Piracy History

The answer to this badly conceived rhyme is not extremely difficult to discern. Pirates! Thanks to Hollywood these criminals have been immortalized on screen and in the minds of generations of America’s citizens. Everyone recognizes who Blackbeard, William Kidd, and Hollywood’s Captain Hook and Jack Sparrow are. They have become a part of our culture. But do we know the true stories? What about the beginning of piracy? What about the varieties of pirates that are virtually unknown? Do we know the true story of the great Blackbeard himself? Probably not. Fortunately that is all about to be amended. Prepare yourself to take a journey into the distant past, into a land of danger and excitement, where pirates are boundless, to a place

known as…America.
Something that few people ponder is this: when and where did pirates come from?

Looking way back to the beginning of seafaring voyages, it is visible to see that wherever there have been ships there have been also been pirates. However it truthfully stretches back even further than the beginning of the use of ships. It really originated with the first thief. When a man beheld an object that he desired for himself, even though it belonged to another, he elected to purloin the item that had caught his attention. That is exactly what pirates did and, in some parts of the world, still do today. They aspire to take what other people have, and enormous bodies of water will never hinder greed. If a merchant decided to transport his wares by ship, the thief followed suit and also took to the waters. A pirate is simply a thief with a boat. But we digress; back to the official origin of piracy. The approved source is in Greece around two-thousand years ago, when sea robbers began to attack ships along the Greek trade routes. Without exception, every sea-faring nation in all of recorded history has been plagued by pirates. Yes, it has been at different degrees depending on how vigilant a country was at protecting its ships and how desirable of a target it was. But nevertheless piracy has been in existence for thousands of years, and as we will soon see, it has not always posed a

threat.
Even though all thieves of the high seas are labeled “pirates”, there are numerous varieties of sea-faring raiders. Privateers were “legal” pirates, who were enlisted by assorted countries to attack ships from unfriendly nations. One of the most famous privateers in history is Sir Francis Drake. He was employed by the British government to pillage Spanish merchant ships returning from the New World. He was allowed to retain an enormous percentage of the stolen goods except for a small fee that he paid to the English government. Another brand of pirate was the Corsairs. This was an English term for sea raiders that were either from Muslim or Christian countries. If Muslim, they were assigned to attack ships from Christian nations. If they were from Christian lands, they would pillage Muslim vessels. Therefore it may be perceived that even religious feuds were not invulnerable to criminal resolutions. Buccaneers were also thieves of the open seas, although they began as traders of bacon. They would purchase the smoked meat from hunters from Hispaniola and trade it for a profit with other ships that they encountered. Unfortunately for them, though, there was not much money to be earned in that business. They soon realized that piracy would be an extremely profitable venture instead. In fact the word “buccaneer” is derived from the French word boucan, the French name for the meat that they sold, bacon.