Silver & SailsFamous pirates of the Golden Age
Between about 1715 and 1725 a few thousand pirates sailed the Atlantic, and a handful became famous. These are the real captains you can meet in Silver & Sails: who they were, what they actually did, and which of the stories about them are true.
Benjamin Hornigold
Blackbeard’s mentor at Nassau, who took the King’s pardon in 1718 and turned pirate hunter.
Read the full history ⟶Charles Vane
The Nassau captain who fled Woodes Rogers past a burning ship in 1718 and was hanged at Port Royal in 1721.
Read the full history ⟶Black Sam Bellamy
The young captain whose flagship, a former slave ship, sank off Cape Cod in 1717 and was rediscovered by divers in the 1980s.
Read the full history ⟶Blackbeard
The most famous pirate of all, active for just two years before his last fight at Ocracoke in 1718.
Read the full history ⟶Stede Bonnet
A rich Barbados planter who paid for his own pirate sloop in 1717 and was hanged in Charles Town the next year.
Read the full history ⟶Calico Jack Rackham
The captain who sailed with Anne Bonny and Mary Read, the most famous women pirates, until their capture off Jamaica in 1720.
Read the full history ⟶Black Bart Roberts
The Welsh captain said to have taken about 400 ships, with the most famous pirate code of all.
Read the full history ⟶Edward Low
The Boston rigger turned pirate whose cruelty was feared in his own day, and whose fate is still a mystery.
Read the full history ⟶