François L’Olonnais has long been introduced as the most brutal of the French buccaneers who haunted the...
Pirates
The Golden Age of Piracy, spanning roughly from the 1650s to the 1730s, was marked by a surge in maritime raiding across the Atlantic and the Caribbean. This period saw the rise of infamous figures such as Edward Teach, Henry Every and Bartholomew Roberts, operating at a time when empires were expanding and naval power was in flux. Pirates targeted merchant shipping routes, often exploiting colonial rivalries and weak enforcement. While romanticised in later fiction, piracy in this era was brutal, opportunistic and shaped by the politics and economics of empire, trade and war. It left a complex and lasting historical legacy.
Pirate fiction is usually all crashing waves and rum-fuelled chaos, but Flint and Silver manage something far...
When Our Flag Means Death first sailed onto HBO Max in 2022, few expected a pirate comedy...
Some characters feel like they arrived fully formed. Long John Silver does not. In Black Sails, he...
Some figures slip into history with a flourish of steel. Alexandre Exquemelin wandered in through the back...
Piracy in the Caribbean was never a single era or a neat collection of names. It was...
Sayyida al-Hurra is one of those figures who slipped through the net of popular history yet left...
A historian’s appraisal by a woman who has spent far too long squinting at nineteenth century pulp...
Black Sails has plenty of battles, but it is the duels that stay with you. Those tight,...
Few pirates have sailed so swiftly from obscurity to myth as Thomas Tew. In the late 17th...