Region
Indian Ocean
3 pirates in the codex documented as operating here.
The Indian Ocean and adjacent Arabian Sea were a Golden Age pirate theatre from the mid-1690s, when European pirates began following the Mughal pilgrim convoys that crossed annually between Surat and Mocha for the Mecca pilgrimage. Henry Every’s 1695 capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai was the operation that defined the theatre; the Madagascar bases at Saint Mary’s Island and the Mascarenes hosted a substantial European pirate population through the early eighteenth century until coordinated East India Company and Royal Navy suppression closed the haven by 1720. The Indian Ocean also encompassed the parallel and longer-running operations of the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre on the Konkan coast and the Sulu and Iranun raiding fleets of the Sulu and Celebes Seas, both of which lasted into the nineteenth century.
Pirates of this region
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Henry Every
c. 1659 – fate unknown after 1696English 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.
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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.
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Kanhoji Angre
August 1669 – 4 July 1729Maratha 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.
