The Golden Age of Piracy ran roughly from the 1650s to the 1730s. It began with French hunters on Hispaniola who smoked meat on wooden frames called buccans; when Spain slaughtered their feral cattle and pigs, they moved to Tortuga and turned their marksmanship on Spanish galleons. English and French governors licensed such men with letters of marque, and Henry Morgan, who sacked and burned Panama City in 1671, was knighted and made lieutenant governor of Jamaica. By the 1690s raided towns had little left, peace revoked the commissions, and crews sailed the Pirate Round to the Indian Ocean, backed by cash-starved colonial officials in New York and Rhode Island. Henry Every’s 1695 capture of the Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai became the era’s great windfall.
After the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1714, thousands of discharged sailors met merchant service marked by rotten food, floggings and docked pay. Many turned pirate and sailed under written articles, electing captains and quartermasters. Raiders of the wrecked 1715 Spanish treasure fleet founded the Republic of Pirates at Nassau. In 1718 Woodes Rogers arrived with the King’s Act of Grace and hired former pirates like Benjamin Hornigold to hunt holdouts. The deaths of Bartholomew Roberts in 1722, William Fly in 1726 and Olivier Levasseur in 1730 closed the era, and Charles Johnson’s 1724 General History turned it into legend.
- Pirates wore gold and silver earrings partly to pay for a burial if their bodies washed ashore.
- The Spanish town of Tolu was raided eight times, and Maracaibo was sacked three times in one decade.
- Chain shot, two half balls joined by chain, shredded rigging so cargo was not sunk.
- Sam Bellamy once had his crew strip naked before boarding a French ship.
- More than 40 female pirates are recorded, including Anne Bonny and Mary Read under John Rackham.
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