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.
Stede Bonnet, sometimes known as “The Gentleman Pirate” decided to become a pirate one day due to marital problems. He’d never sailed a day in his life, but he bought a ship (rather than stealing one) and then paid his crew wages instead of giving them a share of the plunder. He was such a useless and inexperienced captain that at one point, his crew abandoned him for Blackbeard’s and he just stayed on the ship as a guest.
(via wildehacked)
