Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was an English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain's North American colonies. Little is known about his early life, but he may have been a sailor on privateer ships during Queen Anne's War before he settled on the Bahamian island of New Providence, a base for Captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose crew Teach joined around 1716. Hornigold placed him in command of a sloop that he had captured, and the two engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition to their fleet of two more ships, one of which was commanded by Stede Bonnet, but Hornigold retired from piracy toward the end of 1717, taking two vessels with him.
Jolly Roger is the traditional English name for the naval 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”.
John Rackham, commonly known as Calico Jack, was an English pirate captain operating in the Bahamas and in Cuba during the early 18th century. His nickname was derived from the calico clothing that he wore, while Jack is a nickname for "John".
Benjamin Hornigold (1680–1719) was an English pirate who operated during the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy.
Stede Bonnet was a Barbadian-born pirate and military officer, known as the Gentleman Pirate because he was a moderately wealthy landowner before turning to a life of crime. Bonnet was born into a wealthy English family on the island of Barbados, and inherited the family estate after his father's death in 1694. Despite his lack of sailing experience, Bonnet decided he should turn to piracy in the spring of 1717. He bought a sailing vessel, the Revenge, and travelled with his paid crew along the Eastern Seaboard of what is now the United States, capturing other vessels and burning other Barbadian ships.
Queen Anne's Revenge was an early-18th-century ship, most famously used as a flagship by Edward Teach, better known by his nickname Blackbeard. The date and place of the ship's construction are uncertain, and there is no record of its actions prior to 1710 when it was operating as a French privateer under the name La Concorde. Surviving features of the ship's construction strongly suggest it was built by French shipwrights, based on differences in fastening patterns in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. After several years of service by French sailors, she was captured by Blackbeard in 1717. Blackbeard used the ship for less than a year, but captured numerous prizes using her as his flagship.
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.
Often called bloody flags or the bloody red, pattern-free red flags were the traditional nautical symbol in European waters prior to the invention of flag signal codes to signify an intention to give battle and that 'no quarter would be given', indicating that surrender would not be accepted and all prisoners killed, but also vice versa, meaning that the one flying the flag would fight to the last man. Such flags were traditionally plain but examples with motifs also existed, such as skull and crossbones on some pirate examples.
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, or simply A General History of the Pyrates, is a 1724 book published in Britain containing biographies of contemporary pirates, which was influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates. Its author uses the name Captain Charles Johnson, generally considered a pen name for one of London's writer-publishers. The prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates, the book gives an almost mythical status to the more colourful characters, and it is likely that the author used considerable artistic license in his accounts of pirate conversations. The book also contains the name of Jolly Roger, the pirate flag, and shows the skull and crossbones design.
Christopher Moody was a pirate as a member of Bartholomew Roberts' crew but was never a captain in his own right. He is best known not for his own actions but for a popular Jolly Roger flag mis-attributed to him as well as for later authors confusing him with unrelated pirate William Moody.
Emanuel Wynn was a French pirate of the 17th century who is often considered the first pirate to fly the Jolly Roger.
Richard Worley was a pirate who was active in the Caribbean Sea and the East Coast of the American Colonies during the early 18th century.
John Quelch was an English pirate who had a lucrative but very brief career of about one year. His chief claim to historical significance is that he was the first person to be tried for piracy outside England under Admiralty Law and thus without a jury. These Admiralty courts had been instituted to tackle the rise of piracy in colonial ports where civil and criminal courts had proved ineffective.
Charles Harris was an English pirate active in the 1720s. He is best known for his association with George Lowther and Edward Low.
Caesar, later known as “Black Caesar”, was a West African pirate who operated during the Golden Age of Piracy. He served aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge of Edward Teach (Blackbeard) and was one of the surviving members of that crew following Blackbeard’s death at the hands of Lieutenant Robert Maynard in 1718. Myths surrounding his life - that he was African royalty and terrorized the Florida Keys for years before joining Blackbeard - have been intermixed with legends and fictional accounts as well as with other pirates.
John Phillips was an English pirate captain. He started his piratical career in 1721 under Thomas Anstis, and stole his own pirate vessel in 1723. He died in a surprise attack by his own prisoners. He is noted for the articles of his ship, the Revenge, one of only a few complete sets of pirate articles to survive from the so-called Golden Age of Piracy.
The Battle of Cape Fear River, also known as the Battle of the Sandbars, was fought in September 1718 between two sloops from the Province of South Carolina led by William Rhett and a group of pirate ships under the command of Stede Bonnet. Rhett's sloops defeated the pirates in the Cape Fear River estuary which led to Bonnet's eventual execution by hanging in Charleston, South Carolina.
Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of the American colonies during the early 18th century. He captained the Queen Anne's Revenge, a 200-ton frigate originally named the Concord, and died in a fierce battle with troops from Virginia on November 22, 1718, at Ocracoke Island.
The Republic of Pirates was the base and stronghold of a loose confederacy run by privateers-turned-pirates in Nassau on New Providence island in the Bahamas during the Golden Age of Piracy for about twelve years from 1706 until 1718. While it was not a republic in a formal sense, it was governed by an informal pirate code, which dictated that the crews of the Republic would vote on the leadership of their ships and treat other pirate crews with civility. The term comes from Colin Woodard's book of the same name.
The Flying Gang was an 18th-century group of pirates who established themselves in Nassau, New Providence in the Bahamas after the destruction of Port Royal in Jamaica. The gang consisted of the most notorious and cunning pirates of the time, and they terrorized and pillaged the Caribbean until the Royal Navy and infighting brought them to justice. They achieved great fame and wealth by raiding salvagers attempting to recover gold from the sunken Spanish treasure fleet. They established their own codes and governed themselves independent from any of the colonial powers of the time. Nassau was deemed the Republic of Pirates as it attracted many former privateers looking for work to its shores. The Governor of Bermuda stated that there were over 1,000 pirates in Nassau at that time and that they outnumbered the mere hundred inhabitants in the town.
