The first pirates were the Sea Peoples who threatened the ships sailing in the Aegean and Mediterranean waters in the 14th century BC.
With European exploration of the New World, the Caribbean became the most fertile ground for pirates because of the enormous bounty transported from the colonies in the new world, back to the European states.
The most famous of all was Blackbeard. Others of note were Capt. William Kidd and Sir Henry Morgan. These two were more privateers or mercenaries, since they were given permission by their sovereign to attack enemy shipping in time of war.
Piracy was practiced in far-flung regions of the world from the Indian Ocean to the South China sea.
There were women pirates as well.
Mary Read captained her own ship in the Caribbean before it was captured and she joined her captor’s crew.
There was also a Chinese woman named Ching Shih, a 19th-century pirate who with her husband amassed a huge fleet of ships and crew that the ran out of the South China Sea.
Of the roughly 10,000 pirates who operated in the Caribbean, one third were black or fugitive slaves.
One of the most famous black pirates was Black Caesar, who raided ships in the Florida Keys for almost a decade before joining Blackbeard aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge. Like many pirates, his life is shrouded in legend.
During the ”golden age” of piracy in the late 1600s and early 1700s, a pirate ship was one of the few places a black man could attain power and money in the Western Hemisphere.
The era of piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1500s and phased out in the 1830s after the navies of the nations of Western Europe and North America with colonies in the Caribbean began combating pirates.
The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1660s to 1730s.
Next Week:
Mel Fisher- The treasure hunter
See Ya' Mates,
John Q.
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