historical
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Rollo of Normandy
A Viking raider on the Seine who became, by treaty in 911, the first ruler of Normandy and ancestor of William the Conqueror.
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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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Sayyida al-Hurra
Sayyida al-Hurra (a title meaning roughly “the noble lady who answers to no one”) was a Moroccan ruler and privateer who governed the city of Tétouan from around 1515 until 1542. Born around 1485-1495 to the founder of Chefchaouen, she became Tétouan’s governor after the death of her husband, Mohammad al-Mandri, and used the position…
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John Coxon
John Coxon was an English buccaneer active in the Caribbean in the late 1670s and early 1680s. In January 1680 he led an attack on the Spanish town of Portobelo and was elected admiral of a combined buccaneer fleet. He then led roughly 330 to 350 men on foot across the Isthmus of Panama to…
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Teuta
Teuta, regent of the Illyrian Ardiaei kingdom, defended piracy as Illyrian custom and drew Rome into its first war across the Adriatic.
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Adam Baldridge
Adam Baldridge was an English pirate merchant who, after fleeing Jamaica to escape a murder charge, established a fortified trading post on Île Sainte-Marie (St. Mary’s Island) off the coast of Madagascar in the late 1680s or early 1690s, sources differ on the exact year. From a hilltop stronghold overlooking the harbor, he supplied provisions,…
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Jean Fleury
French privateer who captured part of Cortes’s Aztec treasure fleet off Cape St. Vincent in 1523, before being hanged as a pirate by Spain in 1527.
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Bartolomeu Português
A Portuguese buccaneer whose escape from Spanish captivity — stabbing a guard, floating ashore on wine jars, and recapturing his own prison ship — became one of Exquemelin’s best-known stories.
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Robert Surcouf
The “King of the Corsairs,” a French privateer whose capture of the East Indiaman Kent in 1800 made him a national hero and a wealthy man.
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Kemal Reis
Kemal Reis was an Ottoman corsair and admiral, born around 1451, who began his career raiding Christian shipping in the western Mediterranean before entering Ottoman state service. Starting in 1487 he helped defend the last Muslim territory in Spain, and after the fall of Granada in 1492 he carried thousands of Muslim and Jewish refugees…