Index
Pirates
Every published entry, ordered roughly by historical era. Each follows the same outline — overview, origins, career, ships, raids, treasures, fate, associates, and sources — so you can compare across them.
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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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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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Sir Henry Morgan
c. 1635 – 25 August 1688Welsh 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.
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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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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.