Era
Golden Age of Piracy
12 pirates in the codex active during this period.
The Golden Age of Piracy is the canonical period of pirate history: roughly 1690 to 1730, with its peak in the years 1716–1722 immediately after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. The geographical centre shifts off the Spanish Caribbean and onto the open Atlantic, the West African coast, the Indian Ocean, and the American seaboard. Many of the era’s pirates were former privateers thrown out of legitimate work by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, who carried their habits and crews into outright piracy.
The era is overwhelmingly the period most readers picture when they hear the word: black flags with skulls, articles of agreement, voted captains and quartermasters, the brief operational independence of crews that owed nothing to colonial government. It is also the period of most legend. The principal contemporary chronicle, Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), is the foundational document for almost every subsequent retelling, and it interleaves verifiable detail with passages of evident invention. Modern scholarship has reconstructed much of the period from admiralty trial records and East India Company correspondence, but the cinematic afterlife of figures such as Edward Teach, Bartholomew Roberts, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read still rests partly on Johnson’s framing.
Pirates of this era
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Henry Every
c. 1659 – fate unknown after 1696English pirate whose September 1695 capture of the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai in the Indian Ocean produced what was at the time the richest single prize in pirate history; touched off a global manhunt and the first international piracy bounty; vanished into obscurity in 1696.
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William Kidd
c. 1654 – 23 May 1701Scottish-born New York privateer commissioned in 1695 to suppress piracy in the Indian Ocean; arrested on charges of having turned pirate himself; tried and hanged at London in 1701; the most documented commission-gone-wrong case of the Golden Age, and the principal source of the buried-treasure motif in subsequent pirate literature.
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Kanhoji Angre
August 1669 – 4 July 1729Maratha admiral whose four-decade career on the Konkan coast (1690s–1729) extracted protection rents from English, Portuguese, and Dutch merchant shipping and repulsed repeated punitive expeditions by all three; classified as a pirate in European sources, as a legitimate naval commander in Indian ones.
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Edward Teach
c. 1680 – 22 November 1718English 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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Stede Bonnet
c. 1688 – 10 December 1718Barbadian sugar planter who bought a sloop in 1717 and turned pirate without prior maritime experience; sailed in consort with Blackbeard 1717–1718; captured, tried, and hanged at Charleston in December 1718.
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Benjamin Hornigold
c. 1680 – 1719English pirate captain operating from New Providence in the Bahamas 1713–1718; Edward Teach's first captain; accepted the King's pardon in 1718 and served thereafter as a pirate-hunter under Governor Woodes Rogers until his disappearance in 1719.
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Samuel Bellamy
c. 1689 – 26 April 1717English pirate captain whose fourteen-month career in 1716–1717 was one of the most prolific in absolute prize-take of the Golden Age; captain of the slaver Whydah Gally, refitted as his flagship in February 1717 and lost off Cape Cod in a storm two months later.
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Howell Davis
c. 1690 – 19 June 1719Welsh pirate active 1718–1719, briefly elected captain of a vessel taken from his employers and then a small consort fleet on the West African coast; killed in an ambush at Príncipe just weeks before Bartholomew Roberts was elected to succeed him.
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Bartholomew Roberts
17 May 1682 – 10 February 1722Welsh 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
c. 1697 – after October 1720 (further dates disputed)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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Mary Read
c. 1685 – April 1721English-born pirate active aboard John Rackham's sloop William in 1720; one of two women, with Anne Bonny, convicted of piracy at the Spanish Town trials.
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John "Calico Jack" Rackham
c. 1682 – 18 November 1720English pirate active in the Caribbean 1718–1720; quartermaster turned captain who commanded the sloop William through a short career of small prizes; remembered chiefly for sailing with Anne Bonny and Mary Read and for the flag design that bears his name.
