Sailing the Black Flag

Beneath the skull-and-crossbones lay a set of codes, elections, and written articles that gave ordinary sailors more say over their lives than they had ever held on land. Captains were voted in and voted out. Plunder was divided by contract. Compensation for a lost hand or a lost eye was written down before the cannon fired.

Sailing the Black Flag is the history of that democracy between 1690 and 1730: the men who built it, the handful of women who fought alongside them, and the empires that hanged them for it.

It is drawn from Admiralty and Vice-Admiralty trial records, surviving ships' articles, and the archaeology of the only authenticated pirate wreck ever found.

Within these pages

The book runs in six parts. The world they fled: the floating hell of navy and merchant service. The experiment: the articles of agreement, and every man a vote. The economics of plunder: the share-out, and why pirates died poor. The limits of liberty: the democracy of violence, and the people in the hold. The other half: women and the compact. And the reckoning: the trial, the suppression, and the afterlife of an idea.

The book and the Archives

The Archives is the research engine behind the book, made public. The same evidence and confidence standards that support every page on this site support every chapter of the manuscript. If you want to see the evidence the book stands on, you are already in the right place: start with the Captain Kidd Collection.

For agents and publishers

Sailing the Black Flag: A History of Pirate Democracy. Narrative history, 85,000 words, complete. Proposal, chapter outline and sample chapters available on request. Neil Johnson is a debut author based in Liverpool, with further work in preparation and a growing readership across Instagram (@sailingtheblackflag) and Substack built on original pirate-history storytelling in a distinctive visual style.

Enquiries: message on Instagram or via Substack. About the curator.