Depending on who you ask, as long as humanity has been sailing or shipping goods via any means across long distances, there have been opportunists stealing their goods and threatening their livelihoods en route. That's what a pirate is: a thief who, usually in a loosely-organized group, intercepts goods being transported from one place to another. This can have various motivations, and can happen over land (including in the modern-day United States!), fictionally (so far) via air and space travel, and of course, as we tend to think of when we hear the word "pirate", by sea.
Some of the earliest recorded examples of piracy come from the Mediterranean of the classical era, and depending on how you define "piracy", the Vikings made a way of life out of it. Most well-known historical sea pirates come from the Age of Exploration, aka The Age of Discovery...you know, the post-Columbus colonial period where Europe figured out what was at the end of their driveway and has made everyone else miserable about it since. The oceans were the fastest way to move goods or people from one continent to another, and with the rise of the trade patterns and routes we call the Triangle Trade, there was a huge expansion of transport, commerce, and travel by sea...so of course more opportunity for piracy.
The Golden Age of Piracy is generally considered to be the latter half of the 17th century--often counted from the rise of Captain Kidd in the 1650s--to the 1720s, when The Man initiated a crackdown. There were of course lots of cool pirates before and after this, as noted in these pages--and if we forget that pirates didn't only exist in European spheres of influence, we miss out on some seriously cool legends--but a lot of the "rockstars" of piracy, those we might be able to name off the top of our heads today, were contemporaries of each other during the Golden Age, inspiring or influencing each other, getting into dramas and politics, forming alliances or causing problems for each other, and generally creating some good stories to be told for centuries to come.
As with all legends, most are rooted somewhere along the line in reality, although specifics might be blurred, exaggerated, misattributed, or fabricated. Browse through the gallery of images below to learn about whatever pirates I think are cool and did some looking into!
| Trendsetters | |||
Sir Francis Drake |
Henry Avery |
Captain Morgan |
Captain Kidd |
| The Flying Gang and associated acts | |||
Blackbeard  |
Stede Bonnet  |
"Black Sam" Bellamy |
Charles Vane |
| Squad Goals | |||
Grace O'Malley |
Zheng Yi Sao |
Anne Bonny |
Mary Read |
| Miscellaneous pirates I just think are cool | |||
Edward England |
Charles Gibbs |
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| Pirates I hope to add more about after more research | |||
Jewish pirates displaced by the Spaniards |
Barbary Coast pirates intercepting trade in and around the Middle East |
That really interesting moment in US history where any willing American who owned a boat was offered writs of marque to attack European merchants! |
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