The Real History of Pirates: Beyond the Skull and Crossbones, Who They Actually Were

Pirates have one of the most heavily mythologized histories of any group of people who ever existed. The myth was being manufactured in real time during the Golden Age of Piracy itself: pirates deliberately exaggerated their reputations to make merchant ships surrender without a fight. A reputation for murderous brutality was cheaper and safer than an actual battle. Blackbeard lit slow-burning fuses and tucked them under his hat so he would be wreathed in smoke when he boarded a vessel. He wanted to look like he had walked out of hell. This worked. He was killed in 1718 after a career of about two years.

Where They Actually Came From

The Golden Age of Piracy ran from roughly the 1650s to 1730. Most people who became pirates during this period were not colorful adventurers choosing a life of romantic crime. They were maritime laborers, mostly sailors and former privateers, responding to specific economic conditions.

Privateers were essentially state-licensed pirates. During the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1714, England and other European powers had commissioned hundreds of private ships to attack enemy vessels. When the war ended, those commissions ended. Thousands of experienced sailors with no other marketable skills found themselves unemployed. The navy was not hiring. Merchant vessels paid badly and treated their crews harshly. Piracy, specifically the Caribbean and Atlantic variety, was essentially an alternative maritime labor market that emerged from this displacement.

The post-Spanish Succession period, from 1715 to 1730, saw English sailors and privateers left unemployed by the end of the war turn to piracy. Many of the most famous pirates, including Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts, followed exactly this career trajectory: naval or privateer service, unemployment, piracy.

The Ships Were Surprisingly Democratic

Here is the part of pirate history that genuinely surprises most people. Pirate ships during the Golden Age operated on organizational principles considerably more democratic than any other ship of the era. Pirate crews were more orderly, democratic, and disciplined than many merchant ships, and probably many navy ships as well. They had codes of honour, legal systems, and took pride in good work.

Each crew operated under a set of written articles that all members signed before the voyage. The articles governed the distribution of plunder, typically in shares by rank. They specified compensation for injuries: a specific payment for a lost arm, a different amount for a lost leg, a further amount for a lost eye. They specified conduct rules: no fighting aboard ship, no gambling, no women brought aboard without crew consent, no going to sleep on watch. These articles were more of a contract than a moral code, and they varied widely between ships.

Crucially, pirate crews elected their captains. The captain had authority in battle. Outside of battle, the crew could vote him out. Several famous captains were indeed deposed by their crews and replaced. In November 1718, the pirate crew of Charles Vane voted to depose him and selected John Rackham as their new captain.

This was not the case on naval or merchant vessels, where captains had essentially unlimited authority and crews had no recourse against abusive commanders. The appeal of piracy to merchant sailors was not simply the money. It was also the governance structure.

Who the Most Famous Ones Actually Were

Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, is the most famous pirate in the English-speaking world. His actual piracy career lasted about two years, from 1716 to 1718. On November 22, 1718, with an enormous bounty on his head, Blackbeard was killed in a sword fight with Royal Marines on the deck of his ship. His severed head was brought back to the governor of Virginia.

His reputation, however, massively outlasted his career. Fear was an essential tool for pirates, and they made sure to present themselves in the most terrifying way possible. Blackbeard even hid lit fuses in his hat so that he would be surrounded by smoke, presumably to appear more devilish. It worked so well that he is still the first name people think of 300 years later.

The most successful pirate of the Golden Age by any objective measure was not Blackbeard but Bartholomew Roberts, a Welsh sailor who did not want to be a pirate. He never even wanted to become a pirate, yet within a year he had become the most successful of his era. During his brief but spectacular career he captured over 200 ships, more than all his pirate contemporaries combined.

Roberts ran an extraordinarily disciplined ship. He banned gambling and drinking aboard. He required lights out at eight in the evening. And finally, he also wore a scarlet silk coat and a diamond necklace into battle, which is the pirate fashion detail that gets me most. Bartholomew Roberts was killed fighting the Royal Navy in 1722.

The Things Pirates Did Not Actually Do

Buried treasure is largely fictional. Pirates did not typically bury their loot because they needed to spend it. They were operating on thin margins, in constant need of supplies, repairs, and new recruits. They sold their stolen goods at port, drank the proceeds, and went out again. The buried treasure narrative comes from Treasure Island, published in 1883, which Robert Louis Stevenson invented wholesale.

Walking the plank is also essentially fictional. It does not appear in any documented pirate account before the 1820s, when it starts turning up in fiction. Pirates who wanted rid of prisoners or crew members had simpler methods available.

The Jolly Roger itself was a real flag, but not a standardized one. Different crews flew different designs. The classic skull and crossbones was one variant. Others used hourglasses, skeletons, arms, swords, and other imagery. A General History of the Pirates, published in 1724 by a writer calling himself Captain Charles Johnson, created the modern conception of pirates. Johnson exaggerated freely and invented details for entertainment. Much of what feels historically solid about the Golden Age of Piracy traces back to one unreliable source from 1724.