William Kidd also known as Captain William Kidd or simply Captain Kidd, was a Scottish privateer. Conflicting accounts exist regarding his early life, but he was likely born in Dundee and later settled in New York City. By 1690, Kidd had become a highly successful privateer, commissioned to protect English interests in North America and the West Indies.
Buccaneers were a kind of privateer or free sailors 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.
Robinson Crusoe is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Written with a combination of Epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.
Bartholomew Roberts, born John Roberts, was a Welsh pirate who was, measured by vessels captured, the most successful pirate of the Golden Age of Piracy. During his piratical career, he took over 470 prize ships. Roberts raided ships off the Americas and the West African coast between 1719 and 1722; he is also noted for creating his own pirate code, and adopting an early variant of the Skull and Crossbones flag.
Mary Read, fictionally known as Mark Read, was an English pirate about whom there is very little factual documentation. She and Anne Bonny were two famous female pirates from the 18th century, and among the few women known to have been convicted of piracy at the height of the "Golden Age of Piracy".
Pirate havens are ports or harbors that are a safe place for pirates to repair their vessels, resupply, recruit, spend their plunder, avoid capture, and/or lie in wait for merchant ships to pass by. The areas have governments that are unable or unwilling to enforce maritime laws. This creates favorable conditions for piracy. Pirate havens were places where pirates could find shelter, protection, support, and trade.
Captain Charles Johnson was the British author of the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, whose identity remains a mystery. No record exists of a captain by this name, and "Captain Charles Johnson" is generally considered a pen name for one of London's writer-publishers. Some scholars have suggested that the author was actually Daniel Defoe, but this is disputed.
Woodes Rogers was an English sea captain, privateer, slave trader and, from 1718, the first Royal Governor of the Bahamas. He is remembered as the captain of the vessel that rescued marooned Alexander Selkirk, whose plight is generally believed to have inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
Henry Every, also known as Henry Avery, sometimes erroneously given as Jack Avery or John Avery, was an English pirate who operated in the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the mid-1690s. He probably used several aliases throughout his career, including Benjamin Bridgeman, and was known as Long Ben to his crewmen and associates.
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.
In English-speaking popular culture, the modern pirate stereotype owes its attributes mostly to the imagined tradition of the 18th-century Caribbean pirate sailing off the Spanish Main and to such celebrated 20th-century depictions as Captain Hook and his crew in the theatrical and film versions of J. M. Barrie's children's book Peter Pan, Robert Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver in the 1950 film adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Treasure Island, and various adaptations of the Middle Eastern pirate, Sinbad the Sailor. In these and countless other books, films, and legends, pirates are portrayed as "swashbucklers" and "plunderers". They are shown on ships, often wearing eyepatches or peg legs, having a parrot perched on their shoulder, speaking in a West Country accent, and saying phrases like "Arr, matey" and "Avast, me hearty". Pirates have retained their image through pirate-themed tourist attractions, film, toys, books and plays.
John Bowen was a pirate of Créole origin active during the Golden Age of Piracy. He sailed with other famous contemporaries, including Nathaniel North and George Booth, who was his captain when he was a crewman aboard the Speaker. Over a four-year period, Bowen took about £170,000 in goods and coinage and retired to Bourbon for a brief period of time before his death in 1704.
The Barbary slave trade involved the capture and selling of European slaves at slave markets in the Barbary states. European slaves were captured by African Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands, Ireland and the southwest of Britain, as far north as Iceland and into the Eastern Mediterranean.
Abraham Samuel, also known as "Deaan Tuley-Noro" or "Tolinar Rex", was a mulatto pirate of the Indian Ocean in the days of the Pirate Round in the late 1690s. He was said to be born in Martinique or Jamaica, or possibly or Anosy, Madagascar. Shipwrecked on his way back to New York from Madagascar, he briefly led a combined pirate-Antanosy kingdom from Fort Dauphin, Madagascar, from 1697 until he died there in 1705.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom is a 2011 adventure novel written by Ann C. Crispin. The book details the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow as a young man after the events of Pirates of the Caribbean: Jack Sparrow and before the events of Pirates of the Caribbean: Legends of the Brethren Court. This is the final novel written by Crispin, who died in September 2013.
The Atlantic World refers to the period between European colonisation of the Americas (1492-) and the early nineteenth century. Piracy became prevalent in this era because of the difficulty of policing this vast area, the limited state control over many parts of the coast and the competition between different European powers. The best known pirates of this era are the Golden Age pirates (c.1650-1730) who roamed the seas off the coast of North America, Africa and the Caribbean.
Joseph Faro was a pirate from Newport, Rhode Island active during the Golden Age of Piracy, primarily in the Indian Ocean. He is best known for sailing alongside Thomas Tew to join Henry Every’s pirate fleet which captured and looted the fabulously rich Mughal ship Gunsway.
John Cornelius was an Irish pirate allegedly active in the Red Sea and off the west coast of Africa. He succeeded William Lewis, who was killed after announcing he had made a deal with the Devil. Lewis and Cornelius are likely the fictional creations of Captain Charles Johnson, who presented their stories among those of real historical pirates.
John Pro was a Dutch pirate best known for leading a pirate trading post near Madagascar.
