One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didn’t actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.
After the original pirate captain was killed, he was democratically elected captain of the pirate crew less than 6 weeks after being captured by them.
My personal fave is Sam Bellamy. His life story reads like a tragic epic novel - poor sailor boy, becomes one of the youngest/wealthiest/most generous (“Robin Hood of the Sea”) pirate captains, hangs out being a pirate with his other dudebro pirate captains, left a mysterious love back from his days of poor sailor boyitude, tragically and abruptly dies at 28 in a storm alongside his closest dudebro pirate captain (possibly whilst on his way to revisit his mysterious love).
These are all great but I think there are two things in particular we really need to talk about:
1. Attacking a ship simply to steal the crews hats has never happened in a movie at that is a travesty.
2. What I’m getting from this is that Bartholomew Roberts is quite literally the Dread Pirate Roberts.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
