Pirates

Introduction

Piracy, or larceny at sea, is an enduring and misunderstood crime. Its occurrence in Atlantic waters is ancient, but it was in the early modern era (c. 1450–1750) that seaborne predation grew most intense, giving rise to many legendary figures. Most popular images of pirates are drawn from the so-called Golden Age of buccaneering, roughly the second half of the 17th century. In this period, thanks to the buccaneer and author Alexander Exquemelin, Atlantic piracy became forever associated with the Caribbean archipelago. A second “Golden Age,” that of the Anglo-American freebooters, dates to the years between the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, and a spate of pirate trials ending about 1730. This was the age of towering figures such as Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Bartholomew Roberts, and female pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read. Although Atlantic piracy was resurgent from time to time in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, extermination campaigns led by the British Navy largely stamped out piracy as a large-scale organized crime in the Atlantic in the 1710s and 1720s. Scholarly studies of Atlantic piracy have mostly explored the following themes: class relations, gender patterns, pirate sexuality, economic motives and effects, legal implications, and literary representations. New work has begun to tie pirate activity more clearly to the transatlantic slave trade. Some studies have attempted to place Atlantic piracy and pirates in the larger context of European overseas expansion, offering some global comparisons. An important distinction must be made between piracy and privateering, however. Piracy has historically been defined as unsanctioned plunder of vessels on the high seas, along with the related crimes of kidnapping, extortion, and ransoming of captives. In some instances, unsanctioned pillage by descent from the sea of land targets such as port towns has also been defined as piracy. Since the high seas were generally regarded in early modern times as open spaces beyond the limits of traditional, land-based sovereignty, emergent nations such as England and the Netherlands established admiralty courts for the prosecution of crimes committed at sea, most importantly piracy, but also including sodomy, petty theft, and drunkenness. Convicted pirates were often hanged from gibbets placed below tidal limits to reinforce the land/sea division. Privateering, called corsairing in the 16th and 17th centuries, consisted of sanctioned raiding by private individuals and commercial associations, almost always during wartime. Privateers were, as the name suggests, privately outfitted sea raiders whose aim was to take profit by capturing commercial vessels flying the flag of declared enemies; a few went after land targets. To be legal, privateering required a letter of marque and reprisal, usually signed by a monarch but at times issued by local governors and other lesser officials. In exchange for the letter of marque, another variety of which was issued to merchant vessels in wartime, crown officials received a portion of booty taken. As can be imagined, the line between piracy and privateering could easily be crossed, and many acts of piracy were committed under false pretenses against nonenemies and during peacetime. Individuals adept at capturing and plundering ships were likely to act as both pirates and privateers in the course of their careers, as happened with famous figures such as Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and William Kidd.

General Overviews

Popular histories of Atlantic piracy abound, but few are based on primary sources. Even fewer have dared to challenge familiar, nationalistic, or sensationalist narratives. The following selections stand out for quality of research, theoretical insights, or coverage of frequently overlooked regions and nationalities. Once piracy became a topic of serious historical inquiry, thanks to Philip Gosse (see Gosse 1932) and other early 20th-century champions, two core questions emerged: How did subjects of the Spanish Empire, the pirates’ main victims, react? And were pirates ordinary criminal gangs taking advantage of new opportunities, or did they constitute an emerging class of “social bandits” reacting to new and oppressive work regimes? Clarence Haring (see Haring 1966 in Spanish Defense) was one of the first Anglophone researchers to consult Spanish manuscript sources, which he used to produce a more balanced narrative of Caribbean buccaneering, exposing the misrepresentations of Exquemelin and other authors. Andrews 1978, Earle 2003, Lane 1998, and others have followed in this vein, usually comparing Spanish documents with those produced in England and other countries. Collectively, these works make clear that, while victimized, Spanish subjects sometimes fought back effectively, at other times colluded with alleged enemies, and in general played more complex roles than older histories claimed. A pioneer historian who portrayed the Golden Age buccaneer as a knee-jerk (if not quite class-conscious) egalitarian was J. S. Bromley (see Bromley 1987 in Formation of New Social Groups). Following similar land-based research by Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and Christopher Hill, Bromley focused on the connection between wars, navy recruitment, and what Gosse had termed “pirate cycles.” Golden Age piracy seemed linked to chronic unemployment of an emerging pool of island-based freelance raiders whose traditions emphasized sharing booty equitably and caring for the wounded. This thread was taken in the direction of maritime class formation in Rediker 2004. Cordingly 1995 borrowed some of Rediker’s earlier observations (see Rediker 1987 in Formation of New Social Groups) on pirate demography and habits in his general survey, but did not embrace his more romantic claims of piracy as social banditry. Earle 2003 challenged Rediker’s class interpretation of Golden Age piracy to argue that the English Navy’s 18th-century suppression efforts amounted to an early modern “war on terror.” Pirates were simply criminal opportunists in this view, but highly organized and dangerous ones. The reality may lie somewhere in between these extremes of sentimental Marxism and antisocial demonization; most pirates and privateers seem to have imagined themselves as enterprising gentlemen of fortune, self-made but not revolutionary. Solidarity could arise when convenient, but so could murderous infighting. If Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan’s career (roughly 1655–1688) is illustrative, the aim of most Caribbean pirates was to get rich at the margins of the law, then go straight and climb the social ladder among landlubbers. The sea offered space for self-improvement and transgression in equal measure. Political scientist Janice Thomson traced this ethical-legal gray area’s longer-term historical implications by treating piracy as a form of nonstate violence (today called paramilitarism) unleashed and then suppressed by early modern European states (Thomson 1994). Pirates could be unwitting tools as well as free agents. Along similar lines, but in narrative rather than modular form, Latimer 2009 ties Golden Age piracy directly to empire building. As licensed privateering, sea raiding was simply a time-tested form of military subcontracting that could also be profitable for small-time investors with few other high-return options. It spurred the growth of Atlantic cities from Charleston to Dunkirk.

Andrews, Kenneth R. The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978.
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One of the first studies in English to examine early Caribbean corsairing from the Spanish perspective, comparing documents produced on both sides of the pillager/pillaged divide. Several of Andrews’s earlier books treat Elizabethan corsairing in greater detail.
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Cordingly, David. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates. New York: Random House, 1995.
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A rare popular but also scholarly book on early modern Atlantic piracy that incorporates women into the larger narrative and challenges various myths, from pirates’ alleged fondness for parrots to their preference for dangerous broadside attacks. Appendixes give useful data on pirate suppression in the 1710s and 1720s.
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Earle, Peter. The Pirate Wars. London: Methuen, 2003.
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Something of a counterpoint to the work of Rediker, Hill, and others, emphasizing pirate fighting in the early 18th century as critical to the rise of the English Navy. Argues that the Navy’s successes in the 1710s and 1720s helped make it the dominant Atlantic enforcer. The 18th-century “war on piracy” is thus presented as a test of the mettle of the modern state. The study goes up to the last great surge of Atlantic piracy in the 1810s and 1820s, when Cuban pirates may have introduced the legendary practice of “walking the plank.”
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Gosse, Philip. The History of Piracy. London: Longmans, 1932.
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Arguably the first global history of piracy, and first to put the famous buccaneers and freebooters of the so-called Golden Age (whose stories nevertheless take up about two-thirds of the book) in perspective.
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Lane, Kris E. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998.
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A brief narrative overview that attempts to situate early modern piracy and privateering in the context of the vast and wealthy Spanish seaborne empire, the pirates’ main target. More attention than usual is paid to the victims of piracy and their responses. Published in 1999 under the title Blood and Silver: A History of Piracy in the Caribbean and Central America (Oxford: Signal).
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Latimer, Jon. Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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A rare interpretive work that ably ties 17th-century buccaneering to the imperial project of England, and to a lesser extent those of France and the Netherlands, in the Spanish-claimed Caribbean.
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Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon, 2004.
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Consolidates the author’s earlier work on the Anglo-American pirates of the 1710s and 1720s (see Rediker 1987 and Linebaugh and Rediker 2000 in Formation of New Social Groups), emphasizing class solidarity and piracy as a form of social rebellion. Citing manuscript documents to buttress the standard account given by “Captain Charles Johnson” in his 1724 General History of the Pyrates, Rediker’s examination of pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read compares well with Cordingly 1995.
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Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
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A seminal political-science approach that carries on to the mid-19th century.
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Anthologies

Pirate studies have expanded in recent years, yielding a growing corpus of collections of essays that cross disciplines. Historical inquiries are routinely joined by examinations of Atlantic piracy in literature, gender studies, archaeology, law, and other fields. Some new avenues of research include piracy’s ties to contraband trade, slavery, and the production of captivity narratives. A good example of emerging cross-disciplinary pirate studies that tie North Africa and the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic is Jowitt 2007. Requemora and Linon-Chipon 2002 offer a similar mix for the Francophone Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. Perhaps the most generally useful collection to date is Pennell 2001, which includes original and reprinted journal articles ranging from political science to anthropological perspectives, again, also including North Africa.

Jowitt, Claire, ed. Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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Contains original essays on east Atlantic and Mediterranean piracy from the perspectives of history, literature, and international law.
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Pennell, C. R., ed. Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
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An essential collection of mostly prepublished essays on piracy in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Perfect for classroom use. Includes theoretical as well as topical essays.
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Requemora, Sylvie, and Sophie Linon-Chipon, eds. Les tyrans de la mer: Pirates, corsaires et flibustiers. Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002.
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A rich blend of essays on piracy in history and literature, ranging from the Maghreb to the Caribbean. The editors also include a valuable discussion of pirate-related terms and their evolution in French, as well as a thorough bibliography.
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Journals

At present no journal specializes in Atlantic pirate history, but several have published groundbreaking articles. Journals specializing in maritime history, especially the venerable Mariner’s Mirror, have been most consistent in quality. The long-established American Neptune and the more recently founded International Journal of Maritime History are also notable for frequent articles and book reviews on piracy. For the Spanish and, to a lesser degree, the Portuguese side of things, the Hispanic American Historical Review in particular demands consultation all the way back to its founding in 1918. A Dutch counterpoint may be found in the equally established New West Indian Guide, and an Anglo-American one in the similarly aged William and Mary Quarterly. Broader journals such as Itinerario and the Journal of World History have emphasized piracy as a global phenomenon, but with good reviews of books on Atlantic piracy and some key theoretical pieces. The Journal of Caribbean History has offered articles on piracy from a more island-centered perspective.

American Neptune.
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Founded by Samuel Eliot Morison and other notable US maritime historians, this journal specializes in short articles, occasionally treating piracy and privateering in history and the arts.
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Hispanic American Historical Review.
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Published by Duke University Press since 1918, this journal has included articles on piracy and privateering, usually with an eye to victims, often subjects of Spain or Portugal. Articles are mostly in English, but some are in Spanish and Portuguese.
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International Journal of Maritime History.
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Published since 1989 by Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, this journal frequently includes articles and reviews related to piracy and privateering.
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Itinerario.
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Published by the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, this journal offers many articles related to European overseas expansion and global interaction.
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Journal of Caribbean History.
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Published by the University of the West Indies (Mona campus, Jamaica), this journal frequently includes articles on piracy and privateering, usually from the perspective of the Anglophone islands.
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Journal of World History.
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The official journal of the World History Association, based at the University of Hawaii. Despite its title, many articles have treated Atlantic topics, including piracy.
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Mariner’s Mirror.
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Published by the Society for Nautical Research, Mariner’s Mirror is England’s most respected journal of maritime studies and one of the best sources for new and important work on piracy and privateering.
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New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids.
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Published by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies since 1919, the New West Indian Guide is the oldest journal of Caribbean studies. Many articles and reviews of books on piracy may be found here.
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William and Mary Quarterly.
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Published by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture on the College of William & Mary campus in Williamsburg, Virginia, this journal has included many seminal articles on piracy and privateering in Atlantic history.
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Primary Sources

Since most pirates sought to cover their tracks, they left behind precious few firsthand accounts of their deeds. Nevertheless, pirates and privateers were often enough chased, captured, tried, and punished, acts that led authorities to produce records of various kinds, including warrants, depositions, and even sermons. The few who did write memoirs avoided self-incrimination, but sometimes were explicit in incriminating their fellows. By the early 18th century, Atlantic pirates were commonly featured in English fiction and “true crime” prosopographies, some of which drew from trial records and oral accounts. Pirate treasure maps are not known, but several sea charts have survived.

Maps and Illustrations

It was not in most sea raiders’ interest to illustrate their adventures, but it seems many pirates and corsairs did use or draw up maps and rutters (navigation charts), which they kept on hand as collateral when charged with crimes—or as evidence of military accomplishments. Such maps could occasionally be offered to a skeptical sovereign as “military intelligence.” Such was the case with the stolen “buccaneer’s atlas” superbly edited and introduced in Howse and Thrower 1992. Many more illustrations and maps are available from the earlier period of Atlantic piracy and corsairing, in part because these acts (at least against the Spanish) were less clearly regarded as criminal. Drake’s 1585–1586 Caribbean expedition was thus lavishly mapped by Baptista Boazio around 1587, and a much wider range of corsair acts were illustrated in Theodor de Bry 1596. More enigmatic is the so-called Drake Manuscript (Kraemer 1996), a treasure trove of late 16th-century illustrations from the Caribbean, most of which have rather little to do with piracy. Of special use to historians of piracy, however, are its rare depictions of ports, indigenous vessels, and mining and refining activities.

Boazio, Baptista. Francis Drake’s Voyage in Early Maps.
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Baptista Boazio accompanied Francis Drake on his 1585–1586 voyage to the Caribbean, which included pillaging stops in the Cape Verde Islands, Santo Domingo, Cartagena de Indias, and St. Augustine, Florida. Filled with strange fish, caimans, and 16th-century sailing vessels, Boazio’s hand-colored maps are a fantastic resource.
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Bry, Theodor de. Historia Americae. Vol. 6. Frankfurt, Germany, 1596.
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Many copies of this influential Flemish engraver’s most reproduced work may be found online, including the US Library of Congress’s Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake. De Bry illustrated pirate attacks (none of which he witnessed) in various parts of the Atlantic in the 16th century. Outstanding are the engravings of French corsair attacks in the early Spanish Caribbean, related in the text by Girolamo Benzoni.
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Howse, Derek, and Norman J. W. Thrower, eds. A Buccaneer’s Atlas: Basil Ringrose’s South Sea Waggoner; A Sea Atlas and Sailing Directions of the Pacific Coast of the Americas, 1682. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
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The introductory material mostly treats buccaneer adventures in the Spanish Pacific, where this atlas was captured, but the editors also offer many useful links to the pirates’ Atlantic bases. Of special interest is a brief treatment of late 17th-century geographic knowledge and navigation techniques.
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Kraemer, Ruth S., trans. Drake Manuscript. London: André Deutsch, 1996.
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An illustrated natural history of the Caribbean from circa 1586, most likely composed by a French Huguenot corsair (the relationship with Drake is tenuous). It includes images of indigenous raiders in canoes as well as pirate and Spanish vessels from the era of Drake.
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Letters and Narrative Accounts

Despite an understandable reluctance to illustrate one’s own misdeeds, many pirates were accomplished writers. Most surviving pirate journals or firsthand accounts come from the 17th-century heyday of buccaneering. Usually these were composed by surgeons or pilots who saw themselves as somewhat removed “participant-observers,” not hardcore pirates. Such was the case with Alexander Exquemelin, Lionel Wafer, and William Dampier. Surviving 18th-century accounts mostly describe contemporary miscreants from a kind of safe distance, and even with some ambivalence as to authorship. This is most evident in Captain Charles Johnson’s (or Daniel Defoe’s, as some have argued) 1724 General History of the Pyrates (Johnson 1998). By this time piracy was a capital offense in much of the Atlantic world and dangerous to brag about or claim any connection to. Sixteenth-century documents, by contrast, vary in tone and form, but are mostly accounts from the victims’ side of it all, usually in Spanish. Wright 1932 is one of several collections of Spanish material edited by Wright. For Anglo-American piracy, many documents may be found in the digital version of The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies, 1574–1739 (Kupperman, et al. 2000). Other documents housed in UK archives may be found using the A2A (Access to Archive) search engine, which ties together a vast range of holdings from the British Library to widely scattered municipal and parish records.

Alsedo y Herrera, Dionisio de. Piraterías y agresiones de los ingleses y de otros pueblos de Europa en la América Española desde el siglo XVI al XVIII. Edited by D. Justo Zaragoza. Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernández, 1883.
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Although Spanish and Spanish American writers routinely recounted pirate attacks and colonial responses from the 16th century onward, this is the first Spanish narrative history of the topic. The author was a colonial official in what is today Ecuador. Originally published in 1740.
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Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World. Warwick, NY: 1500 Books, 2007.
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An unaltered reprint of this classic buccaneer account of his global travels in the late 17th century, with many references to Caribbean natural history reminiscent of Exquemelin 2000. Many other editions of this work are available. Originally published in 1697.
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Exquemelin, Alexander O. The Buccaneers of America. Translated by Alexis Brown. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000.
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Reprint of a 1969 translation of the original edition by Alexis Brown. First published in Dutch in 1678, and soon translated into many European languages. Perhaps the most influential source on the history of Caribbean piracy. Henry Morgan, whose exploits are unflatteringly described in great detail, sued to have the English edition suppressed. A full-text version of the original Dutch edition is available online at the Library of Congress’s exhibit of materials from the Jay I. Kislak Collection.
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Hampden, John, ed. Francis Drake, Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972.
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A valuable collection of materials, including many from Drake’s piratical exploits in the 1570s, when he allied with Panamanian maroons. Pairs nicely with Irene Wright’s translations of Spanish documents (Wright 1932) and other collections from the Hakluyt Society series.
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Johnson, Charles [pseud.]. A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. New York: Lyons, 1998.
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A large-format edition of this classic work, often attributed to Daniel Defoe. (Cordingly explains why he questions this attribution in his introduction to the book.) It constitutes a virtual bible of early 18th-century Anglo-American Atlantic piracy and is the main source of information on renowned figures such as Blackbeard, Sam Bellamy, and Ann Bonny, and Rediker 2004 (see General Overviews) has done most to find corroborating documents. Originally published in 1724.
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Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton, eds. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies, 1574–1739. London: Public Record Office, 2000.
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Originally published in print form from 1858 to 1994, this collection contains over forty thousand manuscripts, including dispatches, land grants, and administrative paperwork.
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Lussan, Raveneau de. Raveneau de Lussan: Buccaneer of the Spanish Main and Early French Filibuster of the Pacific. Edited and translated by Marguerite E. Wilbur. Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1930.
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Translation of a rare French buccaneer memoir. More than most English-speaking pirates in his day, de Lussan writes frankly of the boredom and thirst for adventure that seems to have driven him more than anything to become a freebooter. See also the 1992 French re-issue of Lussan’s journal: Les flibustiers de la mer du Sud: Journal d’un voyage fait à la mer du Sud avec les flibustiers de l’Amérique, depuis le 22 novembre 1684 jusqu’en janvier 1688 (Paris: France-Empire, 1992).
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Wafer, Lionel. A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America. Edited by George Parker Winship. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970.
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A key narrative of this famous buccaneer and physician’s life among the Kuna Indians of eastern Panama, and partial inspiration for the failed Scottish Darien colony. Originally published in 1699.
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Wright, I. A., ed. Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–1580. London: Hakluyt Society, 1932.
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One of Wright’s many collections of Spanish documents from the Archive of the Indies regarding the corsairing activities of the Elizabethans and early Dutch. Documents relating to the English voyages are translated to English, whereas those pertaining to Dutch attacks are in the original Spanish.
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Document Collections

Few authors have thus far attempted to put together “piracy readers” of the sort commonly assigned in history classes, although Antony 2007 is a fine exception. The venerable collection Jameson 1923 is still quite useful, although many of the sources may now be found online. The most comprehensive printed collection of documentary sources for the Anglo-American pirates is Baer 2007.

Antony, Robert J., ed. Pirates in the Age of Sail. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
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A collection of documents with introductory essays relating to piracy worldwide, but with a considerable portion devoted to Atlantic piracy in the Golden Age.
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Baer, Joel H. British Piracy in the Golden Age: History and Interpretation, 1660–1730. 4 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.
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A wonderful facsimile collection of English-language primary sources on Golden Age piracy, accompanied by excellent commentary and bibliography—worth its weight in doubloons.
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Jameson, John Franklin, ed. Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents. New York: Macmillan, 1923.
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Still a fine cache of English and colonial documents for piracy and privateering in the Golden Age.
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National and Regional Studies

Although in the interest of tourism it has become fashionable to celebrate local connections to piracy throughout the Atlantic world, as a universally recognized criminal act, Atlantic piracy in its own time was something states and provinces denied having anything to do with—only sponsorship of privateering voyages was openly proclaimed. As a result, national and regional histories of piracy display a kind of schizophrenia when it comes to sea raiders. As Nina Gerassi-Navarro notes in her study of pirates in Spanish American literature (Gerassi-Navarro 1999), this has been true even of piracy’s main victims since colonial times. A similar mix of fascination/repulsion is evident in Dow and Edmonds 1996, a study of pirates in New England; should these rogues be claimed as ancestors? More recently, Kupperman 1993 demonstrates how integral piracy against the Spanish was to the creation (and quick destruction) of the early 17th-century Puritan colony of Providence Island, off the coast of Nicaragua. Other historians have traded region for nation, studying piracy and privateering from the perspective of the home country. Lunsford 2005 does this fairly close to shore of the Netherlands, whereas Goslinga 1971 and Goslinga 1985 cover the Caribbean and northern coast of South America (excluding Brazil). Moreau 2006 has similarly mined a huge range of primary sources to produce an overview of French piracy and privateering, mostly in the Caribbean but also in the Pacific. Finally, Starkey 1990 offers the most thorough examination of British privateering (mostly in the English Channel) available. The emphasis is on how thoroughly integrated this form of wartime sea raiding was in British business circles in the decades following pirate suppression.

Dow, George Francis, and John Henry Edmonds. The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630–1730. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996.
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A classic study of piracy in New England until the era of extermination, with several primary sources included, such as letters of marque and reprisal. Originally published in 1923.
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Gerassi-Navarro, Nina. Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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A rare and compelling literary analysis of Spanish and Spanish American texts on piracy from the 16th to 19th centuries. A recurring theme is the legend of Francis Drake.
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Goslinga, Cornelis. The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast 1580–1680. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1971.
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Massive study of Dutch commercial and plundering ventures in the Spanish Caribbean, with good coverage of corsairs such as Cornelis Jol, a.k.a. Houtebeen (Peg leg).
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Goslinga, Cornelis. The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791. Dover, NH: Van Gorcum, 1985.
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Continues Goslinga’s exhaustive study of Dutch privateering, trade, and colonization in the Caribbean and “Wild Coast” of South America from Goslinga 1971.
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Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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A deeply researched and surprising study, with Puritans as pirates struggling to survive on a tiny island off the eastern shore of Nicaragua.
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Lunsford, Virginia West. Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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Based almost entirely on primary sources, this brief book ably connects 17th-century sea raiding to an emerging Dutch nationalism.
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Moreau, Jean-Pierre. Pirates: flibuste et piraterie dans la Caraïbe et les mers du sud, 1522–1725. Paris: Tallandier, 2006.
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A wide-ranging examination of French pirate and corsair activity in the Atlantic, based largely on previously untapped primary sources from France and Spain. Moreau challenges myths and traces pirate genealogies from Dieppe, Le Havre, La Rochelle, Nantes, and other key French ports. An important contribution to the generally thin literature on French piracy and privateering.
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Starkey, David J. British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1990.
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Perhaps the most detailed and revealing study of the economics of privateering, mostly in the English Channel, during (and in between) the many naval conflicts of the 18th century. Shows how privateering worked and was considered a standard business practice in the period of its greatest development (that is, after the suppression of piracy in the 1720s).
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Gender and Sexuality

Fascination with the pirate’s sex and sexuality is as old as piracy itself. The existence of female pirates in the Atlantic is less well documented than in the Pacific, but a solid introduction to the topic is historian Jo Stanley’s edited collection (Stanley 1995). Stanley and other contributors trace female pirates from the legendary Artemisia to Cheng I Sao, the “pirate queen” of Southeast Asia. Klausmann, et al. 1997 offers a more tongue-in-cheek mix, but with novel examinations of alleged German female pirates. The pioneering study of Golden Age pirate sexuality is Burg 1995, which argues that buccaneers spent so little time in the company of women that matelotage took the place of marriage. Turley 1999 picks up on Burg and uses literary sources to trace links between early modern England’s persecution of “sodomites” and the more famous coeval war on pirates.

Burg, B. R. Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
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The classic work on pirate sexuality, consulted by Johnny Depp for his role as Jack Sparrow in the film Pirates of the Caribbean (2003).
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Klausmann, Ulrike, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn. Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger. Translated by Tyler Austin and Nicholas Levis. Montreal: Black Rose, 1997.
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A half-serious collection on women pirates worldwide, with sections on the Atlantic and Caribbean.
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Stanley, Jo, ed. Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages. London: Pandora, 1995.
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Pioneering collection of essays on female pirates from ancient to modern times, with good coverage of Ireland’s Grace O’Malley and the Caribbean’s Ann Bonny and Mary Read.
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Turley, Hans. Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
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A mostly literary analysis of sexual identity as revealed by English-language pirate texts (trial records, narratives, and novels) from the 1710s and 1720s.
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Archaeology and Geography

Archaeological interest in pirate sites dates to at least the 1960s, when new technologies enabled researchers to work under water for the first time. The sunken city of Port Royal, Jamaica, was the first great site. A fine sampling of pirate-related archaeology since this pioneering era is Skowronek and Ewen 2006. An archaeologist who has devoted most of his career to excavating pirate vessels is Barry Clifford. His popular books (Clifford 2002, Clifford, et al. 2007) have blended material culture, social history, and even the history of the slave trade to explore the meaning of pirate wrecks. The geography of Atlantic piracy receives welcome attention in Galvin 1999, which focuses on the island of Tortuga.

Clifford, Barry. The Lost Fleet: The Discovery of a Sunken Armada from the Golden Age of Piracy. New York: William Morrow, 2002.
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One of several books by this celebrated marine archeologist regarding pirate vessels, here in the Caribbean context.
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Clifford, Barry, and Kenneth J. Kinkor, with Sharon Simpson. Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007.
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This is the companion book to a popular National Geographic exhibition relating the story of the 1717 wreck of the Whydah, found and excavated off Cape Cod by Barry Clifford. Contains good pictures of artifacts recovered from this rare pirate wreck.
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Galvin, Peter R. Patterns of Pillage: A Geography of Caribbean-Based Piracy in Spanish America, 1536–1718. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
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A rare geographer’s perspective on early modern Atlantic piracy. Galvin ties piracy to rarely studied buccaneer subsistence and market activities such as turtle hunting and logwood cutting; clearly delineates piracy’s seasonal, uncertain character.
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Skowronek, Russell K., and Charles R. Ewen, eds. X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
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A collection of scholarly articles on recent excavations (most of them underwater) from Port Royal, Jamaica, to Cape Cod.
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Formation of New Social Groups

One of the pitfalls of studying Atlantic piracy has always been to treat it in isolation, to focus on pirate lifestyles and wild exploits as if they emerged organically from Caribbean sands. Fortunately, many historians have kept piracy “embedded” in Atlantic history, sometimes in master narratives and sometimes in monographs or essay collections treating the conquest and settlement of individual islands or mainland outposts. From these books we learn how pirate activity fed from, enabled, or retarded other colonial enterprises, and how its reception changed with time and experience. In Linebaugh and Rediker 2000, Golden Age piracy is linked to an emerging democratic working-class consciousness inspired by religious conflict, genocidal colonial violence, and baldly exploitative plantation regimes. This model in a sense pushes back the timeline established by Rediker in 1987. Bromley 1987 prefigures the Linebaugh-Rediker argument in a chapter on Caribbean buccaneers, but his emphasis is more on the hardening division between royal officials and outfitters, on the one hand, and ordinary pirate and privateer hands on the other. For Bromley, the 1697 sack of Cartagena de Indias by the French encapsulates the split between these social groups, both of which were created by the transatlantic stretch of Golden Age buccaneering. While not quite calling the buccaneers social bandits or a seaborne working class, Bromley’s musings on pirate “liberty, fraternity, and equality” were picked up and developed in a stridently Marxist way by Rediker and Linebaugh. Richard Dunn’s approach to emerging social groups in the 17th-century Anglophone Caribbean is quite different (Dunn 2000). He links the emergence of a slave-holding white planter class on Barbados, Jamaica, and other islands to ill-gotten gains from piracy, contraband trade, and other shady dealings. Piracy in this interpretation served as a feeder line to the emerging plantation complex.

Bromley, J. S. Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760. London: Hambledon, 1987.
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Bromley mines English and French primary sources to link the rise of piracy and corsairing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the emergence of the English Royal Navy. Chapters on French privateers stress the special role these men, their supporters (armateurs), and homeports (especially Dunkirk and La Rochelle) played in extending Louis XIV’s power overseas. Bromley suggests an emerging egalitarian ethos that contrasted sharply with a more hierarchical one evident in early navies.
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Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
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A reprint of the 1972 edition with a new foreword, this book treats the settlement of the English West Indies in the context of buccaneer activity. Dunn shows how gains from pirate raids, mostly on Spanish ships and towns, were reinvested in the nascent sugar industry.
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Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon, 2000.
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The chapter “Hydrarchy: Sailors, Pirates, and the Maritime State” shows how Atlantic piracy is situated in the larger context of imperial commercial rivalry. The emphasis is on preindustrial group solidarity and pirates as “primitive rebels.” Whereas Bromley 1987 points out that pirates showed little interest in treating captured slaves as anything but booty, Linebaugh and Rediker stress cross-race solidarity and cooperation aboard vessels.
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Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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Places the pirates of the first quarter of the 18th century in the context of maritime class formation (see Linebaugh and Rediker 2000 for application of this thesis to an earlier period). Key is chapter six, “The Seaman as Pirate: Plunder and Social Banditry at Sea.” The demographic material and core ideas presented here are more fully elaborated in Rediker’s Villains of All Nations (Rediker 2004 in General Overviews).
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Spanish Defense

Readers of Spanish accounts of pirate attacks and related documents have long puzzled over the matter of defense. Haring 1966 can still be read profitably a century after its initial publication. Hoffman 1980 offers a close reading of Spanish defense costs in the era of early French and Elizabethan corsairs. Essentially, the crown put the burden of defense on colonists and shippers. This policy was all but reversed under Philip III and Philip IV, as shown by Phillips 1986, a detailed study of Spanish shipbuilding in the aftermath of Piet Heyn’s 1628 raid in Matanzas, Cuba. Marley 1992 and Marley 1993 look at both sides to see how corsairs and their victims acted along the vulnerable coasts of Central America and Mexico. The latter, Sack of Veracruz, is a tour-de-force reconstruction of a major buccaneer raid, worth comparing with the better-known study of Henry Morgan’s raid on Panama (Earle 2007).

Earle, Peter. The Sack of Panamá: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean. New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 2007.
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Reedition of the author’s 1982 book (with a slightly different title). A gripping, blow-by-blow account based on primary sources from English and Spanish archives. Challenges the contemporary narrative of alleged eyewitness Alexander Exquemelin.
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Haring, C. H. The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1966.
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A classic study of Caribbean piracy in the Golden Age, first published in 1910. The importance of Port Royal, Jamaica, as the premier pirate base and market for stolen goods in the 17th century is nowhere more evident.
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Hoffman, Paul E. The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
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An economic analysis of Spanish defense against 16th-century corsairs based on original documents.
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Marley, David F. Pirates and Engineers: Dutch and Flemish Adventurers in New Spain (1607–1697). Windsor, ON: Netherlandic Press, 1992.
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A small but valuable collection of stories regarding the Dutch corsairing heyday in Mexico and Central America, mostly based on Spanish documents.
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Marley, David F. Sack of Veracruz: The Great Pirate Raid of 1683. Windsor, ON: Netherlandic Press, 1993.
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A gripping account of this important episode based entirely on original documents, most from Spanish and Mexican archives.
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Phillips, Carla Rahn. Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
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A wonderfully detailed examination of Spanish shipbuilding in the era of the great transatlantic fleets, with emphasis on the cost of defense against corsairs. The Spanish captain blamed for the loss of the fleet to Dutch West India Company corsair Piet Heyn in 1628 in Matanzas Bay, Cuba, takes center stage. Fighting pirates was not cheap.
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Biographies

One way to make sense of the seeming chaos and complexity of pirate activities has been to examine individual lives. A highly controversial figure is Francis Drake, whom some are loathe to call a pirate or slave trader, even though the evidence shows he was both at different times in his career. Kelsey 1998 embraces the notion of Drake as pirate, even when he was a licensed corsair after 1585. Sugden 1990 provides a less polemical but equally well researched account. Drake’s contemporary, Martin Frobisher, is thoroughly examined by McDermott 2001, which portrays him, warts and all. Later figures from the Anglophone pirate world include William Dampier and William Kidd. Preston and Preston 2004 highlights Dampier’s accomplishments as a natural scientist, downplaying his buccaneering activities. Ritchie 1986, by contrast, uses the life of Kidd to explore the emerging project of pirate extermination by the English Navy and Admiralty courts. Woodard 2007 offers a fresh look at pirate fighter and privateer Woodes Rogers, and Beal 2007 a new examination of the life of the lesser known John Quelch, the sort of fellow Rogers wished to see hanged.

Beal, Clifford. Quelch’s Gold: Piracy, Greed, and Betrayal in Colonial New England. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.
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An entertaining and well-researched biographical study of New England pirate John Quelch, who terrorized Brazil around the beginning of the 18th century.
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Kelsey, Harry. Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
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Aimed at taking England’s most famous Elizabethan corsair down a peg, this book incorporates a wide range of Spanish sources to show Francis Drake’s unsavory trajectory from slave trader to pirate to world-encompassing knight of the realm.
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Marley, David F. Pirates and Privateers of the Americas. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1994.
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The most thorough and carefully researched collective biography of early modern Atlantic pirates. An invaluable reference source.
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McDermott, James. Martin Frobisher, Elizabethan Privateer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
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Although a biography of Martin Frobisher, this book is also possibly the most deeply researched study of Elizabethan channel piracy, wartime corsair activity, and overseas adventuring. The story is particularly rich in treating Frobisher’s encounters with Inuit peoples of eastern Canada in the 1570s.
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Preston, Diana, and Michael Preston. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer; The Life of William Dampier. New York: Walker, 2004.
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The best examination of Dampier’s life to date, stressing his interest in natural history.
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Ritchie, Robert C. Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
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Still stands as the best scholarly treatment of William Kidd’s rise and fall around the beginning of the 18th century; also a gripping read. Ritchie explains how the rise of the English East India Company and the Atlantic war on piracy launched by the Royal Navy converged to crush the unlucky Kidd after his misadventures in the Indian Ocean.
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Sugden, John. Sir Francis Drake. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.
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Sugden’s deeply researched and dispassionate narrative contrasts nicely with the polemical approach taken by Kelsey.
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Woodard, Colin. The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007.
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Not a scholarly work, but an entertaining overview of Golden Age piracy told through major figures, which ends by focusing on the rise of privateer-turned-pirate-hunter Woodes Rogers.
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