Partly this was because he cultivated a terrifying persona. But among all the most significant pirates from this period, none looms larger than Edward Teach, known more commonly as Blackbeard.īlackbeard’s career as a pirate captain only lasted two years, but this proved long enough for him to became the most notorious buccaneer of them all. These buccaneers even created their own ‘Pirate Republic’ on Nassau island in the Bahamas, and put in place an egalitarian Pirate Code that included compensation for work-related injuries - 600 pieces of eight for the loss of a right hand, for example. Soon pirates like Calico Jack Rackham and Bartholomew Roberts were plundering at will. Navigation laws meant that only British goods could be shipped into British colonies, which created a ready demand for luxury goods taken from the holds of captured Spanish and French merchantmen. In addition to this, there were plenty of colonists content to turn a blind eye to the activities of pirates. Not only were North American waters rich in targets, they were now poorly policed. ![]() ![]() A pool of highly trained but unemployed privateer crews was available to recruit, while the end of the war saw the exhausted participants making sweeping reductions in the size of their costly navies. Many factors coalesced to make this a lucrative time to be a pirate.
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