Pirate: Did you mean...?

The English mariner, privateer, and explorer Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596 CE) made his circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580 CE. Only the second to achieve this feat after the expedition of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan...

The Battle of Flamborough Head (23 September 1779) was one of the most famous naval engagements of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Fought off the coast of Yorkshire, England, it pitted the USS Bonhomme Richard, commanded by John...

In the Merovingian period, Scandinavia was only just emerging from its prehistoric Iron Age. A process of political centralization that had begun in the Migration Period led to the emergence of the first Scandinavian kingdoms and a warlike...

In The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, author and recognized archaeologist Dean Snow shows that Ingram was not a fraud, contradicting the longstanding narrative of his life. Snow's careful examination of three long-neglected surviving...

The Jolly Roger pirate flag of the English pirate Edward 'Ned' Low (d. 1724). Low was one of the cruelest of all pirate captains during the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730), notorious for torturing and mutilating his captives.

A 17th-century illustration of the buccaneer and pirate base of Tortuga, located on the northwest coast of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

A colourised engraving of the pirate Blackbeard, aka Edward Teach (d. 1718). First appeared in an 18th-century edition of a 'General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates' by Charles Johnson (likely a pseudonym...

Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, active in the Caribbean in 1719-20, a 1725 Dutch print which appeared in an early edition of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates by Daniel Defoe/Charles Johnson.

A model of the Queen Anne's Revenge. The ship was originally used for the transportation of slaves but was captured and converted into a 40-cannon pirate ship by Blackbeard, aka Edward Teach (d. 1718). (North Carolina Museum of History)

An artist's impression of how the pirate Mary Read (d. 1721) may have looked. Image from the computer game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag by Ubisoft. © 2013 Ubisoft