Pirate Life & Culture
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Pirate Funerals and Burial at Sea: What Actually Happened When a Pirate Died
Period sources describe sparse, utilitarian burials at sea, not the elaborate ceremonies of fiction, with a weighted shroud and a prayer book standing in for any pirate funeral rite.
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After the Pardon: What Happened to the Pirates Who Took the King’s Amnesty
The King’s 1718 pardon ended the pirate republic at Nassau on paper. What happened next to the men who took it, and the ones who didn’t, tells the real story.
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What Actually Killed Pirates: Disease, Not the Cutlass
Rats, lice, scurvy, and tropical fever did more damage to pirate crews than combat ever did, and Blackbeard’s Charleston blockade shows just how badly they needed medicine.
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What Pirates Actually Did With Their Prisoners
Ransom, forced recruitment, and the real meaning of the Jolly Roger: what actually happened to sailors captured by pirate crews during the Golden Age of Piracy.
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Keelhauling: The Brutal Punishment Pirates Rarely Actually Used
Keelhauling is the punishment every pirate film reaches for. The documented record points instead to the Dutch navy, with no sign pirate articles ever wrote it into their own rules.
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How Pirates Actually Navigated: Instruments, Not Instinct
Pirate crews used the same compasses, backstaffs, and dead reckoning as every other sailor of their day, and ran into the same unsolved problem of longitude.
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Nassau: Daily Life in the Pirates’ Republic, 1713–1718
For roughly five years, the Bahamian port of Nassau had no functioning government at all — just several thousand pirates, a harbor built for careening, and a rough code that passed for law.
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Forced Men: The Pirates Who Said They Never Volunteered
Captured sailors routinely claimed they’d been forced into piracy. Courts rarely believed them — except when the accused happened to be a surgeon.
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Piracy on Trial: How the Vice-Admiralty Courts Judged Pirates
Pirates who were caught rarely walked a plank. They faced a specific legal process built around a 1698 law, tried by seven commissioners instead of a jury.
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Black Pirates and the Limits of the Pirate Code
Black and African sailors were a substantial part of Golden Age pirate crews, until capture exposed how differently the law treated them.