historical
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Piri Reis
Piri Reis was an Ottoman corsair who began raiding Mediterranean shipping in the 1480s alongside his uncle, the corsair captain Kemal Reis, before turning to naval cartography after Kemal’s death around 1510. He later served in the Ottoman navy under admirals including Hayreddin Barbarossa and eventually commanded Ottoman fleets in the Red Sea and Indian…
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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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Edward Mansvelt
Edward Mansvelt was a mid-17th-century buccaneer admiral of the Brethren of the Coast whose failed attempt to hold Santa Catalina Island as a permanent base preceded, and set up, the career of his protégé Henry Morgan.
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Pierre le Grand
Pierre le Grand was a French buccaneer said to have captured a Spanish galleon near Hispaniola in the mid-17th century with a crew of 28 men in a small boat, in a raid often cited as an early, defining episode of Caribbean buccaneering.
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Pier Gerlofs Donia
Grutte Pier: a Frisian farmer turned rebel and pirate whose real campaign against Habsburg rule in the 1510s was later inflated into tales of a seven-foot giant.
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Robert Culliford
An English pirate of the Pirate Round who mutinied against William Kidd not once but twice, took a fortune in the Red Sea, and outlasted the more famous man he betrayed.
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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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Christopher Myngs
Christopher Myngs was an English naval officer and buccaneer who led fleets of privateers against Spanish colonial towns in the Caribbean during the 1650s and 1660s. He raided settlements including Tolu, Santa Marta, and Cumana, and in 1662 captured and plundered Santiago de Cuba. In February 1663 he led the largest buccaneer fleet then assembled,…
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Francis Verney
An English gentleman who lost his inheritance, sold his estate, and became one of the most feared Barbary corsairs operating out of Algiers.
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Jeanne de Clisson
Jeanne de Clisson (c. 1300–1359) was a Breton noblewoman who turned privateer against the French crown after her husband, Olivier IV de Clisson, was beheaded in Paris on August 2, 1343, on a treason charge that contemporaries widely regarded as unjust. She sold her remaining lands, raised several hundred men for reprisal raids in Brittany,…