PROPRIETARIES, PRIVATEERS, AND PIRATES: America’s Forgotten Golden Age

Abstract

Scholars have usually treated all pirates as the same, regardless of class and education. Gentleman privateers and merchants from Jamaica, Bermuda, and other English cities of the West Indies, however, varied in cultivation, education, land-ownership, and wealth with respect to common, poor pirates in the Bahamas, the quintessential "pirate nest." A close study of the cultural landscape in early America reveals the basis for those differences. Early depositions of the events at the beginning of the Golden Age of Piracy (1715-1726) provide pertinent case studies illustrating that difference.