Pirate
Written by Todd Massey on July 7th, 2008Pirate is now the commonly accepted term around the world for a person who commits a variety of treachery on the high seas. Earlier in the history of pirates, they were given more specific names that helped to better identify them.
Privateers would have been pirates legally commissioned by a country or government giving them permission to wage war against another country or government. The French and English pirates that were living in the Caribbean about the time of the seventeenth century went by the name, buccaneer. Of course the name buccaneer is a very anglicized version of the French word, boucanier.
A stretch of land and water called the Barbary Coast was home to the privateers or Islamic pirates called Barbary corsairs. The French and other non-Islamic nations considered the corsairs pirates, instead of privateers. But they focused their efforts on Christian and non-Islamic prey.
In the Mediterranean area where sea trading was extremely active was where pirates really came to grow and be very dynamic. The governments and countries fighting with each other often used pirates against their enemies. The city-states of Greece even used pirates at one time as tax collectors because they new the locals were so afraid of the pirates that the people would pay up.
Pirate activity was sometime made legal by a country, when this happened the pirates became known as privateers. Warring countries like England, France and Spain would direct their privateers to attack enemy ships and disrupt trade. Privateers were often more successful than the navies at fighting and the theft of merchants and government treasure could badly hinder a country.
When trade would become too disrupted by pirates some governments would join together in a concentrated effort to purge the pirates from trade routes.
Pirates would escape to sea running from poverty, escaping the local navy or cruel laws of the land. Pirates needed their own laws on board ship so that they could come together and operate successfully. This inadvertently led to pirates creating what became known as the first true individual democracy in which every pirate had a voice by having an equal vote in what took place on board the ship. But shipboard lawbreakers found they had to face harsh penalties to pay for their transgressions against fellow crew members.
Severe injury, lost limbs or body parts was commonplace in the dangerous life of a pirate. But pirates take care of their own, and established compensatory payment for injuries. Establishing in writing for example that the loss of a leg was worth 500 pieces of eight.
Piracy could be a hard life, dangerous and deadly but it was often preferable to the navy of the day. You could potentially get better pay, better food be treated better and have a say in decisions.
Navy pay was terrible while a pirate could receive large sums after a successful raid and the treasure had been divvied up. But as was often the case a pirate would spend or lose all his money in a few nights of celebration.
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