Portal:Piracy/Selected article
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- Week 30 2007 (7/22/07 - 7/28/07)
A treasure map is a variation of a map to mark the location of buried treasure, a lost mine, a valuable secret, or a hidden locale. More common in fiction than in reality, "Pirate treasure maps" are often depicted in works of fiction as hand drawn and containing arcane clues for the characters to follow. Regardless of the terms literary genesis, anything that meets the criteria of a "map" describing the location of a "treasure" could appropriately be called a treasure map. Although buried pirate treasure is a favorite literary theme, there are very few documented cases of pirates actually burying treasure, and no documented cases of a historical pirate treasure map.
One documented case of buried treasure involved Francis Drake who buried Spanish gold and silver after raiding the mule train at Nombre de Dios — after Drake went to find his ships, he returned six hours later and retrieved the loot and sailed for England. Another case in 1720 involved British Captain Stratton of the Prince Eugene who, after supposedly trading — rum with pirates in the Caribbean, buried his gold near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. One of his crew, Morgan Miles, turned him into the authorities, and it is assumed the loot was recovered. In any case, Captain Stratton was not a pirate, and made no map. (more...)
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- Week 31 2007 (7/29/07 - 8/04/07)
The Jolly Roger is the name now given to any of various flags flown to identify the user as a pirate. The most famous Jolly Roger today is the Skull and Crossbones, a skull over two long bones set in an X arrangement on a black field. Historically, the flag was flown to induce pirates' victims to surrender readily.
Since the decline of piracy, various military units have used the Jolly Roger, usually in skull-and-crossbones design, as a unit identification insignia or a victory flag to ascribe to themselves the proverbial ferocity and toughness of pirates.
The name "Jolly Roger" goes back at least to Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724. Johnson specifically cites two pirates as having named their flag "Jolly Roger": Bartholomew Roberts in June, 1721 and Francis Spriggs in July, 1723. While Spriggs and Roberts used the same name for their flags, their flag designs were quite different, suggesting that already "Jolly Roger" was a generic term for black pirate flags rather than a name for any single specific design. Neither Spriggs' nor Roberts' Jolly Roger consisted of a skull and crossbones. (more...)
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- August 2007
Wōkòu or Japanese pirates (Chinese character: 倭寇; Chinese pronunciation: wōkòu; Japanese pronunciation: wakō; Korean pronunciation: 왜구 waegu) were pirates who raided the coastlines of China and Korea from the thirteenth century onwards. Originally, the Wokou were mainly soldiers, ronin, merchants and smugglers from Japan, but became predominantly from China two centuries later.
The early phase of Wōkòu activity began in the 13th century and extended to the second half of the fourteenth century. Japanese pirates from only Japan concentrated on the Korean peninsula and spread across the Yellow Sea to China. Ming China implemented a policy to forbid civil trade with Japan while maintaining governmental trade (Haijin). The Ming court believed that limiting non-government trade would in turn expel the Wōkòu. But haijin wasn't successful as it instead forced many Chinese merchants to protect their own interests by trading with Japan illegally. This led to the second major phase of Wōkòu activity which occurred in the early to mid-sixteenth century, where Japanese pirates colluded with their Chinese counterparts and expanded their forces. During this period the composition and leadership of the Wōkòu changed significantly to become Chinese. At their height in the 1550s, the Wōkòu operated throughout the seas of East Asia, even sailing up large river systems such as the Yangtze.
The term "Wōkòu" is a combination of "Wō" (倭) referring to Japanese, and "kòu" (寇), meaning "bandit; enemy; invasion". The earliest textual reference to the term "Wōkòu" as Japanese invader comes from Gwanggaeto Stele erected in 414. (more...)
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- September 2007
Buccaneer is a term that was used in the later 17th century in the Caribbean Islands to refer to pirates who attacked Spanish shipping. The term "buccaneer" draws its lineage from the Arawak word buccan which became corrupted into the French word "boucanier"(referring to French settlers who practiced the smoking of meat). Boucaniers originally were French hunters who were poaching cattle and pigs on western on the islands that are now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They would smoke the meat on wooden frames, boucans, so that it could be saved for a later time. The boucaniers were taught this technique by the local Arawak tribes from Santo Domingo, calling the method Barbicoa - which is where the word and method of Barbecue originated. The word was adopted in English as "buccaneer."
Conflict with Spanish forces from the east of Hispaniola drove many of the buccaneers from the mainland to the island of Tortuga. Here, they turned to piracy against Spanish shipping, generally using small craft to attack galleons in the vicinity of the Windward Passage. English settlers occupying Jamaica began to spread the name with the meaning of rebel pirates sailing in the Caribbean ports and seas. The name became universally adopted in 1684 when a book, The Buccaneers of America was written by Alexandre Exquemelin and translated from Dutch into English. (more...)
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- October 2007
The Golden Age of Piracy occurred mostly in the Caribbean, the American coast, the Indian Ocean, and the western coast of Africa
During the early 18th century, many European and colonial American sailors and privateers found themselves unemployed. Factors contributing to piracy included the rise in quantities of valuable cargoes being shipped to Europe over vast ocean areas, the weakness of European navies in peacetime, the training and experience that many sailors had gained as conscripts in European navies (particularly the Royal Navy), and the weakness of European government in overseas colonies.
In 1713, a succession of peace treaties were signed, known as the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (also called 'Queen Anne's War'). With the end of this conflict, thousands of seamen, including Britain's paramilitary privateers, were relieved of military duty. The result was a large number of trained, idle sailors at a time when the cross-Atlantic colonial shipping trade was beginning to boom. In addition, Europeans who had been pushed by unemployment to become sailors and soldiers involved in slaving were often enthusiastic to abandon that profession and turn to pirating, giving pirate captains for many years a constant pool of trained European recruits to be found in west African waters and coasts. (more...)
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- November 2007
Viking refers to a member of the Scandinavian seafaring traders, warriors and pirates who raided and colonized wide areas of Europe from the late 8th to the 11th century. These Norsemen (literally, men from the north) used their famed longships to travel as far east as Constantinople and the Volga River in Russia, and as far west as Newfoundland. This period of Viking expansion is often referred to as the Viking Age of Scandinavian History.
The period from the earliest recorded raids in the 790s until the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is commonly known as the Viking Age of Scandinavian History. The Normans, however, were descended from Danes, Norwegian (in Norwegian they are still to date referred to as jeg er en Normann), Orkney, Hiberno-Norse, and Danelaw Vikings who were given feudal overlordship of areas in northern France — the Duchy of Normandy — in the 8th century. In that respect, the Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe. Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England who was killed during the Norman invasion in 1066, was descended from Danish Vikings. (more...)
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- December 2007
The Victual Brothers resp. Vitalians or Vitalian Brotherhood were a companionship of privateers who later turned to piracy. They were hired in 1392 by the Dukes of Mecklenburg to fight against Denmark, because the Danish Queen Margaret I had imprisoned Albrecht of Mecklenburg and his son to subdue the kingdom of Sweden. Albrecht was King of Sweden since 1364 and Duke of Mecklenburg since 1383.
The Victual Brothers were organised as a brotherhood or guild and attracted men from all over Europe. Their main naval enemy in 1392 was the powerful Hanseatic town of Lübeck, which supported Denmark in the war. Apart from Lübeck, the Hanseatic League at first encouraged the Victual Brothers. Most of the Hanseatic towns had no desire to see Denmark victorious, since its location was strategic for the control of the seaways. (more...)
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- January 2008
A pirate code is a code of conduct invented for governing pirates. Some of these codes are fictional, and some historical. In the second half of the 17th century, buccaneers began operating under a set of rules variously called the Chasse-Partie, Charter Party, Custom of the Coast, or Jamaica Discipline. These eventually became known as Articles of Agreement, or the pirate's code. Pirate articles varied from one captain to another, and sometimes even from one voyage to another, but they were generally alike in including provisions for discipline, specifications for each crewmate's share of treasure, and compensation for the injured.
Each crew member was asked to sign or make his mark on the articles, then swear an oath of allegiance or honor. The oath was sometimes taken on a Bible, but legend suggests that other pirates swore on crossed pistols, swords, or axes, or on a human skull, or astride a cannon. This act formally inducted the signer into the pirate crew, generally entitling him to vote for officers and on other "affairs of moment," to bear arms, and to his share of the plunder. The articles having been signed, they were then posted in a prominent place, often the door of the grand cabin. (more...)
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- February 2008
Tortuga (Île de la Tortue in French) is a Caribbean island that forms part of Haiti, off the northwest coast of Hispaniola. Tortuga was discovered by Europeans in 1493, during the first voyage of Christopher Columbus into the New World. Columbus' sailors called it Tortuga ("Turtle") because its humped shape resembled a turtle.
By 1640, the buccaneers of Tortuga were calling themselves the Brethren of the Coast. The pirate population was mostly made up of French and Englishmen, along with a small number of Dutchmen. By the year 1670, as the buccaneer era was in decline, many of the pirates, seeking a new source of trade, turned to log cutting and trading wood from the island. At this time, however, a Welsh pirate named Henry Morgan started to promote himself and invite the pirates on the island of Tortuga to set sail under him. They were hired by the French as a striking force that allowed France to have a much stronger hold on the Caribbean region. Consequently, the pirates were never really controlled, and kept Tortuga as a neutral hideout for pirate booty. (more...)
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- March 2008
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The great era of Piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1560s and died out in the 1720s as the nation-states of Western Europe with colonies in the Americas began to exert more state control over the waterways of the New World. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1640s until the 1680s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of British seaports such as Port Royal in Jamaica and the French settlement at Tortuga.
Piracy in the Caribbean came out of the interplay of larger international trends in the early modern period. The Caribbean had become a center of European trade and colonization after Columbus’ discovery of the New World for Europeans in 1492. In the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas the non-European world had been divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese along a north-south line 270 leagues west of the Cape Verde. This gave Spain control of the Americas, a position the Spaniards later reinforced with an equally unenforceable papal bull. On the Spanish Main, the key early settlements were Cartagena in present-day Colombia, Porto Bello and Panama City on the Isthmus of Panama, Santiago on the southeastern coast of Cuba, and Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish were mining staggering amounts of silver bullion from the mines of Zacatecas in New Spain (Mexico) and Potosí in Peru (actually now located in Bolivia). The huge Spanish silver shipments from the New World to the Old attracted pirates and privateers, both in the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, all along the route from the Caribbean to Seville. (more...)
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