Pirate Hall of Fame
In the 1700s, high-seas pillaging was rampant. Here are some of the most notorious practitioners of the craft in history. — Juliet Chung
Henry Avery
This former Royal Navyman, born around 1653, had a short but successful career as a pirate. He seized command of a ship in 1694, renamed her Fancy and plundered ships in Cape Verde and on the west coast of Africa. The biggest prize — and the coup that would make his name a legend — came in the fall of 1695, when Mr. Avery and his crew encountered the Ganj-i-Sawai, the largest ship of the Mogul Emperor in India. An early shot brought down the main mast of the Ganj-i-Sawai. Meanwhile, one of the ship’s cannons exploded, causing mayhem among the crew of the Ganj-i-Sawai, according to David Cordingly’s account of the clash in “Under the Black Flag.” Mr. Avery retired after the ship’s capture and division of its loot.
Blackbeard
The ferocious fighter and womanizer raided ships in the Caribbean and along the Eastern Seaboard. Born Edward Teach or Thatch, Blackbeard was known for his luxuriant beard, which he decorated with ribbons and even slow-burning fuses on occasion, says Pieter van der Merwe, general editor of the National Maritime Museum in London. He eventually commandeered his own ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, and is said to have bested a British man o’ war around 1717 that was sent to destroy him before plundering dozens of other ships over the next six months. Blackbeard came to an inglorious end in 1718 after the governor of Virginia put a price of 100 pounds on his head; his vanquisher hung Blackbeard’s decapitated head from his ship.
Black Bart
Bartholomew Roberts, born around 1682, was one of the most successful pirate captains of the early 18th century. His career take was estimated at 400 boats — more than Blackbeard’s tally — and was marked by swift, savage attacks. One of his best-known captures was of a Portuguese merchant ship traveling in a convoy along the South American coast. Black Bart coerced the captain of another boat in the convoy to identify the richest ship, then had the captain hail the target. Black Bart and his crew made off with booty including gold, jewelry meant for the king of Portugal, sugar and tobacco.
Anne Bonny
Born in 1698, Ms. Bonny was the illegitimate daughter of a lawyer, and abandoned her husband to become the mistress of the pirate Calico Jack. She is often mentioned in the same breath as Mary Read, another female who became part of Calico Jack’s crew when he captured the ship she was traveling on. Both women disguised their gender by dressing in men’s clothes. Calico Jack and crew were eventually captured and hanged, but the women escaped death by revealing that they each were pregnant. Ms. Bonny’s later life is said to have been one of reinvention. Some accounts suggest she was released from prison, married a South Carolina man to whom she bore eight children “and became a respectable woman” who died in her 80s, says Mr. van der Mewe.
Zheng Yi Sao
When her husband died around 1807, Zheng Yi Sao (or Cheng I Sao) took over a large, well-organized confederation of pirates in the South China Sea. At its height, the confederation probably numbered between 50,000 and 70,000 men and controlled 800 large vessels, says Dian Murray, a Chinese history professor at the University of Notre Dame. The confederation made much of its money selling protection to merchants, fishermen and coastal villages, but also profited from plundering ships and ransoming passengers. By 1810, when the group disbanded to take an offer of amnesty from the government, “they had picked the coast clean and trade had been substantially reduced,” Ms. Murray says. “She was able to hold the thing together and ultimately negotiate a successful settlement.”
Sister Ping
This modern-day pirate from the Fujian province of China arranged for ship hijackings in the South China Sea from the 1970s though the 1990s. Cheng Chui Ping, known as Sister Ping, modified the vessels into unidentifiable phantom ships, and used them to smuggle thousands of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. and Europe, says John S. Burnett, author of “Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas.” “They’d be paying up to $35,000 per passage to be locked up in the bottom of a hold of a small leaky boat,” he says. Not all survived. In June 2000, 58 of 60 passengers who had come from Fujian by boat suffocated in a truckload of tomatoes at Dover, England. Sister Ping was recently convicted in the U.S. of heading a smuggling operation, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
The answers to these questions can be gleaned from America’s experience with Barbary. Lacking a navy and unwilling to bear the financial burden of building one, early American leaders opted to pay tribute to the pirates. By the 1790s, the U.S. was depositing an astonishing 20% of its federal income into North African coffers — this in addition to costly naval stores and even cannons and gunpowder. In return for this tribute, America only received more piracy. Foreign corporations refused to ship their goods in American hulls and U.S. diplomats were forced to sail overseas on European-flagged ships for fear of seizure. Dozens of American sailors languished in captivity.
