There was no “pirate ship” type
No standard design of pirate vessels existed. Pirates used whatever was available, and mostly what was useful: a fast vessel that could catch merchant ships and escape the navy’s. Many started with small boats or sloops, and moved up to larger prizes as they captured them. Popular images of black-sailed galleons with elaborate carved decoration come mainly from fiction and film. This article concerns the Atlantic and Caribbean pirates of roughly the 1650s to the 1720s, the period most often meant by the “golden age”, a label that historians use loosely.
The Caribbean sloop
The ship most often linked with pirates is the sloop: a single-masted, fore-and-aft rigged vessel, in a form often built in Jamaica, Bermuda and the Bahamas. A sloop of this kind was quick, shallow in draft, and able to sail well into the wind. Shallow draft helped when hiding in inlets, shoals and creeks that bigger warships could not enter. Sloops could also be rowed with sweeps in calm weather. These were not unique to pirates; the same type was common in coastal trade, and the history of the single-masted sloop shows how widespread it was. A pirate vessel might look almost the same as an honest trader until the flag went up.
Brigantines and schooners were also used, for similar reasons of speed and handling.
Captured merchantmen
When pirates captured a larger ship, they often kept it and adapted it. Extra gun ports might be cut, upper works altered or removed to make the ship lighter and quicker, and the vessel renamed. Captured ships supplied guns, stores and the space for a large crew, which pirates needed because they relied on numbers to overpower and board prizes.
Two examples are well documented. Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, took a French slave ship in 1717 and renamed it Queen Anne’s Revenge; it ran aground near Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in 1718, and its wreck has been studied by archaeologists. Samuel Bellamy captured the slave ship Whydah in 1717, and it was lost in a storm off Cape Cod in April of that year, with its wreck later identified. These were ships of the commercial slave trade, and the slave trade ships they came from carried enslaved people in terrible conditions, a reminder of the context in which this piracy took place. The recovered material from such wrecks forms part of maritime archaeology.
Crews, guns and tactics
Pirate crews were typically much larger than merchant crews. That meant a lot of hands to board and fight, but it also meant more mouths to feed and more pressure on supplies. Pirate vessels carried guns, but their main method was often intimidation and a fast approach, with boarding as the final step. Many merchant crews gave up quickly. Pirates had reasons to avoid damaging a prize, because a ship fought to destruction was no good to them.
Many pirates were former sailors, including men from the navy, merchant ships and privateers. Some had been pressed into service and had grim memories of the practice; the details of press gangs help explain the appeal of life outside the navy’s discipline. Pirate ships were also known for their rough democratic agreements about shares of plunder, though these varied from crew to crew and the evidence is limited.
Myth and record
Several familiar images need care. Pirates did fly flags, often with skull and bones motifs and many other designs, but the standardised “Jolly Roger” is a later simplification. Walking the plank is mostly a literary invention, although cruelty and violence were real. Buried treasure is also largely myth; pirates generally spent or divided what they took. Eye patches, parrots and the like come mostly from later books. Where reliable evidence exists, it comes from trial records, ship’s papers, newspapers and survivors’ accounts, and some of it is one-sided because it was prepared by prosecutors or authors writing for readers who wanted a story.
Piracy should also be separated from legal privateering. A privateer held letters of marque, a government commission to attack enemy ships in wartime, and in theory acted lawfully. When a war ended, many such sailors lost their licence, and some drifted into piracy. The boundary was not always clear in practice.
Why the golden age ended
By the early 1720s the pirate threat was being reduced through a combination of measures:
- Royal Navy ships and colonial vessels patrolled the main trade routes and attacked known pirate bases.
- Governments offered pardons to those who surrendered, with the exemplary use of trials and executions for those who did not.
- Woodes Rogers arrived as governor of the Bahamas in 1718, ending the loose pirate haven at Nassau.
- The end of the long War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 released many experienced sailors from naval and privateering service, which is often thought to have fed piracy in the following years.
- Merchants and ports improved their defences and cooperation.
Bartholomew Roberts, one of the most successful pirates by number of captures, was killed in action in 1722, and the period is usually taken to end around the 1720s or early 1730s. Piracy did not vanish entirely; it continued in other regions and forms, and the Caribbean sea lanes continued to see occasional attacks and smuggling. But the large, organised pirate groups of the golden age were not seen again on the same scale.
What the ships tell us
The pirate ship was less a distinct invention than a use of ships that already existed. Its history says more about the economy of the Atlantic, the supply of idle seamen and the strength of states than about any special technology. That makes it a useful reminder that popular images of the past, however vivid, are best checked against the evidence of the vessels, wrecks and documents that remain.