A public reference
Pirates, plainly catalogued.
The Pirate Codex documents the careers, ships, raids, and contested treasures of pirates across every century and ocean — from the buccaneers of the Spanish Main to the corsairs of the South China Sea. Each entry is sourced; speculation is labelled.
Featured entry
An entry under continuing first-hand research.
An encyclopedic reference on the world’s pirates
Most public material on pirates is romance: a Caribbean cliché of black sails, eye-patches, and buried gold. The historical record is more interesting and considerably stranger. Pirates were privateers operating under government license, smugglers running networks of legitimate merchants, fleet commanders larger than national navies, and, occasionally, the kind of cinematic figures the legend remembers.
The Pirate Codex documents pirates as people who lived in identifiable places at identifiable times. Each entry uses the same outline so readers can compare across them: an overview, the documented origins, the career and notable raids, the ships, the treasures (with documented and rumoured holdings clearly separated), the fate, the associates, the sources, and where applicable a note on modern research and ongoing fieldwork.
Pirates in the codex
6 entries to date. New entries are added as research is completed and sources are checked.
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Jean Lafitte
French-Creole privateer and smuggler whose Barataria Bay operation south of New Orleans dominated the Gulf of Mexico contraband trade in the 1810s; later commander of a privateer base on Galveston Island.
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Zheng Yi Sao
Cantonese pirate confederation leader who commanded the largest pirate fleet in history — by contemporary Qing estimates, between 50,000 and 70,000 sailors across some 1,800 vessels — at her peak in 1808–1810, before negotiating a general amnesty with the Qing dynasty.
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Sir Henry Morgan
Welsh privateer in English service who led the buccaneer assaults on Portobelo (1668), Maracaibo (1669), and Panama City (1671); subsequently knighted and appointed Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica.
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Edward Teach
English pirate active in the Caribbean and along the American Atlantic coast in 1716–1718; commanded the captured French slaver La Concorde, which he refitted as the forty-gun Queen Anne’s Revenge and used to blockade the harbour of Charleston.
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Bartholomew Roberts
Welsh pirate considered by most reckoning the most successful of the Golden Age; captured an estimated four hundred vessels across a three-year career spanning the Caribbean, West African coast, and Atlantic seaboard.
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Anne Bonny
Irish-born pirate active with John "Calico Jack" Rackham’s small Caribbean crew in 1720; one of two women, with Mary Read, convicted of piracy at the Spanish Town trials of November 1720.
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What this is
An encyclopedic reference on pirates throughout history — written for general readers who want what the documented record actually says, not the legend.
What this isn’t
Not a treasure-hunting site. Not fan fiction. Rumoured holdings are flagged as such; speculation is labelled; claims that can’t be sourced are excluded.