Piracy

Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another
ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable items or
properties. Those who engage in acts of piracy are called pirates. The earliest documented
instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders,
attacked the ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilizations. Narrow channels which funnel
shipping into predictable routes have long created opportunities for piracy, as well as
for privateering and commerce raiding. Historic examples include the waters of Gibraltar,
the Strait of Malacca, Madagascar, the Gulf of Aden, and the English Channel, whose
geographic structures facilitated pirate attacks. A land-based parallel is the ambushing of
travelers by bandits and brigands in highways and mountain passes. A privateer is a private
person or ship that engages in maritime warfare under a commission of war. The commission,
also known as a letter of marque, empowers the person to carry on all forms of hostility
permissible at sea by the usages of war, including attacking foreign vessels during wartime and
taking them as prizes. Privateering uses similar methods to piracy, but the captain acts under
orders of the state authorizing the capture of merchant ships belonging to an enemy nation,
making it a legitimate form of war-like activity by non-state actors.

Unlike traditional Western societies of the time, many Caribbean pirate crews of European
descent operated as limited democracies. Pirate communities were some of the first to instate a
system of checks and balances similar to the one used by the present-day United States and many
other countries. The first record of such a government aboard a pirate sloop dates to the 17th
century.

A pirate code, pirate articles or articles of agreement were a code of conduct for
governing pirates. A group of sailors, on turning pirate, would draw up their own code or
articles, which provided rules for discipline, division of stolen goods, and compensation for
injured pirates. Some of the Articles are:

 None shall game for money either with dice or cards.

 Each man shall keep his piece, cutlass and pistols at all times clean and ready for
action.
 He that shall desert the ship or his quarters in time of battle shall be punished by
death or marooning.
 The musicians shall have rest on the Sabbath Day only by right. On all other days
by favor only
Golden Age Of Piracy
The Golden Age of Piracy is a common designation given to usually one or more outbursts
of piracy in the maritime history of the early modern period. In its broadest accepted definition,
the Golden Age of Piracy spans the 1650s to the late 1720s and covers three separate outbursts of
piracy:

1. The buccaneering period of approximately 1650 to 1680, characterized by Anglo-French

seamen based on Jamaica and Tortugaattacking Spanish colonies and shipping in
the Caribbean and eastern Pacific
2. The Pirate Round of the 1690s, associated with long-distance voyages from the Americas
to rob Muslim and East India Companytargets in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea
3. The post-Spanish Succession period extending from 1716 to 1726, when Anglo-
American sailors and privateers, left unemployed by the end of the War of the Spanish
Succession, turned en masse to piracy in the Caribbean, the North American eastern
seaboard, the West African coast, and the Indian Ocean.

Edward Teach (Thatch), more commonly known as Blackbeard, was active from 1716 to 1718 as
perhaps the most notorious pirate among English-speaking nations. Blackbeard's most famous
ship was the Queen Anne's Revenge, named in response to the end of Queen Anne's War. Teach
served under Benjamin Hornigold as a protégé. He taught him everything he knew about being a
pirate. Teach was notorious for intimidating his enemies before battle because of his looks. He
would dress in all black with pistols strapped to his chest and put on a large black captain's hat
and under this he would put slow burning fuses that would constantly sputter and give off
smoke. His goal in this was to look like a devil had stepped out of hell. Blackbeard was killed by
one of Lieutenant Robert Maynard's crewmen in 1718 who was ordered by governor Alexander
Spotswood to hunt down and kill Blackbeard.