Author: savage
Bartholomew Roberts
“In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.”
A General History of the Pyrates (1724)
Active between 1719 and 1722, Bartholomew Roberts is viewed as being one of the most successful pirates, when judged by the amount of vessels captured. It is thought he took as many as 470 vessels, albeit the half of them being fishing boats. Born with the Christian name John, it is unsure why he took the name Bartholomew. Some say he adopted the name in reference to the legendary buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp, others say in order to hide his true identity.…
The Life and Tryals of the Gentleman Pirate
The Life and Tryals of the Gentleman Pirate, Major Stede Bonnet by Jeremy R. Moss
An heir to an established land-owning aristocratic family in Barbados, Major Stede Bonnet enjoyed luxuries equal to those of the finest houses in London. “A Gentleman of good Reputation” and a “Master of a plentiful Fortune,” he was given “the Advantage of a liberal Education,” but the call of the sea-and perhaps more significantly, the push of his obligations as a father and husband-cast Major Bonnet onto an unlikely and deliberate course toward piracy. Easily likable, by friend and foe, many would be drawn to Bonnet. In his two short years of piracy, Stede Bonnet stood alongside some of the New World’s most notorious pirates, including Charles Vane, Charles Condent (also known as “Billy One-Hand”), Robert Deal, “Calico” John Rackham, Israel Hands, Benjamin Hornigold, William Kidd, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and the pirate to whom Bonnet would forever be connected, Edward Thatch (infamously known around the world as “Blackbeard”).…
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia: Buccaneers, Women Traders and Mock Kingdoms in Eighteenth Century Madagascar.
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy – but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land.
