Era
Post-Golden Age
4 pirates in the codex active during this period.
The post-Golden-Age period covers the century from roughly 1730 to 1830, in which piracy did not disappear — it merely lost the open organisational character of the previous decades and concentrated in particular regional theatres. The major ones are the Gulf of Mexico and the Spanish American Independence wars of the 1810s, the South China Sea under the Cantonese pirate confederations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Mediterranean under the Barbary corsair states until the 1830s, and the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea under the Qawasim and other regional powers.
The period also blurs the line between piracy and privateering more than the Golden Age had done. Jean Lafitte and his Gulf operation worked under successive Cartagenan and Mexican commissions, against a Spanish empire whose American claims were collapsing; Zheng Yi Sao’s south-China confederation operated as a parallel maritime authority along several hundred miles of Cantonese coast and ultimately surrendered under a general amnesty rather than being suppressed by force. By the 1830s the major regional pirate operations had been ended either by amnesty, by direct naval suppression (the United States against the Caribbean piracies, Britain against the Barbary states), or by absorption into emerging national navies.
Pirates of this era
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Jean Lafitte
c. 1780 – c. 1823French-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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Pierre Lafitte
c. 1770 – November 1821Elder brother and business partner of Jean Lafitte; the New Orleans–side operator of the Barataria and Galveston privateering enterprise, responsible for moving prize cargoes into the city's wholesale market and managing relations with Louisiana authorities.
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Zheng Yi Sao
c. 1775 – 1844Cantonese 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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Cheung Po Tsai
1783 – 1822Cantonese pirate; adopted son and later second husband of Zheng Yi Sao; operational commander of the Red Flag Fleet, the largest squadron in the confederation, 1807–1810. After the amnesty he served as a Qing imperial naval officer.
