History in Brief Part 2: a draft for a project

Pirates

by Chris Pelletier

copyright 2010

As long as humans have been transporting goods on the water, there have always been people who wanted to take those goods. They are called pirates. Piracy is the act of stealing goods on the water or using water to do a land-based assault for gain. From ancient times in Greece and Rome, pirates controlled trade in the Mediterranean Sea, until a consul of Rome, Pompeii Magnus, broke the piratical fleets, allowing shipping to resume safely.

Of course, pirates did not disappear. They still managed to find ways to come back. In the fifteenth century through the eighteenth century, a Golden Age of Piracy happened. British sailors, tired of the mistreatment and harsh conditions aboard naval and merchant vessels, joined up with French boucaniers, runaway slaves and whoever wanted to sail against all flags for profit. They had a democratic society aboard ship, where every decision was voted upon by the whole crew--even who was to be captain (imagine America having such democracy). They saw their lives as short, but merry with the trade.

The pirates terrorized shipping from the Caribbean to the American colonies. But once stability was maintained in the Caribbean and the American coast, the sea rovers went east to the Red Sea and had bases out of Madagascar to prey on East India shipping. But that field was soon to be difficult to sow. So the piratical boom died down to a whisper by the early nineteenth century.

Books and movies have romanticized the life of buccaneers and sea rogues, but the reality of the life of pirates was hard and dirty. They usually toiled and hunted, only to be put at the end of the rope and displayed in chains for carrion birds to peck upon and remind sailors to stay honest.

The Golden Age of Piracy of characters such as L'Olonais, Roc Brasiliano, Henry Morgan, Stede Bonnet, Calico Jack Rackam, Anne Bonney, Mary Read, Chares Vain and Blackbeard may have come to a close in the nineteenth century, but piracy has not stopped. Acts of sea robbery have been committed in the twenty-first century which are no less in scope than 300 years earlier in the Caribbean, south China seas and the Red Sea comes full circle with another rise with pirates audaciously seizing oil tankers.