A chronicle of rogues, raiders, and the ships they sailed.
From the buccaneers of Tortuga to the Republic of Pirates at Nassau, the Golden Age was a brief and bloody flowering of seafaring outlaws who terrorized the trade lanes of the Atlantic and Caribbean. This is their compendium.
Featured Entries
Selections of note
Edward Teach
Blackbeard
The most theatrical pirate of his age, whose smoldering beard and blockade of Charleston made him a legend before a Royal Navy boarding party ended him at Ocracoke.
Anne Bonny
She-Pirate of the Caribbean
An Irish-born woman who left her husband for Calico Jack Rackham, fought on the deck of his sloop in trousers and pistols, and vanished from the record after her capture in 1720.
Bartholomew Roberts
Black Bart
The most successful pirate of the Golden Age — a teetotal Welshman in damask waistcoats who took over four hundred prizes in three years before a Royal Navy broadside ended him off Cape Lopez.
Samuel Bellamy
Black Sam
The "Robin Hood of the sea" — an eloquent, egalitarian captain who took more than fifty prizes in a single year and drowned at twenty-eight when his flagship foundered off Cape Cod.
Queen Anne's Revenge
Blackbeard's flagship
A French slave ship captured off Saint Vincent, refitted with forty guns, and run aground in Beaufort Inlet a year later — likely on purpose.
Battle of Ocracoke Inlet
The end of Blackbeard
A Royal Navy lieutenant and twenty-odd men in two unarmed sloops ran Edward Teach to ground in the shallows of the Outer Banks. He died on deck after twenty cuts and five musket balls.
Action off Cape Lopez
The death of Black Bart
HMS Swallow ran down the most successful pirate of the age off the coast of Gabon, killed Bartholomew Roberts with a single volley of grapeshot, and hanged fifty-two of his crew — the day the Golden Age is usually said to have ended.
Nassau
Republic of Pirates
From 1706 to 1718, the capital of the Bahamas was effectively under pirate self-rule — a free port where Blackbeard, Vane, Hornigold, and Bellamy laid in stores between cruises.
Sections of the Compendium
The Full Index
All entries
Edward Teach
Blackbeard
The most theatrical pirate of his age, whose smoldering beard and blockade of Charleston made him a legend before a Royal Navy boarding party ended him at Ocracoke.
Anne Bonny
She-Pirate of the Caribbean
An Irish-born woman who left her husband for Calico Jack Rackham, fought on the deck of his sloop in trousers and pistols, and vanished from the record after her capture in 1720.
Mary Read
The Soldier Who Turned Pirate
Raised disguised as a boy, she served as a foot soldier in Flanders before going to sea, falling in with Calico Jack's crew, and standing beside Anne Bonny when the navy came.
John Rackham
Calico Jack
A pirate of moderate success and considerable wardrobe, whose chief contribution to history was the company he kept — Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and the Jolly Roger that bore his name.
Bartholomew Roberts
Black Bart
The most successful pirate of the Golden Age — a teetotal Welshman in damask waistcoats who took over four hundred prizes in three years before a Royal Navy broadside ended him off Cape Lopez.
Henry Morgan
Privateer of Panama
The Welsh buccaneer who sacked Portobelo, burned Panama City, and was rewarded for it with a knighthood and the lieutenant-governorship of Jamaica.
Charles Vane
The unrepentant
The pirate who fired a blazing ship at the Royal Navy rather than take the King's pardon, and who was deposed by his own crew for refusing a fight — cruel, defiant, and hanged at last at Gallows Point.
Samuel Bellamy
Black Sam
The "Robin Hood of the sea" — an eloquent, egalitarian captain who took more than fifty prizes in a single year and drowned at twenty-eight when his flagship foundered off Cape Cod.
Stede Bonnet
The Gentleman Pirate
A wealthy Barbados planter who bought his own ship, hired a paid crew, and sailed off to piracy — an amateur so out of his depth that Blackbeard simply took his vessel from under him.
Queen Anne's Revenge
Blackbeard's flagship
A French slave ship captured off Saint Vincent, refitted with forty guns, and run aground in Beaufort Inlet a year later — likely on purpose.
Whydah Gally
Black Sam Bellamy's prize
A slaver captured in February 1717 and lost to a storm off Cape Cod two months later. In 1984 she became the first fully authenticated pirate shipwreck ever recovered.
Royal Fortune
Black Bart's flagship
The name Bartholomew Roberts gave to a succession of flagships, the last a captured forty-gun warship that carried the most successful pirate of the age until a Royal Navy broadside ended them both off Cape Lopez.
Adventure
Blackbeard's last sloop
The small, shallow-draft sloop Edward Teach kept after grounding the Queen Anne's Revenge — and the deck on which he made his final stand at Ocracoke Inlet.
Battle of Ocracoke Inlet
The end of Blackbeard
A Royal Navy lieutenant and twenty-odd men in two unarmed sloops ran Edward Teach to ground in the shallows of the Outer Banks. He died on deck after twenty cuts and five musket balls.
Battle of Cape Fear River
The taking of Stede Bonnet
A South Carolina expedition sent to hunt Charles Vane instead cornered the Gentleman Pirate up a tidal river, where all three sloops ran aground and a five-hour gun duel waited on the returning tide.
Action off Cape Lopez
The death of Black Bart
HMS Swallow ran down the most successful pirate of the age off the coast of Gabon, killed Bartholomew Roberts with a single volley of grapeshot, and hanged fifty-two of his crew — the day the Golden Age is usually said to have ended.
Nassau
Republic of Pirates
From 1706 to 1718, the capital of the Bahamas was effectively under pirate self-rule — a free port where Blackbeard, Vane, Hornigold, and Bellamy laid in stores between cruises.
Port Royal
The wickedest city on earth
A buccaneer boomtown on a sandspit at the entrance to Kingston harbor — until the 1692 earthquake dropped two-thirds of it into the sea.
Tortuga
The buccaneers' island
A small turtle-shaped island north of Hispaniola whose rocky harbor and stubborn French-Dutch-English garrison made it the cradle of Caribbean piracy.
Île Sainte-Marie
The pirate island of the East
A long, sheltered island off Madagascar that became the great haven of the "Pirate Round" — the base from which Tew, Every, and Kidd raided the rich shipping of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.