ON THE ACCOUNT

the golden age of piracy · 1656 to 1730

The years each man sailed, the waters he haunted, the company he kept, and the end he came to.

THE LEDGER

WHO SAILED WHEN, IN WHAT WATERS, AND HOW IT ENDED
THE KEY
CARIBBEAN & SPANISH MAIN ATLANTIC SEABOARD & OPEN SEA GUINEA COAST · W. AFRICA INDIAN OCEAN & RED SEA THE SOUTH SEA · PACIFIC ALIVE, OFF THE ACCOUNT ▾NOTED EVENT ☠SLAIN †GALLOWS OR GAOL ≈THE SEA ?VANISHED ✕A BAD END ⚑DIED FREE

Hover a bar for the waters and the years. Hover a name to light his known consorts and rivals.

THE RECKONING

WHERE THE ACCOUNT CLOSED, MAN BY MAN
☠SLAIN†GALLOWS OR GAOL≈THE SEA?VANISHED✕A BAD END⚑DIED FREE

Tap a mark to open the man.

SOURCES

The period sources

  • Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (Amsterdam, 1678). Morgan’s own barber-surgeon, and the only inside account of the buccaneer generation. The English Bucaniers of America of 1684 came by way of a Spanish translation and gained material at every stage, the nuns driven ahead of Morgan’s men among it, which he sued over and won.
  • Ringrose, in Bucaniers of America (1685). The journal of Sharp's South Sea raid, kept aboard by a man who was there.
  • Capt. Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (1724). The book every pirate myth descends from. Indispensable and unreliable in equal measure.
  • The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates (Jamaica, 1721). The court record for Rackham, Bonny, and Read.
  • The Trial of Stede Bonnet (1719). Verbatim proceedings, including his letter begging for life.
  • Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea (1734). A slaver captain held by Davis's flotilla, writing down what he saw.
  • Ashton's Memorial (1725). Philip Ashton's escape from Edward Low, and sixteen months alone on an island.
  • A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, Lately Taken by Captain Ogle (1723). The proceedings against Roberts's company. Fifty-two hanged.

The modern literature

  • Cordingly, Under the Black Flag (1995). The standard general history, by the National Maritime Museum's former keeper.
  • Linebaugh & Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra (2000). The deeper current, with pirates as one head of a transatlantic resistance.
  • Rediker, Villains of All Nations (2004). The academic case for the pirate ship as a floating experiment in equality.
  • Woodard, The Republic of Pirates (2007). The Nassau generation, told as one story.
  • Leeson, The Invisible Hook (2009). An economist reads the articles as constitutions before constitutions.
  • Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All (2009). Hostis humani generis traced from Cicero to the present.
  • Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment (2023). The Madagascar settlements as real experiments in radical democracy.

Dates follow the Julian calendar as the English sources give them, with the year taken to begin 1 January rather than 25 March, which is where the civil year actually started until 1752. A clerk writing in February 1722 would have dated it 1721. Continental sources are Gregorian and run eleven days ahead of the English ones through this whole period.

HOSTIS

ENEMIES OF ALL MANKIND

A free man is sovereign by virtue of being. He is the locus of his own existence, the keeper of the light he carries, the author of every step he takes. He asks no man’s leave for what is already his. He stands under the flag he raised himself.

Hostis humani generis. Enemy of all mankind. Cicero’s charge, fastened onto pirates and hardened by English admiralty law into a rule. A pirate belongs to no nation, may be tried by any nation, stands outside the protection of every one. Mankind agrees to treat a man as the common enemy of mankind. The category is a verdict passed by interested parties, and always was. Enemies of all mankind by their decree. We keep the name by consent.

Before a company put to sea it wrote down the terms it would sail by. A vote to every hand aboard. An equal share of the provisions. Payment in coin for a limb or an eye lost at work. Captains elected, and turned out again by ballot. No king in Europe granted a seaman one of the four. The crews took all four in the one place on earth where nobody could stop them, and the Crown answered by hanging them in chains at the mouths of harbours, where the lesson would be legible from the deck of every ship coming in.

Court transcripts. Articles of indictment. Inventories of confiscated goods. Sermons preached at the condemned on the Sunday before they died. Power documents itself to justify itself, the paper outlives the office, and it is read at last by people it was never meant for.

The fence has moved. From the shore to the page, from the page to the server. The name moved with it. We are where we have always been.

One crew, then, and a long one. Each hand on it told what he might do with what was already his. Those companies. The printers. The mechanic. The farmer. The archivist. The cryptographer. The buyer. The spender. The seeder. Every one of them was asked the same question at the moment it was put to him. Every one gave the same answer.

This page was set down to show how short the runs were, how few of them ended anywhere but a rope or the water, and what the companies wrote down for themselves in the years they had. The same fight runs straight through to now, in other waters and under other names, and the rest of it is at hostis.black.