Region
North American Atlantic Coast
7 pirates in the codex documented as operating here.
The North American Atlantic coast, from New England south through the Carolinas, was a secondary but consequential theatre of Golden Age piracy. The colonial governments’ willingness to deal with pirates ranged from the active complicity of some New York and Rhode Island administrations in the 1690s, to the official tolerance of the early Carolina governors, to the determined suppression that began under Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood in the late 1710s. Edward Teach’s Charleston blockade of 1718 and his death at Ocracoke later that year are the period’s most documented coastal episodes.
Pirates of this region
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Sir Francis Drake
c. 1540 – 28 January 1596English 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.
