early 17th century, 1600s-1635
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Moses Cohen Henriques
Moses Cohen Henriques was a Sephardic Jewish privateer of Dutch-Portuguese descent who sailed for the Dutch West India Company during the Eighty Years’ War. In 1628 he served under Admiral Piet Pieterszoon Hein in the capture of the Spanish treasure fleet at Matanzas Bay, Cuba, helping seize roughly 11.5 million guilders in silver, gold, and…
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Henry Mainwaring
Henry Mainwaring was an English pirate who began his career hunting other pirates. In 1610 the Lord High Admiral commissioned him to capture Peter Easton; that mission failed, and Mainwaring was instead given a privateering commission against Spanish shipping. He turned pirate with the ships under his command, operating from a base at La Mamora…
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Peter Easton
An English privateer who turned pirate, briefly controlled the seas off Newfoundland with a fleet of ten ships, and retired a wealthy nobleman in Savoy.
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Red Seal Ship (Shuinsen)
Red seal ships were large Japanese trading vessels licensed by the shogunate for officially sanctioned overseas trade in the early 17th century, often built with hybrid Japanese-Chinese-European design features and crewed in part by sailors with earlier wokou piracy connections before Japan’s maritime trade restrictions tightened.