In the early 17th century an autonomous, self-sufficient community of escaped slaves (maroons) known as Palmares established itself in the Captaincy of Pernambuco in north-eastern Brazil. It grew considerably throughout the 17th century, eventually becoming the largest settlement ever founded by runaway slaves in Brazil. Most of the information about this community comes from Portuguese and Dutch colonists and many of the names of those involved are unknown. At its apex, the population of Palmares reached somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000. The Palmaristas constantly resisted Portuguese and Dutch attacks while at the same time carrying out their own raids on the colonists. In the 1500s nearly half of all those enslaved from Africa were transported to Brazil, which was governed by the Portuguese at the time. Their settlements, called mocambos or quilombos, were constructed in the land’s interior, although the later is a modern term. At its height in the 1660s, Quilombo of Palmares was a confederation with a central capital and associated fortified towns and villages.…
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.