Famous Pirates in History from Golden Age of Piracy

The earliest known literary reference of a “Golden Age” of piracy is from 1894, when the English journalist George Powell wrote about “What appears to have been the golden age of piracy up to the last decade of the 17th century.”

Powell employs the phrase while reviewing Charles Leslie’s A New and Exact History of Jamaica, then over 150 years old. Powell employs the phrase only once.

In 1897, a more systematic use of the term “Golden Age of Piracy” was introduced by historian John Fiske, who wrote, “At no other time in the world’s history has the business of piracy thriven so greatly as in the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth.

Its golden era may be said to have extended from about 1650 to about 1720.”

Fiske included the activities of the Barbary corsairs and East Asian pirates in this “Golden Age,” noting that “as these Mussulman pirates and those of Eastern Asia were as busily at work in the seventeenth century as at any other time, their case does not impair my statement that the age of the buccaneers was the Golden Age of piracy.”

Pirate historians of the first half of the 20th century occasionally adopted Fiske’s term “Golden Age,” without particularly following his starting and ending dates for it.

The most expansive definition of an age of piracy was that of Patrick Pringle, who wrote in 1951 that “the most flourishing period in the history of piracy … started in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ended in the second decade of the eighteenth century.”

This notion starkly contradicted Fiske, who had vehemently denied that such Elizabethan figures as Drake were pirates.

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