blackbeard blockaded Charleston for several days, seizing ships as they tried to enter or leave the harbor and holding their crews hostage. What he demanded from the colony's government was a chest of medicines, with a threat to kill the prisoners if it did not arrive. The chest came, the prisoners were released, and the pirates sailed away. Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 history gives the reason plainly: Blackbeard was in want of medicines.
No pirate of his era came close to Bartholomew Roberts. The National Maritime Museum credits him with well over 400 vessels captured in about three years, a success rate far greater than any other pirate of the period, though many of his prizes were fishing boats, among them the fishing fleets off Newfoundland. He dressed for the ending, too: a crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain with a diamond cross hanging from it.
Anne Bonny sailed with Calico Jack Rackham until the crew was captured off Jamaica in 1720. Rackham was hanged. Bonny and Mary Read were condemned too, but both were pregnant, and they were reprieved. Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 history then loses her: "what is become of her since, we cannot tell; only this we know, that she was not executed." Later accounts bring her home to South Carolina, married and buried there in 1782. The National Maritime Museum is of two minds: one of its pages tells that ending as fact, another calls it only a claim.
Mary Read received the same reprieve as Anne Bonny, and it did her no good. Tried alongside Bonny on November 28, 1720, she was condemned to death and then reprieved because she was pregnant. She never left the prison. Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 history says she was seized with a violent fever soon after her trial, and the National Maritime Museum records her burial on April 28, 1721. There is no record of her child, which suggests she died while still pregnant.
When her husband died in 1807, the captains of the confederation chose his widow to lead it, and the fleet she ran in the South China Sea is counted in hundreds of ships and, by some estimates, tens of thousands of people. Most pirate careers ended at a rope. Hers ended at a table. On April 18, 1810 she brought 260 junks into Canton and bargained: the pirates kept their plunder and gave up most of their ships. She died in 1844, aged 69.
Pirate crews voted. In 1716 the crew Samuel Bellamy sailed with voted Benjamin Hornigold off the ship and elected Bellamy captain. The ship they took the next year, the Whydah, made them rich; National Geographic counts 53 ships robbed in their spree. Then, on April 26, 1717, a nor'easter drove the Whydah onto the shoals off Cape Cod. Only two of the 146 aboard survived. Bellamy, born in England in 1689, was 28 years old.
Most pirates stole their ships. Stede Bonnet bought one. A prosperous Barbados sugar planter with no real experience at sea, he purchased a fast sloop in early 1717, named her Revenge, and paid his crew out of his own pocket, where most pirates sailed for a share of the plunder. He is sometimes called the Gentleman Pirate, though he proved no great success at either. When he fell in with Blackbeard, the seasoned pirate simply took the operation over.
Bonnet's luck ran out in a river. Hauled over on the Cape Fear to scrape his hull, he was found by William Rhett of South Carolina, and the fight that followed ran about six hours before he surrendered. Judge Nicholas Trott condemned him on November 12, 1718, and he was hanged at White Point in Charleston on December 10. The gentleman pirate had been in the trade for less than two years.
Before she was Queen Anne's Revenge she was La Concorde of Nantes, owned by Rene Montaudoin, and she first appears in the records as a privateer. Sailing in July 1710, she took a Portuguese slaver off West Africa, then a Dutch one, and later several English coasting vessels in the Caribbean. When Queen Anne's War ended in 1713, Montaudoin put her to work carrying captives. On her third slaving voyage she left Whydah in October 1717 with 516 captive Africans aboard, and sixty-one died on the crossing. Pirates took her before she could reach Martinique.
Pirates did not need a big ship to take one. The vessel that became Queen Anne's Revenge was taken by two sloops, one with 120 men and twelve cannon, the other with 30 men and eight, according to the archaeology project that excavates her wreck. Her own sixteen guns counted for little. The Atlantic crossing had already killed sixteen of her crew and left thirty-six more seriously ill with scurvy and dysentery. After two volleys, Captain Pierre Dosset surrendered.
A captured ship was a blank slate. Blackbeard renamed La Concorde the Queen Anne's Revenge and, North Carolina's state encyclopedia says, mounted forty guns on her, well over double the sixteen she had carried under her French captain. That turned a merchant vessel into something a colonial governor had to answer. The armament also worked as theater, since a ship that looks unbeatable rarely has to prove it.
In June 1718 the Queen Anne's Revenge ran onto a sandbar entering Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, and stayed there. On November 21, 1996, a search team from the firm Intersal found a cluster of cannon and anchors on the seabed nearby, with a bronze bell dated 1705, a blunderbuss barrel and a sounding weight among the first items up. More than 400,000 artifacts have followed, and the site joined the National Register in 2004.
Finding a wreck is only half the job. Proving whose it is can be harder. Barry Clifford located the Whydah off Cape Cod in 1984, and in 1985 divers found the ship's bronze bell, cast with the words The Whydah Gally 1716. National Geographic calls the wreck the world's first fully authenticated golden age pirate ship. Other pirate wrecks, Blackbeard's among them, have been identified from the evidence around them. This one gave its own name.
The Whydah was not built for pirates. National Geographic describes a trim 300-ton galley, launched in London in 1716 and purpose-built for the slave trade. On her first voyage, 312 captive Africans who survived the crossing were sold in Jamaica. She was on her way home in early 1717 when Bellamy's crew caught her near the Bahamas after a three-day chase, with barely a shot fired. The pirates saw her size, speed and firepower at once, and kept the ship and her name.
The skull is the famous one, but the flag that decided your afternoon was plain red. According to the National Maritime Museum, a black flag signaled that quarter would be given if a crew handed the cargo over, while a red flag was the warning that no quarter would be given and the pirates would fight to the death. The choice of cloth was an opening offer, and most captains preferred a surrender to a fight.
Not every pirate attack began under a black flag. As the National Maritime Museum explains, some crews flew false colors, such as the flag of a friendly nation, to fool their victims, and revealed who they really were only when they were close by, leaving very little time to fight back. Bartholomew Roberts often approached a ship under a particular country's flag, then swapped it for one of his pirate flags when it was too late. By the time the pirate colors went up, most of the choices had already been made.
9The ship that made a pirate rich enough to vanish
On the tile: The Fancy1695
Henry Every did not build his warship. He stole it. In May 1694 he led a mutiny aboard the privateer Charles II, docked in Spain, and sailed her away as the Fancy, a ship of 46 guns. In September 1695 Every's pirate fleet ran down the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai, homeward bound for India. A cannon shot brought down her mainmast, and after hours of fighting she surrendered. The haul, estimated at between about 325,000 and 600,000 pounds, made his crew rich. Every himself was never caught, and his treasure has never been recovered.
Pirate lore is full of blindfolded captives edging out along a plank, yet nobody can prove golden age pirates ever made anyone walk one. The National Maritime Museum puts it flatly: pirates never made their victims walk the plank. They threw them overboard, or abandoned them on a deserted island. The plank arrived later, through print and then film. Charles Ellms pictured a prisoner tumbling off one in 1837, Howard Pyle painted the scene in 1887, and Peter Pan made it famous. Real pirates favored punishments just as unpleasant, such as flogging and marooning.
Treasure maps belong to fiction. The National Maritime Museum says pirates almost never buried their loot. They mainly spent it quickly, and they drew no secret maps. The famous exception is Captain William Kidd. The museum's curator Robert Blyth writes that Kidd buried some treasure once, and just once, on Gardiner's Island near Long Island, New York, in 1699. At least some of it was dug up and sent to London as evidence at his trial for piracy and murder. Despite many searches, nothing else has been found.
Long John Silver's shoulder bird did not come from nowhere. Sailors really did collect parrots: on the coast of Mexico in 1676, the buccaneer William Dampier found scarcely a man who had not sent one or two aboard. The National Maritime Museum's judgment is that pirates probably kept them as valuable things to sell rather than as pets, and back in London, merchants ran stalls that specialized in tropical birds. Picture a cage in the hold rather than a companion on the rail, and the picture gets closer to the truth.
The patch is real in the sense that the injuries were real. Seafaring maimed people, and the National Maritime Museum notes that pirate crews, like all sailors, included men with wooden legs or the sight gone from an eye. What got invented is the uniform. Treasure Island and its many stage and screen adaptations fixed the image, yet Long John Silver wears no eye patch in the book. He has a crutch and a left leg cut close by the hip. The patch arrived with later depictions of him.
There are no recordings of pirates talking, and the National Maritime Museum says the classic pirate voice has no historical basis. It does have a famous source. The Dorset-born Robert Newton played Long John Silver in Disney's 1950 Treasure Island, the studio's first live-action feature, and exaggerated his native West Country accent. He kept it for Blackbeard the Pirate in 1952 and Long John Silver in 1954. Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates, notes that golden age crews included Scots, Irish, Africans and French, and that the largest group of English pirates probably came from London.
Walking the plank belongs to storybooks. Marooning does not. The National Maritime Museum describes it as deliberately leaving someone on an uninhabited island, one of the punishments a pirate captain would have used to maintain discipline among the crew. It could be a formal sentence, too: captains listed marooning among the punishments in their codes of conduct. Fiction knew it well: in Treasure Island, Ben Gunn tells Jim Hawkins he was marooned three years before and has lived on goats ever since.
The book that shaped pirate lore has an author who did not exist. A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, first sold in London in May 1724, carried the name Captain Charles Johnson, a pseudonym for a writer identified as either Daniel Defoe or Nathaniel Mist. It was a bestseller, in its fourth edition by 1726 and still in print. It claims to draw on trial records, newspaper reports and interviews with former pirates, and the National Maritime Museum notes that its author certainly added or exaggerated details.
Pirates were a circulation strategy. Robert Blyth, author of Buried Treasure: A Pirate Miscellany, writes that pirate adventures and courtroom trials made good press stories, turning up regularly in early eighteenth-century newspapers and helping sell copies to a public keen on grisly details. Journalists and editors also exaggerated, to make pirates look even more violent and destructive. The golden age was being turned into legend while it was still going on, and the National Maritime Museum says that coverage shaped many of the pirates in books, films and television today.
The flag's nickname arrived late. The National Maritime Museum notes that the name Jolly Roger is thought to have been first used by Bartholomew Roberts in 1721 and Francis Spriggs in 1723. Captain Charles Johnson, who recorded both, gives it as the name Roberts's crew used for their black flag, and as the name Spriggs's men gave a black ensign bearing a white skeleton. Where the words came from is unproven. One suggestion is the French joli rouge, pretty red. Another is Old Roger, a nickname for the devil or for death itself.
1The only naval officer knighted for fighting pirates
On the tile: Chaloner Ogle1722
Chaloner Ogle's HMS Swallow caught up with Bartholomew Roberts at Cape Lopez, in present-day Gabon, in February 1722. Roberts had two ships and 72 guns against the Swallow's 50, but his crew had spent the night before drinking their way through a captured prize's liquor. On February 10 the Swallow's broadsides wrecked the Royal Fortune's masts and rigging, and grapeshot killed Roberts at once. London praised the victory, and Ogle was knighted in 1723. The National Maritime Museum notes he is the only naval officer knighted for an anti-piracy operation.
Virginia's governor did not wait for North Carolina to act. Alexander Spotswood sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard, who found Blackbeard in the shallows of Ocracoke Inlet on November 21, 1718, and attacked at first light. The fighting was hand to hand and Blackbeard was killed the next day. Maynard brought the head back displayed on his bowsprit, because in 1718 a pirate was only finished once people could see that he was.
Warships were only half of the crown's plan. A royal proclamation of September 5, 1717, promised a full pardon to any pirate who surrendered to a colonial governor within a year, and many did, including Benjamin Hornigold at Nassau. Blackbeard collected his from Governor Charles Eden at Bath, North Carolina, in June 1718. Captain Charles Johnson wrote that he took it only to wait for a better chance to play the same game again, and he was soon raiding once more. Amnesty only works on people who want out.
Piracy had a paperwork problem. Suspects taken in the East or West Indies had to be sent to England for trial, and the statute itself complains of the great trouble and charges involved, which encouraged men to turn pirate, trusting they could not easily be brought to account. An Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy, known today as the Piracy Act 1698 though it became law in 1700, let the cases be heard at sea or on land in the king's islands, plantations and colonies. The courtroom moved to where the crime was.
The difference between a pirate and a privateer was a piece of paper. In wartime a government could issue a letter of marque that let a private captain intercept enemy shipping, and the same act without one was piracy, a hanging offense. That instrument sits in the founding document of the United States. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress power to define and punish piracies committed on the high seas and, in the very next clause, to declare war and grant letters of marque and reprisal.
Federal piracy law in the United States opens with a single sentence. Title 18, Section 1651 provides that whoever, on the high seas, commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations, and is afterwards brought into or found in the United States, shall be imprisoned for life. No range, no lesser penalty in that section, and no definition either, since it borrows one. The section took its current form in 1948, based on a provision from 1909.
Before the United States had a navy worth the name, it bought quiet. In 1795 it sent diplomats to make treaties with Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, and under their terms the country agreed to pay tribute. The receipt annexed to the Tripoli treaty of November 4, 1796, lists what was handed over: 40,000 Spanish dollars, thirteen watches, five rings, 140 piques of cloth and four brocade caftans. In 1801 Tripoli's ruler demanded more and declared war. The 1805 treaty that ended the fighting included a ransom for prisoners but no tribute at all.
8The most pirates condemned at one Admiralty trial
On the tile: Roberts's crew1722
Killing a pirate captain was never the point. Ending the trade was. After Bartholomew Roberts fell in 1722, his surviving crew were tried by the Court of Admiralty at Cape Coast Castle, in present-day Ghana, and 52 of them were hanged. The National Maritime Museum calls it the greatest number of pirates ever sentenced to death at a single trial in an Admiralty court. The punishment was meant as a warning, and through the 1720s, as navies hunted pirates down, the golden age came to an end.
Zheng Yi Sao's confederation in the South China Sea was far too large to run on menace alone, so it ran on written rules. Going ashore without permission was punished. Captured goods had to be registered before anything was shared out, and a ship that took a prize kept one fifth, the rest going to the fleet's common fund. Townspeople were supposed to be paid for supplies, a rule not always kept. Bookkeeping, as much as daring, held it together.