Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, and vessels used for piracy are called pirate ships. The earliest documented instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked the ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilisations. Narrow channels which funnel shipping into predictable routes have long created opportunities for piracy, as well as for privateering and commerce raiding.
Buccaneers were a kind of privateer or free sailors, and pirates particular to the Caribbean Sea during the 17th and 18th centuries. First established on northern Hispaniola as early as 1625, their heyday was from the Restoration in 1660 until about 1688, during a time when governments in the Caribbean area were not strong enough to suppress them.
A privateer is a private person or vessel which engages in commerce raiding under a commission of war. Since robbery under arms was a common aspect of seaborne trade, until the early 19th century all merchant ships carried arms. A sovereign or delegated authority issued commissions, also referred to as letters of marque, during wartime. The commission empowered the holder to carry on all forms of hostility permissible at sea by the usages of war. This included attacking foreign vessels and taking them as prizes and taking crews prisoner for exchange. Captured ships were subject to condemnation and sale under prize law, with the proceeds divided by percentage between the privateer's sponsors, shipowners, captains and crew. A percentage share usually went to the issuer of the commission.
A letter of marque and reprisal was a government license in the Age of Sail that authorized a private person, known as a privateer or corsair, to attack and capture vessels of a foreign state at war with the issuer, licensing international military operations against a specified enemy as reprisal for a previous attack or injury. Captured naval prizes were judged before the government's admiralty court for condemnation and transfer of ownership to the privateer.
A brig is a type of sailing vessel defined by its rig: two masts which are both square-rigged. Brigs originated in the second half of the 18th century and were a common type of smaller merchant vessel or warship from then until the latter part of the 19th century. In commercial use, they were gradually replaced by fore-and-aft rigged vessels such as schooners, as owners sought to reduce crew costs by having rigs that could be handled by fewer men. In Royal Navy use, brigs were retained for training use when the battle fleets consisted almost entirely of iron-hulled steamships.
Jolly Roger is the traditional English name for the ensign flown to identify a pirate ship preceding or during an attack, during the early 18th century. The vast majority of such flags flew the motif of a human skull, or “Death's Head”, often accompanied by other elements, on a black field, sometimes called the "Death's Head flag" or just the "black flag".
The Golden Age of Piracy is a common designation for the period between the 1650s and the 1730s, when maritime piracy was a significant factor in the histories of the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Adam Baldridge was an English pirate and one of the early founders of the pirate settlements in Madagascar.
Jan Erasmus Reyning (1640–1697) was a Dutch pirate, privateer and naval officer.
Piracy in the ancient Mediterranean dates back at least as far as the Bronze Age. The roots of the word "piracy" come from the ancient Greek πειράομαι, or peiráomai, meaning "attempt". This morphed into πειρατής, or peiratēs, meaning "brigand," and from that to the Latin pirata, where the modern English word pirate originated. According to the classical historian Janice Gabbert, "The eastern Mediterranean has been plagued by piracy since the first dawn of history." The Bronze Age marked the earliest documented wave of piracy, as it is difficult to differentiate piracy from trade during earlier periods.
The Atlantic World refers to the time period of the European colonization of the Americas, around 1492, to the early nineteenth century. Piracy became prevalent in this era because of the difficulty of policy in this vast area, the limited state control over many parts of the coast, and the competition between European powers. The best-known pirates of this era are the Golden Age Pirates who roamed the seas off North America, Africa, and the Caribbean coasts.
"No purchase, no pay" was a phrase used by pirates and privateers, of the 17th century in particular, to describe the conditions under which participants were expected to join expeditions or raids. The phrase describes a remuneration arrangement similar to a commission.
William Mayes was a pirate active in the Indian Ocean. He was best known for taking over William Kidd’s ship Blessed William and sailing with Henry Avery. William Mayes is American, specifically from Rhode Island. Mayes was supposedly one of the original founders of Libertatia. A civil war came about and William was poisoned by Henry Avery and Thomas Tew.
Joseph Thompson was a pirate from Trinidad, Cuba, and was active in the Caribbean. He is primarily known for a single incident involving grenades.
John Philip Bear, last name also spelled Beare, was a 17th-century English pirate active in the Caribbean who also served with the Spanish and French.
Philip Fitzgerald was an Irish pirate and privateer who served the Spanish in the Caribbean.
Don Benito was a Spanish pirate and guarda costa privateer active in the Caribbean.
The Calligraphic Galleon is an example of Islamic calligraphy dating to the mid-18th century. Attributed to a calligrapher in the Ottoman Empire, the work depicts a galleon of the Ottoman navy. The ship is inscribed with the names of the Seven Sleepers, a group of men who were protected by the Abrahamic God, likely to confer a blessing of protection on the ship. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Juan Corso was a Corsican pirate and guarda costa privateer who sailed in Spanish service, operating out of Cuba.
Guarda costa or guardacosta was the name used in the Spanish Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries for the privateers based off their overseas territories, tasked with hunting down piracy, contraband and foreign privateering. They rose with the naval reforms of the House of Bourbon, which mixed up private corsairs in harmony with the royal navies. Commanders like Blas de Lezo helped develop this system.
