legendary
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Jacquotte Delahaye
Jacquotte Delahaye is a figure said to have been a female pirate of mixed French and Haitian descent in 17th-century Saint-Domingue, reputedly faking her own death to evade capture. However, no contemporary primary sources or historical records verify her existence, and most modern historians consider her story to be a later legend rather than documented…
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Lai Choi San
Lai Choi San was reported to be a female pirate commanding a fleet of junks in the South China Sea during the 1920s-1930s, described in journalist Aleko Lilius’s 1931 book I Sailed with Chinese Pirates. Because Lilius was a source of questionable reliability with a history of fraud allegations, and no independent corroboration of her…
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Klaus Störtebeker
Klaus Störtebeker was the best-known leader of the Victual Brothers (Vitalienbrüder), a fraternity of privateers-turned-pirates that raided Hanseatic League shipping in the North and Baltic Seas in the late 14th century, after originally being hired to supply besieged Stockholm during a war between Sweden and Denmark. Much of his popular legend, including his name, was…
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Sadie the Goat
Sadie the Goat is a figure described in Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book The Gangs of New York as a Manhattan street criminal and gang member who later led river piracy raids on merchant boats along the Hudson River around 1869. Because Asbury’s book is the sole source for her exploits and is known to blend…
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Alwilda
Alwilda is a legendary pirate queen described in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Gesta Danorum, said to have disguised herself as a man and taken to piracy in the Baltic Sea to avoid an arranged marriage to Prince Alf of Denmark. According to the tale, Alf eventually defeated her fleet in battle, after which she revealed her…