The Archives

What changed

Newest first

What has been published, which exhibits have been placed, what has been corrected and what the site has learned to do, in date order. The same entries are available as a feed at /feed.xml.

18 September 2026

  • Published Seventy-eight rebuilt records landed Thirty-nine people, thirty-four ships and five records re-founded from the documents are now in the Archives, with 1,396 new checked claims behind them.

8 September 2026

  • Corrected No encyclopaedias: the rule applied in full An encyclopaedia is never a source on the Archives. Every claim that rested only on Wikipedia or another encyclopaedia has been withdrawn, and with them the claims resting only on unsigned tourism, municipal and hobby pages: 188 claims across 68 records, and the sentences they carried cut or rewritten on 130 pages; a further 308 claims that named such a carrier beside a document now cite the document alone. Where a fact has gone, the record says what would settle it.

2 September 2026

  • Corrected A rule about sources, and what it changed Wikipedia and encyclopaedia articles are no longer carried as sources behind a claim. 250 claims that rested on nothing else now read Unverified until the document behind them has been read, and the records that carry them say so. Fifty-eight places where two records disagreed have been settled on one rule: the record whose subject the fact is decides, and where the sources genuinely differ the difference is now carried on both pages.
  • Corrected Straight quotes throughout The 182 curly-quote entities left in the Bellamy, Every and Pirate Government Collections and the Every trial source page are now the site's straight quotes.
  • Exhibit The 1701 trial print, on the killing of William Moore A second exhibit on the killing of William Moore: the title page of the Kidd trial print, with Murther before Piracy.
  • Exhibit The 1696 trial print, on the Red Sea record A second exhibit on the Red Sea: the title page of The Tryals of Joseph Dawson and five others, the record through which the captures of August 1695 reached an English court.
  • Exhibit The Blackbeard plate of 1724, on the Ocracoke record A second exhibit on Ocracoke Inlet: the engraved plate from Johnson's General History, placed beside the passage on what the accounts will not agree on.
  • Published Thirty-three new Themes The Themes section grows from five records to thirty-eight: careening and havens, death and the gallows, flags, justice and discipline, marooning, prizes and fencing, recruitment and forced men, plunder shares, the slave trade nexus, naval suppression, alcohol and food, cargoes and values, charts, disease, hurricanes, mutiny and desertion, navigation, privateering, prize law, ship construction, weapons, shipworm, the Admiralty courts, captain election and removal, gender disguise, impressment, maroon communities, pirate ports, race and maritime labour, religion at sea, trials and defence rights, violence and coercion, and women at sea. 233 checked claims behind them.
  • New on the site Open questions and What changed Everything the Archive is still working on, gathered from every record; and this page, with a feed.
  • New on the site Trails Six routes through the records: four guided readings, a question put to you as the jury, and Blackbeard tested against the record.
  • New on the site The map All 35 places pinned on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins, with the events and people at each, and three voyages drawn as reconstructions.
  • New on the site The timeline All 33 dated events on one scale, 1670 to 1730, with strands for the Collections and filters by person, place and theme.
  • Corrected Plain words for confidence Confirmed, Very likely, Likely, Possible, Disputed, Speculative and Unverified replace the register's terms wherever a reader sees a grade; 269 phrases in the running text of 80 pages were reworded to match.
  • New on the site The evidence layer Numbered markers on every record lead to the claims behind it; Show the evidence puts them beside the text; the evidence page lists all 1,010 claims with filters.
  • New on the site Full-text search Every page searchable by name, alias, ship, place, event or phrase, with a search field in the header of every page.
  • Exhibit The Nassau dispatch of November 1718 The official account of Woodes Rogers's arrival, from the London Gazette.
  • Exhibit Gardiners Bay on Des Barres's chart of 1779 The anchorage as the first detailed printed survey drew it, eighty years after Kidd's call.
  • Exhibit Kneller's portrait of John Somers The Lord Keeper who sealed the grant of pirates' goods and held a share in it.
  • Exhibit The London Gazette proclamations of 1717 and 1718 The Act of Grace and its extension, as the government printed them.

1 September 2026

  • Exhibit 58 exhibits placed on the new records Open-rights images, each with a zoom copy for the Examine viewer, on every new place, event and source page that had one.
  • Published 24 primary source records Trial pamphlets, state papers, company records, newspapers, charts and archaeology, each with what it can and cannot tell.
  • Published Institutions: a new section of 23 records The companies, courts, councils and markets that made, hunted, tried and profited from the pirates.
  • Published 28 event records Dated events from the sack of Panama in 1671 to the last campaigns of 1726 to 1728, each carrying a date with its precision.
  • Published 33 place records From Anguilla to Whydah: the harbours, forts, courts and shorelines of the story, each with the events that happened there.

24 July 2026