Pirate Codex

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Regions

Pirates are tagged by the seas and coasts in which they primarily operated. Many appear under more than one region, since few stayed in a single ocean for long.

Pirate operations cluster along a small number of maritime trade routes — the Spanish silver convoys of the Caribbean, the African slaving coast, the Indian Ocean spice routes, the south-China salt and rice trade — and along the chokepoints, harbours, and refuge anchorages that adjoin them. The codex groups regions at the level at which a working pirate would have recognised them: the Caribbean and its constituent zones (the Spanish Main, the Bahamas, the Gulf of Mexico, the North American Atlantic Coast); the South China Sea and its Pearl River Delta hub; the West African Coast from Sierra Leone to the Bight of Biafra; and the secondary theatres (Brazilian coast, Texas coast, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean) where particular operations were based.

Few pirates stayed in a single region for an entire career. Bartholomew Roberts crossed the Atlantic three times in thirty months; Jean Lafitte’s base shifted from Louisiana to the Texas coast and then into the western Caribbean; even the Cantonese confederation under Zheng Yi Sao occasionally ranged out into Vietnamese coastal waters. Each pirate’s entry lists every region in which they worked, and that pirate appears under each of those region pages.