Triangular Trade made Piracy Golden

When European demand for the products from the Spanish Main and the Caribbean Islands soared in the 17th and 18th centuries, a very profitable system was set up to transport these goods back to England, Spain, France and The Netherlands.  The so called Triangular Trade took manufactured products such as cloth, iron and beer to Africa to be exchanged for slaves, which were then takes across the Atlantic and sold at tremendous profit.  The ships then loaded up with sugar, molasses and rum and headed back to Europe in a triangular circuit that took about a year to complete.

By the beginning of the 18th century all of this wealth, the slave ships coming in from Africa and the goods laden ships leaving for Europe, had become irresistible targets for looters and pirates.  The golden age of piracy was born, not due to grand efforts on the part of the pirates themselves, but because of the abundance of spoils and the ease of taking them.

Here’s some more reading material: http://piratesoflore.com/triangular-trade.html

Pirates didn’t worry about Hurricanes

In the years from 1645 to 1715, which coincided with the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean, there was a lull in tropical storm activity.  Recent studies of examining the tree rings in the wood from 500 year old shipwrecks shows there were 75% fewer storms during that time period.

One wonders if the increasing number of hurricanes, which clearly made their trade more perilous, further encouraged the pirates of Nassau to accept the amnesty pardon offered by Woodes Rogers, the new governor of The Bahamas, when he arrived in 1718.

Here’s a link to the article:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth-sciences/what-shipwrecks-tell-us-about-500-year-old-hurricanes?utm_source=Today+in+Cosmos+Magazine&utm_campaign=2677157da0-RSS_EMAIL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5f4ec2b124-2677157da0-179843297

 

The real Robinson Crusoe was a pirate

I just read a great article from the Smithsonian about Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe; click here to read it for yourself.  Not only does it tell the story of Selkirk, but it also provides a glimpse into what life aboard a real pirate ship might have been; here’s an exerpt from the article:

“Because pirates have been so romanticized by actors from Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp, it’s easy to overlook that the typical pirate ship stank of animals and excrement, that scurvy and yellow fever often killed so many that corpses were routinely dumped at sea, and that pirates often delighted in macabre torture.

Pirate prisoners would most likely have chosen to walk the plank—a practice more common in TV cartoons than in pirate history—rather than be subjected to sadists like Edward Low, who, in the 1720s, cut off a prisoner’s lips and broiled them in front of the hapless fellow, or those who practiced “woolding,” in which slender cords were twisted tightly around men’s heads in the hope of seeing their eyes burst from their sockets.

Consequently, when commercial shipowners or governments captured pirates, they were rarely shown mercy. Pirate expert David Cordingly, former curator of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, writes in Under the Black Flag that it was common practice in the British colonies to place the body of a captured pirate in a steel cage shaped like a man’s body and suspend it near the entrance to a port as a grisly warning to seamen.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-robinson-crusoe-74877644/#uojl6hh0zwYidZiL.99
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