Who Were the Pirates of the Caribbean? The Golden Age of Piracy and Its End
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Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Bartholomew Roberts, Anne Bonny: the names come from a single generation, roughly 1690 to 1725, when a few thousand men and a few women in ships stolen from their owners preyed on the trade of every empire from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean and briefly made the Atlantic unsafe. They were not the first pirates or the last, but they were the ones the books and the films are about, and the reality, which was recorded in trial transcripts and colonial dispatches, was shorter, harder and more political than the legend.
Where they came from
Piracy in the Caribbean began with the state. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England, France and the Netherlands licensed privateers to attack Spanish shipping in wartime, and the buccaneers of Hispaniola and Jamaica, Henry Morgan among them, sacked Spanish towns with government letters in their pockets. The golden age began when the licences ran out. The War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1713 and put tens of thousands of sailors out of work, at a time when merchant seamen were paid little, fed badly and flogged, and a captured merchant ship whose crew was invited to join the pirates often did. The base was Nassau in the Bahamas, an ungoverned island with a good harbour, where in 1716 several hundred pirates under men like Benjamin Hornigold and Charles Vane operated more or less as a republic.
How a pirate ship was run
The surprising thing in the records is how orderly the ships were. Because a pirate crew had no owner and no navy behind it, it governed itself by written articles that every man signed, and the articles of several crews survive:
- •The captain was elected and could be deposed by vote, and commanded absolutely only in battle; the quartermaster, also elected, ran the ship the rest of the time and divided the loot
- •Plunder was shared by fixed proportions, the captain getting perhaps two shares to a sailor's one, against the merchant service where a captain earned many times a seaman's wage
- •Injuries were compensated from the common fund at set rates: so much for a lost leg, so much for an eye
- •Rules against gambling aboard, fighting aboard, bringing women aboard and deserting one's post, with punishments decided by the crew
- •Black sailors, escaped slaves among them, served in most crews and in some made up a quarter or more, sometimes as equals and sometimes not
The famous ones
Edward Teach, Blackbeard, cruised for two years, blockaded Charleston in 1718 with a captured French slaver renamed Queen Anne's Revenge, and was killed that November in a boarding fight off North Carolina by a naval party sent from Virginia; his head was hung from the bowsprit. Bartholomew Roberts, Black Bart, the most successful of them all, took over four hundred ships in three years off Africa and the Americas, drank tea rather than rum, and died under naval fire in 1722. John Rackham, Calico Jack, is remembered for his flag and his crew, which included Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two women who fought in men's clothes and were spared the gallows by pleading pregnancy at their trial in 1720. Edward Low was a sadist whose own crew marooned him. Most pirates were none of these; they were ordinary seamen who joined for a year or two, took a few prizes, and were hanged, pardoned or drowned.
Why it ended
The golden age was stamped out in about a decade by a combination of pardon and force. In 1717 the British crown offered amnesty to any pirate who surrendered, and in 1718 sent Woodes Rogers, a former privateer, as governor to Nassau with warships; most of the pirates took the pardon, and those who did not were hunted. Navies were expanded on the American and African stations, colonial governors who had traded with pirates were replaced, and the law was changed so that pirates could be tried and hanged in the colonies rather than shipped to London. Between 1716 and 1726 around 400 to 600 were hanged, their bodies left in chains at harbour mouths as a warning, and by 1726 the Atlantic trade was safe enough for insurance rates to fall. Piracy continued elsewhere, off the Barbary coast, in the South China Sea and today off Somalia and in the Malacca Strait, but the Caribbean version was over.
The legend
Almost everything popular culture knows about pirates comes from two books. A General History of the Pyrates of 1724, by a Captain Charles Johnson who may have been Daniel Defoe, told the lives of the recent pirates with a mixture of records and invention and gave the world Blackbeard's smoking beard and Bonny and Read. Treasure Island, in 1883, added the parrot, the peg leg, the treasure map with an X, and the one-legged cook; the pirate accent is Robert Newton's West Country in the 1950 film. Walking the plank appears in almost no record, buried treasure in about one, and the skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger, was one flag among many. What is true is more interesting: for a few years a few thousand of the most exploited workers in the world ran their own ships by vote and shared what they took, and every empire in the Atlantic joined forces to hang them.
The takeaway
The pirates of the Caribbean's golden age were mostly unemployed seamen who, between about 1690 and 1725, took ships from the trade of every Atlantic empire, ran their crews under written articles with elected captains and shared plunder, and were based at Nassau until Britain reclaimed it in 1718. Amnesty, expanded navies and colonial hangings ended them within a decade, and the parrots, plank and treasure maps came later from a 1724 history and Treasure Island.