When was piracy most popular

The pirates would take all the treasure or cargo that the ship carried. These might include silks, jewels, spices, wine, brandy, linen, money or slaves.

Sometimes the pirates added the captured ship to their fleet or sank it to get rid of any evidence that would convict them. The seamen would be killed, ransomed, taken as slaves or joined the pirate crew. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the slave trade was a lucrative business, the profits from slavery attracted many pirates.

Some became slavers whilst others sold cargoes of slaves captured from the merchant ships bound for the American colonies or from raids on the West African slave ports. There were not many women pirates as seamen believed that it was unlucky to have women aboard ships.

Women wanting to live as a pirate usually disguised themselves as men. Yet, there were some extremely powerful women pirates, such as Ching Shih who commanded a pirate community of 80, The two most famous women pirates were Anne Bonney and Mary Reed.

They were captured in and put on trial in Jamaica. They were both sentenced to death but escaped execution as they were both pregnant. Mary Reed died of fever a few months after the trial but Mary Bonney was released. The official punishment for piracy was death by public hanging. Pirates captured at sea could receive a summary punishment of hanging at the yardarm though only if no legal judgement could be obtained due to the location. Likewise if a ship was attacked by pirates on the way to America and the pirates were captured, they could be executed without trial under Marine Law but otherwise all robberies and felonies committed by pirates at sea could be heard in any County of England, by the Kings Commission as if the offences had been committed on land.

The bodies of executed pirates were often tarred to preserve them to be hung from a gibbet. The corpse would be chained into an iron cage to prevent relatives from burying the body. A condemned man was measured for his iron cage before his execution, and many pirates feared this more than the hanging. The notable pirate, William Kidd, received this fate and his body hung for three years at Tilbury Point in the Thames estuary as a warning to seamen and pirates.

After Blackbeard was killed in battle, his head was cut off and tied as a trophy to the yardarm of HMS Pearl. Organised piracy and privateering was finally ended in the nineteenth century. However, lawful privateers still flourished until when the majority of maritime nations signed the Declaration of Paris.

This banned letters of marque and therefore outlawed privateering. Navies of each country were used to enforce this law. The age of steam also helped to end piracy as anti-slavery operations as steam ships could sail without wind and at great speed, while pirates still relied upon more cumbersome sailing ships. By there were only a small number of pirates remaining.

In the s songs, plays, operas and novels were written about buccaneers, and during the nineteenth century storybook pirates were more famous than the real ones. Yet ordinary seamen toiled for modest wages and were subject to strict discipline. In contrast, piracy not only offered them a chance to get rich quick but also a rare opportunity to exert a degree of power over others.

The image of the pirate never fails to capture the imagination. Browse our range of publications to inform and entertain. More about pirates. The life and times of a pirate.

Who became a pirate and what was life like for them? Step into the world of pirates in the classic age of piracy. Letters of marque. A letter of marque was a commission authorising privately owned ships known as privateers to capture enemy merchant ships.

The real pirates of the Caribbean. While Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films are entirely fictional, there is no doubting that the Caribbean was the centre of piracy in the Golden Age of Piracy. Infamous pirates. For over years, we have thrilled to the antics of fictional and fictionalised pirates from Long John Silver to Jack Sparrow.

Bringing pirates to justice. Justice, like life, was short, brutal and spectacular for pirates. Visit us. National Maritime Museum. Plan your visit. Shop our selection of pirate-themed books The image of the pirate never fails to capture the imagination.

Browse our range of publications to inform and entertain Shop. Contemporary historians have tended to use pirates for their own ends, depicting them as rebels against convention.

Their pirates critique early modern capitalism and challenge oppressive sexual norms. They are cast as proto-feminists or supporters of homosocial utopias. They challenge oppressive social hierarchies by flaunting social graces or wearing flamboyant clothing above their social stations.

They subvert oppressive notions of race, citing the presence of black crew members as evidence of race blindness. Moses Butterworth, however, did none of these things.

The true rebels were leaders like Samuel Willet, establishment figures on land who led riots against crown authority. It was the higher reaches of colonial society, from governors to merchants, who supported global piracy, not some underclass or proto proletariat.

Popular culture has invested heavily in the image of pirates as anarchists who speak in colorful language and dress in attire recognizable to any five-year-old. In fact, what we imagine pirates to look and sound like matches only one decade of history: to Before that, piracy consisted of a spectrum of activities from the heroic to the maniacal.

Many historians, like many pirate fans, write about piracy as a static phenomenon. But most sought one large prize and hoped to use their plunder to join the middling to upper echelons of colonial society. One reason piracy was often an act or a phase, and not a way of life, was simply because humans have not evolved to live on the sea. The sea is a hostile place, offering few of the pleasures of terrestrial society.

Pirates needed to clean and repair their ships, collect wood and water, gather crews, obtain paperwork, fence their goods, or obtain sexual gratification. Simply put, what is the value of silver and gold in the middle of the ocean? Why would someone risk his life in a hostile maritime world if there was no chance he could actually spend his booty?

Until the s, English pirates almost always had somewhere to go to spend their money, either for a few days or to settle down for good. The British National Archives holds a petition from 48 wives of known pirates, begging the crown to pardon their husbands so they could return home to care for their families.

Returning to London was not an option for most sea rovers, but a life in the American colonies offered the closest proxy. Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, who was instrumental to the development of the American colonies and commanded a fleet of privateers, was painted by Anthony van Dyck around Support of piracy on the peripheries of the British Empire dates to the first forays of English sea captains overseas.

Pirate Nests begins in Elizabethan England with the active protection of piracy by port communities in Devon and Cornwall. The ascension of James I coincided with the migration of a plunder economy from England to farther shores. Puritan communities in Ireland, and soon the fledgling colonies of Jamestown, Bermuda, New Plymouth, and Boston all supported illicit sea marauders.

In the s, men like Moses Butterworth joined crews heading out of colonial ports to the Indian Ocean, basing themselves on the island of Madagascar. Initial attempts to better regulate the colonies faced heated resistance like the riot that sprang Moses Butterworth in Royal officials battled with colonial elites over control of their court system, choice of governors, economic policies, and other issues.

But the transformation of law, politics, economics, and even popular culture in a relatively brief period of time soon persuaded landed colonists of the long-term benefits of legal trade over the short-term boom of the pirate market. After being sprung from jail, Moses Butterworth eventually headed to Newport, where, in , he captained a sloop that sailed alongside a man-of-war in pursuit of runaway English sailors.

The former pirate had turned pirate-hunter. Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, has inspired the depiction of pirates in fiction, film, and on stage. The expansion of commercial trade, particularly the slave trade, cemented a colonial social order increasingly threatened by instability at sea and less tolerant of social mobility on land. This is the era of characters like Blackbeard Edward Teach , Bartholomew Roberts, and female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, colorful rebels who lived dangerously and fit the legend.

Where for centuries pirates had sailed under the flags of their own nations or of foreign princes, they now sailed—and were hanged under—flags of their own construction.