In the early 1700s, pirates like Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts terrorised the Caribbean, the American coast and West Africa, capturing hundreds of ships. Within about a decade, almost all of them were dead or hanged. The Royal Navy is usually given the credit, but the real story is more interesting. Here is how the Golden Age of Piracy rose and fell.
The Pirates: Who They Were
The "Golden Age of Piracy" roughly covers 1650 to 1730, and its most intense phase ran from about 1716 to 1726. Many pirates were former sailors from merchant ships or the navy, thrown out of work when the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1714. Others were privateers, who had legally attacked enemy shipping in wartime and simply kept going in peacetime.
Life on a merchant ship was hard, poorly paid and brutally disciplined. Pirate ships offered something very different. Crews signed articles, written rules that set out shares of the loot, compensation for injuries and punishments. Captains were elected and could be voted out, and in some ways a pirate ship was more democratic than any government of the time. Famous names include Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Bartholomew Roberts ("Black Bart"), Charles Vane, "Calico Jack" Rackham and his crewmates Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
The Royal Navy: Who They Were
By the early 18th century, Britain's Royal Navy was becoming the most powerful navy in the world. Its great ships of the line carried up to 100 guns and existed to fight enemy battle fleets in Europe. For policing trade routes, the navy used smaller, faster warships: frigates and sloops of 10 to 40 guns, based at stations in Jamaica, Barbados, New York, Virginia and elsewhere. Sailors were professionals, many forced into service by press gangs, under strict naval discipline.
Ships and Weapons
- Pirates: usually fast sloops or captured merchant ships, refitted with extra guns and cleared of cargo space. Blackbeard's flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge, was a captured French slave ship armed with up to 40 guns. Pirate crews were huge compared with merchant crews, often over 100 men, and they relied on boarding with pistols, cutlasses, boarding axes and grenades. Their main weapon was fear: the black flag signalled that surrender meant mercy and resistance meant none.
- Royal Navy: purpose-built warships with more and heavier cannon, trained gun crews, plentiful powder and shot, and naval bases to repair and resupply. A navy frigate could usually outgun any single pirate ship.
Tactics
Pirates avoided fair fights. They wanted to take ships intact, so most victims surrendered without a shot once they saw the black flag and a deck packed with armed men. Pirates used speed, false flags and shallow coastal waters where large warships could not follow. When they did fight, they tried to board quickly and overwhelm the defenders.
The navy wanted to fight at range with broadsides, or to trap pirates at anchor. Its biggest problem was simply finding them in a vast ocean full of islands and hidden inlets.
Two Famous Showdowns
Blackbeard's Last Fight (1718)
On 22 November 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy, sent by the governor of Virginia, trapped Blackbeard at Ocracoke Inlet in North Carolina. Maynard's two small sloops had no cannon. After Blackbeard's broadside ravaged one of them, Maynard hid most of his men below deck. Blackbeard boarded, thinking the fight was won, and the sailors rushed up. In the brutal hand-to-hand fight that followed, Blackbeard was killed. By one famous account he had five gunshot wounds and around twenty cuts. Maynard sailed home with his head hanging from the bowsprit.
The End of Black Bart (1722)
Bartholomew Roberts was the most successful pirate of the age, credited with capturing more than 400 ships. In February 1722, off Cape Lopez in modern Gabon, the navy warship HMS Swallow under Captain Chaloner Ogle caught his ships. Roberts was killed by grapeshot early in the fight, and his crew, many reportedly drunk from a recent capture, surrendered. The trial at Cape Coast Castle was the largest pirate trial of the era, and more than fifty men were hanged.
Why the Pirates Lost
Warships were only part of the answer. The pirate age ended because Britain attacked it from every direction:
- Pardons: in 1717 King George I offered a pardon to any pirate who surrendered, and hundreds took it.
- Losing their bases: in 1718, former privateer Woodes Rogers arrived as governor of the Bahamas and shut down Nassau, the pirates' main haven.
- Harsher laws: the Piracy Act of 1721 punished anyone who traded with pirates, cutting off their markets.
- More patrols: the navy stationed more warships in the colonies, and colonial governors hired their own pirate hunters.
- Mass hangings: pirates were hanged in large numbers, sometimes in chains at harbour entrances as a warning.
Verdict: Who Wins?
The Royal Navy wins, and history is clear about it. Pirates could win individual fights through surprise, numbers and ferocity, and a single navy sloop could be beaten, as Blackbeard nearly proved. But they had no bases, no supply of new ships and nowhere to hide once the empire committed to hunting them down. Within about ten years of the peak, the Golden Age of Piracy was over.
The community agrees, with the Navy in front, but the pirates still have plenty of fans. Which side are you on? Vote on the homepage.
Sources and Further Reading
- Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (1724)
- David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag
- Colin Woodard, The Republic of Pirates
- Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age