Pirates

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.

Elder 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.

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.

Cantonese 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.

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.

English 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.

Scottish-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.

Maratha 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.

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.

Barbadian 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.

English 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.

English 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.

Welsh 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.

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.

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.

English-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.

English 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.

Medieval German pirate leader; commander of the Victualbrüder (Victual Brothers) and later the Likedeeler fraternity that operated against Hanseatic League shipping in the Baltic and North Seas in the 1390s; captured and executed at Hamburg in 1401.

Gaelic chieftain of the Ó Máille clan on the west coast of Ireland; led a fleet of galleys and a network of coastal castles in the levying of tolls and the raiding of English and rival Irish shipping from the 1550s to the 1590s; met personally with Queen Elizabeth I at Greenwich in 1593.

Ottoman corsair-turned-admiral who, with his elder brother Oruç, established the Regency of Algiers under Ottoman suzerainty in the 1510s–1520s; appointed Kapudan Pasha of the Ottoman fleet in 1533; commanded the decisive Ottoman victory over the Holy League at the Battle of Preveza in 1538.

English privateer, navigator, and vice-admiral in royal service under Elizabeth I; the second person to circumnavigate the globe (1577–1580); commanded the 1587 raid on Cádiz and the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588; described in Spanish sources of his lifetime as the most prominent pirate of the age.