This soon spread far beyond the Caribbean, with piracy a common occurrence in the Indian Ocean and off the East Coast of America, and the explosion carried on until There were even times when privateers and buccaneers were led by Royal Navy officers on specific missions against the Spanish, and the English government were happy to see the activities continue whether they were still at war with Spain or not. 'Buccaneers' was soon universally adopted as a name for pirates in the 1680s, and the Jamaican governor's acceptance of piracy (and his decision to allow pirates to base themselves at Port Royal) made the island massively prosperous.
When the French government had the same idea, and offered their own colonists and the free privateers the chance to go freebooting with legal backing, the result was an explosion in piracy the likes of which had never been seen before.
(This was not an unusual occurrence, either – in the previous century, sailors as famous as Sir Francis Drake had often carried out pirate attacks on Spanish shipping with the full backing of Queen Elizabeth I). As far as the English government was concerned, piracy was an easy and cost-free way of causing havoc for their Spanish rivals. Plagued by the Spanish who at that time had the balance of power in the Caribbean, the buccaneers targeted Spanish shipping, and when the English Navy captured Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, the English gave the French buccaneers official permission to continue with their seabound attacks on the Spanish trade ships. This was heightened by the presence of French 'buccaneers' – privateers and free sailors who spent the early 1600s living off the land on the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola and Tortuga. At a time when England, France and the Dutch Republic were consolidating their empires and stretching the hand of colonialism across the world, there was a massive increase in trade, with the result that suddenly there were lots of wealthy, relatively unprotected ships to be found, and serious money to be made. However, when people think 'pirate', they're generally thinking of one particular kind of pirate – the renegade sailors that hail from the so-called 'classic era of Piracy' in from 1650 through to around 1720. Piracy is still a problem today, and travelling areas like the Somali coast, the Strait of Malacca and the waters between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean means taking the extreme risk of running afoul of armed and well-resourced pirates whose activities can cause damage and losses running into billions of dollars. Since then, it hasn't taken much to push certain sailors into becoming privateers, utilising narrow stretches of water and predictable shipping routes to prey upon the less well-defended and claim a profitable bounty, often leaving violence and bloodshed in their wake.
The act of using a ship to commit violence against another ship or a coastal settlement has been happening since at least 1400 BC, when ships in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas came under attack from groups of raiders.
Piracy has a long and violent history that dates back thousands of years. So – if you're ever in need of a pseudonym to hide your dastardly deeds, then you've come to the right place, for we've got pirate treasures aplenty (along with a frankly ludicrous amount of rum).
This generator was put together in 2013, and was created with International Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19th) in mind.